8 ms·

Weird to blame the lockdowns when the real cause was the pandemic. It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with peopl

Weird to blame the lockdowns when the real cause was the pandemic. It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. China especially was hit so incredibly badly in that first wave; it was always gonna go pear-shaped no matter what.

wyager 5y ago
> Weird to blame the lockdowns when the real cause was the pandemic. The lockdowns were the actual proximate cause for most business disruptions. > It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. People who are employed are usually younger than 65 and therefore were never at significant demographic health risk from coronavirus.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
How much this was due to organic behaviour changes in the population and how much was due to government regulations isn't clear to me at this point, only that it was both. Sweden and Denmark have ended all covid state restrictions afaik - anyone has data on how that affected productivity?
- ihsw 5y ago
  The implication that government policy has an effect on individual choices is a fallacy -- assertions that lockdowns destroyed productivity (it didn't) are false and assertions that relieving lockdowns restored productivity (it didn't) are also false. Individuals will behave in their best interest regardless of external factors like unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.
eljimmy 5y ago
It's true - China's numbers, unsurprisingly, really don't give light to how badly they were impacted. I remember reading about how they were building brand new hospitals to cope. Literally building a brand new hospital. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho... Looking back on that, it's interesting to think about how that should have been a major warning sign of things to come for the rest of the world.
- antiSingularity 5y ago
  They also released vidoes of people literally dropping in the street "with Covid".
  - tibbydudeza 5y ago
    Or scenes where a white van stops and couple of folks in Hazmat suits jumps out and then proceed to drag infected people away.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      Not quite "dragged", but this happened to a friend of mine. Her country was on the safe (no isolation) list when her plane landed in China, and she then boarded a long distance, overnight train. Her country then announced their first positive case. When she left the train, two men with hazmat suits and a van were on the platform to meet her. They took her to an isolation hotel room with an alarmed door. (Not an actual lock, as I understand, so she could leave if there were a fire. But an alarmed door.)
    - fidesomnes 5y ago
      > infected supposedly. snatch and grab is never done for anyones safety.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  > Literally building a brand new hospital. We built multiple temporary hospitals in the UK too. And albeit not so widely reported, temporary morgues. To be honest I assumed a whole bunch of countries were doing this...
antiSingularity 5y ago
You've got that mixed up. The reason that supply chains are in disarray are because of the enormous disruption caused by Covid restrictions and lockdowns, not because people were literally dying of Covid on the job. You could infer that if we hadn't acted the way we did, then what I described would have actually happened and things would be a lot worse. You could also infer that long-term and large-scale control of an airbourne respiratory virus through social means is ineffectual, and things would have been about the same anyway (from a death and disease standpoint).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  I think the parent was more making the point that however we chose to deal with the pandemic, it was difficult to avoid disruption to the supply chain. I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another.
  - CydeWeys 5y ago
    > I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another. Thank you for phrasing so perfectly the exact point I was making. It feels disingenuous when people solely blame the reactions to a worldwide pandemic while ignoring that the worldwide pandemic was still gonna be happening regardless.
    - antiSingularity 5y ago
      Does blaming the declining mental and physical state of previously healthy people on "lockdowns" also get vaguely political? My wife and I did not come near to breakdowns as we tried to care for our young family through the lockdowns and restrictions because of Covid itself, I can tell you that much.
Factorium 5y ago
Life continued as normal in Sweden, Russia, Belarus... the pandemic 'response' was driven by the media and politicians. If there is surge of deaths in nursing homes (typically 50% of COVID deaths), it has no impact on the rest of the economy. Many of those same politicians later benefitted to tune of millions of dollars from advance knowledge of federal bank intervention in markets. If there was no lockdown, this opportunity would not have occurred. There was a clear conflict of interest. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fed-vice-chair-traded-stocks-152738020.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/fed-vice-chair-traded-stocks-1527... Its the same for individuals who bought into MRNA startups eg. BioNTech in 2019 - there's a clear financial motivation to promote disruptive lockdown, in order to position vaccines as the cure. https://trialsitenews.com/gates-earns-10x-on-biontech-in-just-two-years-55m-investment-now-over-550m/ https://trialsitenews.com/gates-earns-10x-on-biontech-in-jus... Its likely that lockdowns worsen COVID, because of the reduction in health from lower Vitamin D (staying inside), poorer diets, increased stress, and reduction of exposure of younger people (school cancellations, nightclub closures etc.) who usually form the bulk of the herd immunity population for seasonal respiratory viruses.
- norenh 5y ago
  >Life continued as normal in Sweden... Sweden had less formal lockdowns, but recommendations that was largely followed . Also limited opening hours for restaurants and closed events with live audience. Most workers stayed at home, traveling went down A LOT and people could not visit care homes etc. If you compare the effect on society it was largely the same as the rest of Scandinavia that did have slightly more formal lockdowns. Lots of companies (restaurants, cultural events like concerts, theatre etc.) had real economical issues and a lot of people became unemployed. Could be worse, but still it is misleading to say life continued as normal. A quick google show that unemployment in Sweden doubled during the pandemic and that is largely attributed to the measures that took place as a response to the pandemic.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > live audience Exactly. Last year I watched (over the internet) Sanna Nielsen sing Stockholm in my heart to an empty field where there should have been an audience of thousands. Useful to have a bit of an awareness of foreign media to see what's actually happening, not what's reported by delusionists on the internet. It was never true that there were no restrictions in Sweden, just less restrictions.
tibbydudeza 5y ago
When I saw the time lapsed footage of a emergency hospital being built in Wuhan in only 10 days I turned to the wife and said there is some big $hit coming. Three weeks later we had 4 cases from Italian tourists - it all went pear shaped from there - 2.91M infected and 87,819 deaths.
- symlinkk 5y ago
  China was also welding people in their homes, I don’t think they should be used as a barometer of how serious something is
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vcxy 5y ago
    I don't understand this comment. If you think it's not useful evidence of anything, then are you saying that welding people into their homes was equally likely if nothing was happening and it's just coincidence that they did it when they did?
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    “Welding people into their homes” sure doesn’t sound like something you do if you don’t think things are super fucking serious if you ask me.
  - tibbydudeza 5y ago
    Entire city of Wuhan (11 million) and later the province of Hubei was placed on lockdown - that is 58 million people - it was very serious.
stickfigure 5y ago
I'm pretty sure the hardcore red states in the US would have simply soaked up the 0.7% IFR and moved on. That might not have helped with semiconductors, but there would probably still be meat and potatoes.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Sure they'd have soaked up the loss but I strongly doubt a collapsing healthcare system would have resulted in not much "moved on". Delta isn't 0.7 IFR. But even a high IFR doesn't calculate how many hospital/ICU beds are used by infected but not (yet) dead.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  The IFR for covid is also heavily stratified by age. The latest best estimate from the CDC put it at 0.6% IFR for the general population, but at 0.05% for the 18-49 years group. I am still not completely convinced that the choice of blanket lockdowns instead of focused protection of risky groups didn't make things worse by prolonging the pandemic, a.k.a. "flattening the curve". Old people are not very mobile by nature, and had we kept the economy working, but with government assistance, we would probably be able to improve the social distancing of the elder and the obese for as much as we needed. The rest of the population could live their life as usual, with minimal consequence, and the virus would peter out when it find it difficult to find new host without immunity. Instead we lockdown indiscriminately, and opened up indiscriminately and probably sooner then the ideal, because you simply can't keep thing lockdown for the whole society for long: Your resources are going to exhaust some day.
bserge 5y ago
It was the damn lockdowns, the idiotic response to the pandemic, and most importantly the time it went on for. Masks and distancing would've been enough after the first half a year ffs. But to be fair, we deserve it for running such a fragile system. And they should've just made vaccines mandatory, none of this bullshit soft encouragement while people can't cross borders. People weren't "dropping like flies", either, especially not those of working age. Less than 0.1% dead worldwide, the vast majority of which were over 65. Reminds me of that Reddit thread on psychosomatic death where people were sad their relatives suddenly died. Their 80-90 year old relatives. I mean, fuck me, that's a good life lived right there. Another year or two doesn't make much of a difference. But that's unrelated to Covid, it's just the same type of weird fearful thinking.
ipqk 5y ago
Before the official lockdown happened in NYC, the city was basically already deserted. Virtually no one on trains that didn't have to be, and restaurants/bars nearly empty. It was going to happen regardless of government intervention.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> when the real cause was the pandemic. No, the lockdowns were the cause not the pandemic. We didn't have to do lockdowns--they weren't on anybody's pandemic plans until March of 2020. Lockdowns and our reaction to Covid was entirely upon humans. > It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. China especially was hit so incredibly badly in that first wave Were they really though? Or was the hysteria in March off the charts?

wyager 5y ago

> Weird to blame the lockdowns when the real cause was the pandemic. The lockdowns were the actual proximate cause for most business disruptions. > It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. People who are employed are usually younger than 65 and therefore were never at significant demographic health risk from coronavirus.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

How much this was due to organic behaviour changes in the population and how much was due to government regulations isn't clear to me at this point, only that it was both. Sweden and Denmark have ended all covid state restrictions afaik - anyone has data on how that affected productivity?

ihsw 5y ago
The implication that government policy has an effect on individual choices is a fallacy -- assertions that lockdowns destroyed productivity (it didn't) are false and assertions that relieving lockdowns restored productivity (it didn't) are also false. Individuals will behave in their best interest regardless of external factors like unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.

eljimmy 5y ago

It's true - China's numbers, unsurprisingly, really don't give light to how badly they were impacted. I remember reading about how they were building brand new hospitals to cope. Literally building a brand new hospital. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho... Looking back on that, it's interesting to think about how that should have been a major warning sign of things to come for the rest of the world.

antiSingularity 5y ago
They also released vidoes of people literally dropping in the street "with Covid".
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Or scenes where a white van stops and couple of folks in Hazmat suits jumps out and then proceed to drag infected people away.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    Not quite "dragged", but this happened to a friend of mine. Her country was on the safe (no isolation) list when her plane landed in China, and she then boarded a long distance, overnight train. Her country then announced their first positive case. When she left the train, two men with hazmat suits and a van were on the platform to meet her. They took her to an isolation hotel room with an alarmed door. (Not an actual lock, as I understand, so she could leave if there were a fire. But an alarmed door.)
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    > infected supposedly. snatch and grab is never done for anyones safety.
tailspin2019 5y ago
> Literally building a brand new hospital. We built multiple temporary hospitals in the UK too. And albeit not so widely reported, temporary morgues. To be honest I assumed a whole bunch of countries were doing this...

antiSingularity 5y ago

You've got that mixed up. The reason that supply chains are in disarray are because of the enormous disruption caused by Covid restrictions and lockdowns, not because people were literally dying of Covid on the job. You could infer that if we hadn't acted the way we did, then what I described would have actually happened and things would be a lot worse. You could also infer that long-term and large-scale control of an airbourne respiratory virus through social means is ineffectual, and things would have been about the same anyway (from a death and disease standpoint).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tailspin2019 5y ago
I think the parent was more making the point that however we chose to deal with the pandemic, it was difficult to avoid disruption to the supply chain. I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another.
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  > I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another. Thank you for phrasing so perfectly the exact point I was making. It feels disingenuous when people solely blame the reactions to a worldwide pandemic while ignoring that the worldwide pandemic was still gonna be happening regardless.
  - antiSingularity 5y ago
    Does blaming the declining mental and physical state of previously healthy people on "lockdowns" also get vaguely political? My wife and I did not come near to breakdowns as we tried to care for our young family through the lockdowns and restrictions because of Covid itself, I can tell you that much.

Factorium 5y ago

Life continued as normal in Sweden, Russia, Belarus... the pandemic 'response' was driven by the media and politicians. If there is surge of deaths in nursing homes (typically 50% of COVID deaths), it has no impact on the rest of the economy. Many of those same politicians later benefitted to tune of millions of dollars from advance knowledge of federal bank intervention in markets. If there was no lockdown, this opportunity would not have occurred. There was a clear conflict of interest. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fed-vice-chair-traded-stocks-152738020.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/fed-vice-chair-traded-stocks-1527... Its the same for individuals who bought into MRNA startups eg. BioNTech in 2019 - there's a clear financial motivation to promote disruptive lockdown, in order to position vaccines as the cure. https://trialsitenews.com/gates-earns-10x-on-biontech-in-just-two-years-55m-investment-now-over-550m/ https://trialsitenews.com/gates-earns-10x-on-biontech-in-jus... Its likely that lockdowns worsen COVID, because of the reduction in health from lower Vitamin D (staying inside), poorer diets, increased stress, and reduction of exposure of younger people (school cancellations, nightclub closures etc.) who usually form the bulk of the herd immunity population for seasonal respiratory viruses.

norenh 5y ago
>Life continued as normal in Sweden... Sweden had less formal lockdowns, but recommendations that was largely followed . Also limited opening hours for restaurants and closed events with live audience. Most workers stayed at home, traveling went down A LOT and people could not visit care homes etc. If you compare the effect on society it was largely the same as the rest of Scandinavia that did have slightly more formal lockdowns. Lots of companies (restaurants, cultural events like concerts, theatre etc.) had real economical issues and a lot of people became unemployed. Could be worse, but still it is misleading to say life continued as normal. A quick google show that unemployment in Sweden doubled during the pandemic and that is largely attributed to the measures that took place as a response to the pandemic.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > live audience Exactly. Last year I watched (over the internet) Sanna Nielsen sing Stockholm in my heart to an empty field where there should have been an audience of thousands. Useful to have a bit of an awareness of foreign media to see what's actually happening, not what's reported by delusionists on the internet. It was never true that there were no restrictions in Sweden, just less restrictions.

tibbydudeza 5y ago

When I saw the time lapsed footage of a emergency hospital being built in Wuhan in only 10 days I turned to the wife and said there is some big $hit coming. Three weeks later we had 4 cases from Italian tourists - it all went pear shaped from there - 2.91M infected and 87,819 deaths.

symlinkk 5y ago
China was also welding people in their homes, I don’t think they should be used as a barometer of how serious something is
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vcxy 5y ago
  I don't understand this comment. If you think it's not useful evidence of anything, then are you saying that welding people into their homes was equally likely if nothing was happening and it's just coincidence that they did it when they did?
- egypturnash 5y ago
  “Welding people into their homes” sure doesn’t sound like something you do if you don’t think things are super fucking serious if you ask me.
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Entire city of Wuhan (11 million) and later the province of Hubei was placed on lockdown - that is 58 million people - it was very serious.

stickfigure 5y ago

I'm pretty sure the hardcore red states in the US would have simply soaked up the 0.7% IFR and moved on. That might not have helped with semiconductors, but there would probably still be meat and potatoes.

r00fus 5y ago
Sure they'd have soaked up the loss but I strongly doubt a collapsing healthcare system would have resulted in not much "moved on". Delta isn't 0.7 IFR. But even a high IFR doesn't calculate how many hospital/ICU beds are used by infected but not (yet) dead.
elzbardico 5y ago
The IFR for covid is also heavily stratified by age. The latest best estimate from the CDC put it at 0.6% IFR for the general population, but at 0.05% for the 18-49 years group. I am still not completely convinced that the choice of blanket lockdowns instead of focused protection of risky groups didn't make things worse by prolonging the pandemic, a.k.a. "flattening the curve". Old people are not very mobile by nature, and had we kept the economy working, but with government assistance, we would probably be able to improve the social distancing of the elder and the obese for as much as we needed. The rest of the population could live their life as usual, with minimal consequence, and the virus would peter out when it find it difficult to find new host without immunity. Instead we lockdown indiscriminately, and opened up indiscriminately and probably sooner then the ideal, because you simply can't keep thing lockdown for the whole society for long: Your resources are going to exhaust some day.

bserge 5y ago

It was the damn lockdowns, the idiotic response to the pandemic, and most importantly the time it went on for. Masks and distancing would've been enough after the first half a year ffs. But to be fair, we deserve it for running such a fragile system. And they should've just made vaccines mandatory, none of this bullshit soft encouragement while people can't cross borders. People weren't "dropping like flies", either, especially not those of working age. Less than 0.1% dead worldwide, the vast majority of which were over 65. Reminds me of that Reddit thread on psychosomatic death where people were sad their relatives suddenly died. Their 80-90 year old relatives. I mean, fuck me, that's a good life lived right there. Another year or two doesn't make much of a difference. But that's unrelated to Covid, it's just the same type of weird fearful thinking.

ipqk 5y ago

Before the official lockdown happened in NYC, the city was basically already deserted. Virtually no one on trains that didn't have to be, and restaurants/bars nearly empty. It was going to happen regardless of government intervention.

spookthesunset 5y ago

> when the real cause was the pandemic. No, the lockdowns were the cause not the pandemic. We didn't have to do lockdowns--they weren't on anybody's pandemic plans until March of 2020. Lockdowns and our reaction to Covid was entirely upon humans. > It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. China especially was hit so incredibly badly in that first wave Were they really though? Or was the hysteria in March off the charts?