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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I'm always amazed at the diversity of opinions about lockdowns. In this case, I'm flabbergasted anyone ever thought that lockdowns alone would eliminate the disease, or that elimination was the goal of lockdowns. Are either of these common beliefs?

Let alone that that lockdowns + prison + tracking those with persistent infections was the next logical step in the case of TFA

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In my understanding at the time the lockdowns were strictly for reducing the spread of the virus to the point that the hospitalization rate didn't exceed our hospital beds. The lockdowns in Washington State were very effective at limiting the pressure on hospital resources early in the pandemic to the degree that the Army withdrew their temporary field hospital in Seattle and the hospital ship the Navy had originally stationed in Seattle was moved to California where the lockdowns weren't as widely followed. The two hospitals were stationed in March and withdrawn by May or June as I recall. And we wouldn't see any further backup in Washington for the rest of the pandemic.

Another thing that gets missed in these discussions is that Washington State was following the best data that they had, and you could watch it on the Department of Health's website. When cases started trending upwards they would wait for the hospitalization rate to trend upward and the bed count to reach a certain point and then ratchet down on the controls. When the trends reversed and fell below a certain point they would loosen the controls. It was very predictable what would happen next if you watched the DOH's website.

There was also a very gradual decoupling of the hospitalization rate from the case rate the first summer vaccinations were widespread, and that seemed to demonstrate that as a public health measure vaccination was very effective.

A seldom expressed idea is that maybe we acted close to optimally throughout this whole thing. I hesitated to write that, because I know someone will bring up a case where an official lied or there was widespread corruption (and I still welcome such arguments)...

But, some mistakes pushed us towards too much lock-down, and some mistakes pushed us towards too little lock-down, and perhaps they balanced out to something close to optimal. Not only in the case of lock-downs, but in other things too: surely some executive acted with primary concern for profits, and surely some others spread baseless anti-vax conspiracies. Maybe they balance out?

Maybe society is like a huge machine learning model. It has many errors, sometimes it estimates too high, sometimes it estimates too low. We are always striving to correct both types of errors, but the errors do not stop us from finding an approximate middle path which is often good enough.

> A seldom expressed idea is that maybe we acted close to optimally throughout this whole thing.

He doesn't go so far as to say "optimal," but Janan Ganesh recently made a similar point in the Financial Times:

https://on.ft.com/45SVbyD

Health policy aside, we clearly stimulated too much, but if you look at what the administration and lawmakers were saying back then they said things like "we'd rather err on the side of too much stimulus rather than too little," a sentiment that I think most people agreed with at the time, and, well, that's what we got.

"any solution is optimal for an appropriately defined cost function"

In other words, whether something is "optimal" or not depends on your values and the trade-offs that you're willing to make.

> In this case, I'm flabbergasted anyone ever thought that lockdowns alone would eliminate the disease, or that elimination was the goal of lockdowns. Are either of these common beliefs?

Quarantines and lockdowns work really well for less communicable diseases. Given we didn't know how communicable COVID was early on, or that the absurdly easy to spread omicron variant would come along, assuming proper lockdowns could contain COVID wasn't unreasonable.

Also, prior to omicron, some countries (Vietnam, China are the two I know of) did manage to completely stop COVID with targeted lockdowns and quarantines.

What China was doing before Omicron was still unsustainable. It was crushing exports and demographics.

> work really well for less communicable diseases

In particular, SARS was successfully contained and then eliminated using similar measures in 2002–2004, so it was not totally absurd to think in the initial phases that it might work again for SARS 2.

>Also, prior to omicron, some countries (Vietnam, China are the two I know of) did manage to completely stop COVID with targeted lockdowns and quarantines.

Ironically Omicron was exactly one such "cryptic lineage" that effectively descended from alpha and incubated in a presumed immuno-compromised and/or AIDS patient in South Africa while delta was already dominant.

So any potential for global elimination was already foiled by exactly the sort of thing discussed in the article.

I was unaware that forever infections existed. I was definitely of the opinion that if we all locked down for 2 weeks and made no contact with anyone, this would all go away because the disease would be dead.

I of course also realized that it's impossible for everyone to actually be locked down with no contact.

Yeah, the definition of “lockdown” varied wildly. In many parts, any employer could make the case that an employee was “essential” if they had a job worth paying for.

Recreational activities (even solo ones) faced the harshest enforcement.

> Recreational activities (even solo ones) faced the harshest enforcement.

The least functional restrictions, the harshest on mental health of those impacted, on top of severe isolation issues that many faced. Luckily I can handle isolation quite well contrary to most folks I know, and I had 1 and then 2 babies to consume all attention but few were so lucky.

Also Switzerland where I live didn't enforce basically any hard restriction on movement, just asked politely to stay home if you can, so whoever wanted to do sport outside just did it. Unlike say neighboring France which went batshit crazy with 1km-around-your-home one (so much for 'liberte', I find the more politicians talk about some catch word the less they actually mean to adhere to it when it matters).

Why isn't that a reasonable thought? If the virus was less contagious (e.g. SARS) it would have worked, no?

The stated goal of lockdowns was to "flatten the curve." The working assumption was that the virus would become endemic no matter what we tried, but by limiting interpersonal contact, we could decrease the rate of hospitalization to a manageable level. It is not reasonable to declare the lockdowns a total failure because they didn't achieve a goal they weren't intended to solve.

Sure, and it would have worked with COVID as well IF there was close to 100% compliance AND you could sustain that for 2 to 4 weeks. The only place that had real lockdowns where they actually welded the doors of people's apartments was China and they did effectively stop the spread of COVID until the much more contagious omicron came along. By then people were weary of lockdowns and the protests started threatening the government.

People don’t have an understanding and trusted health officials and politicians who all absolutely communicated poorly, lied, said ambiguous and conflicting things.

And then those people made it their whole identity till this very day.

So phrases like “stop the spread” was taken literally by both proponents and opponents.

And “mitigate the spread while we increase treatment capacity but then don’t” Was far too complicated for the population

Flatten the curve was pretty straightforward, I thought.

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