I don't believe you are "arguing in favor of ending all lockdown-ish behavior, letting the chips fall where they may, and relying on herd immunity to save us". My point is, if you aren't, then why are you acting like you are disagreeing with me?

I've seen you ask about Japan in other threads, using much of the same words, without the various counterpoints seeming to register to you, and now you're making the same points here. It just seems weird. Why are you bringing Japan up as if it's some sort of counterpoint, when it's a counterpoint to something that you apparently believe in? Why are you bringing it up if you aren't in favor of ending mitigation and aren't in favor of acting more like... Japan? I don't care if (R0-1)/R0 is off by some negligible percentage - it would still mean there's a huge difference in death depending on whether we do or don't stop mitigation. I'm arguing against the people that don't even seem to have a rough mathematical sense about this, and also the people that seem content to be like Thanos and shrug their shoulders at a million, 350k, or 200k people in the US dying as long as it's not their friends.

I mean, back to your first comment, if you think herd immunity maxes out at 30%, and that IFR of 0.5 - 1% is a "significant overestimate", then you're pretty close to projecting our current death toll anyway. 0.25% IFR at 30% would be like 250k in the US, which we'll probably hit with our half-hearted mitigation. But since you're in favor of mitigation efforts, you clearly don't believe the estimates to be that low. So... again, what is the relevance of what you're saying? Are you just being sophist? What's the syllogistic connective tissue in your points? What's your therefore? You believe the R0 and IFR estimates are overestimates; therefore what?

Why do I need to explain Japan? I mean obviously something must be happening in Japan that is consistent with what is happening elsewhere, it's not like they are an alternate universe. It's not like Japan is a counterpoint to NYC or Lombardy; they're in the same reality somehow. How do you explain Japan? It's probably some mixture of culture and bad stats in a way that doesn't really have any bearing on what we should do - we already have sufficient data to know that mitigation saves lives, and we're stupid enough that we're about to learn it all over again for the first time over the next six weeks.

1-1/R0 may be off by a factor of two or more due to heterogeneity, which I don't consider negligible. I listed that and other effects because I believe they are real and significant, and not because they fit cleanly into any argument for a preconceived position. I agree that a horrifying number of people have died (and will die) of coronavirus. I also believe that the societal costs of the lockdowns will be huge, and will be paid for years to come. Ten years from now, will social scientists find a significant and permanent divergence in educational attainment between rich and poor schoolchildren starting from the school closures? I don't know, but from other studies of interruptions in education I fear yes.

Both harms seem tremendous to me, neither so obviously larger than the other that we should disregard information that helps make the best estimate possible. Do you disagree? If yes, how did you convince yourself that the costs of the lockdowns were definitely smaller? I agree that some of the people arguing against lockdowns are ignorant of the likely death toll, or indifferent to human life; but some of them just think you're underestimating the cost of the lockdowns, just as you think they're underestimating the cost in human life.

In any case, we certainly both agree that the government should take actions to mitigate the coronavirus. In your reply above, you've switched freely between "lockdown" and "mitigation", when the latter is a broader category. Japan is surely undercounting some (like everywhere), but you can't miss NYC-scale mortality. I see basically no question that Japan has many fewer deaths, despite the near-absence of lockdown-type mitigations there. As you say, the Japanese aren't aliens--so if something in their culture is saving them, why can't we find out what and adopt it? Whatever they're doing, compared to the USA, it let them operate their society almost uninterrupted and avoided about 46,000 deaths. How can you dismiss whatever they did as non-actionable, when we don't even know what it was?

Was it all the masks? I don't know, but maybe. So why haven't we tried actually enforcing their use, and a big public education campaign on how to wear them properly? How many Americans have dismissed masks because they tried a fabric mask made from too many layers of high-thread-count fabric and found it hard to breathe through? Masks made from meltblown material are easier, and back close to normal prices. Do Americans know that? I didn't until recently.

Or maybe it's the contact tracing? I doubted that before because Japan is missing most of its cases, but I read a paper observing that heterogeneity meant the most important cases (super-spreaders) would be found preferentially. So maybe it's their cooperation with contact tracers? You could spend more than Coca Cola does in a year advertising the importance of that, and it would cost less than a day of strict lockdown. Why haven't we tried that? Or hygiene in general? Are Americans just bad at washing their hands? Major ad campaigns for basic public health measures have been successful in Africa. Why couldn't they here?

Or maybe it really is something non-replicable? I liked the humidity theory, though the trend in Florida goes against that (though Japan also tends to run the air conditioning hotter and more humid than American tastes; should we advise people to do that?). Something genetic? But even if it's not replicable, I'm amazed by the incuriosity most people--on either side of the "lockdown" debate--show at this massive unexplained difference.

I'm afraid you're trying to interpret my comments as supporting or opposing a small number of well-known, hardened, binary political positions. The result is confusing, because reality is a poor fit for either side of those positions. To the extent I have any goal in writing this beyond procrastinating, it's to show that, and to encourage people to spend their time exploring all the (messy, uncertain, self-contradictory) information available, instead of just arguing a position.

I don't really want to engage with most of this. I think you need to appreciate that there is very little daylight between your kind of points, which might very well be in good faith, and the approach of someone who just engages in what-about-isms with an intent to occlude debate and distract people from the urgency of implementing blunt solutions that do a lot of good. The latter is a particularly cowardly form of debate, where people suggest various forms of possible counterpoints and allude to certain controversial conclusions that they just never quite say out loud.

Just to highlight one point that I think is often missed. Comparing the "additional cost of covid if lockdown is ended" to the "cost of lockdown" is a frequently abused argument - partly because of bad faith, but in other cases because people legitimately miss that "ending the lockdown" doesn't mean that people will all of a sudden leave home. There is a portion of economic cost, and I won't engage in trying to size it right now, because I tire of this, that will remain just from people being rational self-actors. Restaurants will still close, schools will be reduced attended, etc. Because of the virus. So the comparison is to compare "additional cost of covid if lockdown is ended" (and we know there are sufficient idiots out there to drive spread in this case; it doesn't take a lot to have large effects) to "saved marginal cost if lockdown ends".

I understand the impulse to reveal truths selectively in order to guide people to the correct short-term action. I think it's incredibly dangerous, though. That's basically what policymakers did early in the pandemic when they advised Americans that masks were ineffective. Perhaps they got their short-term action, conserving scarce masks for medical workers; but now the shortage is over, and people (a) still aren't wearing masks, and (b) have lost considerable faith in the public health authorities in general. Hard to judge, but I suspect their noble lie saved hundreds of medical workers or patients at most, and will kill tens of thousands of Americans over the next year.

Those policymakers were trained professionals, so I doubt I'm any better at picking and choosing what truths should be spoken. So especially in a forum of moderately sophisticated readers, I'm not inclined to limit myself. I understand that may sometimes superficially look like things people often say in bad faith, but I hope readers expend the effort to distinguish.

In any case, I certainly agree that the coronavirus has tremendous societal and economic cost independent of the mitigations. That doesn't mean we still can't make it worse, though. I'm perhaps more optimistic than you are that Americans can do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities, and actually wear masks properly and cooperate with other mitigations short of lockdown, with the right (perhaps coercive) guidance. I hope you weren't too close to the earthquake, continuing the apocalypse bingo.