The lockdowns weren’t unprecedented. We did something similar in 1918, and it backfired in the same ways. As a bonus, last time, a much more deadly strain emerged and ended up ripping through the population killing young adults and middle aged people.

If they hadn’t locked down for the first wave, they probably would have reached herd immunity before the second, more devastating wave. This time, we have a vaccine, so we’ll probably avoid that, at least.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s a safe bet that people will take a dim view of the 2020 lockdown in hindsight.

>We did something similar in 1918,

I looked at this a while back and, as far as I can tell, there were relatively limited interventions in the US. If you read beyond the headline of this link [1], for example, it doesn't seem as if you had much in the way of workplace closures and, in general the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" were for a fairly limited period of time. This study concludes they helped but the data is inconsistent and hard to interpret.

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/study-sa...

"The researchers report that all the cities used at least one of the three main categories of NPIs, and 15 used all three at the same time. The most common combination was school closures and public gathering bans, used by 34 cities for a median of 4 weeks. All the cities except New York, Chicago, and New Haven (Conn.) closed their schools for some period of time; the median was 6 weeks."

You are talking out of both sides of your mouth. How is it that people who think the lockdowns were net beneficial need to wait 'decades' to decide, but you're allowed to conclude now that they were a terrible idea?

It seems to me we should all state our positions now with the information we have available now, and let the future take care of itself.

Because he/she stated it as a personal opinion while the other person said it as a matter of fact that couldn't be questioned.

I'll go a step further and actually suggest that authoritarian lockdown measure haven't done as much as they've been touted as doing. This is pretty easy to see by comparing states with less lockdown measures vs. ones that went full economy shutdown. Most of the "open" states aren't any worse off than the ones who went lockdown crazy and in some cases they're actually better off when you look at spread and death.

> Most of the "open" states aren't any worse off than the ones who went lockdown crazy and in some cases they're actually better off when you look at spread and death.

This could also indicate that states where Covid-19 had a bigger impact responded by enacting stronger mitigations. What makes you prefer your interpretation?

>This could also indicate that states where Covid-19 had a bigger impact responded by enacting stronger mitigations. What makes you prefer your interpretation?

You can say that but there's no data that supports this at all.

What states are you comparing? Massachusetts and NYC locked down pretty hard and their post-April numbers look pretty good compared to, say, Texas, Florida, and South Dakota.

All of them, and since the start of this. I don't know where you're getting your data and why you've decided April numbers are a good measure of how states have done overall. Infection rate is less relevant than deaths anyway. If people are getting infected and recovering it's not really an issue.

NYC(not state) tops the charts for deaths per 100k. Notice how low FL is?

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_deathsper100...

What you can easily notice is that strict lockdown measures don't seem to make any difference at all.

All while the topology in all jurisdictions is so different that it will never be possible to directly compare