Don't go moving goalposts on us all now that we've flattened the curve, especially when we're talking about people's constitutional rights.
(a physician friend mentioned the other day that we're not truly certain yet that COVID 19 sufferers cannot be reinfected, although that's the popular assumption. So there's also that)
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...
There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.
I don't know that much about it, but sometimes people infected with a coronavirus can get sick again, not as ill as they were previously, but contagious. [1] COVID 19 hasn't been analyzed well enough, long enough to say for certain.
There were some scary stories early on, a month or two ago, about people becoming reinfected with full blown cases of COVID 19, but they really felt more like uncertain anecdotes. I strongly suspect the immunologists will know a lot more about this in just a few weeks. Researchers are already giving people test vaccines and sending them out into the world.
In a nasty - hypothetical - reality where people regularly get reinfected: things do not go back to normal, and we have to figure a lot of difficult social stuff out.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-immunity-r...
I doubt this is likely to be the case, though. Antibodies to SARS seemed to have long lifetimes (several years), and COVID is likely to be similar. It is certainly possible that for some people, immunity fades much faster for reasons specific to that person, and that may be what is being picked up in these reports.
It is also possible it's just shoddy lab work. There has been a ton of that going around lately, and it's not just caused by pressure from the situation. Not all scientists are equally competent....
(Disclaimer: my knowledge of immunology is likely little better than yours, but I did at least used to be a Real Scientist in a different field.)
I, personally, am livid that the construction site right outside my bedroom window is now allowed to make ungodly amounts of noise for 15 hours a day and I have nowhere to go. This is insane.
Lockdowns have a tremendous cost in mental health. There's a point at which the toll is simply too high. We're not there yet, but it's not far. And waiting until "the data shows it" through elevated suicide rate is... not how I want us to play this, as a society.
On the one hand there is a tremendous amount of real damage being done by everyone sheltering in place. On the other hand it's not the government's orders that are the direct cause, so much as the virus itself. We are in a global pandemic. It is unprecedented. Telling everyone to go outside again is not going to magically make it happen.
Can you imagine re-opening schools right now? Summer camps? It would be sheer carnage, and those who do want to protect themselves will be less able to do so. It would just shift the pain points around, and cause a lot of deaths right away. Would that be worse than it is right now? Probably. Would it be worse than another six months of sheltering in place? Nobody knows!
