Early on it made sense and we were told the lock-down would be a couple of weeks. Those couple of weeks stretched for years and that's why there was a switch when it was obvious lock-downs didn't work but were still imposed.
I also can’t think of anywhere in the US where anything was still mandated closed a single year after it started, let alone multiple years. I’m struggling to think of anywhere that even came close to a full year.
The revisionism around Covid has gotten wild. Certain businesses had to close for a few months (with government aid), capacity limits came and went for a while after that, and some places required you to wear a mask for longer. But somehow the narrative has become “the government would not let me leave my house for multiple years”.
People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California. While I wasn't boarded in my home, I was turned away while outside dining to use the restroom in a restaurant and got threatened by the police by the beach when beaches and parks were still closed.
The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy.
Most schools definitely were not closed for almost two years either. IIRC the only district that even came close to 2 years was San Francisco (due to seismic levels of school board incompetence, ending in a recall). If you live in SF that could be why it feels like most schools were closed that long—but in fact that length was so abnormal, even in “harsh” California, that it got a generally pro-covid-restrictions city to recall the school board.
> People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California.
Ok and they’re wrong since they aren’t even close. People conflate all kinds of things. I’m sorry a police officer threatened you—as a country we definitely have a problem with power-tripping cops. Still doesn’t mean we did a China-style lockdown policy.
> The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy.
Yeah see this is what I mean about how this discourse has gotten utterly deranged. Yes, if there’s a respiratory illness straining the ICU system to the breaking point again in the future, I think the government should close restaurants etc. for a few months (with aid for small businesses and individuals). So what does it mean that I am “the enemy”? Are you going to do something to me in that scenario?
Or are you arguing we should have gone full China?
Technically that's one narrative among many - popular with some, unpopular with others.
Possibly relevant:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
Etc
Turns out that even after seventeen weeks of complete isolation in Antarctica you can still catch the common cold…
So yeah… you can’t stop Mother Nature no matter how hard you try.
It could have been a coincidence each time, but I’d need some good studies to convince me.
It's trivial to prove this because waves last roughly the same amount of time everywhere, so you can just compare places that went into lockdown with places that didn't and see what happens. The answer is that the waves are the same size and shape regardless of what governments do.
You can also do a regression analysis on "strictness indexes" and case counts, which also yields no correlation. There are such studies:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
"Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate"
https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC...
"Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people"
But you don't need studies. The fact that Sweden didn't lock down and yet has some of the lowest COVID mortality in Europe is decisive. Claims about the effects and necessity of lockdowns were universal and made no exception for Sweden, so the existence of even a single counter-example disproves the theories.
dunno how much that is true or played into it thou
The goalposts really went supersonic once vaccines came onto the table. Allegedly, they were supposed to be our ticket out of hell, but clearly the enthusiasts were enjoying it too much to allow that. From "just wait this lockdown out until we have a vaccine" to "until all over 40s have been jabbed" to people still insisting that "it's not safe until we've triple jabbed 18 year olds", as we opened up and their apocalyptic fantasies did not come to fruition
This assumes that most people in the society are not very privacy-conscious, i.e. are fine with being tracked (contact tracing).
And personally I'm certainly not willing to participate in any scheme involving the government tracking my location.
On the assumption that you're an American, your country was not organized enough to couple a lockdown with effective contact tracing and mass testing, which is what other countries did to eliminate the virus.
If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely.
Lots of lives were still saved by our strategy because almost everyone had a chance to get vaccinated before getting covid.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, its still controversial whether the lockdowns were worth it overall. But they were definitely effective at containing covid.
Between the initial outbreak and Omicron (roughly, April 2020 - March 2022), most people in China never experienced a lockdown, because each new outbreak was controlled locally before it could spread to the rest of the country.
And yet, in my home state of Victoria, the state premier behind the lockdowns was reelected after covid with a huge majority. It seems like the way the story unfolded for people inside of Victoria was very different to how the story was told everywhere else.
That's a feat no other leader in any world's jurisdiction even attempted to. I don't know if it is another "red shirts" undertaking or a sycophantic "grass roots" movement - wouldn't be surprised with both, but just don't care at the moment. Seeking an exit of Victoria, but the most likely one for me will be out of existence.
If you think public support validates the "measures", check another example of similar landslide victory - election in Belarus of 1994. That win was as democratic as they get, I am telling you as a first-hand witness. The support was very genuine, for at least a decade to come. As for myself and my family - we feel that we escaped that hellhole only to land in a worse one... where there is no escape from.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Victoria
Did you know that covid can infect many other mammals? Here's a summary of the science on this: [0]
> appears that many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible
> the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human
> found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species
> found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested
> Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs
Does your belief that city wide lockdowns could be used to eliminate covid take the above into account? Wouldn't covid continue to spread in other mammals and reinfect humans again?
I don't know that any experts ever said that lockdowns could eliminate covid. From where did you get such an idea?
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
China completely eliminated CoVID-19 from its population in early 2020, and a bunch of other countries did the same.
Are you saying that you agree with the original poster, that city wide lockdowns could have eliminated covid from entire planet?
Even if every person in the world were isolated for weeks, so that covid no longer existed in the human population, many animal species would still carry covid, like rats [0] and pets like cats and dogs [1], and humans would become reinfected again.
Unless perhaps we destroy all those animals? And deer, and minks, and bats, and perhaps a few dozen other species [2]. Bats carry hundreds of different coronavirises and spillovers happen all the time [3]. There's evidence that Omicron evolved in mice then jumped back into humans [4]. It doesn't seem possible to eliminate covid from all those animals, does it?
That's why city wide lockdowns could never -eliminate- covid from the planet, as the original poster stated. They could only temporarily suppress covid in human populations. Like what happened in countries that did impose lockdowns. Temporary.
Here's what the scientists say:
> The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said. [5]
I assume that some people don't want to face the fact that diseases spread between animals and people and there's nothing we can do about it, and that scares them. Some people get so afraid they would do anything, even the impractical, to believe they retain some measure of control. They might not want to face facts that conflict with their fears. Not everyone thinks this way.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/e...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_S...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/20/8077428...
[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr...
[5] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus...