this is a good example of people saying the response was overblown, because the response had its intended effect
Simply put, this argument is invalid. Why? Because my writeup went into the IFR. Therefore we can calculate how many deaths might occur in the "do nothing" scenario, and compare that to lockdown-induced deaths.
Also we should note that social distancing and lockdown are different things, and it _appears_ that the former is much more responsible for the slowed rate of transmission. My proposal does not involve getting rid of social distancing, although it does encourage it to be voluntary as opposed to compelled.
> Note that this classic "pro-lockdown" talking point is an unfalsifiable claim.
If you want to get down to epistemological arguments, then we should be clear: we can't know ANYTHING about the real world for certain and all no claim about the natural world is falsifiable; the only claims we can make are those that are tautological or conceptual only. The scientific method itself does not stand on anything more than sand from an epistemological perspective.
Obviously, that's a ridiculous way to think about the world and not helpful. What we CAN do is see the changes in trajectory of the virus growth rate caused by the lockdown; and extrapolate based on the data that we've seen about how it would grow without the lockdown. This is what a large number of domain experts (including data scientists with domain knowledge) have been doing, and they believe the lockdown has been necessary (and will continue to be, at least in part).
> Also we should note that social distancing and lockdown are different things, and it _appears_ that the former is much more responsible for the slowed rate of transmission.
For someone talking about the falsifiability of claims, you should take note that this is a unfalsifiable claim, and one that's intuitively ridiculous (as the lockdown causes more social distancing than would happen otherwise).
Obviously, we can't lock the entire civilization down forever, and nobody has made such an argument - there will be a gradual easing of restrictions over the coming months, but there's an expectation that we might see another wave of virus transmission in the fall.
> Obviously, we can't lock the entire civilization down forever, and nobody has made such an argument - there will be a gradual easing of restrictions over the coming months, but there's an expectation that we might see another wave of virus transmission in the fall.
So, the fear of the "second wave", in my opinion, is precisely because of practicing Containment as opposed to practicing pareto mitigation and letting the virus run its course in non-at-risk individuals. Or more accurately, since we're talking about still quaranting ~40% of the US, we would still see a small wave but it would not be nearly as significant.
In other words, the potential for the wave exists because having "protected" everybody from infection, there is now a huge differential pressure for SARS-CoV-2 to exploit. i.e. there are still plenty of vectors and thus the second wave is absolutely a concern.
Given how low prevalence in places like California is, I absolutely think we will see that wave. But again I essentially view it as a sign that we handled the situation wrong.
Given our current Containment policies, the resurgence of the wave might be met by a new wave of lockdowns. I certainly hope not, but that seems very likely. Hopefully by that point though people have mostly went back to work and thus it _might_ be politically untenable.
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I guess I'll address the unfalsifiable point really briefly (I won't do it justice) - I think the claim that social distancing did/does more than lockdown is definitely falsifiable. Maybe not perfectly so, but we can see movement data and try to correlate that with waves of infection via projecting deaths backwards in time. It's certainly fuzzy given we'd be using average time until death as a proxy, but the claim is much _more_ investigable than the infamous "lockdown worked, end of story" line.
Basically we need to moderate both opinions which effectively work together: the "there's no problem to begin with" group feels validated by the "the world is ending" group being way off the mark
This happens with global warming too. Some people think everything's going to fall apart within the next 10 years. They're wrong. So others claim there isn't a problem, because they were wrong
I agree. Do you have any idea what approach could be taken to accomplish this though, even where dealing with a single, otherwise logical person?
I tend to try to demonstrate napkin math with pessimistic numbers to show that they're out of bound. Napkin math is particularly useful math because it allows one to play with parameters & abstracts/aggregates complicated bits. So we can also show how pessimistic things would have to be for them to be right, ie what we should be seeing now which would support their projection outside of their anecdotes or imagination
It's important to not become identified as an adversary (ie, I'm not denying a problem when I assert they should reduce their perceived risk). This means making sure to underline which facts you agree on, & verify that your values are aligned
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...
For example, in New Jersey (USA), where I live, 40% of deaths are of people at extended care facilities (i.e., retirement homes). We locked down everything and everybody (i.e., no focus) and those deaths still happened; because we failed to "harden" the sites (and people) most in danger. If this is a war, that's not how you win a war. Furthermore, "flare ups" at such facilities continue to happen. That is, where is the lockdown win?
Now imagine taking 40% of the deaths off the table. Did the lockdown work? Probably. Just the same, the dynamic of the conversation changes when you look at how C19 hits - or doesn't - the general healthy population.
Finally, how many lives will be lost to the economic fall out? If the lockdown did save lives then the "side effects" of the lockdown must be considered as well.
Taking the data in aggregate and declaring lockdown a win is an oversimplification.
By the time NYC locked down, the virus had likely already been spreading unimpeded for weeks. The only possible short term solution was the population-wide lockdown, which "fixed" the issue in that it stopped the immediate disaster from becoming even worse. In nursing homes already infected, it was simply too late at that time.
The fact that the lockdown was required is evidence of a colossal failure on the part of our society. Our infrastructure should have been able to target this more precisely and we (the US) specifically squandered a huge advantage we had in that we had time to clearly see the progress of the virus overseas before it arrived, but did nothing useful with that time.
Even after all of this, few steps have been made to make the transition from "shut it all down" to a strategy that involves broad testing and targeted protection of vulnerable populations. It seems people are resigned to keeping the daily death rate steady and eventually just letting all vulnerable members of the population contract the virus and die.
Lessons to be learned? You bet. Of course.
But we took a semi-effective - again, despite the lockdown nursing homes continue to be a significant contributor to deaths - and applied it _everywhere_. Certainly, it's now reasonable to look at other options. But that's not happening.
It as if the "cure" isn't going to lead to deaths as well. That's naive.
Yet, the extended care facilities _to this day_ remain a major contributor to the death toll.
Even if you call it hindsight bias, what do you call the current refusal to step back and ask what we've learned so far? To stay the course, with a lack of data to support it? What do we call that?
Hospitals and other resources take a finite time to construct and they can only be constructed in linear time. That is to say, the number of new hospitals is not a function of the number of existing hospitals.
Now, in contrast the virus grows exponentially and is further aided by a period before symptoms appear and by asymptomatic carriers.
As such, when it overwhelms you there is very little you can do to catch in the middle of the fight up without taking draconian methods and accepting enormous number of deaths. Italy and NYC.
As such, the prudent course of action - especially for a wealthy country - is to build the additional hospitals and capacity ahead of time, even if - horror - they are never used.
A similar comparison is the ridiculous amount of military hardware that is procured and mostly never used.
Edit: spelling
At the same time the occupation is still a long slog and there are nuclear deterrants and occasional non-nuclear ones like North Korea's mass of concealed artillery aimed at Seoul.
Chances are that if current manufacturing capabilities instead of stockpiles matter both sides should probably truce because both will lose. But if they both had sense they wouldn't be at war.
WCGW. /s
"this" being the article.
The comments upon the article are a good example of someone (actually, a group of people, near unanimously [1]) saying ~"because the outcome was <x>, we know (~it is proven, or logically conclusive)[1] that the cause was <y>", which is also poor logic. This seems quite tricky for people to see though, due in part to the ~"culture war" nature of the subject I suspect (change the subject, strict logical capabilities return to normal, or so goes the theory), as well as how beliefs ("facts") are formed in the mind - I've seen this ~"if nothing happened, it proves(!) our recommended measures worked!" meme repeated so often across both social and mainstream media, and it seems to me that it has kind of become an axiomatic belief, not to be questioned, even by scientific/logical people.
If a similar assertion was made but with the subject being something other than covid-19, I suspect references to the "garlic repels vampires" fallacy would be plentiful.
You can often detect other artifacts of this thinking in online discussions. In this case, there was a lot more detail in the paragraph than the single excerpted sentence:
> Weeks and months later, facts on the ground show that the purported collapse of the healthcare system did not occur. Moreover, this was not due to success in seriously curtailing the spread in hard-hit areas like New York, but was rather due to the aforementioned discovery that COVID-19, while extremely deadly in certain subsets of the population, was not nearly as deadly overall as previously thought. An analysis of the flawed IMHE model is outside the scope of this article, but suffice to say that the model is built on extremely dubious assumptions and represents an approach of blind curve-fitting rather than a true epidemiological model, and makes bizarre assumptions that result in an unrealistic symmetricality as far as death drop-off is concerned (see this excellent analysis by “LessWrong” user Zvi) [2]. Confronted with the reality of having “succeeded” in avoiding the collapse of the healthcare system, albeit arguably not due to the lockdown policy, policymakers have not lifted the lockdown restrictions in much of the country, but on the contrary appear to have shifted the goal to a goal of total containment: staying locked down until COVID-19 has been suppressed to such an extent that it becomes feasible to perform widespread location tracking (dubbed “contact tracing”). Indeed, the current policy seems to be one of “indefinite postponement”, the key assumption being that it is feasible to avoid exposure to SARS-CoV-2 until a safe and effective vaccine is developed and delivered to the global population, and that the indefinite lockdown will not lead to excess mortality. We strongly dispute these assumptions and believe that they don’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_decision-making
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief
Interestingly, this very same behavior can typically be seen on both sides of any culture war [3] related disagreement, if(!) one is willing and able to look for, and see it that is (which is far easier said than done, because of the very neurological phenomenon that causes the disagreement in the first place). And to make it even more tricky, it is incredibly easy for the mind to spot logic errors in one's ideological opponent, but very difficult to spot in oneself. So, both sides evaluate the other as ~"soooooo stupid".
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QuzAwSTND6N4k7yNj/seemingly-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
As for myself, I have no stance on the matter, because epistemically, the actual(!) truth of the matter is essentially unknowable - all we can do is make educated guesses. I mostly just derive great enjoyment from observing the conversations, which illustrate the various ways that humans think, and how thinking seems to vary depending on the content of the variables involved.