Sure, but the implementation was still absurdly bad. For example, by imposing a harsh lockdown on cities with no plan for migrant workers, the only thing they could do was head home to their villages, ensuring the virus would be distributed widely across the country.

Can't say I'm surprised though. When and where do governments ever treat migrant workers as humans?

Where do the migrant workers normally sleep?

Answer: In the cities they chose to leave.

"Chose"? Most of them live a hand to mouth existence: if they can't work, they don't eat.

That’s the rational calculus, yes. But humans have a really hard time balancing suffering today against hypothetical suffering tomorrow, especially when successful intervention makes it appear like the problem was never there in the first place.

That's an interesting presupposition, entirely unconfirmed by data.

It's true almost by definition. Actions sufficient to mitigate a low-probability, high-impact event will seem like complete overreaction for people who can't do this calculation - which is most of them. After all, lots of effort and sacrifice happened, and there was no damage!

I don't know enough about psychology to Google the exact term, but let's not be so pedantic as to pretend it is not at least a plausible assumption.

No, this is a stance that's completely unsubstantiated, with the obvious tie in to COVID-19 that's also unsubstantiated.

Can you point to a study about this? In Bayesian terms most people would put the prior probability in favor of his common sense hypothesis. And you just have to Google for "psychology of risk perception" to get a few more studies in favor of it.

Well yes, of course it's rational. Tautologically, hypothetical suffering tomorrow might not happen whereas suffering today actually is happening - in this case we have only the words of essentially discredited 'experts' (epidemiologists), many of whom are constantly bickering in public and pronouncing each others models useless or broken.

And the idea that mass lockdowns can stop the spread of virus is itself a radical, new idea that's never been tried, and which has its own cadre of experts saying it hasn't been working or is making little difference.

Given what we know now, extending a shelter-in-place order through all of May is catastrophic. It will likely trigger mass civil unrest. The virus just isn't that dangerous.

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

> And the idea that mass lockdowns can stop the spread of virus is itself a radical, new idea that's never been tried, and which has its own cadre of experts saying it hasn't been working or is making little difference.

You probably could say "has not been tried recently", but mass quarantines has been tried since time immemorial.

No. Preventative mass global quarantine has never been tried anywhere. Even quarantines in classical times were used for the already infected and known to be infectious, not everyone at once. What's being done now has no precedent.

Global quarantine has never been tried just because there was (almost) no global travel or communication.

And I think your second statement is false, preventive isolation en masse was practiced (to the extent possible) during bubonic plague.

The name quarantine itself comes from a preventative isolation practice.

But lockdowns during pandemics have been practiced occasionally, but always at the city level, due to the nature of governance during past pandemics. Famously Newton and Shakespeare did work during London lockdowns, and some Italian city states distributed fixed rations to peasants to help them stay at home.

What’s new isn’t preventative quarantines, what’s new is global travel and communication.

If that's your comparison, the lockdown has been an outstanding failure because the virus is still spreading widely and pending to go exponential any day the lockdown is slightly relaxed. Heart surgery that can't prevent the heart attack.

If we're going to abuse the analogy into irrelevance:

The heart surgeon is booked out for a few months. Avoid strenuous exercise until they're available to fix you.