What I absolutely oppose is half-hearted “flatten the curve” lockdowns which prolong the pandemic over a long period of time while putting stifling restrictions on people. It’s the worst of both worlds, and simply letting the virus run wild would be preferable.
I’m fairly confident that an analysis of population-wide QALYs will back up my view.
Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.
This is a multi-faceted issue, not a binary one.
A year later, to have all those things and follow the same policies implies we either a) nailed it from the start or b) are not applying what we've learned. One of those is unlikely and the other unacceptable.
Ordinary people had little trusted data.
Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w [2] https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
Asympomaticity or pre-symptomacity?
>Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3].
Yet Italy had crowded ICUs and Sweden had to beg neighboring countries to take some ICU patients from them. It'd have been all much much worse without lockdown. Your CFR assumes good critical care.
Terrorism was the excuse last time, and we were told to support the troops. Now it's a viral infection, and we are told to follow the science.
This should not ever be a valid excuse, especially since one doesn't have to be that old to remember the last time these sorts of excuses were made - to justify the West's horrific and brutal Middle East occupations. We knew better, and in the face of those facts this excuse is either made out of ignorance, or to cover up for remarkable amounts of incompetence. Neither should be acceptable justifications to the citizens of those countries who hide behind that excuse.
> Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.
Under what circumstances would a government be able to lock their people down and shutter their businesses, while also sufficiently protecting those people and those businesses? Which governments would have the resources to actually achieve success using these strategies?
Governments have a responsibility to operate within their own laws and any country whose legal code allows for the government to overreach into the movement of individual people as they have over the past year, are at grave risk of morphing into the sorts of evil regimes we haven't had to deal with since the end of the second world war.
EDIT: Programmers should have better social intelligence than this. Most people in this world do not want to live like programmers, locked up in a room looking at screens all day, transporting bits of electricity from one place to another. In fact, I would reckon many would rather die than live like we do. If people want to live this way freely and of their own choosing, fine - but to impose this on others as the only answer to a multi-faceted issue is just cruel to the broader public.
Humans are REALLY bad at responding to "highly unlikely" risk.
With the corona virus, there is a really small chance (~2% depending on factors) that you die after catching the disease. Some people look at this and say "well, I probably won't even get enough viral load to get sick". There are sone people say "wait, I might survive, but then spread it to someone else, with X% probability - and EACH OF THEM might die".
Both groups are EQUALLY INCAPABLE of properly assessing the likelihood of living a healthy life or dying (or something in the middle). BOTH GROUPS are responding out of "gut feelings" and emotion and VERY LITTLE LOGIC.
I say this not to condem you - in fact I have been in both parties. I say this so that we can find common ground and MEET TOGETHER and acknowledge that is IS HARD, and we should try to work TOGETHER AND NOT DIVID.
Destroying a generation of kids is going to have significant long term effects over the next 50+ years.
dibs on not being the guy doing laps of my garden.
It sounds to me like an ineffective broader strategy by your government. I definitely wouldn’t be voting for those people again, and maybe legal action around their incompetence could be an option. I think the examples set by Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea show that effective responses are possible. Lockdowns were an important part of these responses, but of course a lockdown by itself will not solve the pandemic.
Tangentially, my personal takeaway from the situation is that Europe is doomed. The combination of an ageing population, young voters absenteeism and political clientelism means that policies are now strictly geared towards pensioners. I fear a victory of the far right at the next election in France and fully expect a severe brain drain once the crisis is over.
> I think the examples set by Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea show that effective responses are possible.
If we remove China whose statistics are dubious, I find it remarkable that apart from Vietnam, all these countries are islands or can be considered as such with regards to immigration.
Except for last week where you were under your third lockdown? I work with people from Melbourne and I feel like a lot of them suffer from at least some mild PTSD. This was re-ignited when the 3rd lockdown was announced with worries that it would last months again (luckily this was not the case!). The mental health aspect/general population wellbeing seems to be largely ignored in Victoria.
> I’m going to a concert with thousands of people this week
Unless there's another leak and you go back into a snap lockdown. There's always uncertainty under such a system! Again, not great for mental health. (and yes, you can argue that there's always uncertainty under a pandemic, but the levels of uncertainty differ between geographies)
I am sure a lot of work from home office people without kids will view these lockdowns rather positively. But I doubt business owners, hospitality workers and artists will appreciate them as much.
The article makes some good points and we really need to look at the wider issues around the disease and its countermeasures.
I agree lockdowns are awful. But what if we didn’t do the snap lockdown last week? I don’t think that would be better.
I also disagree with your statement about mental health not being taken seriously. I think it’s difficult to talk about, but I believe mental health resources have been made broadly available. I’m not really sure how much more seriously it can be taken without making mental health checks mandatory.
Stopping the system entirely is certainly a way to reduce the risk ;)
> I also disagree with your statement about mental health not being taken seriously. I think it’s difficult to talk about, but I believe mental health resources have been made broadly available. I’m not really sure how much more seriously it can be taken without making mental health checks mandatory.
I was mostly thinking of the way the pandemic has been handled in general by the Victorian government. Locking people inside for 22-23 hours a day, curfew, etc. There is very little if no scientific evidence that these drastic measures, which severely impact mental health, have a measurable effect on getting numbers down. Not all lockdowns are the same, NSW's North Beaches lockdown allowed people to picnic outside for example (and made gathering exemptions on Christmas day). This again points to the benefit-risk evaluation mentioned in the article.
Similarly, banning Victorians out in regional NSW from returning home: forcing them to make a dangerous dash across half of the country to get back within the day. Again this could have been handled with a much stronger emphasis on benefit-risk but instead the wellbeing of Victorians was disregarded.