Evidently, there must have been some other factors at play besides the boolean of lockdown true/false. Better healthcare, maybe?
I think the most important difference is that ~50% of the population here thought the government was being incompetent/paralyzed and then performed a voluntary lockdown, much harsher than the government-mandated restrictions.
Since lots of those people who disagreed with the government (in)actions work as "knowledge workers", it was also relatively easy to make the switch to work from home, and they did, along with pretty much everone who was able to do WFH.
Possibly related: the current social democrat prime minister Stefan Löfven made a surprise announcement today that he'll be stepping down in November, a mere ten months before the next election.
I think it's natural that it would play out differently in Brazil - so many differences in the structure of the work force, access to information, English language skills, personal economic reserves, etc etc.
After we've witnessed the experience of northern Italy in February / March 2020, most informed/reasonable people concluded that the situation is more serious than previously indicated, so it's obvious that people's habits would change. People are somewhat rational, after all.
But arguably self-imposed/-chosen changes in human behaviour can both better account for individual differences (in health, exposure, and risk aversion) as well as respond much faster to short-term, local changes of the situation, compared to government policy.
Confirmed cases:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Confirmed deaths:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Again? He got kicked out and reelected two months ago. This government is a damn yo-yo.
This latest announcement is that he will be stepping down as the leader of the Social Democrats. There's a new election in Sep 2022, and to me (a Swede) it looks as if no-one is interested in an extra snap election right now (the regular election will be held in Sep 2022 as planned anyway).
Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control.
If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it. We had as little control over covid as we have control over other natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.
Tell that to New Zealand, who have had less than 3,000 cases in a population of 5 million. They did this with strict border controls (people on inbound flights must isolate for 2 weeks) and quick response to community transmission (several lockdowns totalling 40 days).
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/17/asia/new-zealand-lockdown-one...
At best, its a fragile, brittle, costly "solution" that may work in an isolated country like NZ until vaccines are available.
It's been 8 months since vaccines have been available, and they're still in the low 20s in terms of people getting the vaccine.
Yes we locked down over one case. The next day we had a few more, and then more and more and more (21 in each of the last two days). Delta is amazingly spreadable.
Because we are locked down straight away, every case is easily contact traced, and people that did catch COVID are already isolated in their bubble, so cannot re-transmit easily behind that. As people are diagnosed they are taken to isolate in a hotel.
So there will be an end, even though we were unluckily enough to have had a number of very large spreader events (conferences, churches, schools etc.).
The oft-touted alternative from activists outside NZ is to vaccinate and open up. We are vaccinia go quickly, but that plan does not work. (NZ had no right/need to get vaccines early - we did not need them. We are now ramping up quickly, all to the plan.)
But vaccines do not prevent transmission.
Vaccines do not provide population immunity with Delta until a very large percentage (90%?) of all people, kids included, are vaccinated.
Vaccines do not eliminate illness (including long COVID) and death. They do reduce it a lot, but many people will die, especially the vaccine hesitant. Meanwhile anti-vaxers spread disinformation, much as the similar or overlapping anti-lockdown crowd do. (Think about that)
Vaccines are not available to kids, and some very vulnerable.
It has been really amazing living essentially a normal live while most the rest of the world “lives with COVID”. We want that back.
This is not a serious response. The correlation is far too definite to be mere chance; and the mechanisms that cause it not hard to understand. Or in plain English: it's not random.
Pandemic response is not coded into us, it’s something we have to consciously do- and it’s draining to fight an invisible enemy.
I have issues with authority, so I understand the desire to fight against being told what to do.
But you’re denying science, this is not helpful.
Science has nothing to do with these NPIs because science doesn’t tell society what do to.
Here, I’ll do you better: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
> One of these neighboring Southeastern states had a statewide mask mandate. The other two did not.
> [Shown: COVID-19 Deaths, per million, 7-day average]
But mask mandates do not claim to prevent COVID-19 deaths, rather transmission. A state with relatively low transmission but poor healthcare infra will see similarly unintuitive/surprising trends.
There is almost no way that lockdowns did nothing. It may have been overkill, there may have been a single aspect of lockdowns that far outperformed everything else, and we could have just practiced that. But this fatalistic view is lazy, unscientific and reductive, and in a societally harmful way.
I can't remember the exact date, but I think in march or april 2020 there were restrictions put in place by government to limit the number of people that could attend a public event. Organizers and event-goers would commit a crime if they attended an event with more than 50 people.
Sure infected people did not get literally locked into their own homes, but "lockdown" is clearly more of a scale where some governments effectively locked the doors to everyones homes and some told everyone to stay home.
Probably it’s down to developed countries having a well-defined response protocol AND its citizen sticking to it.
August 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under...
June 2021 https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/31380...
January 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lo...
Right now it seems quite the opposite. Their vaccines are not very effective against the Delta variant, and they're having several outbreaks. They recently shut down a huge port. They never learned how to do partial lockdowns and just dealing with low levels of infection, so if they don't manage to eliminate the virus, they're screwed. What are they going to do with the Delta variant? Import foreign vaccines? Wait for better domestic vaccines? What if a new more infectious variant comes along that's even less affected by their vaccines?
I think China may be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. We know their approach has killed people, and the huge amount of resources spent on these lockdowns and massive amount of testing may have been better spent saving lives elsewhere. But we'll never know because they don't publish reliable data on excess mortality.
There is basically no real way to prove that lockdowns did a single thing. The fact so many countries were so willing to jump onto a completely unproven non pharmaceutical intervention that has massive negative side effects is pretty scary.
The fact so many people get hot and bothered by this and just assume that lockdowns worked at all… it’s quite disturbing.
Didn’t vote you down.
In my opinion anything that does not allow people to exercise conditional probability at the last mile is bound to have negative expected value.
Things that I do think make a difference: better airflow, more outdoor time, less obesity, better testing, a public equipped with better tools to diagnose and treat conditions at home, vaccines, better data infra and publishing of medical data, etc. Dumb blanket mandates that are applied across a population are stupid.