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I hope that the legacy of covid lockdowns is a renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action, to be weighed aga

by jl6 4y ago

I hope that the legacy of covid lockdowns is a renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action, to be weighed against the direct and intended effects.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
And that the number of cases of people with repeat infections and long covid is considered in assessing whether these lockdowns and restrictions should have been lifted and the disease allowed to spread freely.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- malloci 4y ago
  You would need to counter-balance this with the likely models of death and long covid if lockdowns _hadn’t_ occurred as well. You cannot look at the actual stats without taking those mitigating factors into account.
- EricE 4y ago
  You aren't going to shelter in place a highly contagious airborne virus. Life is not risk free and it's beyond obvious that lockdowns did FAR more harm than good.
roflc0ptic 4y ago
I find myself despairing that almost no lessons were learned, no clear institutional improvements came from these systems. The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines. Then you have the total failure to mobilize an institutional response for contact tracing. There’s not apparently any infrastructure for it, despite how monumentally useful such a thing could have been, would be now. I don’t want another endemic smallpox-related virus, and this virus having lots of hosts to evolve in has some clear second order risks. Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks. The initial lockdowns, I think, hold up pretty well in retrospect. Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors; keeping the schools open was a lot less clearcut for the teachers. You don’t become a schoolteacher because of your high appetite for risk.
- dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
  > The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines. Asking gay men to stop having orgies isomorphic to asking people to put on masks.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    Randy Shilts' book And the Band Played On spends a lot of time on exactly this problem during the early days of AIDS. Closing the bathhouses was controversial and resisted for too long.
- nradov 4y ago
  Some countries did seriously try contact tracing for COVID-19 and it was generally a waste of resources. Most contact tracing programs have now been discontinued or scaled back. China is still doing it, but their approach requires an authoritarian surveillance state which is far worse than any virus.
  - trention 4y ago
    >an authoritarian surveillance state which is far worse than any virus I'd take any authoritarian state over ebola, thank you very much.
    - adamiscool8 4y ago
      The irony of seeing this reply in a thread started with hope for "renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action" is darkly comic.
      - trention 4y ago
        The first-order effect of ebola is (almost) certain death. No need to consider anything of higher order.
elric 4y ago
It's probably not as cut and dry as we'd like it to be. How do you weigh a number of children with hepatitis vs people missing out on care because hospitals are overwhelmed with covid patients (in a world where there were no lockdowns)? Can we confidently say "lockdowns were bad because X children got ill and only Y people would have suffered from hospital-collapse"? Or the reverse?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jl6 4y ago
  I agree, it's difficult to evaluate, and I think we would benefit from recognizing the difficulty, and acknowledging that there were a lot of sound arguments being made both for and against lockdowns, and that the decision was a grave one. I supported the initial 2020 lockdown, and I lament that it did not come sooner, but I also don't hurl vitriol against those who delayed the decision, because I know that their motivation was not malice, but balancing the totality of needs.
- hammock 4y ago
  You could be right. How much of the reported hospital overwhelm was due to children being admitted with primary Covid infection?
dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
Lets also appreciate that second-order effects are smaller than first-order effects. This particular second-order effect affected 1000 people in 35 countries.
- rajup 4y ago
  Not small for the parents of those 1000 children I'm sure.
  - dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
    - rajup 4y ago
  - jonhohle 4y ago
    One of my children is currently very afraid of statistically unlikely events causing him harm or death. Part of life is evaluating choices for likelihood of harm and deciding if that is an acceptable risk. I’m not saying this or that about the causes that led to this illness, but 30 cases per country is a bit hard to justify as an input to decision making, especially at a community or country level. It’s valuable information, but if we hid under the sheets for everything that affected a small portion of the population, we’d all have bed sores.
    - dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
      Appreciate the irony that the people in favor of taking no actions against covid because the probability of dying is so low are the same people in this thread crying over 1000 people worldwide.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    And that's why we need to ban encryption /s.
gabereiser 4y ago
More than likely we'll forget all about it in 10-15 years time and will repeat the same mistakes. Science will see it but governments won't.
- fbdjsjbfxb 4y ago
  > Science will see it Sure if they create the next one too I suppose they'll "see" that one too.
- VancouverMan 4y ago
  In Canada, so-called scientists, academics, and medical doctors have consistently been among the most vocal initiators and proponents of the obviously-idiotic and useless restrictions that have caused widespread harm. They've also been among the most vocal proponents of censoring and silencing any opposition or questioning of their claims. We've seen a massive amount of anti-scientific behaviour from the "science" community.
femiagbabiaka 4y ago
How do you model for unintended effects? You can only operate based on the knowledge you have at the time.
cratermoon 4y ago
Alternately, if the US and other countries hadn't half-assed their response with the pseudo-lockdowns, the "lockdowns" would have been far shorter, fewer, and farther between. Nobody advocated for months-long "lockdowns" where the upper socioeconomic groups would stay home and pretend they were on a fun vacation while the rest were crowded into shipping facilities, food packing plants, and so on in order to make the "fun vacations" possible.

by jl6 4y ago

I hope that the legacy of covid lockdowns is a renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action, to be weighed against the direct and intended effects.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

And that the number of cases of people with repeat infections and long covid is considered in assessing whether these lockdowns and restrictions should have been lifted and the disease allowed to spread freely.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
malloci 4y ago
You would need to counter-balance this with the likely models of death and long covid if lockdowns _hadn’t_ occurred as well. You cannot look at the actual stats without taking those mitigating factors into account.
EricE 4y ago
You aren't going to shelter in place a highly contagious airborne virus. Life is not risk free and it's beyond obvious that lockdowns did FAR more harm than good.

roflc0ptic 4y ago

I find myself despairing that almost no lessons were learned, no clear institutional improvements came from these systems. The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines. Then you have the total failure to mobilize an institutional response for contact tracing. There’s not apparently any infrastructure for it, despite how monumentally useful such a thing could have been, would be now. I don’t want another endemic smallpox-related virus, and this virus having lots of hosts to evolve in has some clear second order risks. Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks. The initial lockdowns, I think, hold up pretty well in retrospect. Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors; keeping the schools open was a lot less clearcut for the teachers. You don’t become a schoolteacher because of your high appetite for risk.

dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
> The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines. Asking gay men to stop having orgies isomorphic to asking people to put on masks.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Randy Shilts' book And the Band Played On spends a lot of time on exactly this problem during the early days of AIDS. Closing the bathhouses was controversial and resisted for too long.
nradov 4y ago
Some countries did seriously try contact tracing for COVID-19 and it was generally a waste of resources. Most contact tracing programs have now been discontinued or scaled back. China is still doing it, but their approach requires an authoritarian surveillance state which is far worse than any virus.
- trention 4y ago
  >an authoritarian surveillance state which is far worse than any virus I'd take any authoritarian state over ebola, thank you very much.
  - adamiscool8 4y ago
    The irony of seeing this reply in a thread started with hope for "renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action" is darkly comic.
    - trention 4y ago
      The first-order effect of ebola is (almost) certain death. No need to consider anything of higher order.

elric 4y ago

It's probably not as cut and dry as we'd like it to be. How do you weigh a number of children with hepatitis vs people missing out on care because hospitals are overwhelmed with covid patients (in a world where there were no lockdowns)? Can we confidently say "lockdowns were bad because X children got ill and only Y people would have suffered from hospital-collapse"? Or the reverse?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jl6 4y ago
I agree, it's difficult to evaluate, and I think we would benefit from recognizing the difficulty, and acknowledging that there were a lot of sound arguments being made both for and against lockdowns, and that the decision was a grave one. I supported the initial 2020 lockdown, and I lament that it did not come sooner, but I also don't hurl vitriol against those who delayed the decision, because I know that their motivation was not malice, but balancing the totality of needs.
hammock 4y ago
You could be right. How much of the reported hospital overwhelm was due to children being admitted with primary Covid infection?

dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago

Lets also appreciate that second-order effects are smaller than first-order effects. This particular second-order effect affected 1000 people in 35 countries.

rajup 4y ago
Not small for the parents of those 1000 children I'm sure.
- dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
  - rajup 4y ago
- jonhohle 4y ago
  One of my children is currently very afraid of statistically unlikely events causing him harm or death. Part of life is evaluating choices for likelihood of harm and deciding if that is an acceptable risk. I’m not saying this or that about the causes that led to this illness, but 30 cases per country is a bit hard to justify as an input to decision making, especially at a community or country level. It’s valuable information, but if we hid under the sheets for everything that affected a small portion of the population, we’d all have bed sores.
  - dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
    Appreciate the irony that the people in favor of taking no actions against covid because the probability of dying is so low are the same people in this thread crying over 1000 people worldwide.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  And that's why we need to ban encryption /s.

gabereiser 4y ago

More than likely we'll forget all about it in 10-15 years time and will repeat the same mistakes. Science will see it but governments won't.

fbdjsjbfxb 4y ago
> Science will see it Sure if they create the next one too I suppose they'll "see" that one too.
VancouverMan 4y ago
In Canada, so-called scientists, academics, and medical doctors have consistently been among the most vocal initiators and proponents of the obviously-idiotic and useless restrictions that have caused widespread harm. They've also been among the most vocal proponents of censoring and silencing any opposition or questioning of their claims. We've seen a massive amount of anti-scientific behaviour from the "science" community.

femiagbabiaka 4y ago

How do you model for unintended effects? You can only operate based on the knowledge you have at the time.

cratermoon 4y ago

Alternately, if the US and other countries hadn't half-assed their response with the pseudo-lockdowns, the "lockdowns" would have been far shorter, fewer, and farther between. Nobody advocated for months-long "lockdowns" where the upper socioeconomic groups would stay home and pretend they were on a fun vacation while the rest were crowded into shipping facilities, food packing plants, and so on in order to make the "fun vacations" possible.