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Comment by thrav | Hacker News Reader

This is more or less what Texas has decided to do. I’m in California, but my entire family is there, and many of my younger family members are going about their lives relatively normally.

At least one of my cousins caught it and their whole young family (parents 30’s, kids <10) were fine. My 90+ year old grandparents are obviously being kept very isolated. Their kids (my parents’ generation - 60’s) are being careful, but not cancelling their entire 2020.

Everybody hated on Texas because of the Lt. Governor’s over the top declaration of sacrificing grandparents for the economy, but there are definitely aspects of their approach that I prefer to what’s happened in California.

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Florida went even further and removed all state level lockdown orders on September 25. So far it's too early to tell what effect that will have on the death rate. Case numbers are roughly flat.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/

I'm not advocating for other states to follow Florida's approach. But it serves as a natural experiment. Depending on what happens to their daily death rate over the next couple weeks that will tell us a lot about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of lockdowns.

>Depending on what happens to their daily death rate over the next couple weeks that will tell us a lot about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of lockdowns.

It's already been more than a couple weeks since September 25th; how many more "couple weeks" do we need until we can draw a conclusion?

For patients who are going to die, that typically happens about three weeks after initial infection. After the lockdown orders will lifted it still takes a while for businesses to reopen and for people to change their behavior. There are delays in state level data reporting.

So I would say that if we don't see a sustained rise in death rates in about three more weeks from today then that would confirm the "null hypothesis" of lockdowns being ineffective. Or if they have a major spike in deaths then that would indicate that lockdowns are effective.

Well, you'd need a couple weeks before you expect to seeing measurable impact on cases/hospitalizations and another couple weeks before it starts really showing up in deaths. The daily data is noisy to start with so it's hard to eyeball trends, but it looks like cases have started to trend up recently and deaths are still mostly flat, which is about what you'd expect at this point in time if the lockdown that was lifted was having a significant effect on limiting COVID impacts.

> Depending on what happens to their daily death rate over the next couple weeks that will tell us a lot about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of lockdowns.

Less than you might think, because we know the value of lockdowns for an contagious respiratory disease varies based on conditions, including the current infection and immunity rates on the local population, for which we have inadequate surveillance pretty much everywhere. It also varies by the degree of enforcement, which is also inadequately measured but probably was lowest in the same places that are inclined to remove lockdowns entirely. So we're missing lots of data necessary to interpret both the local meaning and the meaning for other places of any numbers that come of a one-jurisdiction top-level policy change.

'Lockdown' is only one artifact of net social distancing.

People's individual decisions to distance probably are the most important factors - in soft-lockdowns, some people might not have trouble having parties, hanging out with friends etc. but depending on the culture, directives by government, the level of 'fear' from the daily results ... people may adjust their behaviour.

I wish there was much more study on exactly what social distancing means in material reality, not just 'policy'.

You have no idea how it would affect you or your family members until it does. This person lost 8 family members. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/us/phoenix-arizona-aguirre-fa...

"Then, despite all precautions against the virus, a family member got sick. Then another and another and another. Now, seven months after the shutdown, seven people in Ricardo Aguirre's extended family and his father, Jesús, 67, have died of Covid-19 complications."

Two observations: First, this happened despite all precautions. Secondly, extended families can be hundreds of people, including many elderly. Lastly, in a large-enough population you will inevitably find clusters that are more affected by some illness than the average person. That's why you need to observe solid data, not a media spectacle, to come to rational conclusions.

> First, this happened despite all precautions

... in this family.

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