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And @danstuff... I'm clearly not getting the message... I understand that to attain a level of immunity more people need to be infected but at what human cost? He trails off into this is a boomer problem and maybe boomers need to make way for the next generation by dying etc, maybe I wasn't paying enough attention... I'll watch it again...
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I haven't watched it, so I've no idea if the points he's making are valid or not. All I know is that evil bastards can sometimes be right, despite being evil bastards, and history is littered with really nice, kind, well-intentioned people with really dumb ideas.
But if his argument was that it's OK for older people to die before their time just because they're old, then that's as stupid as the argument previously advanced on this thread that's it's OK for a few younger people to die as long as the oldies are OK.
Brommers
But that's exactly what he's not. He's very carefully pointing out that if the costs of lockdown (deaths from lockdown-related issues) are greater than those lost directly from Covid-19 then our actions have killed people. As he says, epidemiologists don't suffer if they predict 100x or 1000x more deaths than occur, but do suffer if they underestimate by a factor of 3. It's therefore in their nature only to publish generous estimates of mortality.
It's like the helmet debate. People argue that cyclists must wear helmets because "if it saves one life" when we know very well that we could save far more lives by encouraging people to cycle rather than scaring them off it by suggesting that it's a form of transport that requires armour.
Incidentally, I'm not saying I agree with him, but when you're dealing with deaths across populations of hundreds of millions you need to be brave enough to consider the unintended consequences of what seems like the right thing to do right now.