Do you really think we're going to come out of this period causing people to lose their jobs, lose their savings, lose their loved ones, not see their friends, stop going to sports and social events… and everyone's going to be like "Hey, that was fun, let's do it again next year"?
Some countries have week-long holidays where most people go home/travel/don't work. Their economies aren't dead.
Make it a tradition where everyone with non-essential work stays home at least one week a year, all at the same time. More time is better, but even a little bit would likely cut back on disease. Governments already define Christmas/New Years/etc as a holidays and huge numbers of people aren't working on those days and economies don't die. It wouldn't be hard for companies to promote "Pre-Stay Home Week Extravaganza" sales and make people actually look forward to staying home, eating and watching movies/playing games/whatever.
Do you personally know many people who has lost a loved one or their job to COVID? 2nd, could be painted as a lets do this preemptively every year or in memory...
Don't need to close everything, could be as simple as work from home if you can don't do gatherings/go out unnecessarily for a week or two.
I wonder if people are just ignorant of the widespread devastation caused by the lockdown, if they feel like people devastated by the lockdown did not “do enough to prepare” and so somehow deserve it, if they somehow believe people will be made whole by trillion dollar handouts, or what?
I personally know two family businesses which have laid off all their employees and may never start up again, and another which if it doesn’t see bailout funds before next month who won’t be able to make payroll.
To say nothing of the kids missing their friends, their educations, their graduations, the weddings canceled, even funerals, etc.
Yeah let’s totally do this every year. This is so out of touch with reality it’s bizarre.
Besides that I consider this discussion mostly theoretical as I doubt that one would get large enough parts of the population to agree - they are not even agreeing to erradicate diseases we could easily erradicate, like the measels - a planned limited shut down wouldn't be very disruptive.
Here it Europe, it is quite common for businesses to shut entirely down for a few weeks every year. The reason is managing employee vacations. It is easier managing this by shutting down entirely. Even the big car companies have two weeks every year, where the production is mostly shut down. And even many US companies have mandatory shut-downs on thanksgiving or christmas.
A coordinated reduction of time spent in groups doesn't have to be extreme to have a pretty big impact on infection transmission.
Like state health departments could declare that influenza is trending in the state and businesses could have less face to face meetings, and maybe churches cancel some of their non-worship gatherings, and so on.
For example, the orange scenario on https://covidactnow.org/state/MI includes possibly closing schools. States are doing the ones down at the bottom of the graph, social distancing is less severe and less effective, but still compares favorably to not adjusting behavior.
School closures in response to infections could probably be done more aggressively than we usually do now, but doing it on a statewide basis also probably doesn't make sense.
“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.”
Let’s not do social distancing, or even “social distancing lite” at all please. It’s disastrously damaging to public health.
That paragraph doesn't describe social distancing, it describes the government ordering everything closed.
But whatever, we can call the thing where we take simple, effective public health measures that do not have grave economic impacts something else.
(the irony to me is that reducing the spread of things like flu would have economic benefits, many of which would be concentrated with those that are economically vulnerable)
Even easier and also reliable, normalize wearing surgical masks. Outside of Asia, wearing a surgical mask before the outbreak might invite some funny looks.
Plus most people still go to work when sick. They will just dose up on whatever drugs they have to hide the symptoms and make them feel better, then go to work anyway. Even here in Europe where the government pays sick leave that happens.
As we have observed in the Covid-19 pandemic, It could be the case that you were just only lightly sick but also contagious. Not to mention also a few things are difficult to pass, for example, University lectures (skipping one can make it difficult to follow the next) and again lecture halls are cramped so you can easily infect somebody.
Just you and me? That's not going to do much. Organizing action in the scale of the billions is a lot harder than having the idea. I'm not sure if there's any precedent for what's happening now.
Please do not. Social distancing has a high health cost, mainly wrt. mental health. It bad for depressed people, people with "home" problems like violent partners or parent, people which have problems socializing, children (in general, or at lest for most children it's bad if kept up).
It's fine if done once due to a bigger health emergency but it only should be a last effort if we have no better way to handle it.
Instead I would prefer:
1. Better wide spread education about all kind of disease and related thinks, especially de-stickmatization. But this would need major changes like proper sexed (required for proper education about STD's).
2. Wide spread vaccination where applicable. (maybe even required, e.g. for children when entering school).
3. Good health system so that people can always get help to fight illnesses, at least infectious ones.
