Here I am trying to quit my Medium addiction, and you put up another brilliant article.

My interpretation of the data convinces me that lockdowns do reduce the spread. But at what costs?

Covid went through our local beef plant last May, giving my town the highest Covid ratings in Canada. The company put together some effective transmission reductions within the plant. Now we have 1 active Covid case in a population of 25,000. And the plant is still going full steam.

For the past month, I have observed at least a 90% compliance in face masks in public places in my town. While not perfect, these face masks have a big part of the 1 in 25,000 result.

My mother's neighbor died of Covid. So he is one of the statistics. But he was 90 years old and had been fighting a bladder ailment for the past 3 years. We really need some co-morbidity stats.

In "The Blank Slate", Dr. Steven Pinker talks about our inability to mange risk wisely. Our hunter gatherer ways genetically engineered us to stick with the "known ways." Risk takers were weeded out of the genetic pool. Now we can see we can take take more risk in our modern life. So we do. But we lack the ability to analyze that risk.

Aggressive driving is one of those features. Just because a person has a 99.999% chance of making a trip without an accident while driving aggressively does not mean the benefits (time saved) outweighs the cost of a low probability accident (car repairs, injury, or death).

We really need a government framework to analize all the angles properly and come up with reasonable public policies.