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Comment by fivea | Hacker News Reader

> Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too.

That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down".

European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket.

Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme.

It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.

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Look, I’m in Barcelona right now. A huge chunk of the population here would be deeply offended by your “negligible externalities”. In fact, I’m not sure who wouldn’t be.

Almost half the restaurants are just gone, other sectors are absolutely devastated too.

The hospitality industry is absolutely fucked, while most hotels still operate they usually have less than half the staff on payroll they used to have before lockdowns.

Because of the economic damage, the security situation in the city has gone to hell. Violent robberies are way up, it’s now normal to get robbed at knifepoint while driving your car. Cars with broken windows are everywhere.

> negligible externalities.

I hate this trend of downplaying how harsh the lockdowns were, even in Western countries. If you think they were worth it because you personally put a high importance on longevity, fine, that’s a legitimate policy position (though I disagree with it). But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.

> But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.

I lived in Spain through the pandemic. I saw from my apartment the army trucks racing across Madrid, the police cars with loudspeakers advising everyone to stay indoors, and army patrols going through the city to enforce the lockdown.

Do you actually know what was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard? Having to commandeer the local ice rink to have a place to store all the excess dead bodies, and setting up a huge makeshift hospital in the city's expo hall to accommodate the patients.

Knowing that, do you have any idea what finally managed to reign in the outbreaks under control? Lockdowns. Two weeks since their onset, infection rates dropped to residual.

Don't talk about things you know nothing about.

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