(This is just a placeholder in case you get downvoted too much until I got my reply ready)

> There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help

I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.

The point was the delay of cases. During COVID many people died of preventable diseases or issues because COVID patients were siphoning our hospital and medical systems of resources. This man died of something that could've been prevented because hospitals were full and he couldn't get an ICU bed [1]. There are many more stories of this during the height of COVID of people dying from things that were low risk emergencies that became high risk ones because of hospitals being stressed.

In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

Omicron is certainly less deadly that the earlier variants, and the time gained with lockdowns allowed the population to get vaccinated, and gave hospitals time to build more ICUs. I think it's fair to say that these things are facts, not opinions!

i would argue they did help. i have not gotten covid yet as far as I know. If and when I do, I guarantee I will be much happier to have gotten it when vaccines, treatments and therapeutics are improved compared to 3 years ago.

Curfews and other such measures had no effect and this is clear in the data. It's been looked at extensively and there's no correlation between severity of lockdown measures and outcomes.

It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time.

And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is:

1. Wrong

2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.

I don’t wish in any way to minimise or attempt to refute how you feel about the events your family missed, and I know a great many other people had similar experiences. Lockdowns, when done properly, do work. Here in New Zealand, we enjoyed more than a year of _normal_ life between our first Nation-wide lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, and the eventual emergence of omicron in the community. That period not only provided time for the population to be vaccinated (we got to 92% fully vaccinated) but also saved many many lives, and allowed people to do things like attend funerals and births which they wouldn’t have been able to do (safely) if there was no lockdown. History will record that it was the right approach.

The US has 70 times the population of New Zealand, an underclass that's larger in percentage terms and less functional than New Zealand's, a porous border through which literally millions of people pass illegally, outside of the government's control, and tens of millions of illegal residents who have illegal or no ID and studiously avoid being tracked by the government. There was no possible way that the US could ever have implemented New Zealand's policy successfully, even if Americans wanted to do so.

Sure - I think I agree that the same approach wouldn't have worked in the USA. But it's also not a binary choice between 'lockdown until elimination' and no lockdowns, but having said that, I don't know what the US or similarly large countries should have done.

And Sweden did nothing and got an equally good outcome and doesn't even have the benefit of being an island country.

It doesn't take much time to find articles from reputable sources that show that Sweden most definitely did not have 'an equally good outcome' (if I understand you correctly and you're comparing to New Zealand). For example: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-s...

You're using terms differently. What New Zealand did was border closures. The word lockdowns refers to forcing everyone to stay at home, closing all the businesses and schools.

Neither approach worked. The NZ approach merely delayed the inevitable and was horrific for citizens who wanted to return home and were unable to do so. One NZ citizen had to rely on the kindness of the Taliban because nowhere else would take her. Incidents like that are nothing to be proud of.

Meanwhile, good luck implementing such controls in places where it's easier to get to!

History will record that the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe, revealing the truth that expert advice was damaging and futile. Something that was already clear in 2020 to anyone who cared to look.

New Zealand did both, and both worked - it did delay the inevitable, but that allowed time for the population to become vaccinated, for supplies of PPE to build up, for hospitals to build ICUs etc, and provide time for the virus to change to the much-less deadly omicron (delta and alpha never spread widely in NZ - we avoided all of that). Per head of population, our death rate was lower than almost any other country in the world. And we enjoyed an entire year of normal life between the successful elimination of alpha/delta and the eventual emergence of omicron while the rest of the world suffered. All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice, and you'd be hard pressed to find a significant number of New Zealander's that think now that the better strategy would have been to 'let her rip'. Of course you can find personal examples where lockdowns/border closures were a worse outcome for some people (I have a friend whose brother was unable to see his dying father), but being able to quote examples like that doesn't refute the strategy, because we only have to look to other countries to see what the alternatives were - a much, much, higher death rate. You say "the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe", but you don't say what that country was - did it have a lower death rate than NZ did?

I was referring to Sweden, which did neither lockdowns nor border closures and ended up with one of the lowest death rates in Europe. Lockdowns didn't work, they just made things worse.

Anyway, death rates are garbage data during COVID. They were classifying murders by shooting as COVID deaths. They were classifying people who died at 95 as COVID deaths. Where lockdowns were implemented they wanted the measured death rates to be as high as possible to justify what was being done, so classification criteria were as loose as possible. In NZ the political narrative relied on border closures being effective so they needed deaths to be as low as possible. Public health is so corrupt and malign that you can never really know what's going on if you listen to them.

> All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice

Then they are idiots because COVID wasn't eliminated, was it? As you said yourself, their strategy was at best one of delaying the inevitable.

> Lockdowns, when done properly, do work.

It works when (or rather almost entirely because) you’re in a geographically isolated island.

Maybe the Netherlands could have pulled this of if they really wanted to, like them time they flooded half of the country to keep out the French but it’s not applicable to any other country in Europe

I work in healthcare and attended on COVID wards when that was a thing.

One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families.

There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID.

They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy.

To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.

Would you rather one person lose a hand or many people lose a finger, that's effectively what you advocate for here.. distribute the impact that would natural affect few onto the many and with no actual analysis to see if we minimized harm overall. I think the lack of empathy can cut both ways.

I think your argument is disingenuously reductive but I'll bite: yeah. Life over limb is not a hard argument. Thankfully nobody is going around chopping off fingers. Would you donate blood to save lives? Or reduce a company's profit a bit to have less environmental impact through regulations?

I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing.

You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.

Way to not address the issue at all. Some people have dog allergies should we outlaw dogs to save the unfortunate few? How do you balance the benefits of your interventions with the damages?

I acknowledge your point but disagree with the logic behind it. Perhaps someone has died from a dog allergy but not any significant amount to affect society and the medical systems capability to deal with everything else. This was a one in a few generation pandemic and clearly a different situation. Why someone would expect a perfect public policy response to this I also can't imagine and lessons are hopefully learned from it. I think there was a lot of grift in there as humans are oft to do with bailouts, subsidies, contracts and when it got politicized it all went to hell so I can't defend that.

As an aside certainly some have died from aggressive dog breeds. I personally agree with the bans that exist in some municipalities on them to prevent a toddler from getting mauled. But I can see how some don't and that is a valid perspective.

Thank you for sharing your perspective.

Yes my original comment was honestly in response to your comment that you are losing faith in humanity based on the response you are seeing. I have no conclusion really on which way I think things should have been decided and think the only way things can be improved upon is if we take an honest critical look at what we are doing. My analogies are not similar in extent to COVID but are hopefully illustrative of the pitfalls of solving one problem and creating others and the need to practically account for it, at least after the fact acknowledge it, don't get butthurt because not everyone could immediately get with the program.