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I don't understand how you can be skeptical about lockdowns. The virus needs people to come in contact in order to spread. If you reduce contact you reduce spre

I don't understand how you can be skeptical about lockdowns. The virus needs people to come in contact in order to spread. If you reduce contact you reduce spreading. It's the simple fact of the matter. Case closed. Nobody denies lockdowns have damaging effects in other areas. That leaves a discussion about what kinds of lockdowns are worth the benefits they bring. But seems to me the sub isn't geared towards finding that truth?

impendingchange 5y ago
In an utopia where individual rights are not a matter of importance, lockdowns make perfect sense. Case in point is nearly every prison that locked their populace down to control the spread of the virus.
jMyles 5y ago
> I don't understand how you can be skeptical about lockdowns. The virus needs people to come in contact in order to spread. If you reduce contact you reduce spreading. It's the simple fact of the matter. Case closed. Just to check in with you - and this is honestly meant as a check-in and not an insult: do you realize how unabashedly privileged you sound? I ask this first because I know that for me, I often don't realize when I make statements that reflect my own privilege, and I find that when that happens, it's almost always a chance to learn something new and important. I hope that is the case here. Let's look at how lockdowns _actually_ interdict spread: I'm reasonably affluent. Long-time remote worker in a fairly elite engineering position. I am able to sit in my home and order everything I need delivered to me. I live in a two-generation household, and I'm the oldest. We are all at low risk for adverse outcomes from SARS-CoV-2. In fact, for us, the risk is statistically difficult to distinguish from any other year's circulating pathogens. Meanwhile, the person delivering things to me (and thus entering and leaving dozens of restaurants and stores every day to obtain the things for me and my affluent neighbors) is far more likely to live with a higher-risk relative and also more likely to live in a three-generation home (which is a fairly dire situation in light of this pathogen). Let's imagine that my delivery worker lives with his 82-year-old grandmother with untreated high blood pressure. For her, in contrast to me, the risk this year is _nothing_ like that resulting from a typical year's respiratory pathogens. It's perhaps as much as 100x higher. Her risk of hospitalization - which she is also less likely to be able to afford - may be as high as 10%, compared to my small fraction of a percent. As the months go on, I'm "protected" from infection. Instead of being able to adjoin the cohort of the highest spread acuity and then isolate (which I believe is my civic duty as a low risk person, to protect my higher-risk neighbors), I have to wait a year or more for my inevitable infection. But that's not the end of the world, right? I had to mostly socially isolate and work remotely for a while, cancel a bunch of trips, etc. But all in all, nothing to cry over. Now: what about my delivery driver and his grandma? For them, my delay in getting infected comes at an enormous cost. Namely, it increases the overall chance that the high-risk members of their family will be infected. They might possibly be able to interdict infection across their three-generation household for a few weeks, but not for years. Now perhaps you see the actual first-order impact of lockdowns: they don't simply "slow the spread", they actually break one of the most important tools humans have in our collective ability to fight infectious disease: our social proclivity to facilitate differences in spread acuity _by risk_. We are actually very good at ensuring that young, healthy people share pathogens and develop community immunity quickly. By preventing that, we protect only those privileged enough among us to isolate more-or-less indefinitely. In other words, lockdowns don't change spread acuity, they just shift its stratification from being by risk (which is great for preventing adverse outcomes) to being by socioeconomic status (which is arguably the worst possible approach if the goal is to prevent adverse outcomes). My friend Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford refers to this situation as "let it drip" (a play on words in the face of "let it rip", a sophomoric slogan used by opponents of traditional vertical risk stratification). So, what we're saying is that we can observe not only the collateral consequences of lockdowns (which of course are devastating), but also an undesirable impact in first-order effects: lockdowns which are long enough to decrease spread acuity in the low-risk tier also increase first-order death in the high-risk tier. This is the reason that lockdowns (previously referred to as "quarantine of the healthy") are advised against in the published pandemic plans prior to 2019. By all means, go to Google Scholar (or your search engine of choice for scholarly material) and drive yourself down this memory lane. You'll be astounded and almost certainly come out the other end a lockdown skeptic.
- bartimus 5y ago
  Thank you for the detailed response. I'm afraid you totally misunderstood my comment. I said: "Nobody denies lockdowns have damaging effects in other areas." What I'm saying is, is that lockdowns technically work. Keep everyone inside (including the delivery guy) and spreading will be reduced. Let's take this one step further. What if we could (hypothetically) isolate the entire planet for 1 month. We might just completely irradicate a whole bunch of deceases. But of course it would come at a cost. Lockdowns are just one of the tools we have at our disposal. There's no doubt they work. Viruses don't spread telepathically. This in itself is nothing to be skeptical about. The only question is if the benefits outweigh the costs. A better name for the sub would perhaps have been: /r/lockdownpolicyskepticism
  - jMyles 5y ago
    > What I'm saying is, is that lockdowns technically work. Keep everyone inside (including the delivery guy) and spreading will be reduced. Let's take this one step further. What if we could (hypothetically) isolate the entire planet for 1 month. We might just completely irradicate a whole bunch of deceases. I doubt we'd eradicate any disease which is a significant threat to humankind with a month of isolation, for two reasons: * In the case of many pathogens, there are extreme outliers who remain contagious for months (and of course with others, such as some retroviruses, it is normal to remain contagious indefinitely). * There are sufficient animal reservoirs for many pathogens (including SARS-CoV-2 and influenza and many other respiratory pathogens) that, no matter how long humans isolate, they'll be exposed rapidly upon emergence. > There's no doubt they work. I'm not sure how you can say this, when a giant chorus of experts from all of the world's foremost institutions of medical research have expressed exactly this doubt. I appreciate the exercise of your hypothetical, but even in the extreme case you present, it's far from clear that it will have an impact which reduces adverse outcomes. And in the real world, with its imperfections? I see no reason to believe that lockdowns have any positive impact, first- or second-order.
    - bartimus 5y ago
      > I'm not sure how you can say this, when a giant chorus of experts from all of the world's foremost institutions of medical research have expressed exactly this doubt. There's no doubt. It's scientific fact that the virus cannot spread when its host doesn't occupy spaces that other people do. Besides it being a "rain is wet" kind of thing, it's also backup up by scientific research. The discussion is about what flavor of lockdown offers sufficient benefits that outweigh the costs. And if such flavors can be enforced.

impendingchange 5y ago

In an utopia where individual rights are not a matter of importance, lockdowns make perfect sense. Case in point is nearly every prison that locked their populace down to control the spread of the virus.

jMyles 5y ago

> I don't understand how you can be skeptical about lockdowns. The virus needs people to come in contact in order to spread. If you reduce contact you reduce spreading. It's the simple fact of the matter. Case closed. Just to check in with you - and this is honestly meant as a check-in and not an insult: do you realize how unabashedly privileged you sound? I ask this first because I know that for me, I often don't realize when I make statements that reflect my own privilege, and I find that when that happens, it's almost always a chance to learn something new and important. I hope that is the case here. Let's look at how lockdowns _actually_ interdict spread: I'm reasonably affluent. Long-time remote worker in a fairly elite engineering position. I am able to sit in my home and order everything I need delivered to me. I live in a two-generation household, and I'm the oldest. We are all at low risk for adverse outcomes from SARS-CoV-2. In fact, for us, the risk is statistically difficult to distinguish from any other year's circulating pathogens. Meanwhile, the person delivering things to me (and thus entering and leaving dozens of restaurants and stores every day to obtain the things for me and my affluent neighbors) is far more likely to live with a higher-risk relative and also more likely to live in a three-generation home (which is a fairly dire situation in light of this pathogen). Let's imagine that my delivery worker lives with his 82-year-old grandmother with untreated high blood pressure. For her, in contrast to me, the risk this year is _nothing_ like that resulting from a typical year's respiratory pathogens. It's perhaps as much as 100x higher. Her risk of hospitalization - which she is also less likely to be able to afford - may be as high as 10%, compared to my small fraction of a percent. As the months go on, I'm "protected" from infection. Instead of being able to adjoin the cohort of the highest spread acuity and then isolate (which I believe is my civic duty as a low risk person, to protect my higher-risk neighbors), I have to wait a year or more for my inevitable infection. But that's not the end of the world, right? I had to mostly socially isolate and work remotely for a while, cancel a bunch of trips, etc. But all in all, nothing to cry over. Now: what about my delivery driver and his grandma? For them, my delay in getting infected comes at an enormous cost. Namely, it increases the overall chance that the high-risk members of their family will be infected. They might possibly be able to interdict infection across their three-generation household for a few weeks, but not for years. Now perhaps you see the actual first-order impact of lockdowns: they don't simply "slow the spread", they actually break one of the most important tools humans have in our collective ability to fight infectious disease: our social proclivity to facilitate differences in spread acuity _by risk_. We are actually very good at ensuring that young, healthy people share pathogens and develop community immunity quickly. By preventing that, we protect only those privileged enough among us to isolate more-or-less indefinitely. In other words, lockdowns don't change spread acuity, they just shift its stratification from being by risk (which is great for preventing adverse outcomes) to being by socioeconomic status (which is arguably the worst possible approach if the goal is to prevent adverse outcomes). My friend Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford refers to this situation as "let it drip" (a play on words in the face of "let it rip", a sophomoric slogan used by opponents of traditional vertical risk stratification). So, what we're saying is that we can observe not only the collateral consequences of lockdowns (which of course are devastating), but also an undesirable impact in first-order effects: lockdowns which are long enough to decrease spread acuity in the low-risk tier also increase first-order death in the high-risk tier. This is the reason that lockdowns (previously referred to as "quarantine of the healthy") are advised against in the published pandemic plans prior to 2019. By all means, go to Google Scholar (or your search engine of choice for scholarly material) and drive yourself down this memory lane. You'll be astounded and almost certainly come out the other end a lockdown skeptic.

bartimus 5y ago
Thank you for the detailed response. I'm afraid you totally misunderstood my comment. I said: "Nobody denies lockdowns have damaging effects in other areas." What I'm saying is, is that lockdowns technically work. Keep everyone inside (including the delivery guy) and spreading will be reduced. Let's take this one step further. What if we could (hypothetically) isolate the entire planet for 1 month. We might just completely irradicate a whole bunch of deceases. But of course it would come at a cost. Lockdowns are just one of the tools we have at our disposal. There's no doubt they work. Viruses don't spread telepathically. This in itself is nothing to be skeptical about. The only question is if the benefits outweigh the costs. A better name for the sub would perhaps have been: /r/lockdownpolicyskepticism
- jMyles 5y ago
  > What I'm saying is, is that lockdowns technically work. Keep everyone inside (including the delivery guy) and spreading will be reduced. Let's take this one step further. What if we could (hypothetically) isolate the entire planet for 1 month. We might just completely irradicate a whole bunch of deceases. I doubt we'd eradicate any disease which is a significant threat to humankind with a month of isolation, for two reasons: * In the case of many pathogens, there are extreme outliers who remain contagious for months (and of course with others, such as some retroviruses, it is normal to remain contagious indefinitely). * There are sufficient animal reservoirs for many pathogens (including SARS-CoV-2 and influenza and many other respiratory pathogens) that, no matter how long humans isolate, they'll be exposed rapidly upon emergence. > There's no doubt they work. I'm not sure how you can say this, when a giant chorus of experts from all of the world's foremost institutions of medical research have expressed exactly this doubt. I appreciate the exercise of your hypothetical, but even in the extreme case you present, it's far from clear that it will have an impact which reduces adverse outcomes. And in the real world, with its imperfections? I see no reason to believe that lockdowns have any positive impact, first- or second-order.
  - bartimus 5y ago
    > I'm not sure how you can say this, when a giant chorus of experts from all of the world's foremost institutions of medical research have expressed exactly this doubt. There's no doubt. It's scientific fact that the virus cannot spread when its host doesn't occupy spaces that other people do. Besides it being a "rain is wet" kind of thing, it's also backup up by scientific research. The discussion is about what flavor of lockdown offers sufficient benefits that outweigh the costs. And if such flavors can be enforced.