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> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity The point of the lockdown was not to e

• deleted 3y ago
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• CalRobert 3y ago
  It also was to increase the number of people who got covid after being vaccinated, instead of before. Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.
  • landemva 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • bluuurgh 3y ago
      The vaccine was never meant to prevent infection or transmission, it was to prevent severe symptoms like death
      • account42 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • TurkishPoptart 3y ago
          No, it's true. The matter of fact was that some collective hypnosis or lie was happening, and when you told people that the vaccine wasn't meant to stop transmission, they would just get angry from the cognitive dissonance.
          • account42 3y ago
            Gaslighting me won't change the fact that the public messaging at the time was about herd immunity, i.e. prevent transmission.
            • TurkishPoptart 3y ago
              No, we, who are rational truth-seekers, are the ones who were gaslit for 2+ years about the whole idea of "natural immunity". Despite having had covid and recovered from it, we were still told we needed to vaccinate even AFTER recovering from it.
      • surge 3y ago
        That is simply not how the vaccine was presented by authorities and the media. They literally said the vaccine will stop you from getting it and stop transmission. It took them months to acknowledge you could still get it and spread it with the vaccine and all the data simply points to a reduction in severity of symptoms. What happened was they rolled out the vaccine before they had all the data, and it was bit oversold despite lack of data, perhaps to encourage people to get it. It's water under the bridge now. But don't gaslight people on what they were told.
        • Izkata 3y ago
          They were lying. Or at the very least didn't understand the claims actually made by Pfizer/etc, which was only that these vaccines prevented the disease, not that they prevented infection/transmission. They made no claims about infection/transmission. We knew this in 2020: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines-may-not-prevent-spread-of-virus-so-mask-wearing-other-protections-still-critical/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronavirus-vaccine-prevent-transmissions-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-19-vaccines-transmission.html https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-... It comes down to the stupid conflation of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 into just "covid". Pfizer/etc use the two terms correctly, saying they prevented COVID-19, but didn't say anything about stopping SARS-CoV-2, but because everyone thinks "covid" is the virus they can't seem to understand what was actually said.
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      > So the vaccines did not prevent infection nor transmission. Yeah they did. They just didn't do it perfectly. And only about half the people out there got vaccinated. So vaccines failed to be a silver bullet that ended the pandemic.
    • Timon3 3y ago
      Can you name a single vaccine that prevents infection and transmission, as in "nobody with the vaccine gets sick or gets someone else sick"? I don't think such a vaccine exists, but I might be wrong.
      • landemva 3y ago
        Nothing is absolutely perfect, and polio vaccine has great results.
        • Timon3 3y ago
          But they don't prevent infection nor transmission. What is the word to describe a proposed medical treatment that does not work? Both the Covid vaccine and the vaccines you are saying had great results share this trait. You mentioned this negatively for the Covid vaccines. Why is it different for other ones?
          • landemva 3y ago
            I don't know anyone, in western countries, who got polio vaccines and suffered illness. I know people who took the covid shots and boosters and got sick with covid and variants. Some got it multiple times, so somehow the covid shots are interferring with sterilizing immunity.
            • Timon3 3y ago
              > Some got it multiple times, so somehow the covid shots are interferring with sterilizing immunity. How do you get to this conclusion? People without vaccination seem to be more likely to be re-infected. If anything, Covid itself is interfering with sterilizing immunity, and the vaccines help!
      • brutusborn 3y ago
        CDC says Polio is "99 - 100 % effective" against paralytic polio [0]. So essentially perfect efficacy. Covid vaccines look like a failure in comparison (<60% effective against hospitalization, much more significant harms)[1] To me the problem wasn't that the vaccines didn't perfectly to prevent infection and transmission; the problem is that the messaging from the medical field was that the vaccine _would_ prevent transmission and harmful reactions would be rare. No matter how much one squints, neither of those look remotely true. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-duration-protection.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur... [1] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-comparison https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-compariso...
  • wccrawford 3y ago
    I think you got downvotes because it sounded like a conspiracy theory, when actually I think you were just trying to say that the idea was to get people vaccinated before they came in contact with the real disease to ease the symptoms, or even give immunity.
  • timcederman 3y ago
    Exactly. Look at New Zealand's low excess death rate by allowing almost the entire population to get vaccinated before infection.
• saiya-jin 3y ago
  Yeah but there were and are nasty side effects to this, covering literally hundreds of millions or rather billions of people in some form. Missed social interaction is super important for child development, but how do you want to measure that, how many harm points do you assign to this versus some old or frail person dying. And look at ie India, delaying the height of infection didn't help them at all, estimated numbers of dead there are what, 5 millions? Let's not focus on just few wealthy nations, human life is human life regardless of origin. Also psychical stress from prolonged withdrawal from most if not all social interactions. We fucked up economy pretty badly and still seeing the results of it, made millions of financially very vulnerable people lose their job or family business overnight. And so on and on. Typical HN crowd is probably the least impacted so we are not a good sample to discuss this objectively. In number of deaths alone yes it was without question the best course of action. The bigger picture, I am not so sure. And cases like Sweden show that restrictions were mostly stupid flexing of control powers by politicians who were generally during crisis clueless as fuck, and the harder they went the more they polarized non-trivial part of society. Again we still see the effects and they are not going anywhere, ever. If I would be and old and frail person in high risk category, I personally would take all effin' risks and don't screw up childhood (and conversely rest of life) of my grandkids. But that's just me.
  • onlypositive 3y ago
    > We fucked up economy pretty badly and still seeing the results of it, Still? We've only just begun dealing with this fallout. It will be effecting us for a generation.
    • abduhl 3y ago
      Between the unprecedented amount of money that was injected into the economy, the PPP loans, and the low interest rates, we’ve seen one of the largest transfers of wealth ever. The coming inflation will certainly cement the growing class divide. Hopefully nobody reading this is poor because the reality is that you’re most likely going to continue being poor throughout your lifetime, and you’ll probably become much poorer relatively compared to those who were able to capitalize on COVID policies.
• TeeMassive 3y ago
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  • nicoburns 3y ago
    No, but an infectious disease is also limiting on people's freedoms, so it's equally not obvious that those rights override the rights of people to be protected from infectious diseases.
    • black6 3y ago
      What right to be protected from infectious diseases? If it exists then it's been violated my entire life.
      • nicoburns 3y ago
        Well, it's not an absolute right (and it's obviously constrained by the limits of what it is even in our power to control). But then neither is the right not to be detained, or really any other right. All rights run into limits when they come into conflict with other rights.
        • TeeMassive 3y ago
          But people were also free and supported to stay inside if they were afraid of getting infected. This logic doesn't hold up here.
        • s1artibartfast 3y ago
          I think it was a witness test of people's moral philosophy. Rights are fundamentally philosophical position, not a law of physics. Those that favor preserving negative rights over positive rights generally objected to the lockdown. In general, people who favor negative rights do so because they don't come into conflict with each other. Positive rights come into conflict with other positive rights and negative rights, and require trade-offs
          • 3y ago
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  It wasn’t even entirely that, although it certainly was in the seattle area at the beginning and in New York when refrigerated trucks were filling up fast. It was to “flatten the curve,” which was to allow for effective treatments and buy time for vaccine development. Unlike in the 1950’s, we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine. The vaccines that were eventually developed were designed within weeks of the viral genome being sequenced. However we also didn’t know how to stop people from dying from covid at the beginning. It took some time discover pronation and other treatments that’s improved mortality. Finally I would note that the articles celebration of a five times worse outcome as some sort of victory is survivor bias at its worse. “See, everyone who didn’t die didn’t die!” I think there will be plenty of review of what was effective and wasn’t. Maybe lockdowns lasted too long. Maybe they didn’t. But this article is less than convincing. Their metrics are also off. In 1959 the US had a population of 159m. In 2020 it has a population of 331m, a 208% increase. However in the pandemic 1.14m Americans died. They quote 0.119m deaths. How they come to the conclusion of “with a broader reach for severe outcomes than Covid-19 of 2020,” it’s hard to tell. Of course, the source isn’t exactly unbiased.
  • peteradio 3y ago
    > we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine. How?
    • fnordpiglet 3y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052930/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052930/
      • peteradio 3y ago
        I'm not seeing that we knew anything. I'm seeing that a lot of work had been done to create a potential for success. Can you point out where this "knowing" is coming from in the linked paper?
        • 3y ago
• DrThunder 3y ago
  Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't. Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to save costs and began to quickly get overwhelmed due to their unpreparedness. "It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person. " This is false and there's no data backing this claim up.
  • shlant 3y ago
    > in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators The ventilator argument is brought up a lot so I wanted to share an article going over the related evidence: "Based on the evidence at hand, we can reasonably say that there probably wasn’t a large impact either way from early intubation treatment paradigms."[1] [1] https://archive.li/RNzwh#selection-1077.0-1077.148 https://archive.li/RNzwh#selection-1077.0-1077.148
    • DrThunder 3y ago
      So it was useless? Okay, then the idea lockdowns were needed for hospitals with useless treatments is still bad.
  • BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    > Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't. Uninformed and wrong. ICU staff worked through extreme conditions to save many. Ask a few how much better their patients would have fared at home instead. > Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to save costs and began to quickly get overwhelmed due to their unpreparedness. Expanding ICUs is not a matter of furnishing rooms, it's a matter of finding people with the requisite skills and experience. A localized need can be met by moving people around, but when every hospital in the country needs to grow its staff there is no way to conjure up more of this sort of person.
• kristopolous 3y ago
  Also it's not the same disease. I assume experts look at a large number of factors to assess whether it should or should not happen and measure the disease by a variety of metrics. Also I'd assume the urbanization, science, and ability to execute a lockdown changes over 62 years. Also the nature of work is different. Nobody was doing home computer video conferencing in 1958. If anyone really wanted to compare it, they'd probably need to have some technical expertise in both diseases and also be some kind of specialized historian.
• empath-nirvana 3y ago
  My general opinion of it is that lock downs at the beginning were essential for slowing the spread of the disease and allow the hospitals to prepare for it, but there was a point where the virus was endemic anyway that all the masking and isolation protocols were doing more harm than good.
  • garciasn 3y ago
    I will agree that isolation for long periods could have had some negative impacts, but masking never did and never will.
    • codyb 3y ago
      The way things are going here in N America soon we’ll be wearing masks outdoors for the smoke and indoors for the pandemics!
    • potbelly83 3y ago
      Exactly, case in point is the abundance of mask wearing in Asian countries. They seem to go about their lives just fine.
      • jliptzin 3y ago
        They were doing it even before covid, although not to the same extent. I don't know why people have such a problem if someone wants to protect themselves from airborne illness.
        • peteradio 3y ago
          If someone harassed you or a loved one for wearing a mask, that person is an asshole. If someone harassed you or a loved one for not wearing a mask, that person is also an asshole (caveat outside hospitals or care homes for vulnerable people).
    • zackpete 3y ago
      Not even for children in the developmental stage of recognizing facial expressions? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9628515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9628515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.669432/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6694...
• jjfoooo4 3y ago
  At least in the American context, it’s far from clear the lockdowns reduced mortality [1]. Adjusting for age/health Florida had similar mortality to California’s. [1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/04/02/why-major-study-argues-floridas-covid-death-rate-compares-favorably-to-californias/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/04/02/why-major-study-argue...
  • ecf 3y ago
    Florida also massively doctored their stats so I’m not sure how you can trust them.
    • stodor89 3y ago
      I was in my wonderful homeland of Bulgaria. Every time a person died, the hospital always wrote down Covid, so they can get extra money from EU and the state. Car crash? Covid! Old age? Covid! AIDS? Covid! Drank bleach? Covid! F***ing Bulgarians living in year 3020.
      • pfdietz 3y ago
        I mean, unlike Florida, that's actually smart of them to do.
      • solumunus 3y ago
        Everyone parrots this. It’s a common belief in the UK too. I’ve never seen any actual evidence that this ever took place. How do you know this? Did you just read it somewhere or is there some meat to it?
        • gorlilla 3y ago
          We had people saying the same thing where i am in the states. Except that county mwdical examiner records are freely available online and did not reflect that in any way shape or form. There were still, far more deaths from overdose and suicide than Complications of Covid-19.
• VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  >The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread... That claim is pretty inconsistent with the marketing slogans and messaging about the purpose of the lockdowns. Similarly, the vaccines turned out to be ineffective for inducing sterilizing immunity, but good for diminishing the severity of symptoms, which would also result in fewer sick people in hospitals. But again, the marketing and messaging around the purpose and intent was completely incongruent with the reality, seemingly intentionally deceptive at times. If you didn't take the vaccine, you were literally killing and holding everyone else back because the vaccine would ostensibly make you immune and prevent the spread. The biggest failure of Covid was the disingenuous communication.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    The problem with communicating is a substantial fraction of the US population does not have their mental receivers tuned to reality.
  • giardini 3y ago
    VoodooJuJu says "The biggest failure of Covid was the disingenuous communication." "Disengenuous communication" is a vague term. I think rather that the biggest failure in the USA was for the government to intercede at all and to adopt protocols that delayed immediate treatment. By delay of treatment I mean that the protocol doctors were instructed (and later forced to use) was: 1. Tell the patient to stay at home (do NOT visit the doctors' offices) until (s)he can barely breathe and to then 2. Go to the hospital where they can hook you up to a ventilator and where you will die, Rather than 3. immediately prescribe hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin, or other...) and antibiotics (to prevent secondary infection, not the Covid virus) for home use, and go to the hospital only if it gets significantly worse. Countries who jumped immediately to 3 had far fewer fatalities (indeed, far fewer hospitalizations) than the USA, who followed the steps 1-2 (and omitted 3 or did 3 in a hospital setting far too late to work), above. Consequently the USA suffered extremely high Covid deaths: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usa+covid+deaths+more+than+other+countries https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usa+covid+deaths+more+than+other+c... Even worse, it appears that the USA "powers that be" did that to justify established institutions and corporations who stood to make billions of dollars creating not-yet-existent (and later incompletely tested) vaccines instead of providing cheap and effective treatments that were readily available and that worked.