The Core

I always said from the start we should have identified the most vulnerable, protected them and told the rest to carry on.

As far I know (I could be wrong) but there are no cures for any viruses.
HIV is still about, the flu is still about to name a couple, and it's only because we train our own immune systems to fight them by evolution or nudging it along using dumb down versions of the virus that we surive.
Yes, there will be fall out, but I can't see any other way to proceed from this.
You just have to see how the population are getting lockdown fever to know that it can't carry on.

There is no doubt that pandemic fatigue has set in.  Most are in denial as to how long this will likely drag on.  Fauci has been trying to gently give us a reality check, but we're not listening.

Fauci cautions that things won’t return to ‘normal’ until end of 2021
https://cbs4indy.com/news/coronavirus/fauci-cautions-that-things-wont-return-to-normal-until-end-of-2021/

>>At worst it is taking 1.4 years off our lives.

And that is the problem with looking at things in terms of averages :-)

To do an extreme thought experiment, let's say that we came up with a miracle anti-aging drug. If you inject it, it adds 8.1 healthy, active, productive years to your life, roughly 10%. The problem is, it kills 10% of patients instantly, taking an average of 48.6 years off their lives. On average, that drug adds 2.4 active years to your life by my possibly faulty math

((90*8.1) - (10*48.6))/100

So on average, it's a good thing, but I'm not letting them stick that needle in my arm.

>>vaccine

that was in my mind while doing my math.

Honestly, it's a moot point for me. I am not a healthcare worker or high risk, so I won't be first in line even if I desperately want to be.

What's interesting is some of my doctor friends feel the same way. They've made it this far without getting Covid or, in one case, has gotten Covid and is not back to normal, so they are not interested in being part of a mass experiment on a product rushed through under intense political pressure.

One-in-four Albertans would not take coronavirus vaccine: Poll | Calgary Herald
https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/one-in-four-albertans-would-not-get-coronavirus-vaccine-poll

>>Thoughts?

We (and I'm not really sure who I mean by that, but definitely Americans) have become a fearful people in general. We keep optimizing risk out of our lives. I think of all the changes in my life: seatbelts, helmets, airbags, tamper-proof packaging, children carefully supervised, police in the schools, endless rules at ski areas, huge limitations on the freedom of children compared to my childhood.

Battle of Verdun resulted in 700,000 casualties and 300,000 deaths. In the Battle of the Somme, the British alone had roughly 20,000 deaths in the single worst day of combat. Between 150,000 and 250,000 people died in the Battle of Okinawa in WWII (and though the Western Allies were not involved, they did follow the Battle of Stalingrad with its staggering two million casualties).

Obviously these things are horrible and tragic. The waste of human life for a small bit of ground or because they couldn't be bothered to buckle a seatbelt is tragic.

But at the same time, I find it odd that some extreme helmet advocates have almost implied that I am mentally unstable for riding a bike or skiing without a helmet. It is not that long ago that almost nobody wore a helmet for either of those activities.

I can't really quite grope my way to a coherent though here, but I feel that our risk tolerance as a society has perhaps become too low. I also think it's part of the split between the haves and have nots. The obsessive helmet wearers are mostly haves, while the have nots still face all sorts of systemic risk on their jobs and in their environment (smoking is now essentially a habit of the have nots and nutrition is dramatically poorer among the have nots, both of which carry more risk than occasionally tooling around town on a bike without a helmet).

I'm not exactly sure how that constitutes any sort of reply to your question about whether or not the young should get on with their lives. I guess it boils down to this - in past times, the level of risk required for the young to get on with their lives would be considered minor in relation to the overall risks they were taking just through normal living. But as we have progressively removed one bit of risk after another and, perhaps, as families have moved to putting all their bets on one or maybe two kids, the tolerance for young people taking risk has decreased to the point where it impacts their ability to live fulfilling lives.

Those are thoughts I had before Covid, but since Covid, they keep rattling around my brain.

This might play into how you think about this

https://www.economist.com/international/2020/10/05/will-the-economic-and-psychological-costs-of-covid-19-increase-suicides

Will the economic and psychological costs of covid-19 increase suicides?
It is too early to say, but the signs are ominous

>>getting risk averse

That's something that, over my life, I have seen progressively curtail some of my freedoms since, as a younger person, I rather enjoyed relatively dangerous activities. But it's not just that we are risk averse, it's that for the first time in human history, in the last... maybe 80 years??... we have come to think of death as an affliction of the old. That is new in human history. Indeed, for most of human history, the vast, vast majority of people died before the age of 10. Death was primarily an affliction of the young, and then things evened out.

But it was a commonplace of medieval and early-modern wills that "nothing is more certain than death and nothing less certain than the hour of our death." The great essayist Michel de Montaigne (who in fact invented the word essay in the sense we mean it now), commented that nothing hurts more than the death of a child, but, he added, he had lost two children without falling into despair.

Again, I'm not saying that a world where large numbers of children die is a good place. On balance, it's better to be in a world where most children survive. But it does work on our psyches and create a view toward risk and death that is utterly unlike the view that was held for the previous 500,000 years of human history.

We have reached a point where we have the expectation that in most cases, we can control the deaths of the young, and therefore we have come to find them unacceptable, perhaps more so than the young themselves.