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There were plenty of instances of state leadership (not sure if you are in the US or not) asking people to stay in their homes and not go out or meet with people. This is message from the Wisconsin governor when he signed the Executive Order for staying at home:

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/articles/governor-tony-...

And here's the actual order https://evers.wi.gov/Documents/COVID19/EO094-COVIDRecommenda...

It actually calls out staying as close to home as possible and not even travelling to a second home if someone owned it.

That “order” contains recommendations, encouragements, and suggestions. It doesn’t seem to be legally enforceable.

I think every state had its own variation but ultimately after around April 2020 everyone has been free to get in a car and drive anywhere or get on a plane and fly anywhere within the USA. Some states had compliance regimes where you were supposed to quarantine or be tested after arriving, or be fined, but many did not. I traveled to one state with such an order twice and each time it was essentially voluntary - there was a theoretical fine if I didn’t follow the rules, but no one ever checked up on me to make sure I had a negative test. Unlike overseas governments (Singapore, Australia, China, vietnam, etc) our restrictions were basically on the honor system everywhere.

I believe one major exception is Hawaii where they actually did enforce quarantines somewhat and jailed or expelled tourists, and also had the lowest cumulative per-capita covid death tolls.

Based on the data from Worldometers, Hawaii is running a CFR (ratio of confirmed cases to fatalities) of 1.4% per capita which is low but not as low as say Utah, Nebraska, Wisconsin, others which remain below the US national CFR average of 1.8%. Frankly, that Hawaii did this the way it did is a scary abuse of power in my mind. As an opposite example, the UK which had and still maintains restrictions and lockdowns that are greater than the US maintains a CFR of 2.7%. If you are going to quarantine, quarantine the most vulnerable populations (if they want to be quarantined. Personally, my grandfather refuses to quarantine at all since that reduces his ability to be around his family). It seems inadvisable to quarantine a low risk population, especially as we are starting to see speculation of the negative impact lockdowns have had to the general immune response of the body to other diseases.

> It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering.

You're not representing the article fairly. For example, here is the passage where the author mentions obesity:

Vitamin D and exercise have both been linked to better outcomes for COVID-19 patients. In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. Lockdowns caused Americans to gain an average of two pounds per month and reduce their daily steps by 27%, thereby increasing the likelihood of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.

If you disagree, fine, but at least disagree with what she's actually saying.

I'll bite.

> thereby increasing the likelihood of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.

Assuming they get the virus! Which the lockdowns were supposed to prevent! If you do the math and the benefit of the lockdowns were small, and the risk from gaining weight was large, then fine, but the pathologic case of this logic looks like: "The government wouldn't let me drive to the store today because of the tornadoes. They say I should go tomorrow, at which point I'll be older, and therefore statistically a worse driver, putting me at an increased risk."

I'm VERY open to critiquing the lockdowns on these kinds of grounds, I'm just getting sick of folks with an agenda bringing a condescending tone and the false appearance of logic to a complex discussion.

> Assuming they get the virus! Which the lockdowns were supposed to prevent!

The key words being "supposed to". COVID killed as many people as it did despite lockdowns that destroyed the economy and ruined everyone's lives for the past 15 months.

Well, presumably it would have killed more without the lockdowns, but it's not clear how many more. It sounds like you're saying not doing lockdowns would have been worth the extra deaths. Which is certainly a justifiable argument if we're being specific, but absent some sort of rough sense for how many extra deaths, it seems like a bold kind of thing to write a blank check for.

Yea. One thing is, to know how many people would have died without lockdowns would require to go into some other dimension or universe where this was the case. Otherwise, its about accurate as me saying what the world would like if world war 2 had not happened. It would require too many assumptions for it to be reliable

There's no need to imagine other dimensions, Sweden and numerous US states which did not lock down allow us to make at least a ballpark guess as to how different the outcome would have been in terms of deaths from Covid. North Dakota vs South Dakota is a particularly apples-for-apples comparison. Even adjusting for the greater population density of some of the lockdown states & countries, it's not a massive difference.

South Dakota has a higher death rate per capita than north dakota. Both are in the top 3 for covid cases for per capita. I would say bad example. Where as California was an extreme compared to either state and per capita death rate is 161/100,000 and South Dakota is 229/100,000. That is a roughly 42% difference between South Dakota and California?

I mean, New York was also an extreme compared to South Dakota, and more comparable in terms of latitude, and it had a 20% higher per-capita death rate. But I don't think either it or CA make for a very good comparison as opposed to ND, whose per-capita Covid death rate was about 10% lower than SD's. This is the upper bound on lives saved by the lockdown policy, from which you have to start subtracting out deaths from the knock-on effects of lockdowns (isolation, delayed medical screenings and treatments, economic impacts, etc).

Which is why I pointed out that the problem is to complex to perceive what the world without the measure looked like with accuracy. To add on to your list, lives lost that would have been prevented if a hospital was not ran over and medical care stretched to thin and rationed. We can both run endless what ifs to show that we have absolutely no clue what a world that managed covid differently would have looked like. Even taking foreign countries into account, countries have different cultures. I've never been to Japan but my dad who has done business there said a person masking up when they had the common cold was considered a general courtesy pre-pandemic. Some countries also manage health differently. Many European countries, like Cuba, put a lot more towards preventative care than we do in America. Economic impact of a sufficient amount of workers being sick at facilities to stop production or slow production. Endless things we could name to tweak what a different reality looked like.

> Many European countries, like Cuba

Cuba is in the Caribbean...

While true I could be more charitable to the article I think it would do a disservice to not point out the fact that the author constantly minimizes the impact of the pandemic by highlighting how the death rate is for lower the non-elderly non-vulnerable non-obese and there’s no reason to even being this up unless you’re trying to drive home the subtext.

> You could go outside at literally any time during the past year regardless of orders.

If you talk about Europe and parts of Asia, I can tell you from experience that, no, you couldn't go out of the house for long periods of time in certain hourly intervals during the past year.

The author is a teacher in the SF Bay Area. I also live there and went on plenty of walks, runs, hikes, and drives all through the early pandemic. I voluntarily restricted my interactions, but there were plenty of people around here acting as if nothing was going on with absolutely no interference from law enforcement or anyone else.

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but at least here in Denmark we had no restrictions on going outdoors.

Here in the UK we technically had a "1 hour of exercise a day" rule at one point, but it wasn't enforced at all (people congregating in groups was, but someone just taking a 4 hour walk instead of a 1 hour walk wasn't). I think it was mostly a case of having to make the rule a bit stricter than it actually needed to be so that the level people actually followed it was at the correct level. I've heard that there were stricter restrictions in France/Italy/Greece at points.

Lots of places in the US had "covid curfews" too.

this isn't entire true - actually i don't think there was a single country in europe that made going outside alone an actual fine with law behind it. it was made to appear that way, but i've heard many anecdotal stories that when stopped by the police, the police ended up admiting they couldn't really do anything

> It's not okay to just say that only the old, fat, and vulnerable are at risk of dying so why should everyone else have to take all these precautions? The lack of empathy is staggering.

Nobody was saying not to protect those people or lacking empathy for them. In fact, the opposite is true. We were saying that we should have focused our measures on protecting just them, rather than treating everyone as equally vulnerable.

In the US, the old, fat, and vulnerable is 70% of the population.