While technically correct, painting these outcomes as so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.
Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years amidst the background of a pandemic is almost certainly a net negative. We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.
There should be an extremely high risk for the next pandemic - not just boomers/obese dying a year or two earlier - to justify what we did to the world. Years of people’s lives taken.
> We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.
That perception of prisons and mental wards is fundamentally broken IMHO. Perhaps that's how it's run in most of the US, but the base principal is reeducation and reform, not punishment.
The core idea is to lock people away because keeping them around is a net negative, and bringing them back to society so they can reintegrate.
Which is modeled after the educational system, because prisons is supposed to be reeducation, if you want to draw parallels.
> Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years
Did any country do that or intent to ? We had strict lockdowns and it was for weeks at most, with social interactions still allowed but at reduced scope (limiting the contact radius to a minimum of 10~15km or so)
China famously was more heavy handed and the most it lasted was two month.
> so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.
Humans are complex, and it rarely works the way we envision it, especially when it comes to social phenomenons. Think about the opposite natural experiment: people who can't go home and stay in a shelter and have to interact with hundreds of people for weeks. This is also an extremely traumatic event that countries with frequent natural disasters are working hard at solving.
There's so many variable, I think we can only say they could be different, who knows if t will be for better or worse, or neither.