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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

At the beginning (early March 2020) we were told that the lockdowns would last for at most a month or two, in order to "flatten the curve", at least that's what "science" was telling us. I know I believed in that, even though I'm no scientist.

One year on and that "prophecy" (because that's what that was, just a prophecy) turned out to be pretty damn false. Nevertheless, we still let the people/scientists who deceived us back in March 2020 to take "science"-based decisions that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions going forward. Nobody will be held responsible, apart from a few politicians.

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"Flattening the curve" definitely worked, and you can see that in the data. However, what you're not accounting for is what happened AFTER the lockdowns were effective.

Experts worked on detailed plans for staged re-opening after the lockdown. I don't know about Europe, but the US did not follow such a plan. Different states reacted differently, and politics had a bigger say in how reopening was done than any epidemiologist.

I think you are very mistaken if you think that. Lockodwn appeared to work, but given that it takes at least 20 days from catching covid to dying, you can see in many countries that the curves for deaths were flattening off well before lockdown could have been the cause. Uruguay, Japan, Sweden, Belarus didn't lockdown, and don't stand out in any way for their numbers.

Japan has a far different culture than the US, people wear masks in normal times there.

And Sweden wasn't exactly a success, and has done far worse than their nordic neighbors, say, Norway. The numbers do not lie here.

Belarus had a very effective plan - they tested far earlier and more often, and have far more hospital beds per person.

Straight up country comparison is just a fool's game. We will have to learn from this as best we can - what worked, what didn't work, where, and why. If everyone wore masks properly, was lockdown necessary? We need time to study and find answers.

Sweden was very average for Europe without any tyranny from government. I would say that is success. Here in Spain we had many more of our rights taken away and still had more deaths with corona.

> Sweden wasn't exactly a success, and has done far worse than their nordic neighbors, say, Norway

> Straight up country comparison is just a fool's game

This idea of 'flatten the curve' is pretty easy to prove false with a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Like: how many people that simultaneously have corona can the hospitals support? From that it follows how much time it takes for everyone to get corona. When I did that calculation back in March I found that it was a few years. So, the consequnce of 'flatten the curve' is a few years of lockdowns. A very bad conclusion....

This doesn't work because this assumes no learning takes place.

As you can see we now have vaccines - it would not have been a few years of lockdowns.

The story told to the general public was obviously not the story to be closest to scientific truth, but instead the story that was thought to lead to the least severe outcomes. Nobody really knew the real fatality rate last year, the numbers could range from more than 10% to about 0.1%. If they turned out to be about 10%, quarantene would be essential in stopping the spread of the infection. Also, higher fatality rate would mean that the infection rate would be relatively low (as the number of dead were known), meaning that it would be realistically possible to exterminate the virus. On the other edge of the spectrum, the fatality rate might be near 0.1%, but the infection rate would be much higher. If this held true, flatting the curve would actually be a good strategy. Finally, if the true fatality rate would be around 1% (roughly the real number), the one would "flatten the curve" until a vaccine could be provided, as if hospitals had been flooded way behond what has happened, the fatality rate could easily be 2-4x higher. In the case of the US, that could mean around 10 million dead by now, if no lockdown or social distancing had been attempted.

Of course, had no action been taken to slow it down, and millions had died last spring (in the US alone), the public opinion would strongly demand a lockdown, as well as become so scared that they voluntarily self-isolate.

I'm not sure I understand.

New Zealand did lockdowns for a month or two and became completely Covid free.

China did lockdowns for a month or two and became almost Covid free.

Most European countries did lockdowns for a month or two and were quite open over the summer.

So either it was a different prophecy in the rest of the world or the prophecy was correct after all.

Other 100+ countries did the lockdown as well and didn’t have the same results as NZ, science would thus tell us that what happened in NZ was the exception/statistical anomaly.

Okay, so you are saying that lockdowns do work, albeit in exceptional cases.

Then how did the lockdowns work in say New Zealand or Australia, or Singapore, or China? What is the mechanism of action?

Through severe restrictions on travel, people coming in the country and invasion of privacy.

I know Australian people in Europe who haven't been able to visit home in a year. I know second-hand that in China if you had multi-stop flights you needed to quarantine at every stop. I don't know what test and trace measures the AU and NZ governments decided on, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't like them if I knew.

And it's easy to say 'well, good, people shouldn't travel now' - but this is not just about holiday. These restrictions keep families apart, make it more difficult for people to care for each other. Imagine someone close to you is in distress and you can't go help them because of this, how would you feel?

I don't know about you, but I would not want to live in China, even it gets to zero covid. And I wouldn't particularly like being isolated in AU or NZ either.

Completely agree, would not want to live in China either.

My comment was a response to parent, who feels betrayed by science, because lockdowns were supposed to work.

What I will say though is that there is no win scenario. It's lose-lose, either way. A non-Covid world does not exist anymore. Lockdowns come with exactly the downsides you describe. No lockdowns come with an overload of the health care system and high death tolls. Light lockdowns are a combination of both.

Both proponents and opponents share the same motivations by the way - to be able to see relatives, meet other people etc.

> Lockdowns come with exactly the downsides you describe. No lockdowns come with an overload of the health care system and high death tolls.

Please stop pushing the unproven narrative that lockdowns stop the healthcare system being overloaded. It's morally wrong to push for such a destructive policy without good supporting evidence.

Sweden, Japan, Uraguay, South Korea. No lockdown. No problem for any of those healthcare systems. It can be easily shown that curves were flattening before lockdown had a chance to take effect.

This is about as close as we will get to a controlled trail on lockdowns.

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

You are absolutely right, lockdowns are just a proxy, the real factor is behaviour. If everybody behaves lockdown-like, lockdown can be avoided.

You don't need lockdowns to stop the healthcare system from being overloaded, if everybody wears masks, socially distances, agrees to track, trace and isolate programmes, there is mass testing, no incentives for people to come to work sick, etc. One year on we have a pretty good estimate how each behaviour/measure influences the reproduction rate of Covid-19.

> Please stop pushing the unproven narrative that lockdowns stop the healthcare system being overloaded.

I don't understand what exactly is unproven. Lockdowns correlate with behaviour. The Chinese healthcare system was completely overwhelmed, even with CCP spin on things. In Bergamo, Italy, the dead were carried away in army trucks. Look at fatality rates for both countries at the time.

> If everybody behaves lockdown-like, lockdown can be avoided.

Speculation without evidence.

Lockdowns are apolitical decision, not a scientific one. Lockdowns can be avoided if governments choose not to implement them. But most seem to be relishing in the emergency powers given to them.

Fine but this isn't evidence that lockdowns don't work, they clearly do work, it's just that in many places people put their freedom above other people's chance of getting sick and dying in Covid. If it was a higher risk of death I think that calculus would change.

>completely Covid free.

not any more https://time.com/5939502/new-zealand-covid-19-lockdown/

It's 3 cases and they are already implementing a city-wide lockdown.

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