8 ms·

Early on it made sense and we were told the lock-down would be a couple of weeks. Those couple of weeks stretched for years and that's why there was a switch wh

Early on it made sense and we were told the lock-down would be a couple of weeks. Those couple of weeks stretched for years and that's why there was a switch when it was obvious lock-downs didn't work but were still imposed.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jmopp 3y ago
It's an interesting game-theory problem. If everyone locked down, the virus would have been contained. But global cooperation is pretty much impossible, and every choice had its cost.
- abwizz 3y ago
  locking everything down is impossible because ppl would start to starve within a week or so. specialisation and compartmentalisation of labor has a price
  - josephg 3y ago
    For a lockdown to be effective, it didn't need to shut down the city completely. Just do enough to get R0 (the avg number of people who each person infects) below 1. This causes the case numbers to drop exponentially. And when case numbers are small enough, contact tracing can be used.
    - spookthesunset 3y ago
      You assume that lockdowns actually work. We have three years of evidence to suggest otherwise. And if that isn’t enough there is this gem of a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ Turns out that even after seventeen weeks of complete isolation in Antarctica you can still catch the common cold… So yeah… you can’t stop Mother Nature no matter how hard you try.
      - josephg 3y ago
        Do we? Case numbers in Melbourne seemed to go down a few weeks after we went into hard lockdown, each and every time we did it. It could have been a coincidence each time, but I’d need some good studies to convince me.
        mike_hearn 3y ago
        It was a coincidence each time. The problem is that epidemic waves last a certain amount of time, and politicians tend to enact lockdown after a certain amount of delay because they want to be sure it's really going up and have to wait a few days for the announcements to propagate etc, and then you have to wait a short period before you expect any impact anyway. And then that's when the epidemic naturally goes into decline. It's trivial to prove this because waves last roughly the same amount of time everywhere, so you can just compare places that went into lockdown with places that didn't and see what happens. The answer is that the waves are the same size and shape regardless of what governments do. You can also do a regression analysis on "strictness indexes" and case counts, which also yields no correlation. There are such studies: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043... "Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate" https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANCET-LOCKDOWN-NO-MORTALITY-BENEFIT-A-country-level-analysis-measuring-the-impact-of-government-actions.pdf https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC... "Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people" But you don't need studies. The fact that Sweden didn't lock down and yet has some of the lowest COVID mortality in Europe is decisive. Claims about the effects and necessity of lockdowns were universal and made no exception for Sweden, so the existence of even a single counter-example disproves the theories.
        abwizz 3y ago
        afaik swedes did the lockdown more or less voluntarily. dunno how much that is true or played into it thou
- nradov 3y ago
  That is a false premise. First, even if all humans locked down for weeks that wouldn't have contained the virus due to the existence of animal reservoirs. Second, even with perfect global cooperation it's not even possible to lock everyone down. What about farmers, food distribution, healthcare, utilities, law enforcement, etc? Those people are going to carry and spread the virus. The notion of containing a highly contagious respiratory virus was just stupid and unrealistic from the start.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChadNauseam 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, the stated goal was not to eliminate Covid, but to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      [Speaking from a UK perspective, YMMV in other countries] Originally it was, yes, yet this shortly got brushed under the carpet, and we were repeatedly told "just two more weeks!" with the apparent goal of solving death. Society only opened back up because ordinary people got sick of it. If we'd carried on "listening to experts" we'd have been lucky to have last Christmas with more than 6 people round the table The goalposts really went supersonic once vaccines came onto the table. Allegedly, they were supposed to be our ticket out of hell, but clearly the enthusiasts were enjoying it too much to allow that. From "just wait this lockdown out until we have a vaccine" to "until all over 40s have been jabbed" to people still insisting that "it's not safe until we've triple jabbed 18 year olds", as we opened up and their apocalyptic fantasies did not come to fruition
  - jmopp 3y ago
    What it would have done was taken the reproduction number below 1, making contact tracing effective. It's the distinction between 'elimination' and 'eradication'. TB is a classic example of a highly contagious respiratory disease that has been eliminated from much of the developed world. Yes, active TB cases still pop up, but the spread is stopped before it goes out of hand. The fact that associations like the NBA managed to implement a successful bubble shows it would have been possible for essential services to keep moving. Yes, the cost of doing so would have been high, but if people in February 2020 knew what was coming they might have considered it more seriously.
DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
A fair number of countries did have lockdowns that successfully eliminated (as in: completely eliminated the virus within their borders) the virus within weeks. China is the elephant in the room (local elimination by about April 2020), but there are several other countries that did the same thing (such as New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan). On the assumption that you're an American, your country was not organized enough to couple a lockdown with effective contact tracing and mass testing, which is what other countries did to eliminate the virus.
- josephg 3y ago
  Yep. Australian here. We successfully brought our case numbers down a number of times through expensive, city wide lockdowns. Each time we succeeded and then opened back up, the virus unfortunately found a new route in the country and case numbers went up again. If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely. Lots of lives were still saved by our strategy because almost everyone had a chance to get vaccinated before getting covid. Even with the benefit of hindsight, its still controversial whether the lockdowns were worth it overall. But they were definitely effective at containing covid.
  - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
    It's also with noting that there were other zero-CoVID countries that were able to maintain control of the virus with less significant lockdowns. The key was early detection of new outbreaks and effective, rapid contact tracing. Between the initial outbreak and Omicron (roughly, April 2020 - March 2022), most people in China never experienced a lockdown, because each new outbreak was controlled locally before it could spread to the rest of the country.
  - dontknowwhyihn 3y ago
    Australia became a full on prison colony. They didn’t contain covid, they imprisoned their entire population.
    - 3y ago
bryananderson 3y ago
What lockdown? Not a single jurisdiction in the US did a true lockdown like New Zealand, Italy, etc. Not even for two weeks. I also can’t think of anywhere in the US where anything was still mandated closed a single year after it started, let alone multiple years. I’m struggling to think of anywhere that even came close to a full year. The revisionism around Covid has gotten wild. Certain businesses had to close for a few months (with government aid), capacity limits came and went for a while after that, and some places required you to wear a mask for longer. But somehow the narrative has become “the government would not let me leave my house for multiple years”.
- base698 3y ago
  In California during December 2020 after allowing outside dining they shutdown all restaurants. I don't remember when they relented and allowed outside dining again but it was into 2021. Most schools were closed for almost 2 years. Most offices and theme parks were much much longer. People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California. While I wasn't boarded in my home, I was turned away while outside dining to use the restroom in a restaurant and got threatened by the police by the beach when beaches and parks were still closed. The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy.
  - ericfr11 3y ago
    A policy is not meant to be fun. Paying tax and taxes wearing seatbelt are policies geared towards living together as a society
    - spookthesunset 3y ago
      Seatbelts and taxes vs. covid lockdowns are not even close to comparable.
  - bryananderson 3y ago
    Restaurants closed for about 6 weeks in some regions in December-January, and ICUs statewide were at 0% capacity in late December so I’d say that was a really good idea. That still doesn’t reach a year after the first shutdowns, and anyway they had been open for months prior, so not even close to a year of total closure. Most schools definitely were not closed for almost two years either. IIRC the only district that even came close to 2 years was San Francisco (due to seismic levels of school board incompetence, ending in a recall). If you live in SF that could be why it feels like most schools were closed that long—but in fact that length was so abnormal, even in “harsh” California, that it got a generally pro-covid-restrictions city to recall the school board. > People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California. Ok and they’re wrong since they aren’t even close. People conflate all kinds of things. I’m sorry a police officer threatened you—as a country we definitely have a problem with power-tripping cops. Still doesn’t mean we did a China-style lockdown policy. > The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy. Yeah see this is what I mean about how this discourse has gotten utterly deranged. Yes, if there’s a respiratory illness straining the ICU system to the breaking point again in the future, I think the government should close restaurants etc. for a few months (with aid for small businesses and individuals). So what does it mean that I am “the enemy”? Are you going to do something to me in that scenario?
account42 3y ago
There was also a switch in narrative - early lockdowns were meant to contain the virus while it was changed to "flatten the curve" for the longe lockdowns. Its not unreasonable to be in favor of the former but not the latter.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jmopp 3y ago

It's an interesting game-theory problem. If everyone locked down, the virus would have been contained. But global cooperation is pretty much impossible, and every choice had its cost.

abwizz 3y ago
locking everything down is impossible because ppl would start to starve within a week or so. specialisation and compartmentalisation of labor has a price
- josephg 3y ago
  For a lockdown to be effective, it didn't need to shut down the city completely. Just do enough to get R0 (the avg number of people who each person infects) below 1. This causes the case numbers to drop exponentially. And when case numbers are small enough, contact tracing can be used.
  - spookthesunset 3y ago
    You assume that lockdowns actually work. We have three years of evidence to suggest otherwise. And if that isn’t enough there is this gem of a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ Turns out that even after seventeen weeks of complete isolation in Antarctica you can still catch the common cold… So yeah… you can’t stop Mother Nature no matter how hard you try.
    - josephg 3y ago
      Do we? Case numbers in Melbourne seemed to go down a few weeks after we went into hard lockdown, each and every time we did it. It could have been a coincidence each time, but I’d need some good studies to convince me.
      - mike_hearn 3y ago
        It was a coincidence each time. The problem is that epidemic waves last a certain amount of time, and politicians tend to enact lockdown after a certain amount of delay because they want to be sure it's really going up and have to wait a few days for the announcements to propagate etc, and then you have to wait a short period before you expect any impact anyway. And then that's when the epidemic naturally goes into decline. It's trivial to prove this because waves last roughly the same amount of time everywhere, so you can just compare places that went into lockdown with places that didn't and see what happens. The answer is that the waves are the same size and shape regardless of what governments do. You can also do a regression analysis on "strictness indexes" and case counts, which also yields no correlation. There are such studies: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043... "Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate" https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANCET-LOCKDOWN-NO-MORTALITY-BENEFIT-A-country-level-analysis-measuring-the-impact-of-government-actions.pdf https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC... "Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people" But you don't need studies. The fact that Sweden didn't lock down and yet has some of the lowest COVID mortality in Europe is decisive. Claims about the effects and necessity of lockdowns were universal and made no exception for Sweden, so the existence of even a single counter-example disproves the theories.
        abwizz 3y ago
        afaik swedes did the lockdown more or less voluntarily. dunno how much that is true or played into it thou
nradov 3y ago
That is a false premise. First, even if all humans locked down for weeks that wouldn't have contained the virus due to the existence of animal reservoirs. Second, even with perfect global cooperation it's not even possible to lock everyone down. What about farmers, food distribution, healthcare, utilities, law enforcement, etc? Those people are going to carry and spread the virus. The notion of containing a highly contagious respiratory virus was just stupid and unrealistic from the start.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ChadNauseam 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, the stated goal was not to eliminate Covid, but to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    [Speaking from a UK perspective, YMMV in other countries] Originally it was, yes, yet this shortly got brushed under the carpet, and we were repeatedly told "just two more weeks!" with the apparent goal of solving death. Society only opened back up because ordinary people got sick of it. If we'd carried on "listening to experts" we'd have been lucky to have last Christmas with more than 6 people round the table The goalposts really went supersonic once vaccines came onto the table. Allegedly, they were supposed to be our ticket out of hell, but clearly the enthusiasts were enjoying it too much to allow that. From "just wait this lockdown out until we have a vaccine" to "until all over 40s have been jabbed" to people still insisting that "it's not safe until we've triple jabbed 18 year olds", as we opened up and their apocalyptic fantasies did not come to fruition
- jmopp 3y ago
  What it would have done was taken the reproduction number below 1, making contact tracing effective. It's the distinction between 'elimination' and 'eradication'. TB is a classic example of a highly contagious respiratory disease that has been eliminated from much of the developed world. Yes, active TB cases still pop up, but the spread is stopped before it goes out of hand. The fact that associations like the NBA managed to implement a successful bubble shows it would have been possible for essential services to keep moving. Yes, the cost of doing so would have been high, but if people in February 2020 knew what was coming they might have considered it more seriously.

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago

A fair number of countries did have lockdowns that successfully eliminated (as in: completely eliminated the virus within their borders) the virus within weeks. China is the elephant in the room (local elimination by about April 2020), but there are several other countries that did the same thing (such as New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan). On the assumption that you're an American, your country was not organized enough to couple a lockdown with effective contact tracing and mass testing, which is what other countries did to eliminate the virus.

josephg 3y ago
Yep. Australian here. We successfully brought our case numbers down a number of times through expensive, city wide lockdowns. Each time we succeeded and then opened back up, the virus unfortunately found a new route in the country and case numbers went up again. If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely. Lots of lives were still saved by our strategy because almost everyone had a chance to get vaccinated before getting covid. Even with the benefit of hindsight, its still controversial whether the lockdowns were worth it overall. But they were definitely effective at containing covid.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
  It's also with noting that there were other zero-CoVID countries that were able to maintain control of the virus with less significant lockdowns. The key was early detection of new outbreaks and effective, rapid contact tracing. Between the initial outbreak and Omicron (roughly, April 2020 - March 2022), most people in China never experienced a lockdown, because each new outbreak was controlled locally before it could spread to the rest of the country.
- dontknowwhyihn 3y ago
  Australia became a full on prison colony. They didn’t contain covid, they imprisoned their entire population.
  - 3y ago

bryananderson 3y ago

What lockdown? Not a single jurisdiction in the US did a true lockdown like New Zealand, Italy, etc. Not even for two weeks. I also can’t think of anywhere in the US where anything was still mandated closed a single year after it started, let alone multiple years. I’m struggling to think of anywhere that even came close to a full year. The revisionism around Covid has gotten wild. Certain businesses had to close for a few months (with government aid), capacity limits came and went for a while after that, and some places required you to wear a mask for longer. But somehow the narrative has become “the government would not let me leave my house for multiple years”.

base698 3y ago
In California during December 2020 after allowing outside dining they shutdown all restaurants. I don't remember when they relented and allowed outside dining again but it was into 2021. Most schools were closed for almost 2 years. Most offices and theme parks were much much longer. People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California. While I wasn't boarded in my home, I was turned away while outside dining to use the restroom in a restaurant and got threatened by the police by the beach when beaches and parks were still closed. The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy.
- ericfr11 3y ago
  A policy is not meant to be fun. Paying tax and taxes wearing seatbelt are policies geared towards living together as a society
  - spookthesunset 3y ago
    Seatbelts and taxes vs. covid lockdowns are not even close to comparable.
- bryananderson 3y ago
  Restaurants closed for about 6 weeks in some regions in December-January, and ICUs statewide were at 0% capacity in late December so I’d say that was a really good idea. That still doesn’t reach a year after the first shutdowns, and anyway they had been open for months prior, so not even close to a year of total closure. Most schools definitely were not closed for almost two years either. IIRC the only district that even came close to 2 years was San Francisco (due to seismic levels of school board incompetence, ending in a recall). If you live in SF that could be why it feels like most schools were closed that long—but in fact that length was so abnormal, even in “harsh” California, that it got a generally pro-covid-restrictions city to recall the school board. > People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California. Ok and they’re wrong since they aren’t even close. People conflate all kinds of things. I’m sorry a police officer threatened you—as a country we definitely have a problem with power-tripping cops. Still doesn’t mean we did a China-style lockdown policy. > The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy. Yeah see this is what I mean about how this discourse has gotten utterly deranged. Yes, if there’s a respiratory illness straining the ICU system to the breaking point again in the future, I think the government should close restaurants etc. for a few months (with aid for small businesses and individuals). So what does it mean that I am “the enemy”? Are you going to do something to me in that scenario?

account42 3y ago

There was also a switch in narrative - early lockdowns were meant to contain the virus while it was changed to "flatten the curve" for the longe lockdowns. Its not unreasonable to be in favor of the former but not the latter.