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Comment by cimi_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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