> Timing is a very significant factor, I believe - I couch that as a belief, because I haven't had the time to compare all lockdowns

Fair enough, and I agree. It's clear that countries who clamped down super early have fared much better than everyone else.

But going by that FT graph, Spain went into lockdown a week before the UK, and still did worse? Germany later than the UK, and is doing better? There's a crazy amount of uncertainty about what good lockdowns are once you've passed a certain point of community spread.

Sweden obviously missed the point in time where lockdowns would have worked very well, while NZ, Australia, Norway didn't.

The UK obviously missed it as well, but while they were debating herd immunity, it might have been too late anyway? We might never know.

And with all that uncertainty, I think it's wrong for people to argue that Sweden "obviously" would have saved lives by going into a hard lockdown earlier. Maybe, probably, perhaps. Would a stricter lockdown now do anything in Sweden? Unlikely.

> Spain went into lockdown a week before the UK, and still did worse? Germany later than the UK, and is doing better?

Not relative to number of cases: Germany locked down later than UK, but a week earlier on the exponential growth curve.

I'll post this link again, because it's the best articulation of this point that I've found: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Timing, with respect to where a country/region is on the exponential growth curve, is critical. In almost every place you see the same outcome, it's crazy.

Counterpoint: Santa Clara county locked down 3 days earlier than Los Angeles, but a week later on the epidemic curve. LA right now has had nearly twice the death rate per capita, and unlike Santa Clara which is almost at the end of the curve, may not even have peaked.

Lockdowns aren't everything..

Santa Clara’s official lockdown, and the tech world’s “work from home” mandates were separated by about a week, which could account for some of this.

Santa Clara has less population density and air pollution.

> Not relative to number of cases: Germany locked down later than UK, but a week earlier on the exponential growth curve.

Not according to the Financial Times graph in the post I was commenting on. Germany went into lockdown at 3000 cases per day, while the UK went into lockdown at 700 cases per day, and Spain at 600 cases per day, according to that.

Is the FT graph wrong? Do you have a better data source that proves your point?

You're missing an implicit assumption - that each country's testing regimes and levels and criteria were comparable - for an example from the top of my head, some countries only test if you show symptoms.

So if you'll allow me to rephrase:

> Germany went into lockdown at 3000 known cases per day, while the UK went into lockdown at 700 known cases per day, and Spain at 600 known cases per day.

As you said earlier, so many damn factors in this.

To add more data, Germany locked down on Mar 17 at 24 known deaths. The UK locked down on Mar 23 at 336 known deaths. Germany reached 342 known deaths on Mar 27. That's 10 days of lead time on the deaths metric.

Germany's new deaths per day (smoothed) stopped increasing at 215 per day on Apr 9 (2.5 weeks later). The UK's death rate stopped increasing at 850 on Apr 15 (2.5 weeks later).

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

Deaths tend to be more accurate than just confirmed cases.

One way to account for testing rates is to look at the test positive rate, and use that as a proxy. If the test positive rate is 50% (as it was in Spain at some point), you can be pretty sure you’re missing a lot of cases.

So if Spain has “600 cases” but only did 1200 tests, they probably have way more real cases than Germany’s “3000 cases” out of 30,000 tests.

FWIW, Germany had 9 deaths on March 17, while UK had 10 deaths on March 14. By that metric, the UK led Germany by 3 days. There’s more to it than just the one national lockdown date — in particular, Germany is federal and I think different states went into lockdown at different times, as in the US.

But meanwhile, South Korea and Taiwan have avoided lockdowns entirely, so it’s clearly not only about lockdown timing — availability of testing, as in Germany, helps a lot with keeping the sick isolated.

> and worth noting that Johnson and his advisor Dominic Cummings who was hugely influential in pushing for it both went on to contract the illness

Not really worth noting. It's an interesting anecdote, and I'm sure those who take the pro-lockdown position revel in the schadenfreude… but it has no relevance to the debate.

I does when Boris was going around boasting that he was "shaking hands with everyone" (in regards to a hospital visit). Then ends up in intensive care himself using up stretched resources.

I will give leaders who's job it is to meet lots of people to run a country a break, IF they take a reasonable position. Boris flaunting the risks to build up his public persona and then getting egg on his face is absolutely relevant. If you care in any way how a country is run.

Dominic is not so much in the public eye, but I bet he had a lot to do with Boris's early bravado.

It shows how widely it spread in the UK before they went into lockdown, which underlies my point that the efficacy of a lockdown is strongly tied to the timing thereof.