Stanford Dr Calls Lockdowns the 'Biggest Public Health Mistake We've Ever Made'
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
I wish this got more attention. The whole culture around covid is really centered on comfortable office workers talking about zoom fatigue and looking down on people that break the "rules" while the people that feed them are expected to keep working as usual, follow the rules about socializing and fun that have been imposed on them, and not complain.
The issue really is the people enacting the rules do not seem to have any real connection to most of the working class forced to suffer from them.
This particular point is bad. Lockdowns have been imposed much more strongly in several places, and they were effective there.
I agree that the US/Europe's half-assed lockdowns are probably doing more harm than good.
- Half-assed enforcement, mainly using shame and fear. This leads to good people overcompensating and assholes ignoring the restrictions. Any level of lockdown is better if it's actually enforced on everyone.
- Allowing and restricting all the wrong things. Boston had indoor bars and restaurants allowed but closed schools and gyms, WTF? People continue to work in-person but all leisure activities are cancelled. So (combined with bad enforcement) you are hurting good people and not actually mitigating the virus at the same time.
- Worst of all, not the actual restrictions, but the hopelessness everyone expresses towards them. "Welp, looks like we have to isolate and be depressed for the next 6 months". You can hang out and have fun without spreading the virus, but most people don't even try.
But I can't move past the idea that if the entire world had just locked down, all together, for 2 months or so, we could have stopped this whole thing dead.
The virus would have survived somewhere in the world, and quickly began spreading once the 2 month lockdown ended.
New Zealand has a very low population density, including in its largest city, and is geographically very isolated. What applies there doesn't apply in most places.
New Zealand also has had to close its border completely for over a year, and even recently Auckland had to do another lockdown because there were new cases.
Locking down the entirety of society, to stop a virus with a 99.6% survival rate and with the under 70 cohort severely underrepresented among the fatal cases is not reasonable.
No, because we can still do testing and tracing. A virus infecting a few hundred people that we can detect fast is a lot easier to contain than a virus infecting millions or one that we aren't aware of.
Asian nations (China, Japan, SK) are doing similar to New Zealand and they aren't nearly as isolated. Afaik Auckland's lockdown is going to be a couple weeks at most.
Understand that, had we done this 2-month full lockdown, we would not even be locked down now. Young people wouldn't be nearly as affected as they are now.
If we have effective detection methods, we don't need to lockdown. We just trace and isolate any cases that pop up.
>Asian nations (China, Japan, SK) are doing similar to New Zealand and they aren't nearly as isolated.
China had far more cases than New Zealand, which goes to my point; New Zealand's position as an isolated island made it easier to contain the virus.
AFAIK, Japan and Taiwan never did NZ-style lockdowns. Taiwan had very few deaths relying mostly on contact tracing.
>>Understand that, had we done this 2-month full lockdown, we would not even be locked down now. Young people wouldn't be nearly as affected as they are now.
NZ has been isolated from the world for a whole year and just recently locked down Auckland again.