8 ms·

The only thing we can learn from Manaus is that waiting for herd immunity is a very bad idea.

tinus_hn 6y ago
Yeah, we better destroy the economy with lockdowns while waiting for vaccines that don’t work against these new strains, and then pay the price for herd immunity as well.
- wavefunction 6y ago
  It seems the variants are arising in places where people have been mixing and not socially-distancing.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Good luck telling these other governments to lock down to prevent that (assuming it prevents that, of course). That’s the difference between being an isolated nation and being on a continent. You can’t control what the other governments decide.
- acdha 6y ago
  The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on that latter point, if you are really worried about variants the best way to stop them is carefully following medical advice to prevent community spread because each person who gets infected is something on the order of 10e9 chances for a new mutation which is more competitive. If people had worn masks and locked down a year ago this wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad a situation.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Ah. The ‘it works on an isolated island with 5 million people’ fantasy. Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments. And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t. There is no point in blameshifting to people that ‘didn’t wear the masks and didn’t lock down’. Also it is 100% clear that tons of people can’t wait to be allowed to visit each other. Claiming ‘people aren’t going to congregate’ is simply a lie. In the Netherlands we had one test event with 1500 tickets and over 100000 people applied for a ticket. They can’t wait to congregate.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Is China an isolated island? How about Vietnam? And no, land borders don't matter that much. They aren't a strong infection vector. You can just close the borders. The vast majority of infections come from air travel, not land travel that is essentially zero. Were also not taking about the EU here, the Article is American, and there aren't a billion people neither in Europe nor in North America. Incidentally, the modalities for the Schengen zone allow authorities to close down borders in such circumstances. The island argument is a mirage. We're in 2021, land travel can be brought to ~0 and air travel always was the dominant vector of infection.
      - tinus_hn 6y ago
        I presume you have never been in Europe. There barely any borders to close and a lot of people live in one country and work in another. You can’t block that for a year. In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium. By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lockdown: if it doesn’t work we just say it wasn’t strict enough.
        retrac 6y ago
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  Looking back at the strategies that different countries have pursued over the last year, the most effective strategy has undoubtedly been to implement a strict lockdown for several weeks, nearly completely eliminating the virus, and then following up with aggressive contact-tracing whenever any case pops up. Countries that have done this have had far fewer deaths and have suffered less economically. The alternatives (doing nothing, implementing mild restrictions, or implementing strict lockdowns but opening up too early and failing to follow up) have all been far worse, in terms of both lives and money.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    No, the only solution that has worked is being an isolated nation and blocking international travel from the beginning. For 90% of countries that was never an option anyway and for most of the rest that ship has long sailed. The countries that have tried, like Israel, have seen so much success with that strategy they are now in their third lockdown. And that’s with the best vaccination numbers of the world.
    - helge9210 6y ago
      Israel is not a good example. Lockdown application here is very uneven. They have nothing to do with the virus and are mainly used by politicians in power to suppress secular way of life and to redistribute business opportunities.
      - tinus_hn 6y ago
        Ah, so the no true lockdown isn’t strict enough.
        mcguire 6y ago
        "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
        6y ago
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  This is an empirically testable result. Are regions with the harshest lockdowns doing worse economically? A cursory analysis says no. Places like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China that had very strict lockdowns are doing well economically. Then maybe the worst is intermediate lockdowns? Also no. There are few differences between regions with essentially no lockdowns and those with moderate lockdowns, though they fare worse than strict initial lockdowns across the board.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Where ‘a cursory analysis’ is a way to describe ‘some cherry picked examples’, yes.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    It is very hard for me to put myself back in the mindset of figures being real. In the last 12 months we have been routinely lied, and many political leaders believe misleading the public “for the greater good” is an act of leadership. Simplest example is the 30 members of the government saying masks are useless as a form of protection in April 2020. Uniform message, no exception, not temporarily, not on a subset, just the blanket message repeated on all newspapers and TC channels, “masks are entirely useless as a form of protection.” (France, by the way). Obviously their goal was to keep stocks for medical personnel, but they chose the lie as a form of getting to their point. Same goes for all the other figures, I know how easy it is to fabricate statistics; Every Monday they tell us figures have jumped since yesterday — obviously because there are fewer tests on weekends. After all this, I have as much confidence in the figures as agricultural production figures in 1970 USSR - For me Covid is like the default checkbox on all death forms, which explain most of the high figures. Newspapers are under state of emergency anyway, so they probably don’t have the choice in what they write. Some succeeded to print articles about how journalists are not allowed to observe the democratic process of decision anymore, but that’s probably all they are allowed to print. Sorry for the personal anecdote but I’d like to generalize it into “Maybe it isn’t good to tell lies as a routine form of governance.” As for myself, it’s a pain to not have trust in anything, and I’ll probably spend years cautiously recovering trust in any figure from doctors as genuine and not fabricated for political power.
- simonh 6y ago
  I give up. First it's hoax, then it's just a bad flu, then it's going to disappear like magic, then a second wave is impossible, then it's that vaccines aren't necessary and don't work. Meanwhile, people die in their thousands per day and the death toll piles up and hospitals get over-run with dying patients. As for lockdowns, we know from analysis of the Spanish Flu epidemic that cities with successful lockdowns suffered less economically, because cities that didn't lock down had worse outbreaks that lead to longer lasting deeper economic damage. China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth, and yes comparing the US or Europe to small island states makes no sense, but China isn't a small island state. You know what, I don't care. There's no vaccine required to be immune to facts. Whatever you claim to believe, when it's proved wrong and predictions based on it fail to happen you'll just come up with some other bullshit to believe instead. Whatever.
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    > Spanish Flu epidemic Trying to compare now to >100 years ago is full of all kinds of bad assumptions. Life in 1918 hardly resembles life in 2020 in any discernible way. > China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth Believing this means you have to trust information disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party, which would be a foolish thing to do. They are 100% committed to saving face, not to saving lives.
    - simonh 6y ago
      It’s how it looked to the virus that really matters. Large urban populations, massive global movements of people, no vaccine. I think from an epidemiological point of view it really wasn’t all that different. Was it really all that different in terms of day to day economic contact either? Urban sprawl, shopping centres, industry, trains, trucks, telecommunications, global freight. Businesses losing workers and customers had basically the same problems. Sure the Chinese government can’t be trusted, but there are plenty of foreigners in China these days, including journalists. My wife is Chinese and we’re in almost daily contact with family over there. When it comes to general movements of the population and public or industrial policy these things come out eventually.

Yeah, we better destroy the economy with lockdowns while waiting for vaccines that don’t work against these new strains, and then pay the price for herd immunity as well.

wavefunction 6y ago
It seems the variants are arising in places where people have been mixing and not socially-distancing.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Good luck telling these other governments to lock down to prevent that (assuming it prevents that, of course). That’s the difference between being an isolated nation and being on a continent. You can’t control what the other governments decide.
acdha 6y ago
The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on that latter point, if you are really worried about variants the best way to stop them is carefully following medical advice to prevent community spread because each person who gets infected is something on the order of 10e9 chances for a new mutation which is more competitive. If people had worn masks and locked down a year ago this wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad a situation.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Ah. The ‘it works on an isolated island with 5 million people’ fantasy. Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments. And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t. There is no point in blameshifting to people that ‘didn’t wear the masks and didn’t lock down’. Also it is 100% clear that tons of people can’t wait to be allowed to visit each other. Claiming ‘people aren’t going to congregate’ is simply a lie. In the Netherlands we had one test event with 1500 tickets and over 100000 people applied for a ticket. They can’t wait to congregate.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Is China an isolated island? How about Vietnam? And no, land borders don't matter that much. They aren't a strong infection vector. You can just close the borders. The vast majority of infections come from air travel, not land travel that is essentially zero. Were also not taking about the EU here, the Article is American, and there aren't a billion people neither in Europe nor in North America. Incidentally, the modalities for the Schengen zone allow authorities to close down borders in such circumstances. The island argument is a mirage. We're in 2021, land travel can be brought to ~0 and air travel always was the dominant vector of infection.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      I presume you have never been in Europe. There barely any borders to close and a lot of people live in one country and work in another. You can’t block that for a year. In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium. By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lockdown: if it doesn’t work we just say it wasn’t strict enough.
      - retrac 6y ago
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
Looking back at the strategies that different countries have pursued over the last year, the most effective strategy has undoubtedly been to implement a strict lockdown for several weeks, nearly completely eliminating the virus, and then following up with aggressive contact-tracing whenever any case pops up. Countries that have done this have had far fewer deaths and have suffered less economically. The alternatives (doing nothing, implementing mild restrictions, or implementing strict lockdowns but opening up too early and failing to follow up) have all been far worse, in terms of both lives and money.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  No, the only solution that has worked is being an isolated nation and blocking international travel from the beginning. For 90% of countries that was never an option anyway and for most of the rest that ship has long sailed. The countries that have tried, like Israel, have seen so much success with that strategy they are now in their third lockdown. And that’s with the best vaccination numbers of the world.
  - helge9210 6y ago
    Israel is not a good example. Lockdown application here is very uneven. They have nothing to do with the virus and are mainly used by politicians in power to suppress secular way of life and to redistribute business opportunities.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      Ah, so the no true lockdown isn’t strict enough.
      - mcguire 6y ago
        "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
      - 6y ago
sudosysgen 6y ago
This is an empirically testable result. Are regions with the harshest lockdowns doing worse economically? A cursory analysis says no. Places like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China that had very strict lockdowns are doing well economically. Then maybe the worst is intermediate lockdowns? Also no. There are few differences between regions with essentially no lockdowns and those with moderate lockdowns, though they fare worse than strict initial lockdowns across the board.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Where ‘a cursory analysis’ is a way to describe ‘some cherry picked examples’, yes.
- laurent92 6y ago
  It is very hard for me to put myself back in the mindset of figures being real. In the last 12 months we have been routinely lied, and many political leaders believe misleading the public “for the greater good” is an act of leadership. Simplest example is the 30 members of the government saying masks are useless as a form of protection in April 2020. Uniform message, no exception, not temporarily, not on a subset, just the blanket message repeated on all newspapers and TC channels, “masks are entirely useless as a form of protection.” (France, by the way). Obviously their goal was to keep stocks for medical personnel, but they chose the lie as a form of getting to their point. Same goes for all the other figures, I know how easy it is to fabricate statistics; Every Monday they tell us figures have jumped since yesterday — obviously because there are fewer tests on weekends. After all this, I have as much confidence in the figures as agricultural production figures in 1970 USSR - For me Covid is like the default checkbox on all death forms, which explain most of the high figures. Newspapers are under state of emergency anyway, so they probably don’t have the choice in what they write. Some succeeded to print articles about how journalists are not allowed to observe the democratic process of decision anymore, but that’s probably all they are allowed to print. Sorry for the personal anecdote but I’d like to generalize it into “Maybe it isn’t good to tell lies as a routine form of governance.” As for myself, it’s a pain to not have trust in anything, and I’ll probably spend years cautiously recovering trust in any figure from doctors as genuine and not fabricated for political power.
simonh 6y ago
I give up. First it's hoax, then it's just a bad flu, then it's going to disappear like magic, then a second wave is impossible, then it's that vaccines aren't necessary and don't work. Meanwhile, people die in their thousands per day and the death toll piles up and hospitals get over-run with dying patients. As for lockdowns, we know from analysis of the Spanish Flu epidemic that cities with successful lockdowns suffered less economically, because cities that didn't lock down had worse outbreaks that lead to longer lasting deeper economic damage. China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth, and yes comparing the US or Europe to small island states makes no sense, but China isn't a small island state. You know what, I don't care. There's no vaccine required to be immune to facts. Whatever you claim to believe, when it's proved wrong and predictions based on it fail to happen you'll just come up with some other bullshit to believe instead. Whatever.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  > Spanish Flu epidemic Trying to compare now to >100 years ago is full of all kinds of bad assumptions. Life in 1918 hardly resembles life in 2020 in any discernible way. > China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth Believing this means you have to trust information disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party, which would be a foolish thing to do. They are 100% committed to saving face, not to saving lives.
  - simonh 6y ago
    It’s how it looked to the virus that really matters. Large urban populations, massive global movements of people, no vaccine. I think from an epidemiological point of view it really wasn’t all that different. Was it really all that different in terms of day to day economic contact either? Urban sprawl, shopping centres, industry, trains, trucks, telecommunications, global freight. Businesses losing workers and customers had basically the same problems. Sure the Chinese government can’t be trusted, but there are plenty of foreigners in China these days, including journalists. My wife is Chinese and we’re in almost daily contact with family over there. When it comes to general movements of the population and public or industrial policy these things come out eventually.