Why do you say "excuse for another lockdown"? Are you implying that someone in government has alterior motives to desire a lockdown?

This narrative is so silly to me. Same with those who think that mandating mask wearing is some flex by the government to exert control.

It's common sense that in order to stop the spread of highly contagious respiratory viruses, having folks stay away from one another for a bit works... if people follow the lockdown, which too many don't. If anything, politicians are hesitant to invoke a lockdown due to the vocal minority's tantrums over them.

People don't like them, the same way that people don't like wearing masks. But most understand the value of both. And it's not like the local government is gaining anything from slowing down the local economy and annoying its citizens--aside from trying to save lives and put less stress on the healthcare system and its already overtaxed workers.

Based on people I've discussed this with their explanation is: The data doesn't support lockdowns and madates for the masses. Deaths are typically a select subset of the population. Hospitalizations much the same. Using a one size fit all solution - when surgical solutions are more appropriate -makes them suspect.

Please don't shoot this messenger. I'm just providing context that tends to be missed elsewhere.

p.s. fwiw, there were these in the past week or so:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211122-could-mrna-make-...

Both of those certain raise a reasonable eyebrow.

Aside from ethical concerns around shutting a subset of the population out of society to benefit others, that presumes that a selective approach would be effective, and that it is feasible to segregate the vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations. Do you have any practical suggestions as to how that might be implemented? As a I believe that’s why it hasn’t been attempted.

Again, I'm just the messenger. But the gist I get is this: locking down select subsets (of high risk individuals) is doable simply because locking down everyone is doable.

But speaking for myself, the fact that early on there were such a ridiculous number of deaths in retirement homes (primarily in NY, NJ, PA and CA) never smelled right to me. We had data - openly mentioned in the media - about Italy and the elderly and yet the same thing happened here? It's been all down hill since then.

> locking down select subsets (of high risk individuals) is doable

We can’t convince an idiot minority to spend five minutes getting a shot. We’re supposed to trust them to confine themselves at home?

You don't understand the problem, do you? Nor do you understand you're part of that problem.

It's - by definition - is a pandemic of everybody. Anyone who suggests otherwise is suspect. Those ppl fuel the discontent. The fact that they're allowed to furthers the divide.

The phrase that comes to mind is: "Divided we fall." An absolute truth if there ever was one.

It's shutting out a tiny elderly subset for the benefit of all vs shutting down all for the benefit of a tiny elderly subset. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but your ethical concern should be 2 sided.

What is the proposed method of actually isolating the most vulnerable parts of society? I don't see how you do it in any meaningful way (At the very most vulnerable end, they are dependent on lots of people that are less vulnerable...).

To that point, my grandma's retirement home was as well locked down as possible.

But you know who didn't take it seriously? The staff who worked there and brought COVID in, which ended up killing her.

There's no way of isolating them without isolating their staff, their families, everyone they interact with. With a virus as contagious as COVID, there doesn't appear to be a way to target portions of the population effectively.

Indeed, and that's a retirement home which is really the easy case. I don't see how an elderly person that lives with their younger family members is supposed to be isolated.

The staff could work like oil rig workers - in month-long shifts. Get quarantined for a week on the way in, do your shift, go home to your family. Not pleasant, but doable and a lot simpler than placing everyone's life on hold.

An improvement in testing (accuracy + turnaround time + cost) would also help significantly. But there's been little talk in investing in such a tool. That strikes me as a red flag. Instead, we're betting on the jab, and apparently that's not working out well. At all.

> And it's not like the local government is gaining anything from slowing down the local economy and annoying its citizens

It’s a lot simpler than that. Weilding political power is psychologically addictive, perhaps even more so than recreational drugs. Like drugs, the user will always want to come back for another hit, and thus politicians will use every excuse and rationalization to continue to use emergency powers.

You can always follow the money to see who benefits from a decision, and who gets penalized.

The initial lockdowns penalized many small businesses (small shops, hairdressers) that could not operate and benefited large online retailers and chains like Walmart that were declared exempt, that got extra business.

The lockdowns also justified large-scale payout of benefits, that were funded by increasing the money supply. This benefited the owners of limited-supply assets (stocks, real estate, even the f*cking crypto) at the expense of people with cash savings and those with fixed/slowly changing income (most salaried employees).

Since most members of government are major real estate owners and stock investors, they absolutely had benefited from the lockdown-related economic measures more than an average salaried employee.

It is also notable that the effects of increasing the money supply are delayed. We are starting to see the inevitable rise of inflation over a year after the start of the pandemic. It will take a long time for it to taper down, and we are yet to see how it will affect the average quality of life (i.e. salary/expense ratio).

So you’re just ignoring the countless lives saved and lost?

Will we know if we actually saved net lives in 20 years? That's what I keep thinking. If we just let it run its course it could have been over in a few months and we would have been back to normal.

History will tell.

> will we know > history will tell

I’m not following the logic here. As opposed to lockdowns we should.. let everyone die so those who live could go outside a couple months earlier?

Yes, that is literally what so many libertarians on HN and elsewhere think. Who cares if people die or suffer as long as I am not inconvenienced. You see the mental contortions they go through in this thread alone. It's death by petulance as much as pestilence.

That would be devastating to their argument, so of course they are.

Though I'm impressed they're literally making the "lockdowns are being driven by Big Delivery Service" argument.

>Are you implying that someone in government has alterior motives to desire a lockdown?

They have obvious ulterior motives. Political motives, or ass-covering. If they don't do a lockdown they will be utterly attacked by the opposition for 'not being proactive enough' no matter if there is only one more death.

I believe this is the principal motive, health being a distant second. Remember, governments act first to get votes, second to help population.

So… the government is acting in what they perceive the population overall wants. That motive doesn’t sound very ulterior to me.

Do you really mean that government acts primarily to avoid being voted out of office? Should we be shocked or disgusted by that?

I guess someone like Putin doesn't have to be worried about being unelected, so they were able to go soft on the virus in Russia. But, I don't think that turned out well for them.

> Do you really mean that government acts primarily to avoid being voted out of office? Should we be shocked or disgusted by that?

shocked? no.

disgusted? yes.

the ideal politician is one that works towards societies best interests, not one that maximizes time-in-office and career security.

That isn't to say that one can't have one without the other, only to emphasize the fact that no political office was ever won on the promise of a lengthy career and self-interest.

Politicians that do the right thing regardless of election prospects simply aren’t in power long enough (or even at all) for you to notice them. A real “survival bias” at work.

The alternative (an autocracy) doesn’t work out any better, so even though our system has flaws, it is still better than the alternative.

lockdowns are profoundly politically unpopular - from economics, to convenience, to the enormous burden of closing schools, no politician wants to lock down anything, for any amount of time, without an amazingly good reason, period.

I think the ulterior motive is ass-covering.

If you don't order a lockdown and it was needed then lots of people die, this is very bad.

If you do order a lockdown and it wasn't needed then you can say that you were just being safe. And it's hard to even tell when a lockdown wasn't needed because the very act of doing it changes the result and leads to less cases. The lockdown was successful!

It's always easy to say "We did it to save lives" and few people will hold you to account for it.

Such a one sided view. Let me tell you the truth of the matter.

Government is made out of multitudes of personalities and conflicting interests. There are those that care, there are those that don't care, there are scientists, there are people who are knowledgeable of the proper action and there are those who are emotional and everything in between exists as well.

It is a hodge podge of motives. Classifying government action in a singular light as if it was one ulterior ass covering agenda is a lie people tell themselves when they need something to blame.

I don't understand how what you are saying refutes ass-covering at all. Yes, you have a pile of people in government with all sorts of opinions, but ultimately there is someone who has to make the decision.

If you present that person with a cloud of information from a bunch of different conflicting sources it actually incentivises ass-covering even more.

You say "ulterior ass covering agenda" but an Agenda is entirely the opposite of what an ass-coverer has.

When you don't know what you should do, you pick safe option that nobody is going to blame you for.

I didn't refute anything just like the original statement didn't prove anything. To do this you require evidence. Neither of us offered anything concrete so we are in a discussion where we only offer opinions.

Additionally my statement itself doesn't refute ass covering. All I am saying is that the government is too complex to classify it as a singular entity out to cover it's own ass.

Several things cause me to disagree with you. Some of the most best science is being done by people who are part of or have high influence in the government. There are definitely people up there who view the problem as a situation that needs to be resolved rather then an every man for himself type of deal you seem to characterize it as.

As I said, the government is a hodge podge of both. This has both benefits and downsides.

An example of a government that tries to act as a singular entity is China. In terms of stopping covid in its' tracks China done better than the hodge podge government that makes up US democracy. However, in terms of stopping covid from spreading out of Wuhan, Chinas' ass covering is what screwed up the world. There's good and bad to either methodology and It's too complicated to characterize.

"Ass-covering" is a really uncharitable synonym of "being prudent."

Ya, to me, ass covering is much more like trying to rewrite history after the fact, downplaying the virus, or maybe trying to hide statistics like nursing home deaths in your state.

He knows. He just needs to make up an alternate reality to justify his own darkness.

On some level many of us simply don't give a shit about the fact that the virus can slaughter millions. We just don't think it will affect us and we don't want to be locked down. It's like a heroin addict. He knows the reality of his addiction but he needs to make up a reality to justify shoving one more injection into his veins, just one more.

On the one hand, people have been claiming for years that the world is sleep walking into authoritarian, kleptocratic fascism.

On the other hand, if you are even slightly sceptical that the same authoritarians might be using lockdowns to make public protest illegal and overstep civil liberties you are a conspiracy-believing, alt-right moron.

Are there any examples in the US of using lockdowns to make public protest illegal?

Arse covering is as good ulterior motive as any, something anyone who’s dealt with large organisations of any sort will attest to.

I’d argue the reason governments obsess over marginally effective at best measures like masks is that they give society the opportunity to wag their fingers and exercise the usual moral authoritarianism at their neighbours instead of blaming the politicians for their various inadequacies throughout the pandemic (including in the UK’s case running the NHS into the ground with cuts a decade before in their usual miserly short-sightedness).

COVID is bad. When cases spike, people naturally take steps to avoid getting infected. They also want other people to do the same.

The problem is that some steps are more conspicuous than others and that doesn't always align with efficacy. An obvious example is wearing a mask vs. washing your hands. They're both effective measures, but one can be seen by anyone and the other happens in the privacy of your bathroom, so one gets politicized and over-emphasized even if they're both of similar importance.

It works the same way for politicians. If things are going poorly, they're expected to do something. But their incentive is to do things that are conspicuous, even if they have a high cost and therefore a low cost/benefit ratio.

Almost any kind of mandate falls into this category because the cost/benefit for doing that thing is going to depend on individual characteristics. "Stay at home" may be a better strategy for someone who lives with amiable people than someone who lives alone and suffers from depression, or who lives with an abuser, but blanket mandates don't distinguish them. And yet when cases spike, Something Must Be Done.

ulterior

You're disrespectfully referring to the work of Dr. Tyrone Hayes [1] of The University of California at Berkeley, who discovered that Syngenta's herbicide Atrazine is indeed an endocrine disruptor, causing frogs (of both genders I believe) to turn hemaphroditic, develop both male & female gonads-- i.e. males developing ovaries, females developing testes.

Do you... prefer pollutants in your water?

Do you... approve of chemical companies privatizing the gains (profits) of externalizing pollutants into innocent ecosystems and humans?

Or maybe... you just really love to be told what to think by media overlords [2].

[1] https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/tyrone-b-hayes

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

Estrogen and estrogen-like plastics in waterways is a huge problem. Some people mis interpreted it, but that doesn’t discount the fact that plastics are a huge problem that are interfering with nature.

https://www.newsweek.com/female-frogs-estrogen-hermaphrodite...

Sorry, my attempt at sarcasm. I know it's a serious problem, but that wasn't Alex Jones' take on it.

Why Alex Jones? Because the person I was responding to sounded like him.

Haven't Walmart, Amazon et all been eating mom and pop businesses for years now?

People like power, in particular politicians. The have a bias towards any measure that makes them feel powerful and in control.

> https://www.ft.com/content/620e3d31-ba90-4cb6-ae27-6e2d0740d...

19% of britons are in favor of eternal curfews. It seems very likely that some percentage also desire lockdowns

There's a 10-20% proportion on any poll that'll pick the insane option.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739...

Sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of "I'll pick one at random".

From the OP article:

>There is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with Omicron are different from those from other variants. Initial reported infections were among university students—younger individuals who tend to have more mild disease—but understanding the level of severity of the Omicron variant will take days to several weeks.

I read the article and it seems like what she is saying is more nuanced than that. There is significant concern, not least for potential impacts on the elderly and those with co-morbidities.

To the point about lockdowns, nobody in govt in the UK is looking for an excuse for another. The exact opposite is true in fact.