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Comment by dkdk8283 | Hacker News Reader

Lockdowns are bullshit. Despair consequences will be felt for decades.

Bad lockdowns are bullshit. Australian bands are playing full on shows these days no problem because they did/do it with discipline.

You’re confusing government policy with being an island. Hawaii has the lowest rate in the USA and California has the highest despite the latter having strictest lockdowns in the country.

Granted a sufficiently incompetent government can throw away the advantage being an island provides. Looking at you UK.

California presumably has one of the highest compliance rates yet is still one of the worst affected.

If you're relying on individuals making sensible risk assessments and voluntarily complying, you've already lost the battle. See also: drunk driving and seatbelt use.

You're confusing being an island with becoming one, any nation can be an island if they close their borders.

In Australia we had islands inside the island, several states with land borders closed them to the rest of the country and have enjoyed normality since May.

In principal any nation can become an island. Not in practice.

Even with the massive advantage of being an island, in order to achieve that Australia had to close their borders back when the WHO and the press in every Western country was insisting that doing so was xennphobic and counterproductive, lock down strictly for months (two weeks would not cut it here), they imprisoned a bunch of their poor in tower blocks under conditions so reminisicent of these cruise ships that it was apparently a human rights violation... and in the end they only got a short-lived success out of it, because now there are new outbreaks which are leading to new lockdowns there yet again.

Lockdowns are not bullshit. They are effective, unless we did a half ass job.

We did a half ass job. Everybody outside of East Asia did a half ass job or less.

East asia is a police state: have you seen how they treated black people?

If east asia is the model you want the USA to follow I’m afraid of the politics your generation will bring.

Taiwan Japan and Korea are police state? Didn't notice this. I noticed some cops helping a drunk guy into a tax. Also helping to find a lost cat. I guess this is what you mean by police state.

In South Korea the contact tracing led to people being found who were cheating on their partners. Some committed suicide. Moral questions aside, is that the world you want to live in?

I personally don't even use an Android/eyePhone any more to avoid that dystopia.

Last time I checked no other country locks up more people, at higher rates, in prisons it won't even let the UN inspect [0], than the US does. In no other country is one as likely to end up in prison as in the US.

Neither can I think of many countries where police are more heavily armed, literally militarized [1], while killing people at rates that can only be estimated, as there are no state or federal statistics on that.

Still doesn't stop some US Americans from seeing the "police state" everywhere, except at home.

Even after over ten thousand people were arrested, thousands injured, many maimed, protesting against exactly that police state and its violence that disproportionately affects black people and other minorities.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Office

Since you didn’t provide additive information I reaffirm lockdowns are bullshit.

Abstinence is effective at preventing STDs and pregancy, unless you're a sinner. Eating less and exercising more is effective at avoiding obesity, unless you're a lazy glutton. A plan that reliably fails when exposed to human nature is a bad plan.

Abstinence as the primary tool for birth control/STD prevention is stupid because we have better alternatives. If we didn't, abstience would be a lot more popular.

We don't have good alternatives to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Edit: this isn't entirely true though, and there is a lot of grey area. For example, correctly masking & social distancing is a good alternative, but only in spaces where people can/are willing to do it properly.

It sounds like you're saying people who cannot follow lockdown are on par with "sinners" and/or "lazy gluttons", or maybe you're saying some people failing to do something is a good excuse for no one to do it?

covid-induced insanity had me laughing maniacally at this comment

There is literally no scientific evidence they've been effective at all.

If you really dig, you find things like the Flaxman, et. al. paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7) which falls apart if you try to apply it retroactively (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v...) not to mention the huge issues with the methodology (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.58036...)

On social media, people pass around pre-prints like this (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248802v...) on the "long COVID" narrative, which uses the mythology of self reporting on online forums.

There is zero science on the effectiveness of lockdowns what so ever. the Great Barrington Declaration is a scientific counter to any pro-lockdown arguments as well.

Everyone is saying "We didn't lockdown long and hard enough" .. which is just fucking insane at this point. Unless you're an island nation like NZ, there is literally no way to stop a virus that has entered our ecosystem at this scale. It took over 160 years between the development of the Jenner/Smallpox vaccine and its elimination, with a huge 20 year push in the 60s/70s. This thing will be with us for at least a decade or more to come, and we can't continue fooling ourselves into thinking we can just turn off society like gears in a machine with little to no consequences.

Humans are not batteries with an on off switch.

People keep saying that lockdown and elimination strategies only work on islands, but I've yet to hear a compelling narrative why that should be the case.

The only variations in the effectiveness of a lockdown strategy should be due to - Household size - Compliance levels - Duration

Covered population, and population density should be completely irrelevant.

You also need a seperate and ongoing strategy to prevent re-introduction, and an outbreak management strategy, but those are seperate concerns.

Ideally, if your neighbouring countries/states/whatever were similarly effective, then re-introduction management shouldn't be too difficult (cf 'pacific travel bubble', etc).

> but I've yet to hear a compelling narrative why that should be the case.

Why does that matter? We can be confident that something is true without being sure why. We aren't sure what dark energy is, but just from empirical evidence we've observed, we do know that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. How is this situation different?

Name a single consequence of "despair" that is felt 20, 30 years later.

How many times were you despaired in 2000 that you still feel the effects of today? And how many of them are on the same level of importance as a temporary lockdown?

layoffs, evictions etc, unable to eat.

I was personally laid off this year due to lockdown bs and changed careers. It pays 1/5th as much but I’m so glad to be out of tech.

My monthly burn is negative. I’m subsidizing my new job from savings.

Not are all so lucky.

Not sure about 20 or 30 years or "despair" or how it relates to lockdown, but from own experience (only) I can say that prolonged unemployment shakes confidence and makes you cautious taking on large dept / long-time commitment even many years later.

> How many times were you despaired in 2000 that you still feel the effects of today? And how many of them are on the same level of importance as a temporary lockdown?

This is unfair. For a lot of people, these 10 months of lockdown and counting (and the consequences as a result of them) are the worst thing that's ever happened in their lives, so there's nothing equivalently bad to compare it to.

Can you imagine how bad everything would have been without the initial lockdown? Fucking hell, think of a city like New York if NOTHING WAS DONE.

Subsequent lockdowns would NOT have been needed if people would have listened to basic fucking things like: wear a mask, try not to go out unless you really need to, and keep some distance. But no, people are just selfish as hell and it's making it worst for the rest of us. Doesn't help that you have some certain politicians who actively made people resist doing basic things to help out.

You do realize the majority of deaths in NYC were due to Cuomo sending sick COVID-19 elderly patients to be sent to nursing homes and kept in the same rooms as healthy elderly people right? Same with Gov Whitmer in Michigan.

Janice Dean covers it very well when she reported on how her own family member was killed by Cuomo's orders: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/i...

A number of people were killed because of overuse of ventilators. Many people under 40 who were put on them would have likely survived had they not been put on high pressure vents (and they're not used very much today for that reason).

So your premise is if we had done absolutely nothing we would be better off? That doesn't make any sense. If that were true, when lockdowns stopped the deaths would have stopped or rapidly slowed down, but they certainly haven't.

In this case, Cuomo killed thousands of people with very bad decisions. Yes, there's a good chance if he did nothing at all, there would have been a lower death count.

The WHO is already telling all nations the lockdowns need to end. There is little to no scientific evidence they've done anything at all! So really, they've likely only done harm and zero good.

> The WHO is already telling all nations the lockdowns need to end.

I can't find a source for that claim, would you mind sharing one?

S/he is a bullshit artist. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-virus-outbreak-ap-f...

No, I'm not. That AP article directly contradicts what the WHO envoy said

> We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. David Nabarro said to The Spectator’s Andrew Neil. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-...

Honestly, every news organization is continually contradicting themselves at this point. Hell, the New York Times contradicts their own headlines in the same articles!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmgMu5sefzA

Your comments on this and other covid stories are a long string of hyperbolic statements followed by walkbacks. Maybe if you offered arguments of narrower scope and supported them with data up front rather than after being challenged you'd find a more receptive audience.

You seem like a smart person and I'm sure you can get the downsides of things like organized disinformation campaigns, the resulting impact on vaccine hesitancy, and the second-order effects like avoidable increases in measles, eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7590343/

If you could make more of an effort to communicate your ideas in a cooperative rather than an adversarial fashion that'd be great.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-...

No, the premise is that not locking down and not sending COVID-19 positive patients to nursing homes with healthy ones would have left us better off than locking down and sending COVID-19 positive patients to nursing homes with healthy ones did.

No, that's not what I said. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should nursing homes have been used for anything, other than housing the people who originally paid to be in those homes. The Gov issues an executive order, and the nursing homes told both the NY government and the Michigan government (Whitmer did the same thing) they did not have the tools, beds or people to possible take COVID patients.

The lockdowns are unrelated to the leaders of those two states arbitrarily deciding to using private nursing homes to store patients; homes that didn't have individual rooms or isolation areas. The patients could have literally been sent anywhere else, like the massive emergency shelters in NYC that were totally empty and unused.

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