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Korea didn't have national lockdowns and I don't think China did either. Vietnam's lock-downs were all harsh, but extremely short (2 weeks). The common denomin

Korea didn't have national lockdowns and I don't think China did either. Vietnam's lock-downs were all harsh, but extremely short (2 weeks). The common denominator in all covid success cases seems to be an effective and strong contract tracing and quarantine protocol. That is the tried and true method used to defeat outbreaks. If you have a good contract tracing program, a short-hard lockdown can be used to delay the outbreak while your tracers find and isolate the infected. But without an effective contract tracing program (and I'm not talking about some bullshit smartphone app, but public health contract tracers with the power to actually do something), the lockdown is just a delay tactic. Even if we got down to 0 cases in April 2020 in the USA, the virus would work its way back in within weeks, if not days. Without a tracing program that works, we'd be back to ten thousand cases in a few months. All those countries have tight border controls. We get hundreds of thousands of illegal border crosses ever year. We'd have to deploy the military along the Mexican border and probably Canada too. I don't think a single state has really tried to ramp up contract tracing efforts to the required levels. And Australia had a several month long lockdown to get defeat a relatively small, isolated breakout. The bigger the outbreak the longer the lockdown is needed. And the longer the lockdown, the less severe it can realistically be. I accepted "don't have any social visits" for 6 weeks, but I wouldn't comply if they asked for 6 months. You can close factories for a couple weeks, but not for 6 months.

vkou 5y ago
They didn't have national lockdowns, and neither did the US. They had regional lockdowns early in the pandemic. The US... Had a patchwork of half-assed regional lockdowns, that came weeks late. > All those countries have tight border controls. We get hundreds of thousands of illegal border crosses ever year. We'd have to deploy the military along the Mexican border and probably Canada too. The overwhelming majority of border cases in the US did not come from illegal crossings in Mexico. They came from legal crossings through controlled borders, because the US did not implement any quarantine control on inbound travelers. It asked for travelers to self-quarantine as a courtesy, with no verification or enforcement, with predictable results. It's true that lockdowns without contact tracing just delay the problem. The US has failed at that too. If you caught COVID in April, chances are, you'd have no idea who you caught it from. It would have been difficult to engineer a more spectacular disaster, if we tried. You need two parts to this equation. Lockdown, and contact tracing. Both are required, and it's disingenuous to say that lockdowns don't work. It's fair to say that they don't work as we implemented them. Our implementation of them is not the only implementation of them.
- rhino369 5y ago
  I’m not trying to blame illegal immigrants for our pandemic. They didn’t cause it and I really doubt they made it appreciably worse. Like you said, we didn’t even have restrictions on anyone. But in my hypothetical where we got to where NZ and AZ are right now (no covid in the community), and quarantine controlled entries, uncontrolled border crossings would 1000% bring in new cases. My point is you need to seal your borders nearly 100% to pull off what NZ and Az do. And some of it’s a law of large numbers issue. If there is a 1/10,000 chance covid makes it through border quarantine, then if we have 50X as many crossings, we’ll need 50X as many mini-lockdowns. At some point it becomes impractical. I don’t think it’s fair to say “lockdowns work” when you really mean “lockdowns work at the very start of an outbreak when paired with a strong contract tracing, quarantine, and border sealing.” I think there is a point of no return at which you cannot lockdown/trace your way back to zero because the virus is everywhere is large numbers. Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > I don’t think it’s fair to say “lockdowns work” when you really mean “lockdowns work at the very start of an outbreak when paired with a strong contract tracing, quarantine, and border sealing.” Well, I was initially responding to a context-free claim about them not working. I agree, my response was also a bit light on context, and it made a stronger claim than was warranted. > Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid. That may be true. It might not be. I think we will never know, because official policy at the time was 'don't test sick people [1], sweep everything under the rug to make the numbers look good, don't let private providers test people, institute a delayed travel ban that does not include Europe.' [1] Unless they recently traveled from a foreign outbreak area. I remember reading about the hoops people had to jump through to get tested - and how many of them just gave up on the whole thing. Official policy was not to test non-travelers, because there was no evidence of community spread. Of course, if you never test anyone, you won't find any...

vkou 5y ago

They didn't have national lockdowns, and neither did the US. They had regional lockdowns early in the pandemic. The US... Had a patchwork of half-assed regional lockdowns, that came weeks late. > All those countries have tight border controls. We get hundreds of thousands of illegal border crosses ever year. We'd have to deploy the military along the Mexican border and probably Canada too. The overwhelming majority of border cases in the US did not come from illegal crossings in Mexico. They came from legal crossings through controlled borders, because the US did not implement any quarantine control on inbound travelers. It asked for travelers to self-quarantine as a courtesy, with no verification or enforcement, with predictable results. It's true that lockdowns without contact tracing just delay the problem. The US has failed at that too. If you caught COVID in April, chances are, you'd have no idea who you caught it from. It would have been difficult to engineer a more spectacular disaster, if we tried. You need two parts to this equation. Lockdown, and contact tracing. Both are required, and it's disingenuous to say that lockdowns don't work. It's fair to say that they don't work as we implemented them. Our implementation of them is not the only implementation of them.

rhino369 5y ago
I’m not trying to blame illegal immigrants for our pandemic. They didn’t cause it and I really doubt they made it appreciably worse. Like you said, we didn’t even have restrictions on anyone. But in my hypothetical where we got to where NZ and AZ are right now (no covid in the community), and quarantine controlled entries, uncontrolled border crossings would 1000% bring in new cases. My point is you need to seal your borders nearly 100% to pull off what NZ and Az do. And some of it’s a law of large numbers issue. If there is a 1/10,000 chance covid makes it through border quarantine, then if we have 50X as many crossings, we’ll need 50X as many mini-lockdowns. At some point it becomes impractical. I don’t think it’s fair to say “lockdowns work” when you really mean “lockdowns work at the very start of an outbreak when paired with a strong contract tracing, quarantine, and border sealing.” I think there is a point of no return at which you cannot lockdown/trace your way back to zero because the virus is everywhere is large numbers. Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid.
- vkou 5y ago
  > I don’t think it’s fair to say “lockdowns work” when you really mean “lockdowns work at the very start of an outbreak when paired with a strong contract tracing, quarantine, and border sealing.” Well, I was initially responding to a context-free claim about them not working. I agree, my response was also a bit light on context, and it made a stronger claim than was warranted. > Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid. That may be true. It might not be. I think we will never know, because official policy at the time was 'don't test sick people [1], sweep everything under the rug to make the numbers look good, don't let private providers test people, institute a delayed travel ban that does not include Europe.' [1] Unless they recently traveled from a foreign outbreak area. I remember reading about the hoops people had to jump through to get tested - and how many of them just gave up on the whole thing. Official policy was not to test non-travelers, because there was no evidence of community spread. Of course, if you never test anyone, you won't find any...