> If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it

Tell that to New Zealand, who have had less than 3,000 cases in a population of 5 million. They did this with strict border controls (people on inbound flights must isolate for 2 weeks) and quick response to community transmission (several lockdowns totalling 40 days).

The UK made incoming people isolate in March....2021

This is not what I think of by "it worked"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/17/asia/new-zealand-lockdown-one...

At best, its a fragile, brittle, costly "solution" that may work in an isolated country like NZ until vaccines are available.

It's been 8 months since vaccines have been available, and they're still in the low 20s in terms of people getting the vaccine.

New Zealander here.

Yes we locked down over one case. The next day we had a few more, and then more and more and more (21 in each of the last two days). Delta is amazingly spreadable.

Because we are locked down straight away, every case is easily contact traced, and people that did catch COVID are already isolated in their bubble, so cannot re-transmit easily behind that. As people are diagnosed they are taken to isolate in a hotel.

So there will be an end, even though we were unluckily enough to have had a number of very large spreader events (conferences, churches, schools etc.).

The oft-touted alternative from activists outside NZ is to vaccinate and open up. We are vaccinia go quickly, but that plan does not work. (NZ had no right/need to get vaccines early - we did not need them. We are now ramping up quickly, all to the plan.)

But vaccines do not prevent transmission.

Vaccines do not provide population immunity with Delta until a very large percentage (90%?) of all people, kids included, are vaccinated.

Vaccines do not eliminate illness (including long COVID) and death. They do reduce it a lot, but many people will die, especially the vaccine hesitant. Meanwhile anti-vaxers spread disinformation, much as the similar or overlapping anti-lockdown crowd do. (Think about that)

Vaccines are not available to kids, and some very vulnerable.

It has been really amazing living essentially a normal live while most the rest of the world “lives with COVID”. We want that back.

Will you get that back, or is New Zealand's quest for zero Covid lost?

From our experience here in Queensland, it's definitely not lost. We managed to get on top of a delta outbreak that peaked at NZ's current daily cases with a week of lockdown less than a month ago.

I mean, I'm pretty sure Australia has lost now.

Of course they have an effect. Take, for example, the UK. All three local peaks of covid deaths (Apr 20, Nov 20, Jan 21) all came exactly 2-3 weeks after each of the 3 national lockdowns.

That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random. You’d have no way to tell which of our theories are true. None of these lockdowns were proven to work prior to everybody jumping on them.

> That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random.

This is not a serious response. The correlation is far too definite to be mere chance; and the mechanisms that cause it not hard to understand. Or in plain English: it's not random.

It’s a very serious response, and it isn’t my job to prove. All the lockdown proponents need to prove their draconian, Stone Age mitigation’s did anything at all. As far as I can see it’s just blind luck that one region “did better” than a other.

You don’t want to be forced to do anything. I get that.

Pandemic response is not coded into us, it’s something we have to consciously do- and it’s draining to fight an invisible enemy.

I have issues with authority, so I understand the desire to fight against being told what to do.

But you’re denying science, this is not helpful.

The pandemic respond we got was not at all what we planned. It was using something completely untested and unproven with huge massive negative side effects. It was and still is unethical and immoral.

Science has nothing to do with these NPIs because science doesn’t tell society what do to.

I made you this chart of the UK pandemic. It's incomplete by necessity, but gives the flavor. Do the dates and lockdown measures look unrelated?

https://imgur.com/a/026CGjK

You have that as a log chart?

Here, I’ll do you better: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

Such dishonest statistics, this source. For example,

> One of these neighboring Southeastern states had a statewide mask mandate. The other two did not.

> [Shown: COVID-19 Deaths, per million, 7-day average]

But mask mandates do not claim to prevent COVID-19 deaths, rather transmission. A state with relatively low transmission but poor healthcare infra will see similarly unintuitive/surprising trends.

It is a log chart! Look at the y axis. It's hard to see anything sensible on a linear chart.

All disasters have physical parameters. Fires need flammable materials and a level of dryness. Tornadoes and hurricanes need atmospheric pressure differences to propagate in a given direction. Earthquakes happen near fault lines. COVID has to be transmitted (somehow, physically, whether through air, aerosols, water, contact, but something).

There is almost no way that lockdowns did nothing. It may have been overkill, there may have been a single aspect of lockdowns that far outperformed everything else, and we could have just practiced that. But this fatalistic view is lazy, unscientific and reductive, and in a societally harmful way.