> I don't understand how you can be skeptical about lockdowns. The virus needs people to come in contact in order to spread. If you reduce contact you reduce spreading. It's the simple fact of the matter. Case closed.
Just to check in with you - and this is honestly meant as a check-in and not an insult: do you realize how unabashedly privileged you sound? I ask this first because I know that for me, I often don't realize when I make statements that reflect my own privilege, and I find that when that happens, it's almost always a chance to learn something new and important. I hope that is the case here.
Let's look at how lockdowns _actually_ interdict spread:
I'm reasonably affluent. Long-time remote worker in a fairly elite engineering position. I am able to sit in my home and order everything I need delivered to me. I live in a two-generation household, and I'm the oldest. We are all at low risk for adverse outcomes from SARS-CoV-2. In fact, for us, the risk is statistically difficult to distinguish from any other year's circulating pathogens.
Meanwhile, the person delivering things to me (and thus entering and leaving dozens of restaurants and stores every day to obtain the things for me and my affluent neighbors) is far more likely to live with a higher-risk relative and also more likely to live in a three-generation home (which is a fairly dire situation in light of this pathogen).
Let's imagine that my delivery worker lives with his 82-year-old grandmother with untreated high blood pressure. For her, in contrast to me, the risk this year is _nothing_ like that resulting from a typical year's respiratory pathogens. It's perhaps as much as 100x higher. Her risk of hospitalization - which she is also less likely to be able to afford - may be as high as 10%, compared to my small fraction of a percent.
As the months go on, I'm "protected" from infection. Instead of being able to adjoin the cohort of the highest spread acuity and then isolate (which I believe is my civic duty as a low risk person, to protect my higher-risk neighbors), I have to wait a year or more for my inevitable infection.
But that's not the end of the world, right? I had to mostly socially isolate and work remotely for a while, cancel a bunch of trips, etc. But all in all, nothing to cry over.
Now: what about my delivery driver and his grandma? For them, my delay in getting infected comes at an enormous cost. Namely, it increases the overall chance that the high-risk members of their family will be infected. They might possibly be able to interdict infection across their three-generation household for a few weeks, but not for years.
Now perhaps you see the actual first-order impact of lockdowns: they don't simply "slow the spread", they actually break one of the most important tools humans have in our collective ability to fight infectious disease: our social proclivity to facilitate differences in spread acuity _by risk_. We are actually very good at ensuring that young, healthy people share pathogens and develop community immunity quickly.
By preventing that, we protect only those privileged enough among us to isolate more-or-less indefinitely. In other words, lockdowns don't change spread acuity, they just shift its stratification from being by risk (which is great for preventing adverse outcomes) to being by socioeconomic status (which is arguably the worst possible approach if the goal is to prevent adverse outcomes). My friend Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford refers to this situation as "let it drip" (a play on words in the face of "let it rip", a sophomoric slogan used by opponents of traditional vertical risk stratification).
So, what we're saying is that we can observe not only the collateral consequences of lockdowns (which of course are devastating), but also an undesirable impact in first-order effects: lockdowns which are long enough to decrease spread acuity in the low-risk tier also increase first-order death in the high-risk tier.
This is the reason that lockdowns (previously referred to as "quarantine of the healthy") are advised against in the published pandemic plans prior to 2019. By all means, go to Google Scholar (or your search engine of choice for scholarly material) and drive yourself down this memory lane. You'll be astounded and almost certainly come out the other end a lockdown skeptic.
