A strategy that involves convincing every country, and every little province, to destroy their local economies, all at the same time. I can’t believe it didn’t work! Maybe if we just keep trying.
Some examples include:
* China bringing their initial outbreak down to near-zero
* Italy arresting their early surge that overwhelmed health systems
* New Zealand bringing their infection rate low enough to essentially return to normal life (apart from international travel)
* The UK stopping a dramatic winter uptick involving the B 1.7.1 variant from overwhelming the NHS
In what way have they not worked?
Good for Italy!
Sadly, coronaviruses definitely have the potential to deliver on that. Now that so many people have become infected because lockdowns weren't taken seriously, and because poor and working people weren't protected or provided for, we're going to have to deal with every possible mutation that could be imagined. Scary situation when MERS was a thing.
The idea that the world can't wait at a fairly comfortable sustenance level for any period of time is one that might be written on our species' tombstone.
They haven't worked, and they can't work. There are many third world countries that don't have internet access or the equivalent to the CDC. Global cooperation is just absolutely not going to happen. We can't even agree city to city in the US, much less state to state.
The way out of a global pandemic is the same it always has been. Vaccination. Attempting to control individual behavior on a global scale is a fools errand.
The average American 35 year old thinks if they catch covid they have a >10% chance of dying. This is off by almost 1000x.
If you drove that error down to 0 so people knew exactly what there risks were if they got covid (i.e. for most healthy adults and children, covid is a complete non-event)... I don't think the general public would tolerate any of these NPI's at all.
The fact that people can overestimate their covid risks by almost 1000x has destroyed our ability to have rational discussions about kids in school, who should be prioritized for vaccination, and how we should return to actual normal life.
Shoveling nonstop boatloads of absolute fear into peoples head has been one of the most morally bankrupt things the media and public health "experts" have done over the course of the pandemic. Society is going to spend years cleaning up the mental health train-wreck these people have caused.
Source for the figures. Take a look. It blows me away how wrong peoples risk perceptions are of covid. https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
Personally, I am not afraid to admit I am scared of a virus that can be transmitted by asymptomatic people, incubates for two weeks, then can kill you, but hey, I guess that just makes me a scaredy-cat. I'm willing to live with that label.
Because risks are everywhere. Overestimating your risks from covid by 1000x results in making some really, really poor risk tradeoffs.
People joke about dudes drinking bleach and stuff but that behavior was because they vastly overestimated their covid risks... so much so they completely disregarded the very real risks of... you know... drinking bleach.
Much more serious examples of bad risk tradeoffs are how many parents are handling their kids. Some of the stuff people are doing to their poor children is downright deplorable. For example keeping them completely isolated from outside contact. All of it is because their perceptions of covid risks are incredibly wrong.
The media and these "experts" have created a huge shadow pandemic of unchecked, irrational fear. Absolutely nobody seems to acknowledge it and we have to tackle it at some point in order to move past this. Unfortunately, it will require these experts to "tell the truth" about the risks of covid instead of hyping every outlier all the time.
I thought asymptomatic transmission wasn't really a thing. Is there updated data on this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
Here's the best thing I've found for incubation period:
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/10/8/e039652.full.pd...
The people who complain about lockdowns are also the people who refuse to do the alternative, and then claim "nothing works".
I am really tired of the "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" political party. Get out of the way and let people who are capable of handling things get to work.
And then there are countries where the economy is based on resource extraction. Only a relatively tiny amount of people is necessary to work the oil and gas industry, or whatever, and thinktanks have sometimes bluntly referred to all the remaining millions of people as "superfluous population". So, whether you let COVID spread or not has little overall effect on the economy.
If there weren't lockdowns (and people were travelling again), our economy would be doing much better.
[With all that said, and while I dearly missing socializing, it isn't obvious to me that removing the lockdowns would improve things; on the other hand, it isn't obvious to me that letting the disease run rampant would be worse than the mental and emotional toll the lockdowns are taking on people and the economy. So many poorly understood trade-offs.]