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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

Go look at Melbourne Australia and come back and say lockdowns don't work.

They went from 700/cases a day 30,000 infections. To 0/Day 0 Infections in 16 weeks. Everything you said is categorically wrong.

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Australia (Victoria) just got 3 cases and mandated stage 4 measures including limiting gatherings to 15 people.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-31/victoria-coronavirus-...

This is because it was reintroduced by returning Australians due to the rest of the worlds inability to contain it. Now we'll hopefully have some minor restrictions until we get on top of things again because you can effectively contact trace at these levels of transmission.

This doesn't prove that lockdowns don't work anymore than a car crash death proves that seat belts don't work.

Yeah, but Australians come from a notoriously conformist, law-abiding culture, so we can't extrapolate from them to Western society.

Almost(?) every country on Earth had a lockdown at some level. Australia is one of very few that got a good outcome.

This is nonsensical. Lockdowns aren't a binary system. The countries that did real lockdowns combined with testing, contact tracing and isolation are doing extremely well. Look at how China is doing today. Or Taiwan. Or New Zealand. Or Australia.

If lockdowns that aren't "real" (by the way, saying "real lockdowns" brings the no true Scotsman fallacy to mind) don't work to stop the virus, then why are >95% of the countries in the world doing them, since they still have all the negative side effects but without the benefit?

Because politicians are idiots. They think doing some lockdown-light with 50% of the boxes ticked from scientists recommendations will get 50% of the promised effect. And if they pick the right 50% of boxes, it'll also not inconvenience anyone important...

95% of the countries in the world have not done a lockdown. Stay at home orders are not lockdowns. In the USA we have never had an actual lockdown.

Even with your definition, my question stands: if stay-at-home orders aren't lockdowns and so don't stop the virus, why are >95% of the countries in the world doing them, since they still have all the negative side effects but without the benefit?

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