In Melbourne, Australia, a protest against Covid restrictions turned violent

nytimes.com

4 points·AndrewBissell··5 comments

David Elliott, police commissioner of the state of New South Wales: “You’ll also be endangering the lives of your loved ones and of course prolonging this lockdown. You’re going to be doing everything you want to stop.”

In other words: If you want to stop the rules, just follow the rules!

This endemic respiratory virus that has hit every single country which supposedly "did lockdowns right" will go away for good if you just do what we tell you for six more weeks!

There’s demonstrated effectiveness in doing lockdown (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32495067/), although more recent data suggests a more moderate impact. But factually speaking we know that lockdowns contribute to a reduction in the rate of infection.

The study observed cases from January 22nd to May 10th 2020 and has serious limitations. No mention of seasonal effects. No definition of “lockdown measures” across 202 countries.

Just two good ol’ mathematicians playing around with data. If you change the methods just a tiny bit, you might even get wildly different results:

> When looking at the European subsample [...] Lockdown is positive, suggesting that countries that implemented the lockdown have, on average, more New Cases than in countries that did not.

Archived version: https://archive.is/zcJwO

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