Combining that fact and the previous observation by hanniabu:

"many of the people that are against shutdowns (that don't have an ulterior motive) are against them because people are out of work and creates issues with poverty. They are not against it because it doesn't help. So rather than saying no shutdowns, how about we take the proper steps and have a moratorium on rent and mortgages so solve the root of the issue."

inspires me to believe that the brutal and short shutdown, with the planned measures to prevent ordinary people getting penalized during it would in fact be the best treatment imaginable, with the least long term consequences.

But I also imagine enough those who would never be ready to accept such an approach for having huge ideological objections.

Thinking even more about it, some kind of such a response indeed happened in the world and gave the results. Knowing that result and proper planing can surely allow for even less negative effects than those observed.

You could never have a hard enough lockdown to eliminate the virus. As soon as you started to open back up, it would pop up somewhere and start spreading again. The idea that we could have locked down hard for two weeks in March or April and killed it off is fantasy.

This is what China did and it seemed to work pretty well.

Though given how hush hush China is about everything, it's also possible they've had a vaccine they've been using on their population for a while and just deigned not to tell or share.

Italy had to do a quite hard lockdown in the Spring and then it had very low number of cases and deaths in the Summer.

In the US, New York had also to respond hard to the first wave.

Italy and US compared in deaths per million due to Covid-19:

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

China, having the hardest and the most restrictive lockdowns, managed something even better than both: binging the numbers to effectively zero, very early. They also managed to maintain the minimum of new cases by mass testing actions when there was a suspicion of the outbreak:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54504785

"Covid-19: China's Qingdao to test nine million in five days"

And they have still kept wearing the masks this year, whenever they aren't alone, if I understand it correctly.

We also know that such kind of mass testing can be done in Europe too, if mandated, as in Slovakia:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/slovakia-offers-proof-tha...

So, no, it wasn't about the vaccines up to now. The measures simply work, proved in Europe, and even in the US, when they are consistently introduced. As simple as that.

You make this sound easy and side-effect free.

New Zealand has done this multiple times

Not every country is a small island nation with the population of single large city.

Sure, but that definitely helps, but a big part of it was their leadership and organized action to fight it.

As an American living in New Zealand I can attest to the fact that the Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern made mostly good moves by treating COVID seriously and thus winning re-election in a landslide. I cannot say if her decisions helped to squash COVID, but her words and facial expressions were very good politically.

I was in favor of one hard lockdown and strict border controls, and that is mostly what happened. I was not in favor of shutting down butchers, bakers, and green grocers because that just crowded everybody into supermarkets making social distancing difficult and creating long lines at supermarkets. It also crushed several businesses into bankruptcy unnecessarily, caused lots of food to go to waste, and propped up the already-too-powerful supermarket conglomerates.

NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density, a unified jurisdiction, no constitutional restrictions on the government's power, first world medical infrastructure, a timid compliant population that overwhelmingly just does as they are told and doesn't makes a fuss, high social cohesion, double helpings of common sense. Cowardly risk-averse and boring people that will never amount to much more than a hill of beans by American standards, but happy nonetheless [this sentence was meant as tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor, sorry if anyone was offended or took it seriously].

The US does not have the options NZ had. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to enforce a national lockdown, and even local lockdowns are being ruled as unconstitutional. And if you can't do one coordinated severe lockdown to squash it completely and then strictly close your borders requiring two week quarantines for anyone coming in... then I say don't bother with lockdowns at all. Oh, and stop blaming everything on your president.

> Cowardly

How do you figure this? Is the US approach courageous?

> NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density

NZ discovered cases just days after the US. The US is also not heavily populated. It depends on the source but NZ is about 15 people per km/2 and the US is about 36 per km/2.

A comparison could be made between Hawaii and NZ, and the contrast in how things have gone is quite something.

> How do you figure this? Is the US approach courageous?

Cowardly is too strong for what I meant to say and I take it back. I meant it in an 'avoiding fighting' sort of way, choosing to not stand up and fight for one's rights, or choosing to give in so as to avoid confrontation, and in direct contrast to Americans seeming to fight over everything to the bitter end, with laywers, wars, refusals to comply, etc. Now that I read the definition, it was far too negatively connotated.

The paragraph where GP labels New Zealanders as "cowardly" is a case study in US exceptionalism.

It’s particularly odd to be so down on NZ whilst presumably living in NZ restriction free. Yes, international travel is more restricted than previously - I wish it were more restricted.

I'm not at all down on New Zealand. I love it here and always have. I think you've misunderstood my humor. I consider myself a New Zealander. It was self-deprecating.

Can only apologise. As a Brit, I'm ashamed not to have caught the sarcasm.

How do you know?

New Zealand is an island with more sheep than people.

The pop. density of NZ is 15/km2. The pop. density of France is 119/km2. France also shares land borders with 7 other countries.

And South Korea at 510/km2 and Taiwan at 651/km2...

My point is that all of this is devilishly multi-variate, and it will be a while before we can disentangle everything and determine what exactly works and why.

People saying "NZ's lockdowns worked" without actually having done the hard part is not helping.

Said from NZ, we did the hard hard part.

How do you think we eradicated community covid several times?

The "hard part" being crunching the numbers and working to falsify your hypotheses, not lockdowns in this context.

This would seem to be quite obviously correct. Perhaps this comment’s downvoters could explain why they disagree?

And yet the UK is an island, and have done worse than France.

I guess my point is that this is a multi-faceted thing, and focusing on one predictor is likely to be misleading.

Misleading statistic. You need to look at the density of occupied land.

It's not misleading, it's just not as complete as it could be, because population density is a trivial statistic to determine and density of occupied land is much more difficult (for starters you need to define "occupied").

If you have stats on density of occupied land, I'm happy to work with that.

That’s a crazy metric. Is this a thing? How do you define it? Per km? Per metre? Or just by the footprints I make in my carpet? Each gives a very different answer.

And the US has just 36 per km/2. What’s your point?