Yeah, we better destroy the economy with lockdowns while waiting for vaccines that don’t work against these new strains, and then pay the price for herd immunity as well.
What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on that latter point, if you are really worried about variants the best way to stop them is carefully following medical advice to prevent community spread because each person who gets infected is something on the order of 10e9 chances for a new mutation which is more competitive. If people had worn masks and locked down a year ago this wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad a situation.
How do you explain Florida, not locked down, vs. California with some of the strictest lock downs in the country having similar rates of death/infection?
It's even more of a puzzler for those pushing lockdowns since Florida has a population tilted way more in the elderly direction and per capita CA has a population tilted way more in the younger direction. Even if both were locked down you would expect Florida to have more infections simply from the age of its population. Instead they aren't locked down so it should be the apocalypse, no?
All as we pass the year anniversary of "six weeks to slow the spread" :p
In particular, we didn’t have a good economic plan for people who couldn’t work from home. Absent some alternative, economic necessity will force people to leave their houses and that will ensure community spread goes up without more care than was in evidence in much of the country.
The experience from the Spanish Flu, which seems to have similar overall lethality, is instructive. Many developed countries managed to lock down to some extent and keep the death rate from around 0.5% to 1.5% of the population. India failed to manage any significant lockdown at all and the death rate was a staggering 5% of the population.
Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations. The costs in terms of lost educations, lost careers, mental health, isolation, etc, etc, etc.... those all have to be factored into the equation. Sadly we are 11 months into this and people are still pretending like there are no costs.
To make lockdowns worthwhile, you'd have to demonstrate orders of magnitude fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Haggling over which country or state did better than the other by 5% or 8% simply means that even if the lockdowns worked, their benefits are almost certainly not worth the costs.
The impacts of lockdowns (or any NPI) should be clear as day to the common person looking at the data. Thus far, all I see are people nit-picking tiny differences between regions. Which to me is a very strong indicator that they were not worth the cost at all.
In short, your line of thinking is a perfect demonstration of covid myopia. Nothing else but covid has mattered for 11 months. I strongly assert that covid myopia is a disease far worse than the virus. Civilizations in the future will remember this period for our myopic focus on one specific risk to the exclusion of everything else--the virus itself will be but a small footnote in history.
As far as monetary costs go this is really easy to do if you just force businesses to close and send them on their way with a pittance. Is there anything you can’t afford, as long as someone else is picking up the tab?
Great, so we agree that at any given level of lockdown, we should see some kind of marginal benefit vs less lockdown, right? So it does in fact make sense to compare outcomes between California, New York, and Florida?
I'm making no moral judgement here, people are under severe hardship and we all have to make our decisions on our own circumstances, but it is what it is. What we do also has an impact on others.
If banning indoor dining across the state of California results in one fewer person getting hospitalized is it worth it? What if it keeps 10 people out of the hospital?
More generalized, how much benefit does a blanket lockdown have to provide for it to be worth the immense costs. I'm using "cost", by the way, inthe most holistic hippy way possible. Costs include:
-- destroyed mental health
-- Peoples life work getting shut down by the government
-- careers development stalled
-- childhood education
-- Cancer research getting sidelined
-- Preventative healthcare checkups being skipped
-- Lost milestones like prom, graduation, awkward teenage dating not happening
-- pets not getting routine care because vet appointments are now a pain in the ass
-- car oil changes being deferred by 3 months
-- adoptions not being performed
-- dating lives being put on hold
-- people putting off having kids
-- infants not seeing human faces can't be good news
-- physical health being put on hold (closed gyms)
-- and on and on and on. It doesn't take much imagination to see the costs are tremendous.
I assert for a lockdown to be worthwhile it has to have such a profound impact on the trajectory of the virus that it is indisputable to the common person. Not only that, but it has to be orders of magnitude better than no lockdown.
If somebody is going to argue "see, lockdowns work... this region did 5% better than that region"... I just roll me eyes. It just means we flushed 11 months of people's lives down the toilet for almost no real gain.
If we're coaching the team that lost 0-8, we shouldn't try to run the playbook of the team that lost 1-9 in the next game. Especially when that playbook cripples our players in other ways--perhaps academically (to expand your analogy).
It's like claiming a brand of toothpaste isn't very effective because you brushed your teeth once a week and still experienced the same level of tooth decay as somebody who never brushed at all. Is it the toothpaste's fault, or your fault because you were too lazy to brush your teeth more than once per week? There's not enough data to say. Maybe it was a truly ineffective toothpaste and no amount of brushing would have helped. You don't know enough to say.
Calling anything we've tried in America a "lockdown" is laughable, considering how voluntary and unenforced it was. Lockdown, my ass. More like a polite suggestion to stay at home that most of the country ignored whenever they felt like it.
For reference, my customers starting hanging out at the strip club instead, which didn't have the restrictions imposed (it was based on liquor licenses, which they don't have in my state).
So, the lockdown was ineffective at controlling the population or spread, but it still managed to smack my business around.
I don't recall denying that this lockdown has been disastrous for many businesses. You typed that out as if you were disagreeing or offering a counterpoint. Is anybody on Earth even denying the impact this has had on businesses?
I work in the restaurant industry, FWIW. Nobody needs to tell me how disastrous this has been for certain businesses.
More importantly than my post, though: I'm truly sorry your bar has been nailed by this while local strip clubs, of all things, have been allowed to operate. That is freaking absurd. I hope your bar can survive and prosper again soon. I have lost a business myself, prior to the pandemic. It's beyond heartbreaking.
It’d be expensive but other parts of the economy are booming and one point of having things like government debt is recognizing that it helps smooth the impact of disasters. We should be doing a WWII victory bond campaign investing in local businesses.
We've sporadically been able to open normal hours, reduced hours, reduced capacity, and all kinds of other restricted levels of activity, which has resulted in terrible sales, but smaller losses than we would normally have.
It truly is a very small business (9 employees) so its operational cost is pretty low.
I pointed out the strip clubs, but of course the casinos are allowed to continue operation as well. They avoided literally all of the regulations we had to obey: capacity, forced social distancing, reduced hours, etc. And of course they don't have the taboo aspect that some people feel with strip clubs, so they've been nice and busy. I have to imagine they're lining the governor's pockets to enjoy such a privileged status.
what would a proper lockdown look like to you anyway? I uniformed officer at your front door forcing you to remain inside?
Do you think that I was somehow denying that?
When I called our "lockdowns" laughable, clearly I was referring to their effectiveness w.r.t. stopping the virus.
Clearly I was not referring to business impact. That was a point I didn't mention. Is anybody even disputing this has been rough on certain businesses?!?!
It could just be that all the elderly Floridians sit at home in gated communities, while Californians are more likely to be going-in to work surrounded by a much larger, more dense population.
Could also be an effect of prevalence of multi-generational housing. Perhaps the elderly Floridians are more concentrated in gated community-type housing, and not living with extended family in a smaller living space.
The “lockdowns could work if we just tried” view is falsified by the situation in Germany. If Germans lack the discipline to do it, then nobody can do it. Some countries like Australia got lucky because their geography made it easy, but it’s not practical elsewhere.
Northern Ireland vs Ireland is one of the interesting ones.
Well of course.
The USA is at nearly 500K deaths. But we've got a population of 328 Million. The economy won't notice the loss of on 0.15% of the population. It's nothing more than a rounding error.
But isn't that a terrible way to think of it? Think about what you're implying here. How many people should we allow to die just to keep the economy afloat?
My personal feelings are actually simultaneously that we worry way too much about economics rather than human factors but also that personally, I don’t feel that the measures we are taking to counter Covid are worth it for noneconomic reasons, but I can respect that other people feel differently.
Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments.
And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t.
There is no point in blameshifting to people that ‘didn’t wear the masks and didn’t lock down’.
Also it is 100% clear that tons of people can’t wait to be allowed to visit each other. Claiming ‘people aren’t going to congregate’ is simply a lie. In the Netherlands we had one test event with 1500 tickets and over 100000 people applied for a ticket. They can’t wait to congregate.
And no, land borders don't matter that much. They aren't a strong infection vector. You can just close the borders. The vast majority of infections come from air travel, not land travel that is essentially zero.
Were also not taking about the EU here, the Article is American, and there aren't a billion people neither in Europe nor in North America.
Incidentally, the modalities for the Schengen zone allow authorities to close down borders in such circumstances.
The island argument is a mirage. We're in 2021, land travel can be brought to ~0 and air travel always was the dominant vector of infection.
In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium.
By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lockdown: if it doesn’t work we just say it wasn’t strict enough.
This statement is true "Must be the no true lockdown: if it doesn’t work we just say it wasn’t strict enough."
any criticism of the lockdowns is met with "you didn't lockdown enough".
Nobody is saying masks are 100% effective but the scientific consensus has been clear since last spring that they sharply reduce transmission rates. Epidemics are all about cutting those rates, and a minor inconvenience is about as cheap as you can buy a reduction. Certainly better than getting advice from someone who’s going to claim South Korea is a sparsely-populated island to avoid having to admit credulously repeating untrustworthy sources.
I'm not up to date on the situation in the Netherlands. Is it that you can do anything you want if you have a negative test? Because otherwise, I don't think that anecdote means what you want it to mean.
People can’t wait to get together and while most people do follow the measures many would stop the second it was no longer required. But some people have locked themselves in their home for a year now and think everyone is like that. That’s not quite true.
If we accept your analysis, we can say this serves a political purpose.
As for lockdowns, we know from analysis of the Spanish Flu epidemic that cities with successful lockdowns suffered less economically, because cities that didn't lock down had worse outbreaks that lead to longer lasting deeper economic damage. China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth, and yes comparing the US or Europe to small island states makes no sense, but China isn't a small island state.
You know what, I don't care. There's no vaccine required to be immune to facts. Whatever you claim to believe, when it's proved wrong and predictions based on it fail to happen you'll just come up with some other bullshit to believe instead. Whatever.
You realize that during no time when the Spanish Flu was around did they lockdown for 11 months right? The lockdowns you are taking about there are small, localized events. Not huge ones that affected large regions and had year long durations.
The only reason we were able to keep this lockdown afloat is because privileged people like you and me get to work from home and have zoom. Had Covid hit even two decades ago, we wouldn't be doing any of this at all. We'd have sucked it up and got on with our lives as best we could.
> There's no vaccine required to be immune to facts.
You are arguing morality, something which science can help guide but cannot dictate. Science doesn't tell us to lockdown for a year. Society does. Science might provide insight as to what effects a year long lockdown might have (hint: science hasn't a clue... we have no priors to this at all). Science cannot tell us to lockdown. It cannot even tell us to wear masks. That too is a values thing and is guided by what society values.
Even if lockdowns worked and were proven so by a bunch of statistically valid random studies (which don't exist, by the way)... it is still upon a well informed society to decide if it is worth doing (note: I don't think most people are well informed about covid at all... the average person overestimates their risk of covid death by about 1000x).
Trying to compare now to >100 years ago is full of all kinds of bad assumptions. Life in 1918 hardly resembles life in 2020 in any discernible way.
> China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth
Believing this means you have to trust information disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party, which would be a foolish thing to do. They are 100% committed to saving face, not to saving lives.
Sure the Chinese government can’t be trusted, but there are plenty of foreigners in China these days, including journalists. My wife is Chinese and we’re in almost daily contact with family over there. When it comes to general movements of the population and public or industrial policy these things come out eventually.
Do you think reporting on factory activity in Guangzhou is that much harder? China has incredibly vibrant industrial reporting, businesses running just in time supply chains and making investment decisions need accurate information. Your just making up excuses and I suspect you know it perfectly well.
Well executed lockdowns with high compliance rates work. They did it, it happened and there’s plenty if other evidence too. There’s no refuge left for the lockdowns don’t work brigade except “Laa Laaa I’m not listening”. Where they don’t work it’s precisely because the lockdowns don’t work brigade won’t let them, with low compliance rates.
Are regions with the harshest lockdowns doing worse economically?
A cursory analysis says no. Places like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China that had very strict lockdowns are doing well economically.
Then maybe the worst is intermediate lockdowns? Also no. There are few differences between regions with essentially no lockdowns and those with moderate lockdowns, though they fare worse than strict initial lockdowns across the board.
Simplest example is the 30 members of the government saying masks are useless as a form of protection in April 2020. Uniform message, no exception, not temporarily, not on a subset, just the blanket message repeated on all newspapers and TC channels, “masks are entirely useless as a form of protection.” (France, by the way). Obviously their goal was to keep stocks for medical personnel, but they chose the lie as a form of getting to their point. Same goes for all the other figures, I know how easy it is to fabricate statistics; Every Monday they tell us figures have jumped since yesterday — obviously because there are fewer tests on weekends. After all this, I have as much confidence in the figures as agricultural production figures in 1970 USSR - For me Covid is like the default checkbox on all death forms, which explain most of the high figures. Newspapers are under state of emergency anyway, so they probably don’t have the choice in what they write. Some succeeded to print articles about how journalists are not allowed to observe the democratic process of decision anymore, but that’s probably all they are allowed to print.
Sorry for the personal anecdote but I’d like to generalize it into “Maybe it isn’t good to tell lies as a routine form of governance.”
As for myself, it’s a pain to not have trust in anything, and I’ll probably spend years cautiously recovering trust in any figure from doctors as genuine and not fabricated for political power.
Countries that have done this have had far fewer deaths and have suffered less economically. The alternatives (doing nothing, implementing mild restrictions, or implementing strict lockdowns but opening up too early and failing to follow up) have all been far worse, in terms of both lives and money.
For 90% of countries that was never an option anyway and for most of the rest that ship has long sailed.
The countries that have tried, like Israel, have seen so much success with that strategy they are now in their third lockdown. And that’s with the best vaccination numbers of the world.
That's for Jewish residents. Apartheid states direct all benefits to the favored class. That works, until pandemic time. Palestinians are human too, and since they haven't been vaccinated at all they are a persistent source of covid.
My observation has been that in Canada and the UK any sort of selective or regional restrictions have been extremely ineffective and they offer evidence to people who would like to make bad-faith arguments about the power of restrictions.
My opinion is that two things appear to work to get you manageable levels of COVID-19. The first is broad restrictive measures over very large geographical areas that actually reduce time indoors with other people and compel mask use (some of the Canadian provinces did this well). The second is simply letting the epidemic reach levels that scare people into changing their behaviour (many US states).
There's no great mystery here. The virus primarily spreads in indoor settings where people breath the same air. A lockdown is only effective to the extent that it stops people from getting into those situations. Closing pubs will reduce transmission a bit, but not nearly as much as telling everyone to stay home.