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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 mean

by 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).
kcplate 4y ago
> all it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns. I feel like I say this a lot on HN, but there seems to be an attitude among political folk in the last 20-25 years that intent is more important than effect. The effect can be a complete disaster but the politicos expect the public to appreciate their intention to help and to not question the effect. I am a pragmatist, so I don’t care about intention, only the effect, and in the case of the US specifically, the effect of the federal government and medical establishment response at every point in this pandemic has been a disaster. I honestly cannot point to one thing that wasn’t a total clusterfuck.
- woleium 4y ago
  There has to be a bit of survivorship bias here, surely? There must be some things that we got right, but then promptly forgot all about because of everything else going on?
  - kcplate 4y ago
    Intentionally right or accidentally right? I have a hard time seeing any intentional successes.
origin_path 4y ago
"There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission" Sigh :( There is actually an enormous amount of doubt about this. The Nature article is a small improvement in accuracy from their previous positions, but is still fundamentally incorrect and shows that the scientific elites are still in denial about the depths of their failure. If their beliefs about lockdown effectiveness and necessity were anywhere near accurate, Sweden would have the highest COVID death tolls out there. In fact they sit at the bottom of the European COVID mortality league table, with both far less impact from COVID countermeasures and also some of the lowest COVID mortality. The studies claiming lockdowns work are junk science. They typically reach their conclusions by comparing actual mortality to predictions from models and then observing the models predicted far more. They go from this to "lockdowns work". This isn't a valid inference because the gap can also be explained by the models being wrong, as indeed they were proven to be many times. Lockdowns are highly effective in models that assume extremely localized and transient transmission, a.k.a. the droplet model. In the real world they appear to have no effect on COVID and this is best explained by transmission being dominated by aerosols. In the aerosol model SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas. It can hang in the air for long periods, enter via the eyeballs and spread through air ducts. This model should have been seriously considered by scientists at every point because SARS-1 appears to have spread this way, but they ignored it. Instead epidemiologists simply assumed a particular form of transmission, along with many other things. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=SWE~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/

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).

kcplate 4y ago

> all it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns. I feel like I say this a lot on HN, but there seems to be an attitude among political folk in the last 20-25 years that intent is more important than effect. The effect can be a complete disaster but the politicos expect the public to appreciate their intention to help and to not question the effect. I am a pragmatist, so I don’t care about intention, only the effect, and in the case of the US specifically, the effect of the federal government and medical establishment response at every point in this pandemic has been a disaster. I honestly cannot point to one thing that wasn’t a total clusterfuck.

woleium 4y ago
There has to be a bit of survivorship bias here, surely? There must be some things that we got right, but then promptly forgot all about because of everything else going on?
- kcplate 4y ago
  Intentionally right or accidentally right? I have a hard time seeing any intentional successes.

origin_path 4y ago

"There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission" Sigh :( There is actually an enormous amount of doubt about this. The Nature article is a small improvement in accuracy from their previous positions, but is still fundamentally incorrect and shows that the scientific elites are still in denial about the depths of their failure. If their beliefs about lockdown effectiveness and necessity were anywhere near accurate, Sweden would have the highest COVID death tolls out there. In fact they sit at the bottom of the European COVID mortality league table, with both far less impact from COVID countermeasures and also some of the lowest COVID mortality. The studies claiming lockdowns work are junk science. They typically reach their conclusions by comparing actual mortality to predictions from models and then observing the models predicted far more. They go from this to "lockdowns work". This isn't a valid inference because the gap can also be explained by the models being wrong, as indeed they were proven to be many times. Lockdowns are highly effective in models that assume extremely localized and transient transmission, a.k.a. the droplet model. In the real world they appear to have no effect on COVID and this is best explained by transmission being dominated by aerosols. In the aerosol model SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas. It can hang in the air for long periods, enter via the eyeballs and spread through air ducts. This model should have been seriously considered by scientists at every point because SARS-1 appears to have spread this way, but they ignored it. Instead epidemiologists simply assumed a particular form of transmission, along with many other things. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=SWE~Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/