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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 ev

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

> 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...