I'm not at all surprised.
The high level of noncompliance we saw made it pretty much useless. Half measures cause economic pain without providing much benefit.
The careful people wear masks anyway, the reckless won't obey the protective measures.
The high level of noncompliance we saw made it pretty much useless. Half measures cause economic pain without providing much benefit.
The careful people wear masks anyway, the reckless won't obey the protective measures.
Lots of people don't comply with speed limits but that doesn't prove speed limits ineffective.
For those who remember Chicken Pox, almost everyone got chicken pox. To the extend any NPIs reduced transmission (e.g. keeping kids out of school), the primary result was delaying chicken pox or avoiding major outbreaks, and delaying chicken pox may have been a bad thing.
As a different analogy, if you have a Windows XP system in the Internet, it will get pwned. If you update it to Vista, you get a worse UI and it still gets pwned. Sometimes half measures are much less than half effective.
This is false because COVID also has animal reservoirs. It will never get eradicated like polio or smallpox, which only had human reservoirs.
It appears that in 2022 it is now finally understood that COVID-19 will not get eradicated, the vaccines do not prevent transmission or infection (in fact, the original RCT never even showed it -- it was just assumed!), and that cloth masks have much more limited effectiveness than initially assumed. Omicron is highly contagious (but much milder!) so it appears that almost everyone will get it eventually.
Quick aside, polio hasn't been eradicated. Only smallpox and a cat virus I forget the name of.
I recall multiple studies early on stating cloth masks were not effective and should be avoided if you have access to surgical or n95 masks.
My impression is that the (US) government didn't want to nuisance this discussion as it'd only open further criticism of mask mandates.
Assuming all other things are equal in both cases, sure.
In reality though, by flattening the curve we have avoided greater collapse of health systems, we got more time to understand better what works and what doesn't when fighting the disease, we got more vaccinated people, etc. These things combined might have saved a lot of lives.
I'm not sure why delaying chicken pox may have been a bad thing, what do you mean by that?
Regarding chickenpox, it becomes more and more dangerous the later in life you catch it. Getting it as a 5yo is annoying. Getting it at 15 can be quite a bit more dangerous. getting it for the first time at 40 can be lethal.
How does that work out in reality though? There are always people in all those age groups in society and if you let the disease run amok, that just means the 40yo of now are more likely to catch it before there's a vaccine or better treatments, doesn't it? OTOH if you slow down the kids getting it, they will be less likely to spread it to the teens and middle-aged kids :D until those are available. i.e. pretty much the same, is it not?
Disclaimer: I'm pulling those ideas out of my arse, I have no real data or knowlege to back my thoughts.
Now we have a vaccine so I assume this doesn't happen anymore.
> I guess our parents had all had it, so there was no risk of getting it again.
This is not the case with COVID though. Everyone is getting infected for the first time, and we're still unsure how long and how strong immunity-through-exposure is. In fact, there are multiple reports of people catching it multiple times (I know of a person who had it 5 times :-o ).
Sorry, but not too long ago I ran into a figure that 2/3 of Omicron cases had previously been infected with another variant.
Covid is mutating fast enough that prior infection provides only limited protection. If you're lucky your body locks onto the spike protein and the protection works pretty well against all pre-Omicron variants. But you're not guaranteed that, your body might go for a much less stable target and do little against a variant.
We are seeing this with the Chinese vaccines. They're killed-virus vaccines, they worked well at first. Not anymore.
Reinfections are meaningless. What matters is severity of symptoms. Infection by earlier variants gives most recovered patients durable cellular immunity against Omicron.
I didn’t listen to the podcast, but I did read the notes, and I thought “wow, Omicron is no big deal! The data is great! Let me click those links!” Then I clicked the links and they didn’t seem amazing. Apparently previous infection reduces severity, and Omicron is less severe, but neither of these effects is anywhere near as strong as the show notes made them out to be.
I’m not claiming that NPIs are useless. I’m saying that half an NPI may be vastly less than half as effective. I think the OP can speak for itself.
An easy fallacy to handwave away the possibility that the lockdown strategy just doesn’t work so well. Which is kind of obvious if you think it through; either the result is you eradicate the virus completely or the lockdown just delays the inevitable. And it should be clear by now that eradication is simply impossible and from very early on in the pandemic was just never going to happen.
However, that strategy fails when you don't have access to the vaccine.
With booster shots it should never be an option to shut down society.
Speed limits are a good counter-example though, where they can provide a baseline expectation (eg mask wearing is good in crowded places) and then begins the negotiations from there for what is expected social behavior.