It's a question of getting things into perspective. It looks as though the Infection/Death ratio will be in little more than with seasonal flu by the time the antibody tests are done on the general population, but it will be a couple of years before the picture is clear. For now we have to live with it. Like many infections, some people will become very ill, some will not even notice they've had it and most will be somewhere in between. The difference with COVID-19 is that it is that none of the population has had it before, so the reason for the lockdown is that otherwise, the minority who are ill enough to need hospitalisation would have overwhelmed the beds, staff and equipment available. The truth is that it is likely that lockdown is to slow down the rate of acquisition, but it will not stop people from catching the disease in the long run. We will likely have 40,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19, but most years we have 8,000 deaths from seasonal flu, and we hear about that only when the ambulances are backed up at A&E in the winter, we don't particularly panic about catching it, and hardly anybody takes any special measures to avoid it. Thinking about risk, 27,000 people are killed or seriously injured on the roads every year. We don't ban cars, we have speed limits and cars have set belts and air bags. I think that once lockdown is over, we need to take reasonable precautions but avoid panic. Keep calm and carry on, to coin a phrase!
