Reopening Texas Had No Discernible Impact on Covid-19 Cases or Deaths | Hacker News Reader

Reopening Texas Had No Discernible Impact on Covid-19 Cases or Deaths

reason.com

53 pointsMeekro25 comments

Texan here. A couple things: 1) the mask mandate was no longer there, but nearly everyone was still wearing masks anyway 2) the businesses had basically all reopened well prior to this; the "lockdown" phase had ended late in April 2020 3) the number one reason it had little or no impact is that a lot of people had already had it, and a lot of people had been vaccinated

I'm no particular fan of the mask and lockdown policies, because they seemed like the pandemic equivalent of post-9/11 "security theater". But, I don't think you can draw a lot of conclusions from Texas because not much changed after Abbot announced the changes.

While the post-9/11 security “theatre” was mostly window dressing, it’s an undeniable fact that the lockdowns and masking has saved many, many lives.

Did all that prevent infection or simply spread out the infection propagation from a few weeks to 1.5 years?

You have a point in that this should not have lasted this long if the world was able to lock down completely until 0 cases for 8 weeks.

Other than that, what do you think would have happened if life continued unperturbed in early 2020? Do you think we’d be over it already? I don’t think that’s correct, to be polite.

It's too late. The genie is out of the bottle. The moment the virus escaped Wuhan there was/is no stopping it. You'll never get a coordinated world wide lockdown sufficient to stop all infection. And being a strain of flu it will likely coevolve with any vaccine we throw at it. Local strains are already showing resistance against various vaccines. There was even a covid-19 breakout amongst the Yankees team even though they were all vaccinated.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses.

Influenza belongs to a different family of viruses called Orthomyxoviridae.

Saying that covid-19 is a strain of flu is like saying that lions are a form of dog.

Spreading the infection from a few weeks to 1.5 years saves lives. If you look at total cases vs hospital capacity it’s easy to see why. If you have rapid case growth outpacing hospital beds you see deaths like we saw early on in NYC and Italy or currently in India.

On top of that, it kept cases down until vaccines became available, cutting down on total possibly infected populations.

What evidence is there that this is true?

The problem is assuming that no mask mandate means nobody wears masks. As the top poster said, people still wore masks, but it wasn't forced. I suspect this is true of a number of places that didn't have mask mandates.

Also, what we are calling lock downs, weren't really good lock downs. People still went out, people still went to the grocery store and other stores, and other places. I happen to be friends with a contact tracer, and the problem was the lock downs actually made the pandemic worst in a number of cases. If someone got sick in a household, everyone in the house got sick. I would argue if everyone is stuck in the house together and someone gets sick, there is no escape. By the time the person has even figured out they are sick, it's too late because everyone is home all of the time. Now, that's not to say without lock downs this wouldn't have still happened, but the lock downs practically guarantee that someone sharing a house with a sick person is spending most of their day in that location exposed to covid.

I think it's too early to know if lock downs were that useful. I don't think we will know for years as more data is gathered and people look at the kind of lock downs, and places that didn't do lock downs. Maybe some places that didn't do lock downs did well due to a different climate, or because they were more rural. But this would lead to the conclusion that maybe lock downs are not the best solution for all places, maybe they are good for cities and not as useful for rural areas. I think that's something that we might find out in the future.

I’m not going to source hunt for you when the information you seek is so readily available across the internet and any opinion to the contrary is simply an attempt at maintaining ones own ignorant bias on the facts.

By the sound of your resistance to my original comment though, no amount of sources will prove to you that the measures taken saved lives.

I have my doubts as well. Looking at the graphs from a distance, they seem to be dominated much more by seasonality than by lockdowns etc.

Also, Sweden, Florida.

Strict lockdowns may make a difference, but given the fact that 40% of the population just can not work from home, they're never really strict.

For me the 'undeniable' part of your statement was far too strong.

The graphs are only as good as the data they are made from and there has been widespread manipulation (both political and just due to inept data collection) of the data. Just look at Florida firing one of their data scientists due to whistleblowing about bad numbers[1].

Also anecdotally, having lived in NYC through COVID, can confidently state that without the city going on lockdown (and it was by all means a strict lockdown), hundreds of thousands would have died.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-data-scientist-...

I said in my comment that I think that it might be that lock downs worked in certain situations, but not all. From your comment, it sounds like there is no amount of evidence that will convince you that lock downs are more nuanced than the statement that they are 100% effective in all cases.

Remember, they weren't really full lock downs, they were these partial kind of lock downs. Even in the US, some places did curfews, some did not. At the very least, you have to admit that there have been some measures under the lock down umbrella that were not as effective as others. If you can't even examine your faith in your statement, you are right that there is no point in discussing this subject further.

Lockdowns are only effective if they are much closer to "all or nothing" than "regions can pick and choose".

That's the entire reason why the Tri-State area worked together to create and follow each other's lockdown policies.

If you have a piecemeal approach, people will flee the lockdown and bring the virus to wherever they go to continue the cycle. The lockdown (and masks) only work if you have high levels of coordination and compliance. That's why having a national policy is much more effective than a regional or state-level policy. That's also why China was much more effective (from the outside, if you believe anything about their numbers) than the West was.

If everyone is voluntarily wearing masks why should they care about a mask mandate?

Security theater is a great comparison. People already have an opinion before they look into the facts, if they ever take an honest look at the facts. As a final step that no one does, do you check how the facts evolve over time and go back and revise your conclusions when things change?

You don't?

Texas also had a HARD lockdown for slightly longer than a week thanks to the cold snap.

It would be interesting to compare the data before and after for a real assessment of whether lockdowns work.

I had a similar thought. There are a couple complications, though.

1) a lot of people moved in with friends who still had power (e.g. if they were on the same circuit as a hospital), so in some ways there was more mixing of households, in some ways less

2) the actual testing for covid-19 came to a virtual stop, so the data on cases was skewed

Having said that, one week after the snowpocalypse, there was no visible change in infection rates one way or the other, which does tend to suggest that human behavior was not having much impact.

https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/covid_stu...

Misleading title. FTA "We find that the Texas reopening had little impact on stay- at-home behavior or on foot traffic at numerous business locations, including restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, retail establishments, business services, personal care services, and grocery stores," Dave et al. write.

So despite 'reopening' people stayed home. That is why it had no discernible impact.

This is how it is supposed to work. 50 different states, with 50 different policies. The states with the successful policies are copied by those who had failed policies, such as putting covid patients in nursing homes for the elderly instead of an empty hospital ship provided by the federal government. The whole country can benefit. I only wonder why the states with failed polices are reluctant to follow a successful example.

> I only wonder why the states with failed polices are reluctant to follow a successful example.

Because admitting that their policies failed is hard for politicians. So they bloviate about how the policy was actually successful, and try to make it hard to get apples-to-apples data, and otherwise try to hide the fact that they blew it.

It's remarkable how much of politics comes down to "not it!"

I think only one state put COVID patients into nursing homes. A really bad idea, to be sure, and fortunately one that was not copied.

Once you’ve made a decision as monumentality wrong, you’re not going to highlight the fact by correcting yourself too quickly.

It wasn't just New York. Michigan did that too.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...

As well as California, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020...

50 states, 50 policies, 50*50 independent variables, zero controls. Even the overwhelming successes and the overwhelming failures give us little information because of all of the confounding factors.

The only things we know are the really obvious: staying away from other people helps prevent disease spread, having big gatherings causes problems. If you needed to be taught that, you're not going to believe any of those 50 experiments. You'll always be able to single out something about them that contradicts it and continue to believe what you wanted to believe.

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