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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

> Does that make further mitigation efforts worthless?

Mitigation efforts are certainly worthwhile, but there are significant diminishing returns.

I would guess that 80/20 rule applies to mitigation efforts just as much as anything else. The vast majority of protection is provided by a fairly minimal set of precautions.

I think we see this borne out in the data. The places with the strictest lockdowns are doing better than the places with fewer restrictions. However, the numbers aren't so night and day different as to suggest that those additional lockdowns have been worth the price.

One thing I've wondered is how many "odd" social customs in various cultures (no singing / dancing, face coverings, etc.) could actually be explained by past epidemics. We've certainly adopted many of those restrictions in short order.

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> I think we see this borne out in the data. The places with the strictest lockdowns are doing better than the places with fewer restrictions. However, the numbers aren't so night and day different as to suggest that those additional lockdowns have been worth the price.

This is complicated by the fact that the places who were willing to be the most strict would have enacted policies much earlier, and thus didn't actually need to be very strict.

I live in South Australia, where we've been extremely proactive in quarantining new arrivals since the start of the pandemic. We've only had two outbreaks ("outbreak" here meaning literally any locally-acquired cases) since March - the first one was ten cases over the course of about three weeks, during which we shut down almost every non-essential business and imposed very harsh maximum occupancy limits on essential ones. The second outbreak was ~30 cases, and we entered an immediate 6 day "stage 4" lockdown (that ended up only being 3 days) almost immediately after we found the first bulk of those cases.

Those measures are far more stringent than almost anywhere else in the world - the lockdown implemented at 18 local cases in November didn't even allow going outside to exercise, something places with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cases allowed - but it means that we only had to lock down for 3 days in the entirety of 2021, and it means that for the majority of the last year our lives have been completely normal.

My experience has been that the speed at which you react to an outbreak is far more important than how strict you are in reacting to it, as long as you meet some minimum threshold of responsibility. Our initial outbreak in March was completely eradicated just by social distancing, enforcing maximum occupancy requirements, and working from home where possible. It's fine to have relatively loose restrictions as long as you're willing to ramp them up drastically the same day you find more cases than you expected.

I think Coronavirus is best thought of as a cancer.

It was easy to get under control in China. That was where it originated. It was centralized and easy to surgically target.

The spread to Europe and later the Americas was basically the virus metastasizing. Once something metastasizes, there is very little that can be done besides very heavy handed approaches that harm the surroundings as much as the thing you are trying to remove. That's basically lockdowns. And even when you make the largest effort you can manage, it is very often still not enough.

The reason island nations have been so successful is they by definition have strict borders, which means you can catch the virus before it has a chance to spread out to the point that you can never contain it again.

Coronavirus was beyond containment in the Western world by April.

Thankfully, we've learned that it's a much less deadly virus than initial impressions suggested.

I agree that initially, when the danger posed was unknown, a quick and temporary lockdown was justifiable. And indeed, you seem to be describing a sounder response taken in AU, overall.

However, somewhat in defense of the OP, now that we have a good idea of who is vulnerable, as well as the enormous relative health, social, economic, and personal costs that the lockdown has caused to many who don't have the luxury of a desk job, the claim that the lockdown is no longer justified (and hasn't been for some time) is very justifiable. Sadly, incompetence and political maneuvering have taken center stage.

This is not just true for epidemics. When reacting to any sort of situation, often the speed with which you react is much more important than just about anything else. You can always adjust later, especially if your adjustments are also done with alacrity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

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