Establishing societal NAD parameters for lockdown procedures

The Coronavirus pandemic has generated a massive and unprecedented series of lockdown orders throughout the world. Lockdown has been determined as the best option to avoid the faster spread of the virus and thus, additional deaths. Some have argued that case fatality rates for SarsCov-2 have been artificially elevated due to the lack of sufficient testing (testing only those already symptomatic and hospitalized with complications). Independently, there is a strong drive to avoid as many deaths as possible.

This raises the question as to what the number of allowable deaths (NADs) can be before lockdown procedures are implemented. For example, the H1N1 swine flu pandemic killed around 500,000 people worldwide in 2009. Yet despite these numbers, and despite it being declared a pandemic, no actual enforced lockdown procedures were put in place in most countries. In other words, the amount of deaths caused by the H1N1 pandemic, which can be similar to bad flu years, was not deemed as sufficiently bad so as to require these extreme measures.

So given this fact, and the extreme situation we are currently living with this pandemic and lockdown, it would be in our best interests as a society to define in a more objective manner which is our NAD threshold. Establishing a definite number of allowable deaths prior to extreme measures such as lockdowns would take the guesswork out of the equation. The population would also be better prepared when a number is defined, and the media would do a better job of not overly exaggerating scenarios. NADs would also serve as a reminder that in all epidemics and pandemics, people die. Although the idea should always be to reduce the number of deaths as much as possible, expecting no deaths at all, or going to extreme measures to reduce a small amount of deaths could result in unrealistic expectations and undesired outcomes.