3 ms·

No it wasn't. I will keep repeating this fact on HN until my fingers fall off - lockdowns do not work. They. Do. Not. Work. The data is in and the data is unamb

No it wasn't. I will keep repeating this fact on HN until my fingers fall off - lockdowns do not work. They. Do. Not. Work. The data is in and the data is unambiguous, lockdowns have no effect at all. The UK having worse outcomes than some other regions that had far less strict measures should be enough to kill this idea off completely, yet you cite that very fact even though it clearly disproves the notion that lockdown timing had anything to do with the UK's results. As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.

pasabagi 5y ago
... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it. Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics. Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
- thu2111 5y ago
  They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowhere near deadly enough to justify them, as demonstrated by the counter-example states and countries that rejected them and saw far less than the predicted mortality.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    > The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late. I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas. If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.
    - thu2111 5y ago
      You seem to be trying to identify causation from a single graph. That's not how data analysis needs to be done. You have to compare different datasets that vary in the control variable. In the case of Europe the UK vs Sweden is a good comparison because they are similar in most ways that should affect viral propagation except for lockdowns. Sweden has seen significantly better death rates than the UK, despite the theory saying they should have done much worse, meaning the theory is wrong. Because the theory is wrong you can't derive anything by looking at UK curves in isolation and comparing them to a theoretical counterfactual. You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!

pasabagi 5y ago

... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it. Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics. Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

thu2111 5y ago
They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowhere near deadly enough to justify them, as demonstrated by the counter-example states and countries that rejected them and saw far less than the predicted mortality.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  > The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late. I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas. If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.
  - thu2111 5y ago
    You seem to be trying to identify causation from a single graph. That's not how data analysis needs to be done. You have to compare different datasets that vary in the control variable. In the case of Europe the UK vs Sweden is a good comparison because they are similar in most ways that should affect viral propagation except for lockdowns. Sweden has seen significantly better death rates than the UK, despite the theory saying they should have done much worse, meaning the theory is wrong. Because the theory is wrong you can't derive anything by looking at UK curves in isolation and comparing them to a theoretical counterfactual. You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!