Government over-reactions to COVID19 have been disastrous. There would have been an economic hit for sure but things would have returned to near normal by August 2020 if they had respected freedom (or if people had disobeyed in mass).
The ideal strategy without hindsight was conventional wisdom: Protect the vulnerable and stiff upper lip for the rest. That would have more than halved casualties.
With the benefit of hindsight, a 3 month shutdown while hospitals got their acts together (combined with protecting the vulnerable) would have roughly quartered the remaining deaths, but at far lower cost than the full shutdown.
This was predicted by some of the old-guard epidemiologists, which is why they were against the shutdown in the first place.
The cancel culture folks lumped them in with MAGA anti-vaxxers (I blame both sides) and got them censored by the big platforms. Here we are, with 100,000’s unnecessarily dead, trillions squandered, and many careers, businesses and educations ruined.
I suspect roughly zero people have learned a lesson from this. Hopefully I’m overly cynical.
Additionally, you make a few glib statements that don’t really check out - you say give hospitals three weeks to prepare - how? There’s been a lot made of hospitals getting ready, but for the most part, the limiting factor for covid treatment has been how many icu care teams are available. More ventilators don’t help much if there’s nobody to use them. Second, I’m not sure how you protect senior citizens when everyone else, including the people who provide their care, is swimming in a soup of COVID.
Also, we knew by April last year that ventilators were a bad choice: Doctors were jumping to it because of a specific weird symptom (blood oxygen levels impossibly low), but they had to keep turning the ventilators to higher settings to get an effect - to the point it was causing further lung damage. There's a bunch of less damaging ways to get more oxygen into a patient they'd been shifting to: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...
Where was this "full shutdown" you speak of? Not anywhere in the US. In Wuhan, and some other Asian countries, sure.
Didn't we kind of have the 3 month shutdown-lite you're referring to? Mid-March through about June for most places were at varying levels of shutdown in the US. But recall things started opening up in June of 2020. And cases started rising again into July.
> The US is apparently already at ~50% antibodies, not counting vaccination.
Citation? That seems like about 3X the most optimistic numbers I've heard from credible sources.
Source for 50%: Wall street journal. We were above 33% (based on random sampling, not confirmed cases) a few months ago.
This one from Feb predicted herd immunity a bit too early. They ran one with updated numbers last week, but I can’t find it:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-apri...
And he became the darling of the media and even won an Emmy.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/cuomos-nursing-home-...
If true, then social distancing, masks, and lockdowns couldn't have done anything for the rest of us for the past year either.
The argument for "protect the vulnerable" is that these precautions could be more targeted and so, hopefully, more effective.
Let's not pretend that rational discourse was ever an option, and the media isn't the place for blame.
China, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand used strict lockdowns to eliminate community spread, and then largely opened things up again. People in those countries have been able to live much more normal lives than people elsewhere during the pandemic. With hindsight, that was clearly the correct strategy: eliminate the virus, then reopen and keep a hawk eye out for any new cases.
Another one of those examples has been actively censoring covid information from the start, and thus cannot be trusted.
As for Vietnam, it is an interesting case, and we don't have enough data to rule out cross reactivity or other factors playing a role.
Extrapolating these data points to the entire world with wildly varying sociological, biological, environmental, and countless other factors and saying this is clearly the correct (and implicity achieveable) strategy for all 8 billion people on the earth is at best hypothetical.
They took shit seriously and everyone prepared the minute news reached them of a possible pandemic. A good friend of mine is from VN and he was shipping PPE back home to his parents around August or October of 2019.
I think most Americans don't realize how common pandemics have been in east Asia. To them, it's like preparing for any other natural disaster. It's like comparing the Michiganders response to a blizzard to that of Texans.
This is why we need more data about cross reactivity playing a role in the relatively favorable health outcomes in Asia and Africa compared to the rest of the world.
Australia and NZ have densely populated cities, and what does being an island have to do with anything? Countries can close their borders. In fact, Australian states closed their borders to one another.
> Another one of those examples has been actively censoring covid information from the start, and thus cannot be trusted.
You don't have to trust the government. Just ask people you know in China what's going on there. Things have been mostly open for a year now, with no sign of the virus (outside of a few localized outbreaks, which have been dealt with through local lockdowns and blanket testing of the population). China is not the black box that many people think it is.
> As for Vietnam, it is an interesting case, and we don't have enough data to rule out cross reactivity or other factors playing a role.
Vietnamese people are not somehow immune to SARS-CoV-2. They're susceptible, just like everyone else.
> Extrapolating these data points to the entire world
This is the wrong way to think about this. These aren't data points generated by some semi-random process. They're countries that effectively implemented a strategy that we know should work, based on the basic principles of epidemiology. The virus is spread between people who are in close proximity to one another. If you drastically reduce contacts between people, the virus has far fewer chances to spread, and the epidemic recedes. If you do that long enough, you get down to a small enough number of cases that you can trace every single one and snuff out the virus completely. After that, you have to have strict measures at the border in order to catch imported cases, and you have to do regular testing in the population to make sure you don't miss the beginnings of any new outbreak.
There's nothing to "extrapolate." The strategy works because of very basic principles of how the virus spreads. The only question is whether each county has the organizational capacity and societal will to carry this strategy out.
Indeed, that's a critical question to the long term success of the strategy.
If the world is unable to put 8 billion people in solitary confinement (nevermind the disastrous effects that would cause) indefinitely until the virus is eliminated (nevermind the fact that we are incapabale of validating if it was actually completely erradicated), the virus is only going to pop back up.
There is no evidence of such a strategy working at scale across the world.
The scientists on the covid team at the WHO have said as much: lockdowns should only be used as a last resort to buy time to scale up health care resources. Should we listen to those scientists?
> the virus is only going to pop back up.
It does indeed pop up every once in a while, because the borders can never be 100% sealed. There have been outbreaks in Beijing, Qingdao, border towns in Heilongjiang and Yunnan, and elsewhere. But the government is understandably on high alert, and these outbreaks were caught early enough to be stopped with local lockdowns, coupled with blanket testing of the population (i.e., testing everyone in a city in a few days).
There was a brief "second wave" in China this winter, in which an outbreak managed to spread to several cities, but it was ended with relatively short lockdowns and mass testing. The number of new infections per day peaked around 100.
The basic lesson here is that you can both have near-zero case counts and let people live their lives almost as normal if you first act decisively to bring cases to zero, by using temporary, strict lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing.
> There is no evidence of such a strategy working at scale across the world.
China is the largest country in the world, so I'd call that "at scale." Vietnam is larger than any EU country. We're not talking about San Marino or Monaco here.
> The scientists on the covid team at the WHO have said as much: lockdowns should only be used as a last resort to buy time to scale up health care resources. Should we listen to those scientists?
A lot of recommendations will be reevaluated after the pandemic is over. Nothing like this has happened in 100 years.
Agreed
The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Personally, I tend to think governments under-reacted in most Western countries. I'm not sure how things would have returned to "normal" if the virus was raging out of control. A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. I'm assuming you mean by "normal" that people would return to some normal pattern of economic activity - and even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.
That seems hard to believe, since significantly more people die every year of all causes than could possibly have died of Covid, even if every single person in the world caught it. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was different.
> even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.
Maybe so, but the economy is not the only or even the most important casualty of our Covid response. The importance of human social gatherings, the freedom to leave one’s home and go wherever one pleases, the education of children, and so on cannot be measured in economic terms.
> The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it.
Places where there were very few or only brief restrictions, like Serbia, Belarus, or Florida, largely avoided the issues I described above with only a small or in some cases unmeasurable increase in all cause mortality for 2020.
Sweden is an interesting example. Comparing Sweden and Finland, for instance, older people essentially cloistered themselves in Sweden because they had no trust that they'd be safe in society, and their spending dropped by a higher amount than old people in Finland, who changed their habits less due to the swift and more stringent government response? My old-person family members in Finland were able to keep shopping, going to church, and having birthday parties with many families due to that response (as opposed to in the US where we limited ourselves to gatherings with max 3 households and did everything masked or outdoors due to several people still working on site).
Perhaps you live in a very different place. You certainly interpret statistics quite differently given your example of Florida.
If, instead, people had behaved responsibly in mass and we had used the time we got from that to establish coherent contact tracing and testing, things would have returned to normal by August as well, only without many the deaths your way would cause.
A lot
I'd argue that the "response" at the Federal level was a massive under-reaction. Months of denial didn't seem to work out so well.