What scientists have learnt from Covid lockdowns
nature.com
nature.com
There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission, but I question the more subtle impacts and true long term cost. I state this knowing the leaders in place will never be assigned any responsibility and will be long gone when we start to ask why...
I feel like I say this a lot on HN, but there seems to be an attitude among political folk in the last 20-25 years that intent is more important than effect.
The effect can be a complete disaster but the politicos expect the public to appreciate their intention to help and to not question the effect.
I am a pragmatist, so I don’t care about intention, only the effect, and in the case of the US specifically, the effect of the federal government and medical establishment response at every point in this pandemic has been a disaster. I honestly cannot point to one thing that wasn’t a total clusterfuck.
That’s true - there’s no evidence if you aren’t looking.
Thus, they were able to say countless things and rebut the critics with “there’s no evidence of that.” There’s no evidence that an lockdown will cause massive suffering or severe economic downturns that don’t recover easily, or that it will make a potential war easier. And here we are.
Sigh :( There is actually an enormous amount of doubt about this. The Nature article is a small improvement in accuracy from their previous positions, but is still fundamentally incorrect and shows that the scientific elites are still in denial about the depths of their failure.
If their beliefs about lockdown effectiveness and necessity were anywhere near accurate, Sweden would have the highest COVID death tolls out there. In fact they sit at the bottom of the European COVID mortality league table, with both far less impact from COVID countermeasures and also some of the lowest COVID mortality.
The studies claiming lockdowns work are junk science. They typically reach their conclusions by comparing actual mortality to predictions from models and then observing the models predicted far more. They go from this to "lockdowns work". This isn't a valid inference because the gap can also be explained by the models being wrong, as indeed they were proven to be many times.
Lockdowns are highly effective in models that assume extremely localized and transient transmission, a.k.a. the droplet model. In the real world they appear to have no effect on COVID and this is best explained by transmission being dominated by aerosols. In the aerosol model SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas. It can hang in the air for long periods, enter via the eyeballs and spread through air ducts. This model should have been seriously considered by scientists at every point because SARS-1 appears to have spread this way, but they ignored it. Instead epidemiologists simply assumed a particular form of transmission, along with many other things.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling.
But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).
No scientist is going to link those things to the COVID response, because the link is too vague. And there is a chance that maybe all this stuff was going to happen anyway and the timing is a coincidence.
But there is a good reason that "freedom" is a higher civilisational value in the west than "be healthy". Allowing small councils to decide that people can't go to church, meet their neighbours or run a business is a very effective way to bring down a civilisation. It is impossible to do that and enjoy a high standard of living.
A million people died (and more are still dying! the pandemic is not over!) in the US alone, even with the partially-effective measures we took.
Imagine if we hadn't even tried to reduce transmission. Hospitals would have been rapidly overwhelmed (many already got overwhelmed at the peaks, others came very close), and even people who could have been treated—both for COVID and for other health issues—would have died because they couldn't get access.
What are the negative economic impacts of having, say, 3% of your population (10 million people) die over a two-year span?
What are the negative economic impacts of the terrible psychological toll of all that loss? And of the government and other institutions just...not caring?
would is definitive. You don’t know that, and there seems to be plenty of real world examples of hard Covid mitigation policies to soft Covid mitigation policies that indicates it’s not that simple.
Could it have been worse? Sure, but frankly it could have been better too with less lockdown.
The other problem is that it isn’t true. Florida has had 10,000 deaths less than California, despite no lockdown and more old people.
Ah, but we did see it. In Italy in the first week of March 2020, we saw what an unchecked epidemic looked like. The health care system was overwhelmed and in chaos. Funeral services couldn't keep up because people were dying in large numbers.
> Florida ... no lockdown
Here's a story about the Florida lockdown being lifted: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/florida-lifts-covid-19-restric...
The differences in approach between US states aren't as big as you remember them.
How exactly is it that you think lockdowns influenced Vladimir Putin to do that?
https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/podcast-russia-expert-di...
"Dr Schimpfössl said Putin had been “extremely isolated” during the pandemic, with very few people allowed to see him in his “bunker”. She added: “It might well be, as bizarre as it sounds and unimaginable as it might be, that he is losing it and courting advice from people who have such fear of him that they would say what he wanted to hear.”"
The invasion of Ukraine appears to have caught even Putin's generals by total surprise. It was quite clearly not well planned and Putin was over-confident to an extreme degree, i.e. he did not fully understand the situation his military was truly in. Putin is nearly 70. During COVID he became a lockdown paranoiac even by the standards of the time. As a consequence his ability to absorb information or check things for himself would have been much reduced.
https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_putin-bismarck-a...
Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, is taking far more stringent precautions than most of his global counterparts to prevent getting the coronavirus. Kremlin spokesmen Dmitry Peskov this week confirmed that anyone wanting to see the Russian president has to walk through a futuristic "disinfection tunnel," where they're sprayed with an aerosol mist. In April, it was confirmed that anyone wanting to see Putin has to undergo a test for the virus beforehand.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/08/vladimir-putin...
"Russia’s leader is using a five-metre table for one-on-one meetings, but is it just a super-cautious Covid measure?"
The theory is interesting, but I see it as a theory of how the epidemic caused paranoia, not of how lockdowns caused paranoia.
Possibly that destablisied the Russian economy, spooked Putin, and convinced Russian high command that a desperate gamble was needed to try and unite the public against a foreign foe. China could do something similar, Xi wanting to unite the people behind a patriotic war to distract from a Hindenburg-style economic explosion.
The protests in the US got noticeably more violent in the US around the same time as the lockdowns which is probably related to the economic stresses of the shut-down-the-economy policies. I imagine it would be worse in countries that aren't democracies; there are less outlets for the anger.
And it seems obvious to me that we're feeling the snap-back effect of all the oil fields being shut down, + the inflation from rather extreme money handouts during the pandemic. A lot of the current economic troubles (which would also tend to contribute to people feeling stressed and war-like) are probably linked to the lockdowns through that mechanism.
The original Crimea annexation didn't have all these headlines of global food shortages and energy crisii either, raising the questions of "why is this time so much worse?" and "why is this escalating?".
You can blame Putin if you want, but lets be real - economic stresses are a big factor in war and peace.
Economic considerations would have been a great reason to not start a war.
COVID-19 did not cause food shortages and an energy crisis. The war did.
Putin has been running Russia for more than 20 years. So while he may or may not believe that, the timing of war starting right after the COVID pandemic is at least a little suspicious.
> COVID-19 did not cause food shortages and an energy crisis. The war did.
The crippling sanctions that Russia is imposing on the West are certainly the first order cause, but we must nevertheless observe that under more ordinary conditions maybe there would be some slack elsewhere in the world that could make up a bit more of the difference. We were seeing signs of food and energy pressure before the war. It has been brewing for a while now.
I thought having two submissions of the same URL wasn't possible.
(Not that the article doesn't deserve it; it is well worth reading.)