Assessing Mandatory Lockdowns and Business Closure Effects on Spread of Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Assessing Mandatory Lockdowns and Business Closure Effects on Spread of Covid-19

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

28 pointsdisgrunt28 comments

Also see this other recent pre-print study "Lockdown Effects on Sars-CoV-2 Transmission – The evidence from Northern Jutland". In a homogenous area they found that lockdowns had no significant effect on transmission rates.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.28.20248936v...

Most of these, including both the OP and yours, are missing a factor for something like ‘collective civic will’.

Places generally recognized as doing well seem to have that in spades; not sure how to study for that though.

Belarus and Pakistan have significantly lower death rates than the world average. Would you characterize those countries as having high collective civil will?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

If you’re going by that table we should be studying Burundi. There is certainly a data quality element to be considered when trying to comparison shop.

Incidentally, and purely anecdotally, when living in Minsk a couple months I found Belorussians both particularly well educated on civics matters and quite interested and participatory in advocating and acting for collective improvement. Aside from data quality challenges among various regimes, perhaps they’re not the counter example you imply they are?

How do you measure that?

What do Australians do that the rest of us in Europe don't?

> While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions

Study didn't include Australia or New Zealand, two extremely important data points, IMHO.

To not include those countries and Taiwan means this paper is selective nonsense.

Why just compare all the countries that haven't done very well ?

The (lack of) correlation is not significantly dependent on the inclusion of those countries. You see a similar lack of correlation across US States with widely varying policies and enforcement.

Didn't include "lock down early, lock down hard" Peru or Argentina either.

And only assesses the strictness of the rules, not the degree of their enforcement either.

Peru's was military enforced for what its worth.

Sad that this has been flagged. We can't have science disrupting the narrative.

All the data in the world can't change the reality of businesses closing down forever in the city I live in (Sofia, Bulgaria). Organizations who are trying to protect the interests of various business branches raised a huge outcry lately because many restaurants, gyms, malls, and shops housed in malls are at the brink of a complete and irreversible bankruptcy.

Furthermore -- and as is expected here in Eastern Europe -- the government promised to help those businesses and most of them haven't received a cent yet.

In light of these events the government finally decided to actually start opening up the country while still requiring a PCR test if you want to come in. We will be "in lockdown" but a lot of stuff will start operating as usual, with gradually relaxed measures in the areas where things are still locked down spread throughout the next 3 months.

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I feel this pandemic brought the worst out of people. Sure, we must try and protect the lives of others because their immune system might not be as strong and they can literally die, that's not under dispute! But the outright bullying I witnessed both virtually and physically in person out there is nothing but extremely saddening. And overdone.

People turned on each other while the proof that looser social distancing leads to increased cases has been somewhat unconvincing. To be 100% clear, and before I eat 1000 enraged disagreements, the correlation is clearly there but looking at the data week by week (and month by month) that correlation definitely wasn't as strong as the proponents for full lockdowns make it look. And then you have countries like Sweden (and people still can't agree on why their numbers are [were?] like they are).

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And judging by seeing which comments here get the grey color treatment and unconstructive comments, I'd say the pandemic seems to be one of the most strongly politically charged topics in the last several months, likely for the entirety of 2020 even.

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Please try and understand the other side. People who want the lockdown to end are not "monsters" and "dumb egoists" or whatever. They want to be able to afford food! And please don't forget that stimulus packages and meaningful unemployment benefits (not talking about the literal 80 to 100 EUR you can get here in Bulgaria) are actually something very small number of countries are blessed with. Most of the countries on this planet throw their citizens under the bus while still expecting them to pay all taxes. So please leave your privilege at the door before judging.

And please, be considerate. It seems everybody turned on each other. It's heart-breaking to witness and is not helping anything. Bullying people doesn't help a bankrupt family business that leaves 20 people wondering if they'll eat the next week.

Legal precedent is a hell of a drug.

Seems pretty obvious by this stage that lockdowns don't bring benefits proportional to the massive costs. Just look at Peru, who "locked down hard, locked down early" and for months. The insanity needs to end.

Lockdowns do have one benefit for those imposing them. If cases go down - "see lockdowns are working". If cases go up governments can blame the plebs - "it's your fault, you didn't follow the rules"

Newzealand, Australia and Taiwan are places where businesses operate as usual.

I spent ~10 months--pretty much the entire pandemic--in Australia. They locked down early, banned international travel, effectively quarantined incoming travelers, rationed repatriation, locked down, social-distanced, and supported business owners and those affected with direct cash payments.

There are still flare-ups that come from international travel not being quarantined well, but because of all of these early efforts, life started to get back to normal. The virus is effectively eradicated there. I don't know where their vaccine program is now, but they actually have a shot at completely beating COVID--forever.

I feel like the US and Europe never really had very effective lockdowns, and far too many infections were already going before they could have been very effective anyway. So I don't think that we even speak the same language when we talk about lockdowns.

How do you account for Peru? Locked down hard, locked down early. Didn't do them much good.

And parts of Canada, the so-called "maritime bubble".

It is also worth considering that the maritime bubble is employing strategies in addition to business closures that likely has a lot more to do with the region's success. For example: most people entering the region must go through two weeks of self-isolation. When infection rates went up in the fall, self-isolation became mandatory for most people when travelling between provinces within the region. This made it much more difficult for the virus to be reintroduced after it was more-or-less eliminated from the regions. With reduced numbers in the fall it was also practical to guess where the virus may be spread, which resulted in more targeted business closures. Other factors, such as timing, undoubtedly played a role. Extremely low infection rates at the start of the school year meant that the respective governments weren't pressured into opening schools prematurely (i.e. they could open on schedule) and the delayed outbreak in the fall meant that tightened restrictions around Christmas were better accepted (e.g. people could see what was happening in other parts of the country).

The reasons for bringing this all up is more to point out that there was a lot going on besides mandatory lockdowns or business closures. I suspect that it will take years to collect and analyze data to get a coherent idea of how policies interacted and how to employ them effectively. But that is all a moot point for the period the study examined (early in the pandemic, when we were still trying to get a grasp on how the virus spread) and it may not be relevant at the current point of time because the initial response tainted people's emotional responses.

Whats the evidence that they can't operate as usual without lockdown?

I won't read the article as the comments clearly indicate it is selective. We all know lockdowns have a major impact on many businesses and individuals. We also know that restricting contact will slow the spread of disease.

It's all going to be a case of how the statistics are captured, measured, assessed, reported. Can't take any reports as 100% accurate

>> “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Translation: I offer my opinion on something I literally and admittedly avoided reading.

Not entirely - I read the title and the comments of other readers, so my comment is based on those

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