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infected, there's not much immunity, and so lots of people are susceptible to infection. That's why, just as it's important to keep taking antibiotics for a bacterial disease even when you start feeling better, in some cases we need to keep NPIs going until we get medical tools such as vaccines, drugs to treat the disease, or even drugs that could protect you from infection. (That's known as prophylaxis, and we didn't have it for COVID.) , Or at least until we're able to reduce transmission dramatically by testing lots of people and isolating the positive or suspected cases, as South Korea did. Also, not all overreactions--or apparent overreactions--are created equal. Closing borders, for example, did slow the spread of COVID in some regions. But border closures are a hammer that needs to be wielded very carefully. By cutting off trade and tourism, they can crater a country's economy so badly that the cure becomes worse than the disease. This is particularly true if, as is often the case, the border controls come too late to significantly reduce the amount of disease getting across borders. The cost/benefit analysis of targeted lockdowns within a country may be more clearly beneficial. [stat TK] <~?~Insert art 021_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Economies under lockdown. Shutting down local businesses, tourism, and trade hammered economies globally in 2020, but getting the virus under control has allowed many of them to bounce back in 2021. (World Economic Outlook 2021) The cost of not locking down--at least at the height of the COVID pandemic--likely would have been even higher. The economy was bad when businesses shut down, but it could have been even worse if the virus were allowed to run rampant and kill millions more people