So if the old folks meet their family in a specially designated room with good ventilation, both wearing mask, have negative tests, do not spend more than 10-15 minutes per visit, have hands disinfected before and after, etc., shouldn't that be enough?
In a sense, that's probably correct. It's obvious to me that what is needed is multi-pronged protection, testing, masks, hand cleaning, social distance, etc., all the things that everyone already knows need to all be in place to overcome the weaknesses of any one of them. And they have to be in place simultaneously. There's a lot of whining about it, but it's not that difficult to, it's just inconvenient. The citizens of the UK did much more difficult things during WW2. Since there is no one magic bullet, not even a vaccine will be 100% effective, many layers of defence are required. Lockdowns are not really part of an acceptable solution, they are what we're left with when people refuse to implement the other things properly.
So, in simplistic terms, if some jurisdiction opens up a little to keep businesses afloat (that's how we phrase it but really what we're doing is permitting services to reach people) without also implementing enough of the usual contagion safeguards, infections go up, deaths ensue and then we have to clamp down, sometimes via lockdowns. We use the word "lockdown" too loosely, I believe, "restrictions" might be a better word. There's no one with machine guns in Toronto preventing people from buying groceries.
Those other non-lockdown pandemic restrictions are what would permit parts of the economy to stay above water. If everyone was religious in their observance of mask-wearing et al, then maybe we could reduce infection danger enough to keep schools open, as one example. If the medical systems aren't swamped, then maybe they have the time to think about better treatments, or have some free time to dream up better vaccines. But if everyone is in "lockdown/restrictions" because of runaway infections and hospitals are all overcome, all of that other stuff becomes more difficult to do, and it has a big impact on other non-Covid medical conditions what cannot be addressed.
There is no avoiding some deaths, and there is no avoiding an impact on the economy. It's not as if the economy would remain normal if we took no action against the virus; that idea is just ridiculous, it was never a two-variable problem. As is almost always the case in human affairs, some compromise is called for. This is probably not going to end for another year or three.
