131–140 of 312 posts
> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity 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.
> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity 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.
Yeah but there were and are nasty side effects to this, covering literally hundreds of millions or rather billions of people in some form. Missed social interaction is super important for child development, but how do you want to measure that, how many harm points do you assign to this versus some old or frail person dying. And look at ie India, delaying the height of infection didn't help them at all, estimated numb…
Still? We've only just begun dealing with this fallout. It will be effecting us for a generation.
Besides the economic harm and potential developmental harm induced by closing schools for kids, I think lockdowns did incalculable social harm to society. It gave huge swaths of the population a grudge against the system, a chip on their shoulder that won't go away anytime soon. It burned up goodwill and trust for experts and politicians (who generally didn't have much to spare in the first place.) And coupling this…
Do what you want, everything has tradeoff and risks. But don’t pretend science is normative until it becomes inconvenient.
I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale. It's trivially true that if you as an individual avoid all contact with others during a flu season, you won't catch the flu. You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle,…
This is not a popular opinion but I think the fundamental mistake of lockdowns, at least in North America, was starting from a top-down approach instead of bottom-up. People are going to act like selfish assholes. We ordered them not to. I think instead of threats, we should have aligned their selfish interests with the public good by making it easy to sue someone for infecting you. Could you prove that in court? 99% of the time absolutely not. But the fear that killing other people might hit them in the pocket book would, in my opinion, have made a lot of the assholes put on a mask or skip that concert.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you believe that 90% of the excess deaths were not directly related to COVID, your implied point falls flat. Edit: There were 1.1 million COVID deaths in the USA alone. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Over the span of 3 years. To put this in perspective a typical flu year claims ~40K people each year. So Covid over this time span killed about 10X as many people as a typical flu year. If you told people "hey, this year the flu is going to be very bad, probably killing 10 times as many people" would the average response be to close schools and many businesses for over a year? Or would the response be to limit lockdo…
edit: COVID placed a 20x burden on hospitals versus the flu even with lockdowns. That's without counting the increased difficulty of treating a novel disease, and increased time in hospitals for covid vs flu.
I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale. It's trivially true that if you as an individual avoid all contact with others during a flu season, you won't catch the flu. You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle,…
If it was that deadly and every knew someone who died, they wouldn't go outside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and I hesitate to even call them that here in the US, we didn't have literal lockdowns like China had where they welded doors shut on apartments Were there even places that gave you a citation for being out "uneccessarily"? Every single "lockdown" I'm familiar with in the US was voluntary. There was a period where "non-essential" businesses were forced or encouraged to not operate, but even that still isn't a lockdo…
Yes, the word lockdown means forced quarantine of the entire population by law (except "essential" workers). Were they really voluntary everywhere in the USA? For example, the UK is still processing a giant backlog of fines and imprisonments for people who violated lockdown rules, more than 28,000 so far. You were allowed to go for a walk alone or with members of your household once per day, and go to supermarkets, b…
> Whereas lockdowns in the Covid-19 case might have contributed to a lengthening of the crisis by delaying herd immunity 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.
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.
Regardless of everything else, I don't think lockdowns could have ever been an option in a pre-internet society or even a pre-smartphone, pre-social-media society. So, say, before 2007 or so.
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