The point of the lockdown was not to entirely stop the spread- that was obviously not happening. It was to slow the spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals.
It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person.
I assume experts look at a large number of factors to assess whether it should or should not happen and measure the disease by a variety of metrics.
Also I'd assume the urbanization, science, and ability to execute a lockdown changes over 62 years. Also the nature of work is different. Nobody was doing home computer video conferencing in 1958.
If anyone really wanted to compare it, they'd probably need to have some technical expertise in both diseases and also be some kind of specialized historian.
Adjusting for age/health Florida had similar mortality to California’s.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/04/02/why-major-study-argue...
How do you know this? Did you just read it somewhere or is there some meat to it?
There were still, far more deaths from overdose and suicide than Complications of Covid-19.
The original complaint is that hospitals were (and provably so?) given instructions on how to mark Covid deaths for statistical purposes, and those instructions were biased to inflate the numbers. At the time this was labelled as a "conspiracy theory" in order to drive the narrative, and afterwards it came to light.
"Medical examiner records" can't prove this, because they might as well have been doctored. No non-stupid person would write a report talking about patient having serious conditions A, B, and C, and then fill in a field for "cause of death" with "Covid", so of course you won't find any examples of that.
Let's all be honest, the media got caught with their pants down driving a narrative to fit what they felt was right and what "TPTB" wanted, and we're all in denial now about it. The truth will eventually come out.
Expected deaths from an unchecked epidemic: 330 million × 50% infection rate × 4% fatality rate = 6.6 million.
50% infection rate is the estimated no-lockdown epidemic penetration rate that I remember hearing from an epidemiologist. 4% was the fatality rate in Italy, February 2020, when hospitals were overwhelmed.
Not even close.
Besides, even if the true number was 3.8% or 4.3%, that wouldn't change the conclusion.
First: we do not know that the lethality would have been without lockdowns. We didn't (often) see hospitals turning people away. The lockdowns succeeded in preventing that.
But more importantly, it's not fair to judge people based on the decisions they made in the past with the information they had then, using the information we have now.
Let's presume there was no difference in lethality. We did not know that at the time. But it was reasonable to believe it would be helpful and save lives.
Who is sitting there going "yeah but what if it doesn't save any more lives? Let's risk it because I've got a party planned next weekend".
And the point of the study quoted above is that jurisdictions that did not implement lockdowns did not experience increased mortality
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9628515/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6694...
A pretty uncontroversial view among those who had kids or worked with kids during that time.
Here is a great starting point from 2021. https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask...
They are a failure. Globally. https://www.amazon.com/Unmasked-Global-Failure-COVID-Mandate...
One of the largest peer-reviewed European studies says... "These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage." https://www.cureus.com/articles/93826-correlation-between-ma...
Why? Because they are ineffective and were only introduced as a way to busy or "pacify" the masses.
But the difficulty for proving masking helps is: 1. If it only takes ~20 virions to get infected, then masking has to have a basically perfect filtering rate and be worn perfectly 100% of the time, neither of which is obvious. 2. With an endemic virus even if masks slow down spread they aren't going to reduce your likelihood of being infected overall.
> Consistent use of a face mask or respirator in indoor public settings was associated with lower odds of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result (adjusted odds ratio = 0.44). Use of respirators with higher filtration capacity was associated with the most protection, compared with no mask use.
I'll take a reduced risk, even if it's not perfect. Would you prefer to get covid one time, or five times? It's like arguing "why bother wearing a seatbelt, when it doesn't prevent injuries in accidents?"
Also, are you suggesting masking does not help with preventing influenza infection?
Also psychical stress from prolonged withdrawal from most if not all social interactions. We fucked up economy pretty badly and still seeing the results of it, made millions of financially very vulnerable people lose their job or family business overnight. And so on and on. Typical HN crowd is probably the least impacted so we are not a good sample to discuss this objectively.
In number of deaths alone yes it was without question the best course of action. The bigger picture, I am not so sure. And cases like Sweden show that restrictions were mostly stupid flexing of control powers by politicians who were generally during crisis clueless as fuck, and the harder they went the more they polarized non-trivial part of society. Again we still see the effects and they are not going anywhere, ever.
If I would be and old and frail person in high risk category, I personally would take all effin' risks and don't screw up childhood (and conversely rest of life) of my grandkids. But that's just me.
Still? We've only just begun dealing with this fallout. It will be effecting us for a generation.
Not regardless of age though apparently?
Which is 0.37% of the population, which is not that high.
The US is right around 0.33%, but that’s also because only 1/3 of us have officially caught it.
I wish this meme would die. Not only did Sweden not do well in the pandemic, they also ended up enacting a ton of restrictions, some more stringent than what much of the US had in practice.
Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.
Unlike in the 1950’s, we knew early on we could produce an effective vaccine. The vaccines that were eventually developed were designed within weeks of the viral genome being sequenced.
However we also didn’t know how to stop people from dying from covid at the beginning. It took some time discover pronation and other treatments that’s improved mortality.
Finally I would note that the articles celebration of a five times worse outcome as some sort of victory is survivor bias at its worse. “See, everyone who didn’t die didn’t die!”
I think there will be plenty of review of what was effective and wasn’t. Maybe lockdowns lasted too long. Maybe they didn’t. But this article is less than convincing.
Their metrics are also off. In 1959 the US had a population of 159m. In 2020 it has a population of 331m, a 208% increase. However in the pandemic 1.14m Americans died. They quote 0.119m deaths. How they come to the conclusion of “with a broader reach for severe outcomes than Covid-19 of 2020,” it’s hard to tell.
Of course, the source isn’t exactly unbiased.
How?
This is an interesting read… one of the challenges of the revisionism in articles like the original link is they simply ignore all context and lie about any context they include (deaths per capita being more extreme in 1959 etc). Besides being viral outbreaks almost nothing of the context is similar. That’s why people say in the thread this is an anti science article - a huge amount of the decision making context was the state of science and how amazing it is in 2020 vs any other time in all of humanity.
That claim is pretty inconsistent with the marketing slogans and messaging about the purpose of the lockdowns.
Similarly, the vaccines turned out to be ineffective for inducing sterilizing immunity, but good for diminishing the severity of symptoms, which would also result in fewer sick people in hospitals. But again, the marketing and messaging around the purpose and intent was completely incongruent with the reality, seemingly intentionally deceptive at times. If you didn't take the vaccine, you were literally killing and holding everyone else back because the vaccine would ostensibly make you immune and prevent the spread.
The biggest failure of Covid was the disingenuous communication.
"Disengenuous communication" is a vague term. I think rather that the biggest failure in the USA was for the government to intercede at all and to adopt protocols that delayed immediate treatment. By delay of treatment I mean that the protocol doctors were instructed (and later forced to use) was:
1. Tell the patient to stay at home (do NOT visit the doctors' offices) until (s)he can barely breathe and to then
2. Go to the hospital where they can hook you up to a ventilator and where you will die,
Rather than
3. immediately prescribe hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin, or other...) and antibiotics (to prevent secondary infection, not the Covid virus) for home use, and go to the hospital only if it gets significantly worse.
Countries who jumped immediately to 3 had far fewer fatalities (indeed, far fewer hospitalizations) than the USA, who followed the steps 1-2 (and omitted 3 or did 3 in a hospital setting far too late to work), above. Consequently the USA suffered extremely high Covid deaths:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usa+covid+deaths+more+than+other+c...
Even worse, it appears that the USA "powers that be" did that to justify established institutions and corporations who stood to make billions of dollars creating not-yet-existent (and later incompletely tested) vaccines instead of providing cheap and effective treatments that were readily available and that worked.
Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to save costs and began to quickly get overwhelmed due to their unpreparedness.
"It allowed us to reduce the lethality of COVID-19 by having more resources per sick person. "
This is false and there's no data backing this claim up.
The ventilator argument is brought up a lot so I wanted to share an article going over the related evidence:
"Based on the evidence at hand, we can reasonably say that there probably wasn’t a large impact either way from early intubation treatment paradigms."[1]
Uninformed and wrong. ICU staff worked through extreme conditions to save many. Ask a few how much better their patients would have fared at home instead.
> Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to save costs and began to quickly get overwhelmed due to their unpreparedness.
Expanding ICUs is not a matter of furnishing rooms, it's a matter of finding people with the requisite skills and experience. A localized need can be met by moving people around, but when every hospital in the country needs to grow its staff there is no way to conjure up more of this sort of person.