Also PLoS one is basically not peer reviewed - they accept every paper after a short review.

Speculation: conflation of his reasonable and factual statement with the ostensibly similar far-right talking point that the cure (social distancing) is worse than the disease.

Expressing skepticism surrounding the efficiency of social distancing, masks, "non essential business" and all these lockdowns is not a "far right" talking point. None of our response was in any playbook for this level of threat. We threw out all our pandemic planning in a fit on hysteria and panic.

To this day we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all, let alone enough to justify their social costs. Same with social distancing or even masks for that matter. The fact that all this can be considered an uncontrolled experiment on unwilling participants is not "far right" thinking.

You're absolutely right. This kind of misinformation isn't limited to the far right.

> To this day we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all,

LOL, what? This is a truly astonishingly statement.

Literally every place that instituted lockdowns saw a drop in COVID transmission, and every place that reduced or eliminated lockdowns saw an increase.

This isn't even controversial. It's an application of the basic germ theory of infectious transmission.

You can't seriously be making this claim in good faith, can you?

Where is your studies showing these restrictions worked well enough to justify their immense costs to society? They don’t exist. To date I’ve yet to see a single cost benefit analysis done for any of this. It simply wasn’t allowed to be done… you’d get shouted down by the mob.

It worries me greatly how little critical thinking has been applied to the last 17+ months. It’s appeals to authority all the way down.

Show me the proof this stuff worked… and even then we didn’t know it would work going in, which makes it incredibly ethically (and morally) challenged. The last 17 months have shown me the depths of what humanity can do when gripped with fear and hysteria… it is pretty terrifying.

And predictably the goalposts shift.

First it was that we "cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all".

Now it's that the results don't "justify their immense costs to society".

> and even then we didn’t know it would work going in,

Again: Lockdowns are a basic application of germ theory.

The only way they could not work is if infection didn't pass from human to human but was transmitted via miasma or aether.

You could absolutely make valid arguments for or against specific lockdown policy choices (i.e. capacity limits, sizes of gatherings, types of businesses affected, etc).

But lockdowns in general? There's piles of evidence that shows they're extremely effective. Heck, in my own city, we saw a massive spike brewing prior to Christmas, and once a lockdown was instituted, the numbers immediately began to fall. That pattern is repeated anywhere you care to look.

I honestly refuse to spend any time citing data for you, as I do not believe for a second that you're arguing in good faith. If you really wanted to find facts, you could easily dig them up. That you haven't done so tells me everything about your willingness to question your own beliefs.

> The only way they could not work is if infection didn't pass from human to human but was transmitted via miasma or aether.

A public measure and overall behavior are two different things. Lockdown as a behavior is clearly effective in theory and practice. But as public measure, in many cases people stopped to comply sufficiently so that at best you see a flatting effect.

You wouldn’t try to fight HIV with monogamy (as measure). It’s just against human nature of a sufficiently large part of the population.

That isn’t proof. I could very easily claim it was seasonality or things well beyond our control that caused cases to go down. And I am probably right. The charts and graphs all follow the same basic pattern everywhere in the world regardless of restrictions in place. Clearly if lockdowns worked so well you’d see orders of magnitude difference between a place like Florida or Sweden compared to California or New York.

The burden of proof is upon those forcing it upon us and so far, crickets from all around. It’s truly insane how nobody is allowed call out the mounds of public data suggesting the effects of lockdowns or any of our non pharmaceutical interventions are minimal at best… we pissed away well over a year of people’s lives for basically nothing.

Show me they work. And show me they worked well enough to justify the extreme damage they caused to society. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the evidence?

And even if you take the person from Florida who was arrested’s claims as true, it doesn’t change my argument at all. The shape of their curve matches everybody else’s curve no matter whose dataset you look at. If lockdowns worked in any meaningful fashion, why does New York, California, Arizona, South Dakota and Florida all have the same curves?

I assert the lockdowns and masks did very little. Mere rain dances performed by frightened people who fooled themselves into thinking mankind could somehow control an airborne respiratory virus. It’s peak human arrogance.

If that makes me a right winger in your eyes, so be it.

If you actually want to know, the answer is "look at excess deaths." You can game the numbers for confirmed COVID deaths by doing less testing but it's a lot harder to hide the raw number of people dying. Per NYT[1], as of March 6, 2021 (which is when their data ends), Florida had 31,616 confirmed COVID deaths and 35,900 excess deaths (1.14 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,671 excess deaths per million) and California had 51,974 COVID / 69,800 excess (1.34 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,767 excess deaths per million). Since then California's wave has subsided a bit faster than Florida's but either way the difference in outcomes between the two states is very small.

> California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns.

This is true of New York. It is not true of California.

California was not hit particularly hard before it could implement lockdowns, and in fact before winter of 2020 it was doing much better than most states. In the first 6 months after people started taking COVID seriously (mid March 2020 to mid September 2020), about 15,000 Californians died of confirmed COVID cases, or about 375 people per million (and excess deaths track at pretty much a constant multiple with the level of confirmed COVID deaths). Since mid October, there have been another 48,000 confirmed COVID deaths in California. 35,000 of those happened in the 3 month period between December 1 2020 and March 1 2021. Not coincidentally, that period is also when restrictions were at their most severe: starting around November 25, outdoor dining was banned, parks and beaches and campgrounds were closed, a curfew was put into effect, travel was restricted, and so on. Cases continued to rise for the following month after that, peaking in early January.

Really, there is significant reason to doubt that government-imposed restrictions (as opposed to behavior changes people were going to make whether they were mandatory or not), as they were actually implemented in the US, had very much positive impact at all. It's not so much a question of "are the deaths ok?" as it is one of "is this actually helping, or is it just doing something visible so that the politicians can say they tried?".

I know this is an emotionally charged topic, and we probably won't have a clear picture of what worked and didn't work for at least a few years. But certainly government-mandated restrictions were not a slam-dunk obviously effective and worthwhile solution in the way that vaccines were.

It seems intellectually lazy and the epitome of condescension to cast away all criticism in this way. As those opposing arguments are always beyond the pale and not worthy of thought.

The overwhelming feeling I get from this type of person: "there's no possibility I'm wrong."

This isn't 2020 anymore, we should be able to take a sober look at what likely worked (universal mask-wearing, vaccines, border closures, quick contract tracing) and what may not have worked (closing otherwise safe outdoor spaces, obsessive surface cleaning, the "6-foot-rule") without judgement now.

This level of misinformation is no longer rational. You question that not meeting others in person can have an effect? It’s getting close to denying germ theory. Maybe it’s all bad vapors?

Sure, we can’t exactly specify the effect of different measures. But there’s plenty of evidence that they work, collectively. And the only method to come up for evidence regarding measures of this nature is to try them. You can’t do a lockdown study in a lab.

As to negative effects, we know that GDP recovers fast and suicide rates actually didn’t rise, despite constant assertions od the opposite.

That is absolutely not true, PLOS ONE has proper peer-review, their review guidelines just focus on technical soundness and de-emphasize subjective noteworthiness.

(As a personal anecdote, I managed to get one of my papers rejected from PLOS ONE once...)

40yo, not over weight, was at the gym 4 days a week, could squat and deadlift 50kg, very active life.

Only 'pre existing' was coeliac disease and very very mild asthma. Like barely ever took a blue inhaler but had one in the house. Other that That fit and healthy and very active.

Inital covid as bad, but after 2 weeks was nearly back to normal, then breathing got worse, heart rate all over the place, numbness, brain fog etc. Only just getting back to normal now but still not ready for exercise yet.

Presumably you can tease that out to some degree by comparing to folks who didn't have COVID.