The initial rationale of the lockdowns was to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed, which made a lot of sense even if it looks like we had more margin of error on ventilators than we first thought. But now that this scenario has been averted, why should we stay locked down? If it is to try to keep driving the number of cases toward zero, that is unrealistic and the economic cost is too high. This is why the re-opening plan of Avik Roy et al., which contemplates living with the virus without necessarily any great technical breakthroughs on testing or a vaccine, deserves serious consideration.

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