4 ms·

I don't follow this argument. If, say, half the people completely ignored the rules then doesn't that make them only half as effective and cause half the econom

• manwe150 5y ago
  If a business is half fixed costs and half profit, then cutting their revenue in half will cut their profit to zero. Speed limits are a good counter-example though, where they can provide a baseline expectation (eg mask wearing is good in crowded places) and then begins the negotiations from there for what is expected social behavior.
  • eli 5y ago
    That's perhaps an argument against lockdowns, but not an argument that lockdowns don't work because of noncompliance.
    • manwe150 5y ago
      I did not mean to imply it was an argument either way. I meant it more as a way of demonstrating that we need to be careful to be precise about the actual relative impacts of each option, since they each have non-linear side-effects (including rates of compliance). So we should not get caught making absolute statements that something is always better or that it never works in this case, but instead look at the Pareto optimality frontier for each particular region when making policy recommendations and analysis.
• amluto 5y ago
  Not even close, sadly. Consider New Zealand, Taiwan, and China: if you take extreme measures and eliminate all COVID, then there is no COVID. It doesn’t appear from nowhere. (Just like in 2018 there was no COVID.) On the other hand, if you eliminate half the transmission of a highly contagious disease, everyone may well still get it, and while you have flattened the curve, you haven’t actually saved many lives. For those who remember Chicken Pox, almost everyone got chicken pox. To the extend any NPIs reduced transmission (e.g. keeping kids out of school), the primary result was delaying chicken pox or avoiding major outbreaks, and delaying chicken pox may have been a bad thing. As a different analogy, if you have a Windows XP system in the Internet, it will get pwned. If you update it to Vista, you get a worse UI and it still gets pwned. Sometimes half measures are much less than half effective.
  • eli 5y ago
    Wouldn't you MUCH rather get covid today than in April 2020?
    • amluto 5y ago
      Yes. I’m not claiming that NPIs are useless. I’m saying that half an NPI may be vastly less than half as effective. I think the OP can speak for itself.
  • cassianoleal 5y ago
    > if you eliminate half the transmission of a highly contagious disease, everyone may well still get it, and while you have flattened the curve, you haven’t actually saved many lives. Assuming all other things are equal in both cases, sure. In reality though, by flattening the curve we have avoided greater collapse of health systems, we got more time to understand better what works and what doesn't when fighting the disease, we got more vaccinated people, etc. These things combined might have saved a lot of lives. I'm not sure why delaying chicken pox may have been a bad thing, what do you mean by that?
    • abakker 5y ago
      I agree that flattening the curve should have benefitted society and saved lives. Regarding chickenpox, it becomes more and more dangerous the later in life you catch it. Getting it as a 5yo is annoying. Getting it at 15 can be quite a bit more dangerous. getting it for the first time at 40 can be lethal.
      • cassianoleal 5y ago
        I see what you mean. How does that work out in reality though? There are always people in all those age groups in society and if you let the disease run amok, that just means the 40yo of now are more likely to catch it before there's a vaccine or better treatments, doesn't it? OTOH if you slow down the kids getting it, they will be less likely to spread it to the teens and middle-aged kids :D until those are available. i.e. pretty much the same, is it not? Disclaimer: I'm pulling those ideas out of my arse, I have no real data or knowlege to back my thoughts.
• deleted 5y ago
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• tinus_hn 5y ago
  It’s the old no true lockdown argument; if the lockdown fails it’s because it wasn’t tough enough or because it was followed or enforced strictly enough. An easy fallacy to handwave away the possibility that the lockdown strategy just doesn’t work so well. Which is kind of obvious if you think it through; either the result is you eradicate the virus completely or the lockdown just delays the inevitable. And it should be clear by now that eradication is simply impossible and from very early on in the pandemic was just never going to happen.
  • sharken 5y ago
    Very true, but if you can delay the inevitable long enough to get a substantial part of the population vaccinated, then there is value in that. However, that strategy fails when you don't have access to the vaccine.
    • tinus_hn 5y ago
      If you consider the few months of protection granted against severe disease, and not against infection, good enough and believe it’s possible and wise to keep giving people more and more ‘boosters’, and believe the risks of vaccines and an infinite list of boosters remain smaller than the risk of the disease itself and, should one choose to implement a mandate, the cost of losing the right to decide for yourself if you want the vaccine/boosters or not.
      • sharken 5y ago
        I was only addressing the situation where nobody is vaccinated and the vaccine is being distributed. With booster shots it should never be an option to shut down society.
  • landemva 5y ago
    Yes, the argument that it would have worked _if_only_ is similar to the Marxist argument that it would have worked if only all countries had gone full Marxist. Top-down government control of economy and medicine rarely achieves the stated goals.