> If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary. Absolutely. This is the curse of most public health programs, and indeed a lot of pub

> If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary. Absolutely. This is the curse of most public health programs, and indeed a lot of public programs in general: when they work correctly it looks like they're not needed. The Covid pandemic has just shoved this process front and center rather than leaving it in the background. HN readers, of all people, should remember the Year 2000 bug: we heard dire, almost apocalyptic predictions of the havoc it could wreak; we spent extraordinary effort and money scrambling to fix as many date-handling bugs as we could find across countless systems and software packages; then the year rolled over and... nothing much happened. But, of course, the end state of "the Year 2000 bug was vastly overblown" and the end state of "all our painful work paid off and saved us" were effectively identical. So it is with the lockdown.