well, you know, except that that's popular (political and media) dogma, not scientific truth. many things can theoretically reduce transmission and it's far from certain that a nominal and arbitrary lockdown (as US states have employed) in as complicated a system as a society actually does so, especially when many mitigations are occurring simultaneously and haphazardly, and none are tested for efficacy in isolation because it'd be unethical to do so.
the null hypothesis there is that lockdowns don't change the outcome appreciably, and that has not been rejected conclusively by any means.
The key phrase there is as US states have employed.
Lockdowns have been successfully deployed to eliminate national COVID-19 outbreaks in developed countries. Both theory and that experience confirm their effectiveness. However political polarization caused both government authorities and individual citizens to undermine and severely compromise the effectiveness of the strategy in the US. This is one of those things were compromise to a half way solution doesn't work.
If you gave everyone time and resources to prepare for a total 3 week lockdown, then did it, the virus would be totally eliminated at the end of it. Afterwards, with strict traveler quarantine measures and contract tracing, the economy could open up completely. Unfortunately, we have too many people who refuse to distance at all or even wear a mask, so we get to live in an extended garbage fire.
> If you gave everyone time and resources to prepare for a total 3 week lockdown...
This is a great idea in theory, but it ignores a lot of realities. You have to keep some level of basic infrastructure running; that will cause spread. There will always be some level of violations. Borders are more porous than people think. The mental cost of lockdown is also higher than people originally thought. "Listen to the experts" really meant "listen to epidemiologists," but this is their first time trying this at this scale, and it ignores psychologists and economists, even though those forces are going to be major drivers of behavior.
There's also the elephant in the room: If Covid-19 were 10x more deadly or 10x less deadly, people would actually take it very seriously or brush it off. It falls in a very awkward place, and a lot of people are looking at the death rate for their age group, weighing the risk against 1-2 years of partial lockdown, and deciding if the risk is worth it.
I don't think I trust the judgements of the epidemiologist responsible for Sweden's strategy.
> There will always be some level of violations. Borders are more porous than people think
Obviously, but those are things that can be managed.
> The mental cost of lockdown is also higher than people originally thought.
Maybe the mental cost of a shambolic pandemic response is also pretty high, too?
> "Listen to the experts" really meant "listen to epidemiologists," but this is their first time trying this at this scale, and it ignores psychologists and economists, even though those forces are going to be major drivers of behavior.
The non-outlier epidemiologists are the right experts to trust right now. If a town is about to be overtaken by the front lines of a war, you don't ask the economists about the economic cost of closing main street or the psychologists about the emotional costs of forcing people from their homes. You listen to the people who understand war and evacuate the civilian population. You don't tell people to stay put and keep their shops open while the shells fly because some economist's model predicted unemployment and reduced growth if they leave.
It kills 1% to 3% of people that get it, and many of the others have a pretty bad time. The fact that many people can get it with only mild symptoms actually makes it worse, because it means the disease is less self-limiting, and overall more deadly.
And even if you got the statistic right, it's not telling the story you seem to want it to. A car that will only start 99 days out of 100 is not a reliable car. A car that doesn't kill its passengers 99% of the time is not safe car, and may actually be one of the most dangerous cars ever made.
> Censor me if you’d like. Every day fewer people care. There is nothing you can do to change that.
Yep. Stupid and selfish people are a fact of life, unfortunately. That's why the law needs punishments.
It's incredible that you are taking the stance that the non-pharmaceutical interventions were not strict enough. Lockdowns were never a fully-vetted strategy since their interesting origins in 2006 under the Bush admin. They were likely to do untold harm because of this failing. Epidemiologists at large did not endorse any such policy. A UK official already admitted they went with the idea because they were in a panic. Consider this: you kind of sound like the dad that insists his daughter will never date because she will never be allowed to leave the house. You've outsmarted all those stupid and selfish teen boys.
The politically-active neuroradiologist, whose main qualification appears to be that he says what the president wants to hear?
> It's incredible that you are taking the stance that the non-pharmaceutical interventions were not strict enough. Lockdowns were never a fully-vetted strategy since their interesting origins in 2006 under the Bush admin. They were likely to do untold harm because of this failing.
Lockdowns actually worked in China and in other countries, and those places have had far fewer deaths per capita [1] and are also now economically in far better shape. It's a hugely embarrassing situation for the US.
[1] even assuming their numbers are being massaged.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
0-19 years: 0.00003
20-49 years: 0.0002
50-69 years: 0.005
70+ years: 0.054
Morton's Fork. If deaths are low it's because lockdown worked. If they're high we didn't lockdown hard or early enough. Two outcomes, same conclusion: More lockdowns. No consideration to the null hypothesis.
well, we seem to agree that the half-measures here are bad compromises and don't work. but while it's tantalizing to believe we could have eradicated the virus, there was no chance of that given its characteristics, people's natural and wide-ranging behaviors, and the sociopolitical underpinnings of our governments.
the US would never accept hard lockdown, for very good and hard-won reasons, so we're left needing to convince, not force, the populace to take reasonable mitigative measures with the understanding that we're going to have to ride it out. the response from the beginning should have focused on instilling good intuition about infectious diseases, which has the nice by-product of raising trust and people independently implementing real mitigations, rather than manically choreographed safety theater.
the explosion of politically-charged disinformation however, has left people mentally and emotionally exahusted, and struggling to tease apart the effective strategies (modest distancing and avoiding crowded indoor gatherings) from the ineffective (masks everywhere and incessant cleaning). people give up, tune out, and arbitrarily choose the simplest anxiety-quelling option (like wearing masks in public) rather than the harder, but more effective (avoiding large parties).
this is where the failure of leadership manifests, not in failing to institute an unacceptable and likely ineffective authoritarian lockdown.
A percentage of HNers will say "Correlation is not causation." But the history of places like NYC and San Francisco that had huge demonstrations against police brutality without increased rates of transmission disproves "the second wave in the US due to mass nationwide protests."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-failed-experiment-of-covid-...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/argentina/
A stand-alone toy store could not be open.
GameStop only sells non-essential items.
In the long run it would have been better to leave all retailers open. Bad economic conditions literally kill people. They die slowly from deaths of despair (chronic disease, substance abuse, suicide) but in the end they're dead all the same.
That would have been the fair way to do it, putting all market participants on the same footing. Courts in Germany and France even ruled exactly that. If some businesses can be open while others are not, the former must only sell the essentials because to do otherwise unjustly enriches those who are deemed “essential with extras.”
Taxes and let people mellow out.
But yes, when distribution networks are stressed, bigger players will obviously have more pull and smaller businesses will have more trouble getting in what they need and/or delivering their products, at anything beyond a very local scale.