Please elaborate how are lockdowns not a solution to stop the spread of a pandemic, because they most certainly are, and stopped every country's health system to get to the terrible state Italy's got at the beginning.

It's actually quite easy - the virus is airborne. If most people stay indoors and don't meet other people, the spread is significantly stopped.

1. You’re overoptimizing for Covid, and not for health,

2. The adverse effects of mental and physical heath are irreversible,

3. The tanking of the economy and the debt (until 2048 for France) is irreversible,

4. You didn’t even solve Covid.

Those are valid and debatable issues, and a lot can be said about them ( like that the economic downturn isn't optional and is due to the pandemic, as countries like Sweden and states in the US which didn't do any sort of lockdown showed us).

However, the question is do lockdowns help against a pandemic? I don't see how anyone can argue with that. The downsides are indeed significant and need to be taken into account, but it's just a fact that lockdowns severely limit the spread of an airborne virus like COVID-19.

Just today: “Youth suicide attempts soared during the pandemic.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859149

We don’t have the figures yet, that’s why we think lockdowns helped. But cholesterol doesn’t kill immediately. Alcohol doesn’t kill immediately. Loneliness doesn’t kill immediately, it slowly settles as friendships got destroyed in anger during the pandemic, and new meetups didn’t arrive, and the guy becomes homeless 5 years later. It may take years, but a lot of human misery will have been triggered by choosing lockdowns. We don’t even have the figures yet.

> severely limits the spread of an airborne virus

Yes, while we’re locked, and then it just takes weeks to recirculate as normal. It took >1 year to get the vaccines, only a 1 year lockdown would have solved us, therefore it is …not a solution to anything to lock people down.

Not a secret that solitary confinement in prisons is used to destroy someone. Lockdowns made a lot of people completely crazy, particularly the people you don’t notice immediately. But who cares, we’ve solved Covid! Wait, we didn’t.

We solved the initial exponential growths that were threatening to or did overload the medical system. It was the only possible solution.

Edited to add: furthermore, in most countries deaths not related to Covid fell drastically compared to previous years, including suicides. Yes, the fallout medium-long term is still to come, but you can't deny that it did stop the immediate very dangerous impact. In countries like Italy and France military hospitals had to be deployed, and many in intensive care were transferred to neighbouring countries. You can't just dismiss this and say people stuck alone at home had it worse than those on the ventilators.

Did you even read it? They're arguing that keeping a strict lockdown for long has too serious negative effects, not that it isn't effective in combating an airborne virus, which it is.

Furthermore, it's from October 2020, more than a year ago. We have vaccines now and they're helping, but not stopping the virus fully. Hospitals are still filling up in some places, and for that various stages of restrictions up to lockdown are the main ways stop it.

Too little, too late. If only we have been much faster and stronger to react we could have avoided this WHOLE epidemic with a mere ~1 month hard lockdown... (instead we indeed seem to have picked one of the worst ways to deal with it, short of course of no measures at all)

It was a good meassure when there weren't any alternatives.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-lockdowns-idUSK...