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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I'm Swedish.

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.

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Your comment reminds me of the NYC Metro use data that (I think) was posted here at the very beginning of the pandemic. IIRC it showed subway use plummeted before the city or state government enacted any measures to combat the pandemic at all.

Yep. A lot of what got blamed on lockdowns was widely happening without government mandates, and I don't get how people keep making mistakes about this when looking at the effects of policy.

When I argue with people, I use the term "lockdown" to exclusively mean government-imposed lockdowns.

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.

And the clearest counter example to this ridiculous assertion is the US right now; faced with numbers not seen since the winter the population has only minimally changed it’s behavior over the summer and so far there has been no political will for any distancing restrictions returning.

That exactly what was happening here in Thailand. We even had a saying "who needs lock downs when no one wants to go out anyway". Despite many people here being young and healthy not many would care to risk covid exposure just to have dinner or to shop around.

This sounds exactly like what happened where I live in the USA. Many people who could WFH did. People who could not, did not. Everyone made a personal risk assessment and went about his life accordingly.

Yeah, and the outcome (confirmed cases & deaths) is kinda similar.

Confirmed cases:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Confirmed deaths:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Stefan Löfven made a surprise announcement today that he'll be stepping down in November

Again? He got kicked out and reelected two months ago. This government is a damn yo-yo.

His ministry lost a no-confidence vote in parliament, but no-one else was able to form a new government so he was asked to form a new one.

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).

Yeah.. the electoral situation in the parliament hadn't really changed, so that was kinda stupid. Mostly it was just a way for the socialist (borderline communist) eternal support party to the social democrats to flex its muscles, for once.

Looks like we'll have to brace for yet another government crisis

Such an easy argument. The no lockdown failed, but it also succeeded because people locked down anyway.

That doesn’t prove the people doing these voluntary lockdowns had any different of an outcome than if they did nothing at all.

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.

> 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

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).

The UK made incoming people isolate in March....2021

This is not what I think of by "it worked"

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.

New Zealander here.

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.

Will you get that back, or is New Zealand's quest for zero Covid lost?

From our experience here in Queensland, it's definitely not lost. We managed to get on top of a delta outbreak that peaked at NZ's current daily cases with a week of lockdown less than a month ago.

I mean, I'm pretty sure Australia has lost now.

Of course they have an effect. Take, for example, the UK. All three local peaks of covid deaths (Apr 20, Nov 20, Jan 21) all came exactly 2-3 weeks after each of the 3 national lockdowns.

That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random. You’d have no way to tell which of our theories are true. None of these lockdowns were proven to work prior to everybody jumping on them.

> That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random.

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.

It’s a very serious response, and it isn’t my job to prove. All the lockdown proponents need to prove their draconian, Stone Age mitigation’s did anything at all. As far as I can see it’s just blind luck that one region “did better” than a other.

You don’t want to be forced to do anything. I get that.

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.

The pandemic respond we got was not at all what we planned. It was using something completely untested and unproven with huge massive negative side effects. It was and still is unethical and immoral.

Science has nothing to do with these NPIs because science doesn’t tell society what do to.

I made you this chart of the UK pandemic. It's incomplete by necessity, but gives the flavor. Do the dates and lockdown measures look unrelated?

https://imgur.com/a/026CGjK

You have that as a log chart?

Here, I’ll do you better: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

Such dishonest statistics, this source. For example,

> 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.

It is a log chart! Look at the y axis. It's hard to see anything sensible on a linear chart.

All disasters have physical parameters. Fires need flammable materials and a level of dryness. Tornadoes and hurricanes need atmospheric pressure differences to propagate in a given direction. Earthquakes happen near fault lines. COVID has to be transmitted (somehow, physically, whether through air, aerosols, water, contact, but something).

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.

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