5 ms·

Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't

Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if we still didnt have a vaccine? From my perspective lockdown supporters got completely bailed out by one of the greatest medical/scientific achievements in human history (developing and deploying an extremely effective vaccine within 1 year). The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.

whimsicalism 3y ago
> The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future. Even without vaccination, mortality from covid is significantly lower than it was early in the pandemic.
Mechanical9 3y ago
Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the public. heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron... also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
  - boston_clone 3y ago
    About a year after vaccines became available, only 60% or so of folks had received two doses [0]. Public messaging from the initial administration is an obvious contributor to the remaining 40%. County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism). 0. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
    - anthonypasq 3y ago
      im sorry, but people who chose not to get vaccinated knew what they were doing and governments and public health officials holding everyone else hostage cause some people wanted to engage in risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
      - boston_clone 3y ago
        “im sorry, but people who chose not to [follow the speed limit] knew what they were doing and governments and public safety officials holding everyone else to a [speed limit] cause some people wanted to engage is risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of. do you see how ridiculous this sounds?
        anthonypasq 3y ago
        no because this is a terrible analogy. Speeding endangers others who have not consented to that danger, not getting vaccinated has absolutely no societal risk in this particular scenario with covid. If I could make my car crash proof (me getting vaccinated in this analogy), i would have no issues with people wanting to drive as fast as they like (they already do it anyway).
        boston_clone 3y ago
- spookthesunset 3y ago
  > Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. The idea we needed to "flatten the curve until a vaccine" was obsolete the day many states closed their completely unused field hospitals. That should have been the indicator that covid wasn't nearly as bad as predicted. That was the day everything should have gone back to complete normal. These lockdown "experts" never had an end game. They kept pushing the goal posts further and further until they completely lost the plot. That was one of my first objections to such mitigations. There was zero success criteria. Fuckers were just winging it. Which might be okay for some minimally invasive crap like enhanced handwashing protocols but it is absolutely bat-shit insane for something as impacting as lockdowns. What we did was insane. I still have no idea how people look back, given all the data, and say "yup, what we did made sense". None of it make a single ounce of sense at all...
boston_clone 3y ago
> Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed. But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.
  - thedrbrian 3y ago
    give how many people seem to catch covid after having the vaccine, was it worth it?
    - boston_clone 3y ago
      Considering the risk of dying was unequivocally reduced, this is an obvious “yes”.
revelio 3y ago
> Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong. Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded: 1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect. 2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible. This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.

whimsicalism 3y ago

> The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future. Even without vaccination, mortality from covid is significantly lower than it was early in the pandemic.

Mechanical9 3y ago

Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.

anthonypasq 3y ago
When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the public. heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron... also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
- boston_clone 3y ago
  About a year after vaccines became available, only 60% or so of folks had received two doses [0]. Public messaging from the initial administration is an obvious contributor to the remaining 40%. County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism). 0. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    im sorry, but people who chose not to get vaccinated knew what they were doing and governments and public health officials holding everyone else hostage cause some people wanted to engage in risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
    - boston_clone 3y ago
      “im sorry, but people who chose not to [follow the speed limit] knew what they were doing and governments and public safety officials holding everyone else to a [speed limit] cause some people wanted to engage is risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of. do you see how ridiculous this sounds?
      - anthonypasq 3y ago
        no because this is a terrible analogy. Speeding endangers others who have not consented to that danger, not getting vaccinated has absolutely no societal risk in this particular scenario with covid. If I could make my car crash proof (me getting vaccinated in this analogy), i would have no issues with people wanting to drive as fast as they like (they already do it anyway).
        boston_clone 3y ago
spookthesunset 3y ago
> Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. The idea we needed to "flatten the curve until a vaccine" was obsolete the day many states closed their completely unused field hospitals. That should have been the indicator that covid wasn't nearly as bad as predicted. That was the day everything should have gone back to complete normal. These lockdown "experts" never had an end game. They kept pushing the goal posts further and further until they completely lost the plot. That was one of my first objections to such mitigations. There was zero success criteria. Fuckers were just winging it. Which might be okay for some minimally invasive crap like enhanced handwashing protocols but it is absolutely bat-shit insane for something as impacting as lockdowns. What we did was insane. I still have no idea how people look back, given all the data, and say "yup, what we did made sense". None of it make a single ounce of sense at all...

boston_clone 3y ago

> Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed. But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.

anthonypasq 3y ago
yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.
- thedrbrian 3y ago
  give how many people seem to catch covid after having the vaccine, was it worth it?
  - boston_clone 3y ago
    Considering the risk of dying was unequivocally reduced, this is an obvious “yes”.

revelio 3y ago

> Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong. Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded: 1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect. 2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible. This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.