Pray tell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc.
Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Also: no one ever expected the pandemic to be over in two weeks. We did expect our public health officials to stick to the second part, "to slow the spread". Clearly, that was a line to manipulate the public, as things quickly shifted to "until we have a vaccine". People on my side of this issue will never forget or forgive the bait and switch.
But, returning to my original point, once things locked down, a number of politicians realized that they would be blamed for any deaths that occurred when the lockdown was lifted. These politicians received support from the "if we can save even just one life" crowd — which I'm characterizing as the neurotic.
OP states that the original lockdowns were reasonable but then complains about continued lockdowns, and my comment was responding to that sentiment.
You're making an entirely different argument -- that lockdowns were always unreasonable.
> Pretell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc. Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
This is probably one of the least intellectually humble/curious things I've ever seen someone write on hacker news.
There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated". For each of your examples I can give a counter-example, and that exchange would be completely specious and unscientific political punditry. This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested. And certainly not helpful if not entered into as an honest search for truth without preconceptions.
I don't feed trolls.
Goodness. Unfortunately, you'll be positively devastated to learn that this exact discussion has been ongoing in countless threads here for over a year.
> There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated"
It's not that complicated. We have enough data at this point to start revealing signals where they exist. So far, there is some evidence that individual behaviors (e.g., masking, physical distancing) can have positive effects. There is also increasingly strong evidence that state-imposed controls (e.g., lockdowns and mask mandates) have not significantly affected the long-term course of the pandemic.
> This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested.
If your constitution cannot abide listening to people discuss this (or any) topic without first completing your requisite thousands of hours of research, I might gently suggest that HN isn't a safe place for you.
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That is what happened.
> Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow.
Western governments largely did follow that policy, but the US was never able to get out of free-fall. So COVID policy became a bang-bang controller of lockdowns, then slight reopenings, then more lockdowns, because there was never a two week period where spread slowed enough to materially change the risk landscape.
Even when there were lulls in the second derivative, limited re-openings resulted in enormous case spikes. If our numbers ever reached DE or NZ levels, we would've been back in offices and schools. And, in fact, I had plenty of conference calls with Germans who were sitting in their offices last summer.
The re-opening criterion didn't change (except to become more liberal over time, the exact opposite of your characterization). What happened is that the lockdowns -- for whatever reason -- never got spread under control in the USA. That wasn't true everywhere.
> irrational panic
On April 1, 2020 there 26K new cases in the USA. One year later, on April 1, 2021, there were 77K new cases. Vaccination rates among at-risk populations were starting to pick up, but nowhere near where thy are today.
What is the rational policy that would call for lock downs in March 2020 but not in March 2021?
> some would argue...
And others would argue that the expectation that a pandemic should last exactly and only two weeks is its own rather extraordinary neurosis.