I’m not sure your reading of the political climate is accurate. A lot of places have already reopened schools, and I’ve heard a lot of politicians explicitly say that they’re willing to pay the price because it’s not a big deal if kids get it. Maybe they’re wrong, but if you expect that there’ll be public support behind keeping things closed when the death and hospitalization rates start plummeting, I think you’d better readjust.
The Academy of Pediatrics says this. It's not just some politicans who don't know anything about epidemology and likely have never even taken a college-level biology course.
I'm not saying that places will be shut down completely. I was talking specifically about masking and physical distancing mandates and other such restrictions. I don't think big business and the public will tolerate losing another season of attending (in-person) Football, Baseball, Ice Hockey, <insert favorite sport here> games.
> I don't think big business and the public will tolerate losing another season
The whole "COVID fatigue" thing is one of the craziest things I keep hearing with regard to this pandemic. The virus doesn't care if you're bored of the disease and "won't tolerate" staying home from more football games. It's not like it's just going to go away because we're tired of it! I sincerely hope governments aren't going to just open things up because 2021 is a different year and everyone's just really bummed of it all. Surely we have better sense than that.
Avoiding getting Covid is not the only thing that matters in life. As the cost (in months of normal life lost) of the lockdown increases, it may be perfectly rational for people to think it’s no longer worth the decreased risk of catching the virus. Seen in this light, “Covid fatigue” makes perfect sense.
Said another way: imagine an alternate reality where none of the vaccines worked, and we kept getting winter flare-ups of Covid year after year - would you think we should continue the restrictions _forever_ ? If not, why not?
Assuming also that immunization did not emerge some other way also (like from getting the disease once) then yes I’d expect we would permanently change our way of life. What’s the alternative? Just accept the casualties year after year? For what? So we can eat at Olive Garden and go to football games?
How can you reduce all of human social and cultural life to “Olive Garden and football” ?
And yes, of course it’d be worth a slightly lower life expectancy in order to not live under permanent lockdown. If you don’t agree with that, we probably have such a fundamentally different worldview that we will never see eye-to-eye.
Since we're doing scenarios, what do we do when a hypothetical COVID-21 comes along which is 20x deadlier and kills uniformly across age ranges? Do we simply ignore it because we're tired of stay-at-home and we all gotta live our (now potentially shorter) lives?
Yes, if there were a virus that killed 10% of people of all ages and was as contagious as Covid-19, it would be a civilization-level threat and it would be worth extreme measures to attempt to stop its spread (I'm not optimistic that it _could_ be stopped, but it'd at least be worth trying). What's your point?
It's that fundamentally, our opinions are similar: There exists some point beyond which the threat is great enough to change our lifestyle permanently. We simply disagree about exactly where that point is.
