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> the fact that we can't even say (and probably never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning enough.

Exactly. I assert that for any of these non pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile their effect on “the charts” should be plain and dramatic. You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state and have them see plain as day the profound difference.

If you need grad student level statistics to tease apart differences it means even if these things worked, their impact was so minor that the extreme social costs made them not worthwhile at all.

> You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state

Keep in mind that the constitution protects free travel between states, so such an analysis only shows what results a mixed response gives.

If you compare Australia to the US, you can see that lockdowns very clearly do work: 1K vs 600K deaths. Even accounting for relative size, that suggests lockdowns produced a 50x effect.

(of course, if the question is "should California be draconian" then this is still very useful information! I'm just saying the answer changes depending on whether California is doing this while still being forced to have open borders with states that aren't locking down, or if the entire country coordinate a federal lockdown)

You cannot simply compare Australia's deaths to US deaths, "account for relative size" and then proclaim that lockdowns are responsible for a 99.99% decrease in deaths. There are countless other factors that have to be considered.

Please read the comment before replying. I said it suggests a difference, which is very different from proclaiming that there's definitely one. And I said 98%, not 99.99%.

The 50x difference is a starting point, not a declaration that there's no other factors.

Comparing Australia to anywhere else is a pretty weak argument. I mean for all you know their case count is way, way underreported. After all who wants to be “that guy” that shuts down an entire city? Who would ever get tested or be the doctor that recommends it?

And besides, look what they’ve done to their citizens basic human rights. Even if it works, is it worth it?

> I mean for all you know their case count is way, way underreported.

I work professionally with numerous cities in Australia, along with having friends and family there, so I don't have any particular reason to believe that under-reporting would produce a meaningful effect (keeping in mind that even if they were under-reporting by 10x, you'd still have a 5x result towards "yes, lockdowns work.")

I also follow a few scientists that track things like "rise in natural cause deaths" to look for under-reporting, and none of them has flagged Australia as a major concern.

> Even if it works, is it worth it?

That's a question we can only really ask after we've answered "does it work", but I agree it's an important one.

The thing is, "is it worth it" really depends on what the effect size is. If we can get that entire 50x reduction in deaths, that's amazing and I'd be hard-pressed to argue that the price they paid was too high for that.

But if we can get that 50x without such draconian restrictions, that's even better. And it's possible that over here we can't get anywhere close to that 50x because we can't do things like "completely close our borders" the way Australia can.

Moreso, I sincerely believe the fear exacerbated by the ridiculous measures and the social isolation especially of the vulnerable and sick (no visits etc.) caused a substantial proportion of the deaths. We are not isolated organisms.

Fear causes stress. Chronic fear causes chronic stress. Chronic stress causes chronic cortisol. Chronic cortisol causes immunosupression.

At least where I am (UK, and in particular, Wales), it seems our healthcare system is in the process of failing. It was already doing badly, and our response to Covid has tipped it over the edge. That alone will cause a significant amount of suffering and death.

Indeed. And to flesh out in more detail, we caused:

- lack of sleep/exercise (which destroys the body's immunoregulatory capacities, leading to either a sort of acute immunosenescence like you said wrt fear, or alternatively leading to an overreactive immune system that kills via cytokine storm)

- decline in social interaction

- more time spent inside (which apart from the other correlates, very obviously leads to less sunlight). sunlight => vitamin d + nitric oxide; vitamin d is critical for respiratory pathology specifically, as well as just general health, and nitric oxide is very important as an immunoregulatory compound and as a preventer of strokes

- the general environment of fear/stress/anxiety (again, going to screw up the immunoregulatory balance of the body)

I think this is being too light on the impact of covid. In places like NYC, where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies because their morgues were full, or India where the oxygen shortage killed many many people from Delta infection...

I would argue the severe aversion in reaction to the news coming out of NYC wasn't unreasonable, even if it was an overreaction.

> where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies because their morgues were full

Is that really true though? Because what the headlines of these kinds of stories say vs. what the article itself says usually never match.

It’s kind of true. These refrigerated trucks were on standby anyway because they are needed every time there’s a bad flu season.

And that is what I found for almost all articles of that type. If you read into the article it was never “this is happening” but “we are getting prepared”.

While the overall death rate isn't up that much, I've heard that it's clustering a lot more, which means various systems are overwhelmed: We can process X bodies per day but we have a couple weeks where we're getting 1.5X bodies, and so for a while we have a few bodies in refrigerated trucks or other overflow systems.

So... it's sort of true, but it's more of a congestion issue (like rush hour traffic), not a sign of systemic collapse.

Heard from where? Got any numbers for this "clustering"?

I mean it kinda makes sense. Since the beginning we’ve lumped entire continents as a group to compare to another group. When instead this stuff is incredibly hyper localized. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard “the experts” say this.

I live in NYC and have a friend in the funeral business. This was absolutely true in the beginning of the pandemic, although perhaps not at every hospital in the city as some were hit harder with patients than others. There was also a backlog in the ability to process bodies (e.g. Getting death certificates, funerals, burial sites or cremations).

Hospitals and related services are optimized for efficiency, not flexibility. They don't like having empty beds that aren't being used, or idle workforces. So when something out of the ordinary happens they can't deal with it while maintaining their normal level of service. As a society we don't seem to want to pay for idle capacity. Human nature, I guess. We could have been building more hospitals over the last year, training more nurses, etc. But that doesn't appear to have happened.

I too saw the widely-circulated picture of the "open graves" in NYC. Somehow they forgot to mention it was just a regular picture of a pauper's graveyard. Funny what fear can be provoked by context-free visual imagery.

> If it had been 2 million dead in the same period, it would still have been a fairly tame global pandemic

Untrue, at least for all of US history [1]. I honestly think this downplaying of the deadliness of COVID belies an agenda. If it was 3x more deadly...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/20/covid-19-set-to-overtake...

So according to that article, Covid so far has been 1/3rd as deadly as the Spanish Flu, yet any comparison drawn to the flu would elicit the response of "ITS NOTHING LIKE THE FLU, IDIOT!" ??

Interesting. I'm not downplaying the deadliness of Covid. The numbers speak for themselves.

Spanish Flu had a mortality rate of between 2% and 10%, and mostly killed healthy young adults. Estimates for Covid put its IFR somewhere aruond 0.4%, and it killed almost entirely elderly people.