13 ms·

What scientists have learnt from Covid lockdowns

29 points by codexjourneys 4y ago

sposeray 4y ago
[dead]
akolbe 4y ago
Odd – this is a duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535 I thought having two submissions of the same URL wasn't possible. (Not that the article doesn't deserve it; it is well worth reading.)
- neogodless 4y ago
  I believe there's a time limit - something like 12 hours, after which it becomes a new submission (possibly with some logic around an ongoing level of activity on the first).
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I think it depends. I submitted a link last night and it pulled up a 9 day old Share.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Just saw another duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800972 (the latter one got flagged and yanked)
    - dang 4y ago
      I'm not sure I understand that but if an article has already had significant attention on HN, the dupe detector will redirect to it. After a year or so this behavior goes away, so the system is open to a repost.
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        It was a post about a database, I can't remember what the URL was, but it wasn't 'significant' but enough that it got it to the front page I believe.
  - dang 4y ago
    That's correct. IIRC it's 8 hours.
polote 4y ago
- Angostura 4y ago
  Or, the only thing that we have learned is that a small, radicalised minority will ignore best available public health guidance and requirements it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to. It's worth reading the article though - it's quit enlightening. The pros and cons of lockdowns are complex to evaluate.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    That doesn’t really address their comment which was about the ethics of detaining people in lockdowns, not the effectiveness of lockdowns for preventing transmission of disease. There are many things we could do in society that would be extremely effective from a medical standpoint but are nonetheless unethical and therefore not done (organ harvesting from deceased prisoners for instance).
    - dEnigma 4y ago
      Well, there are countries, like Austria, where we harvest organs from everyone (as necessary) unless the person opts out. Quite sensible in my opinion.
    - alliao 4y ago
      the only real lockdown is in China, everywhere else it was just a temporary voluntary sheltering at home. but whoever coined it as lockdown won, and people "felt" restricted as result of the wording... and hell it was effective at least in New Zealand
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        Worked in Singapore and Taiwan too. Only 3 places I ever want to be during another pandemic is New Zealand, Singapore, or Taiwan.
roenxi 4y ago
I think we're under-calling the negative effects of the lockdowns. The economy seems substantially less stable, inflation isn't going to get attributed to the COVID response but realistically is related. Humans suddenly seem to be facing a bunch of energy and food problems that weren't feeling quite so urgent in 2019. The global situation w.r.t war is suddenly a lot more tense and there are serious concerns about several nuclear-armed nations moving their armies about. No scientist is going to link those things to the COVID response, because the link is too vague. And there is a chance that maybe all this stuff was going to happen anyway and the timing is a coincidence. But there is a good reason that "freedom" is a higher civilisational value in the west than "be healthy". Allowing small councils to decide that people can't go to church, meet their neighbours or run a business is a very effective way to bring down a civilisation. It is impossible to do that and enjoy a high standard of living.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  I think you've summarized my more vague feelings well. Add to this that people uncomfortable with the actions taken range from nut-job conspiracy theorists to immature opposition-defiance disorder sufferers to those who took many precautions but put aggregate quality of life over quantity. Then look at the down-voting in this thread spanning the spectrum of opinions... It's going to be hard to reach any sort of nuanced consensus or agreement.
- danaris 4y ago
  While this may be true, I think it's important to remember that the negative effects of not doing the lockdowns would have been much worse. A million people died (and more are still dying! the pandemic is not over!) in the US alone, even with the partially-effective measures we took. Imagine if we hadn't even tried to reduce transmission. Hospitals would have been rapidly overwhelmed (many already got overwhelmed at the peaks, others came very close), and even people who could have been treated—both for COVID and for other health issues—would have died because they couldn't get access. What are the negative economic impacts of having, say, 3% of your population (10 million people) die over a two-year span? What are the negative economic impacts of the terrible psychological toll of all that loss? And of the government and other institutions just...not caring?
skeeter2020 4y ago
I appreciate this article because (and I say this as a triple-vaxxed rule-follower) the phrase "better safe than sorry" has become a trigger for me. All it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns. School closures and the move to (for us) a very poor online experience is a big example: I have a child in late immersion who was supposed to learn French over this period before integrating with kids this year who've been speaking it since the age of 5; you don't make much progress with a couple of hours of group zoom sessions each week. More importantly school is the one safe space for a huge group of kids, and might provide their own healthy meal of the day. I don't really wnat to think what they went through over the past several years and fear some of them may never recover. There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission, but I question the more subtle impacts and true long term cost. I state this knowing the leaders in place will never be assigned any responsibility and will be long gone when we start to ask why...
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  One thing I hate scientists saying is that whenever a claim comes up, they say “There’s no evidence for that.” That’s true - there’s no evidence if you aren’t looking. Thus, they were able to say countless things and rebut the critics with “there’s no evidence of that.” There’s no evidence that an lockdown will cause massive suffering or severe economic downturns that don’t recover easily, or that it will make a potential war easier. And here we are.
- codexjourneys 4y ago
  Agree on the educational impact likely turning out as an utter disaster in the long term. I wish it were more measurable, but the article rightly points out it's hard to quantify effects (lower future income, etc.) that haven't fully materialized yet. Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling. But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).

29 points by codexjourneys 4y ago

[dead]

Odd – this is a duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535 I thought having two submissions of the same URL wasn't possible. (Not that the article doesn't deserve it; it is well worth reading.)

neogodless 4y ago
I believe there's a time limit - something like 12 hours, after which it becomes a new submission (possibly with some logic around an ongoing level of activity on the first).
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I think it depends. I submitted a link last night and it pulled up a 9 day old Share.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Just saw another duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800972 (the latter one got flagged and yanked)
  - dang 4y ago
    I'm not sure I understand that but if an article has already had significant attention on HN, the dupe detector will redirect to it. After a year or so this behavior goes away, so the system is open to a repost.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      It was a post about a database, I can't remember what the URL was, but it wasn't 'significant' but enough that it got it to the front page I believe.
- dang 4y ago
  That's correct. IIRC it's 8 hours.

polote 4y ago

Angostura 4y ago
Or, the only thing that we have learned is that a small, radicalised minority will ignore best available public health guidance and requirements it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to. It's worth reading the article though - it's quit enlightening. The pros and cons of lockdowns are complex to evaluate.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  That doesn’t really address their comment which was about the ethics of detaining people in lockdowns, not the effectiveness of lockdowns for preventing transmission of disease. There are many things we could do in society that would be extremely effective from a medical standpoint but are nonetheless unethical and therefore not done (organ harvesting from deceased prisoners for instance).
  - dEnigma 4y ago
    Well, there are countries, like Austria, where we harvest organs from everyone (as necessary) unless the person opts out. Quite sensible in my opinion.
  - alliao 4y ago
    the only real lockdown is in China, everywhere else it was just a temporary voluntary sheltering at home. but whoever coined it as lockdown won, and people "felt" restricted as result of the wording... and hell it was effective at least in New Zealand
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      Worked in Singapore and Taiwan too. Only 3 places I ever want to be during another pandemic is New Zealand, Singapore, or Taiwan.

roenxi 4y ago

I think we're under-calling the negative effects of the lockdowns. The economy seems substantially less stable, inflation isn't going to get attributed to the COVID response but realistically is related. Humans suddenly seem to be facing a bunch of energy and food problems that weren't feeling quite so urgent in 2019. The global situation w.r.t war is suddenly a lot more tense and there are serious concerns about several nuclear-armed nations moving their armies about. No scientist is going to link those things to the COVID response, because the link is too vague. And there is a chance that maybe all this stuff was going to happen anyway and the timing is a coincidence. But there is a good reason that "freedom" is a higher civilisational value in the west than "be healthy". Allowing small councils to decide that people can't go to church, meet their neighbours or run a business is a very effective way to bring down a civilisation. It is impossible to do that and enjoy a high standard of living.

skeeter2020 4y ago
I think you've summarized my more vague feelings well. Add to this that people uncomfortable with the actions taken range from nut-job conspiracy theorists to immature opposition-defiance disorder sufferers to those who took many precautions but put aggregate quality of life over quantity. Then look at the down-voting in this thread spanning the spectrum of opinions... It's going to be hard to reach any sort of nuanced consensus or agreement.
danaris 4y ago
While this may be true, I think it's important to remember that the negative effects of not doing the lockdowns would have been much worse. A million people died (and more are still dying! the pandemic is not over!) in the US alone, even with the partially-effective measures we took. Imagine if we hadn't even tried to reduce transmission. Hospitals would have been rapidly overwhelmed (many already got overwhelmed at the peaks, others came very close), and even people who could have been treated—both for COVID and for other health issues—would have died because they couldn't get access. What are the negative economic impacts of having, say, 3% of your population (10 million people) die over a two-year span? What are the negative economic impacts of the terrible psychological toll of all that loss? And of the government and other institutions just...not caring?

skeeter2020 4y ago

I appreciate this article because (and I say this as a triple-vaxxed rule-follower) the phrase "better safe than sorry" has become a trigger for me. All it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns. School closures and the move to (for us) a very poor online experience is a big example: I have a child in late immersion who was supposed to learn French over this period before integrating with kids this year who've been speaking it since the age of 5; you don't make much progress with a couple of hours of group zoom sessions each week. More importantly school is the one safe space for a huge group of kids, and might provide their own healthy meal of the day. I don't really wnat to think what they went through over the past several years and fear some of them may never recover. There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission, but I question the more subtle impacts and true long term cost. I state this knowing the leaders in place will never be assigned any responsibility and will be long gone when we start to ask why...

gjsman-1000 4y ago
One thing I hate scientists saying is that whenever a claim comes up, they say “There’s no evidence for that.” That’s true - there’s no evidence if you aren’t looking. Thus, they were able to say countless things and rebut the critics with “there’s no evidence of that.” There’s no evidence that an lockdown will cause massive suffering or severe economic downturns that don’t recover easily, or that it will make a potential war easier. And here we are.
codexjourneys 4y ago
Agree on the educational impact likely turning out as an utter disaster in the long term. I wish it were more measurable, but the article rightly points out it's hard to quantify effects (lower future income, etc.) that haven't fully materialized yet. Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling. But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).