1) Death rates in the US are rising. But they still aren't exponential as seen in the first wave. Even looking at this in isolation of its impact on the poor and developing nations, you have to ask what measures actually buy you something. Contact tracing is totally overwhelmed and probably pointless. Other countries don't tend to have it worse, so you can open international air travel. Masks have lots of evidence behind them and should be supported. Testing and isolating in older communities is absolutely critical. School children > 10 seem to be good conductors, under 10 not so much. Thankfully, the economic cost of >10s not being in school is far lower than <10s. Again economic opening sounds to me like a very good idea with targeted limits focused on the biggest payoffs at the lowest costs.

2) Israel has reached death rates similar to round 1 but seems to be leveling off. The rate is relatively low. The Israeli government has new coronavirus management. They are planning on opening air travel, lots of businesses etc... soon. Masks remain enforced. This looks like a good mix to me.

3) Sweden's death rate is continuing to fall - despite no closure. This continues to suggest the possibility of community immunity of some form. I'm not suggesting they did it right. They didn't protect or treat the old, for example. I included a cumulative graph to show the price they paid. Despite their path being one I wouldn't recommend, they are still providing valuable data for the rest of the world. If we can have spread with limited infection doses (masks) and protection for the most vulnerable (trace and isolate elderly breakouts) that may be the fastest way to achieve a controlled virus at the least total cost - particularly in terms of deaths in the hand-to-mouth world due to economic collapse.

Finally, I was sent a note on science. I'm not a science denier. Clearly, our understanding of the virus is growing due to science. Our understanding of treatment is growing due to science. The possibility of a vaccine exists because of science.

I like to ask people who deny the scientific power behind modern medicine how many times they would have died without modern medicine. For me the answer is twice (that I know of). I had severe pneumonia that was fixed by antibiotics and I had appendicitis.

That said, I tend to regard large-scale models as far less scientific than basic and more limited analysis (how does disease X respond to treatment Y). That's why I tend to ignore economic forecasts, for example - economic reality reacts in a way that makes it impossible to predict, although basic principles can be helpful. That may be one of the big challenges in cancer - it reacts to our inputs in a way that makes modeling very hard.

Corona is a perfect case of large-scale models showing the limits of 'modeling' science. The CDC website (linked) has a collection of models and their very variance emphasizes this reality.

Aside from *all* of that - my case is much more basic. Our extreme measures are going to kill far more people than the virus will - not in the developed world, but in the hand-to-mouth world where billions of people have nothing to fall back on. According to the WFP, 270 million people will be acutely food insecure this year, up from 140 million last year. This is also a model, of course - and issued by an organization advocating for more support in a particular area. But the scale should be shocking and should make us think very carefully about the 2nd order effects of our decisions.

CDC Forecasts of COVID-19 Deaths