I supported contact tracing, testing, and forced quarantines, as well as strict lockdowns to reduce cases to the point where contact tracing and quarantines were feasible. That strategy seems to have worked in much of the Asia-Pacific, successfully returning society to normal.

What I absolutely oppose is half-hearted “flatten the curve” lockdowns which prolong the pandemic over a long period of time while putting stifling restrictions on people. It’s the worst of both worlds, and simply letting the virus run wild would be preferable.

I’m fairly confident that an analysis of population-wide QALYs will back up my view.

Excuses like “protectng human life in the face of uncertainty” seem valid. History should look back more fondly on someone who tried to save lives in the face of unknowns rather than gamble them.

Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.

This is a multi-faceted issue, not a binary one.

I'd like to take a minute and add an important factoid that both sides should know.

Humans are REALLY bad at responding to "highly unlikely" risk.

With the corona virus, there is a really small chance (~2% depending on factors) that you die after catching the disease. Some people look at this and say "well, I probably won't even get enough viral load to get sick". There are sone people say "wait, I might survive, but then spread it to someone else, with X% probability - and EACH OF THEM might die".

Both groups are EQUALLY INCAPABLE of properly assessing the likelihood of living a healthy life or dying (or something in the middle). BOTH GROUPS are responding out of "gut feelings" and emotion and VERY LITTLE LOGIC.

I say this not to condem you - in fact I have been in both parties. I say this so that we can find common ground and MEET TOGETHER and acknowledge that is IS HARD, and we should try to work TOGETHER AND NOT DIVID.

I think this was a valid mindset last March when we had little trusted data, limited mitigation strategies, few treatments, and no vaccines.

A year later, to have all those things and follow the same policies implies we either a) nailed it from the start or b) are not applying what we've learned. One of those is unlikely and the other unacceptable.

> I think this was a valid mindset last March when we had little trusted data

Ordinary people had little trusted data.

Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w [2] https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...

>data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2]

Asympomaticity or pre-symptomacity?

>Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3].

Yet Italy had crowded ICUs and Sweden had to beg neighboring countries to take some ICU patients from them. It'd have been all much much worse without lockdown. Your CFR assumes good critical care.

I’m not sure the US has been applying what we’ve learned, if we’ve learned anything at all. There’s no follow through on restrictions, people have been travelling and partying, etc... Hospitals are still overwhelmed in some cities, health care workers are tired and over-worked, etc... There isn’t enough political capital to end the pandemic or to provide meaningful economic support, so we’re left picking up the pieces of both at the same time.

> Excuses like “protectng human life in the face of uncertainty” seem valid.

Terrorism was the excuse last time, and we were told to support the troops. Now it's a viral infection, and we are told to follow the science.

This should not ever be a valid excuse, especially since one doesn't have to be that old to remember the last time these sorts of excuses were made - to justify the West's horrific and brutal Middle East occupations. We knew better, and in the face of those facts this excuse is either made out of ignorance, or to cover up for remarkable amounts of incompetence. Neither should be acceptable justifications to the citizens of those countries who hide behind that excuse.

> Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.

Under what circumstances would a government be able to lock their people down and shutter their businesses, while also sufficiently protecting those people and those businesses? Which governments would have the resources to actually achieve success using these strategies?

Governments have a responsibility to operate within their own laws and any country whose legal code allows for the government to overreach into the movement of individual people as they have over the past year, are at grave risk of morphing into the sorts of evil regimes we haven't had to deal with since the end of the second world war.

EDIT: Programmers should have better social intelligence than this. Most people in this world do not want to live like programmers, locked up in a room looking at screens all day, transporting bits of electricity from one place to another. In fact, I would reckon many would rather die than live like we do. If people want to live this way freely and of their own choosing, fine - but to impose this on others as the only answer to a multi-faceted issue is just cruel to the broader public.

I get the sense that time is now that reasonable, logical people have realized we screwed up with the overreaction. Back in late March people were already questioning the lockdowns once the unemployment numbers started rolling in. Every day since, we've just been piling up the data that suggests the reaction to covid-19 has been worse than the virus itself.

Destroying a generation of kids is going to have significant long term effects over the next 50+ years.

There is a very unlucky band of kids that've been irreparably screwed over by teachers looking to completely abandon any pretense they're essential to society or have any responsibility to work, liberals looking to avenge Trump and otherwise anti-science, monomaniacal anxiety-ridden adults. It's heartbreaking.

If this round is any judge, it'll be about a century, and we can do it all over again!

dibs on not being the guy doing laps of my garden.

Living in Melbourne, Australia, where we went through some pretty brutal lockdowns, I think they’ll be viewed very positively. Life here is pretty normal now (I’m going to a concert with thousands of people this week), and there’s no vaccine resistant “Australian strain”. To me, these are good results from proactive lockdowns.

> Life here is pretty normal now

Except for last week where you were under your third lockdown? I work with people from Melbourne and I feel like a lot of them suffer from at least some mild PTSD. This was re-ignited when the 3rd lockdown was announced with worries that it would last months again (luckily this was not the case!). The mental health aspect/general population wellbeing seems to be largely ignored in Victoria.

> I’m going to a concert with thousands of people this week

Unless there's another leak and you go back into a snap lockdown. There's always uncertainty under such a system! Again, not great for mental health. (and yes, you can argue that there's always uncertainty under a pandemic, but the levels of uncertainty differ between geographies)

I am sure a lot of work from home office people without kids will view these lockdowns rather positively. But I doubt business owners, hospitality workers and artists will appreciate them as much.

The article makes some good points and we really need to look at the wider issues around the disease and its countermeasures.

Sure! Everyone was freaking out on Friday. But then it actually only lasted five days and the state government is taking steps to reduce risks of outbreak from hotel quarantine.

I agree lockdowns are awful. But what if we didn’t do the snap lockdown last week? I don’t think that would be better.

I also disagree with your statement about mental health not being taken seriously. I think it’s difficult to talk about, but I believe mental health resources have been made broadly available. I’m not really sure how much more seriously it can be taken without making mental health checks mandatory.

> the state government is taking steps to reduce risks of outbreak from hotel quarantine.

Stopping the system entirely is certainly a way to reduce the risk ;)

> I also disagree with your statement about mental health not being taken seriously. I think it’s difficult to talk about, but I believe mental health resources have been made broadly available. I’m not really sure how much more seriously it can be taken without making mental health checks mandatory.

I was mostly thinking of the way the pandemic has been handled in general by the Victorian government. Locking people inside for 22-23 hours a day, curfew, etc. There is very little if no scientific evidence that these drastic measures, which severely impact mental health, have a measurable effect on getting numbers down. Not all lockdowns are the same, NSW's North Beaches lockdown allowed people to picnic outside for example (and made gathering exemptions on Christmas day). This again points to the benefit-risk evaluation mentioned in the article.

Similarly, banning Victorians out in regional NSW from returning home: forcing them to make a dangerous dash across half of the country to get back within the day. Again this could have been handled with a much stronger emphasis on benefit-risk but instead the wellbeing of Victorians was disregarded.

Meanwhile, I have now lived through two multi-months complete lockdowns, have been under a curfew since the beginning of October which prevents me from being out after 6pm and there now is rumors of a third lockdown with no end in sight. Initially I thought we were doing this so our government got time to organize a trace and isolate strategy and then that we were waiting for a vaccine but apparently a year wasn't enough for them to properly put something in place and the vaccination strategy is nothing but a sad joke so I'm starting to seriously wonder why we are accepting this.

I’m sorry to hear that, that sounds very rough.

It sounds to me like an ineffective broader strategy by your government. I definitely wouldn’t be voting for those people again, and maybe legal action around their incompetence could be an option. I think the examples set by Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea show that effective responses are possible. Lockdowns were an important part of these responses, but of course a lockdown by itself will not solve the pandemic.

I actually mostly agree. I don't even know why I'm grumbling like that. I guess it's juste getting long and I somewhat despair at the obvious ineptitude of my government (but to be entierely fair they had already been shown to be extremely incompetent before the pandemic).

Tangentially, my personal takeaway from the situation is that Europe is doomed. The combination of an ageing population, young voters absenteeism and political clientelism means that policies are now strictly geared towards pensioners. I fear a victory of the far right at the next election in France and fully expect a severe brain drain once the crisis is over.

> I think the examples set by Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea show that effective responses are possible.

If we remove China whose statistics are dubious, I find it remarkable that apart from Vietnam, all these countries are islands or can be considered as such with regards to immigration.

How is Australia evidence that lockdowns work when every country in the world had them, and almost all of them worked out much worse than Australia?

I think countries like Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea show that lockdowns can be very effective at stopping spread. However, I think countries like Germany are currently showing us that just because it’s called a lockdown, doesn’t mean it’s effective. See also, California ending lockdowns while still having a high positivity rate.

Because Australia (and Wuhan) had strict lockdowns and finees whereas other countries had barely any enforcement or punishments.