I believe there's a time limit - something like 12 hours, after which it becomes a new submission (possibly with some logic around an ongoing level of activity on the first).
I'm not sure I understand that but if an article has already had significant attention on HN, the dupe detector will redirect to it. After a year or so this behavior goes away, so the system is open to a repost.
Or, the only thing that we have learned is that a small, radicalised minority will ignore best available public health guidance and requirements it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to.
It's worth reading the article though - it's quit enlightening. The pros and cons of lockdowns are complex to evaluate.
That doesn’t really address their comment which was about the ethics of detaining people in lockdowns, not the effectiveness of lockdowns for preventing transmission of disease.
There are many things we could do in society that would be extremely effective from a medical standpoint but are nonetheless unethical and therefore not done (organ harvesting from deceased prisoners for instance).
Well, there are countries, like Austria, where we harvest organs from everyone (as necessary) unless the person opts out. Quite sensible in my opinion.
the only real lockdown is in China, everywhere else it was just a temporary voluntary sheltering at home. but whoever coined it as lockdown won, and people "felt" restricted as result of the wording... and hell it was effective at least in New Zealand
Your statement is categorically false. No country is/was as strict as China, but plenty of countries had mandatory restrictions ('lockdowns' if you will), upto mandatory stay-at-home, or stay-near-home. Just look at the (very partial) wiki list:
mandatory yes, but if you resisted what would they do? a fine? slap on the wrist? not sure if you've seen the severity of lockdown in China, they literally stuck a bolt in concrete to prevent people opening their doors in apartments, and soldered people's doors
Yea, I wrote that no country was as anywhere strict as China. However, quite a few countries had curfews which elicited fines and possible jail time (fines happened, but I don't think jail was used in practice). One example:
it's a lot more concrete than just ethics in my view. A lock-down for isolation precludes a huge number of actions that are very positive for society. There was no consideration of the quality of the results as that would be political suicide.
This entire lockdown experiment in my home state actually has me looking at moving. I am never going to establish a customer-facing business in any state that has a risk of lockdown, period. In my home state, countless small businesses that I loved went bankrupt. Who knows where their owners are now, or how their families are doing. Hopefully (for how hard it was on them) they got counseling.
Did you read the article? It discusses this: economic loss due to lockdown vs economic loss due to increased fatalities. Also discusses non-Covid fatalities due to reduced screening vs overloaded health system.
I do not need an article to say that I would prefer economic downturns and less sales, compared to no sales for more than half a year which no small business or family can support.
Plus, this is still a hot political issue and my trust of these defenses of lockdowns is so thin now, I am not going to take any of these studies seriously until at least ~5-10 years later in retrospective.
> it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to.
You got it right but backwards. It’s the radicalized (though not so small) conspiracy-minded minority instructing their politicians to ignore health guidance and requirements.
As an outsider, it seems to me that both sides in the US were massively radicalised, letting all things related to covid become a partisan issue rather than about optimizing outcomes for the population.
In Republican areas, resistance to vaccines seemed to be at an irrational level, where Democrat areas seems to have enforced lockdowns, maskwearing etc to an extent where it caused much more harm than good. (Mental illness, loss of learning for school children, economic disruption, etc.)
Well, that minority turned out to be right — lockdowns to achieve 0.2% reduction were a bad idea.
The majority fixated on a solution that was always a bad idea and went rabid trying to force it on everyone… something called “mass formation psychosis”.
The "best available public health guidance" failed spectacularly, beginning with "keep going to bars and restaurants and parades" from the NYC health official and mayor. Then "masks don't work" from the CDC. Then asking people to make cloth masks that actually don't work. Then advising people to stay indoors where the virus spreads and to stay away from outdoor spaces like beaches where it doesn't spread. Then closing schools and putting masks on toddlers. Almost all of their advice was precisely the opposite of what should have been done. It harmed not only children and small family owned businesses, but also public health as an institution.
Ignoring their counsel and doing the opposite was literally the wisest thing to do. The only thing they got somewhat correct was the vaccine and even that they flubbed badly.
This does not even begin to address the reality that many public officials disregarded the regulations. They, too, realized it was garbage.
The reason they did so, was not because masks don't work, but because of the following:
1) Masks only have a limited effect. If the messsage were that masks provided protection (similar to condoms, say), people might feel they didn't have to socially distance while wearing them. Instead of thinking like a mask like a condom, it provides protection (to use a similar metaphor) more akin to pulling out.
2) Early on, there were not enough masks available. It was important at the time to avoid creating a panic buying, as that might prevent those who really needed them from being able to get hold of them.
#2 is an attempted defense of our publicly elected officials lying, supposedly for the greater good. Let’s not start that precedent.
As for the masks, they completely ignored other hazards now becoming more well known. The amount of micro-plastics and fibers in the lungs is going to be awful long-term and it gets worse the more we know.
#2 is an attempted defense of our publicly elected officials lying, supposedly for the greater good. Let’s not start that precedent.
I was saying #2 even as it happened, though. To me it was always obvious that masks would provide _some_ protection, just not perfect protection.
> As for the masks, they completely ignored other hazards now becoming more well known. The amount of micro-plastics and fibers in the lungs is going to be awful long-term and it gets worse the more we know.
As we started to understand the mortality rate from covid, this becomes a good point. During the first couple of months, though, while deaths were still rising exponentially (also corresponding to the time slot where we were told NOT to wear mask), we did not know the real mortality rate. It could have been significantly higher than it turned out to be.
Still, during those months, there were not enough of the masks to go around.
This is how you can tell that someone REALLY doesn't care about climate change: They would rather use fossil fuels for energy than nuclear. (Including natural gas.)
>Or, the only thing that we have learned is that a small, radicalised minority will ignore best available public health guidance and requirements it conspiracy-minded politicians instruct them to.
Or, the only thing we learned is that you cannot trust the beaurocrats who call themselves scientists, and the politicians who are all too happy to try and force performative displays in order to gain more control and power over anyone who lacks the critical thinking skills to question them in even the most basic way, such as:
"Hey, that politician/"health official" told me and my family that we can't go to school or work, and we have to wear masks everywhere and stay 6 feet away from everyone. So why do I see those same politicians/"health officials" breaking their own rules, partying with people, unmasked, shoulder to shoulder, as if the so-called "life or death" rules only apply to everyone else?"
Or, how about this question:
"Hey, how come my kids and I can't go to work or school, but Hollywood studios are getting exemptions from those rules to keep filming? Isn't my ability to provide for my family, or my child to learn just as important as Tom Cruise's desire to finish filming Top Gun, or the Academy Awards' desire to put on their vapid showcase of gaudy wealth and unhinged political virtue-signaling?"
I think we're under-calling the negative effects of the lockdowns. The economy seems substantially less stable, inflation isn't going to get attributed to the COVID response but realistically is related. Humans suddenly seem to be facing a bunch of energy and food problems that weren't feeling quite so urgent in 2019. The global situation w.r.t war is suddenly a lot more tense and there are serious concerns about several nuclear-armed nations moving their armies about.
No scientist is going to link those things to the COVID response, because the link is too vague. And there is a chance that maybe all this stuff was going to happen anyway and the timing is a coincidence.
But there is a good reason that "freedom" is a higher civilisational value in the west than "be healthy". Allowing small councils to decide that people can't go to church, meet their neighbours or run a business is a very effective way to bring down a civilisation. It is impossible to do that and enjoy a high standard of living.
I think you've summarized my more vague feelings well. Add to this that people uncomfortable with the actions taken range from nut-job conspiracy theorists to immature opposition-defiance disorder sufferers to those who took many precautions but put aggregate quality of life over quantity. Then look at the down-voting in this thread spanning the spectrum of opinions... It's going to be hard to reach any sort of nuanced consensus or agreement.
While this may be true, I think it's important to remember that the negative effects of not doing the lockdowns would have been much worse.
A million people died (and more are still dying! the pandemic is not over!) in the US alone, even with the partially-effective measures we took.
Imagine if we hadn't even tried to reduce transmission. Hospitals would have been rapidly overwhelmed (many already got overwhelmed at the peaks, others came very close), and even people who could have been treated—both for COVID and for other health issues—would have died because they couldn't get access.
What are the negative economic impacts of having, say, 3% of your population (10 million people) die over a two-year span?
What are the negative economic impacts of the terrible psychological toll of all that loss? And of the government and other institutions just...not caring?
The problem with that “it would’ve been worse” is that the timeline didn’t happen that way, so it is merely conjecture by people who have every incentive to save face for their decisions.
The other problem is that it isn’t true. Florida has had 10,000 deaths less than California, despite no lockdown and more old people.
> The problem with that “it would’ve been worse” is that the timeline didn’t happen that way
Ah, but we did see it. In Italy in the first week of March 2020, we saw what an unchecked epidemic looked like. The health care system was overwhelmed and in chaos. Funeral services couldn't keep up because people were dying in large numbers.
> While this may be true, I think it's important to remember that the negative effects of not doing the lockdowns would have been much worse
would is definitive. You don’t know that, and there seems to be plenty of real world examples of hard Covid mitigation policies to soft Covid mitigation policies that indicates it’s not that simple.
Could it have been worse? Sure, but frankly it could have been better too with less lockdown.
Well, the lockdowns triggered a general collapse of oil prices as using oil suddenly became illegal. The oil price went negative (!) for a few amazing moments.
Possibly that destablisied the Russian economy, spooked Putin, and convinced Russian high command that a desperate gamble was needed to try and unite the public against a foreign foe. China could do something similar, Xi wanting to unite the people behind a patriotic war to distract from a Hindenburg-style economic explosion.
The protests in the US got noticeably more violent in the US around the same time as the lockdowns which is probably related to the economic stresses of the shut-down-the-economy policies. I imagine it would be worse in countries that aren't democracies; there are less outlets for the anger.
And it seems obvious to me that we're feeling the snap-back effect of all the oil fields being shut down, + the inflation from rather extreme money handouts during the pandemic. A lot of the current economic troubles (which would also tend to contribute to people feeling stressed and war-like) are probably linked to the lockdowns through that mechanism.
Are you going to argue that the present situation in Ukraine is equivalent to the situation at the start of 2020? I suppose it might be, I wasn't paying a lot of attention. But my strong suspicion there has been a bit of a turning point that happened after COVID hit, possibly on or about 24 February 2022. It is notable that there was a long stretch of relative calm that ended around the time everyone switched off their economies.
The original Crimea annexation didn't have all these headlines of global food shortages and energy crisii either, raising the questions of "why is this time so much worse?" and "why is this escalating?".
You can blame Putin if you want, but lets be real - economic stresses are a big factor in war and peace.
The motivation behind the two events is the same. Putin sees in the very existence of Ukraine the loss of some glorious USSR past. The timing may have changed due to circumstances, but I think it's likely that escalation would have happened sooner or later anyway.
Economic considerations would have been a great reason to not start a war.
COVID-19 did not cause food shortages and an energy crisis. The war did.
> The motivation behind the two events is the same. Putin sees...
Putin has been running Russia for more than 20 years. So while he may or may not believe that, the timing of war starting right after the COVID pandemic is at least a little suspicious.
> COVID-19 did not cause food shortages and an energy crisis. The war did.
The crippling sanctions that Russia is imposing on the West are certainly the first order cause, but we must nevertheless observe that under more ordinary conditions maybe there would be some slack elsewhere in the world that could make up a bit more of the difference. We were seeing signs of food and energy pressure before the war. It has been brewing for a while now.
"Dr Schimpfössl said Putin had been “extremely isolated” during the pandemic, with very few people allowed to see him in his “bunker”. She added: “It might well be, as bizarre as it sounds and unimaginable as it might be, that he is losing it and courting advice from people who have such fear of him that they would say what he wanted to hear.”"
The invasion of Ukraine appears to have caught even Putin's generals by total surprise. It was quite clearly not well planned and Putin was over-confident to an extreme degree, i.e. he did not fully understand the situation his military was truly in. Putin is nearly 70. During COVID he became a lockdown paranoiac even by the standards of the time. As a consequence his ability to absorb information or check things for himself would have been much reduced.
Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, is taking far more stringent precautions than most of his global counterparts to prevent getting the coronavirus. Kremlin spokesmen Dmitry Peskov this week confirmed that anyone wanting to see the Russian president has to walk through a futuristic "disinfection tunnel," where they're sprayed with an aerosol mist. In April, it was confirmed that anyone wanting to see Putin has to undergo a test for the virus beforehand.
I doubt very much that anyone else had the power to impose lockdown conditions on Vladimir Putin. This kind of health paranoia is exactly what I'd expect to see in a society where there's an epidemic that is out of control: some people will take extreme measures to protect themselves.
The theory is interesting, but I see it as a theory of how the epidemic caused paranoia, not of how lockdowns caused paranoia.
I appreciate this article because (and I say this as a triple-vaxxed rule-follower) the phrase "better safe than sorry" has become a trigger for me. All it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns. School closures and the move to (for us) a very poor online experience is a big example: I have a child in late immersion who was supposed to learn French over this period before integrating with kids this year who've been speaking it since the age of 5; you don't make much progress with a couple of hours of group zoom sessions each week. More importantly school is the one safe space for a huge group of kids, and might provide their own healthy meal of the day. I don't really wnat to think what they went through over the past several years and fear some of them may never recover.
There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission, but I question the more subtle impacts and true long term cost. I state this knowing the leaders in place will never be assigned any responsibility and will be long gone when we start to ask why...
One thing I hate scientists saying is that whenever a claim comes up, they say “There’s no evidence for that.”
That’s true - there’s no evidence if you aren’t looking.
Thus, they were able to say countless things and rebut the critics with “there’s no evidence of that.” There’s no evidence that an lockdown will cause massive suffering or severe economic downturns that don’t recover easily, or that it will make a potential war easier. And here we are.
Agree on the educational impact likely turning out as an utter disaster in the long term. I wish it were more measurable, but the article rightly points out it's hard to quantify effects (lower future income, etc.) that haven't fully materialized yet.
Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling.
But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).
> all it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns.
I feel like I say this a lot on HN, but there seems to be an attitude among political folk in the last 20-25 years that intent is more important than effect.
The effect can be a complete disaster but the politicos expect the public to appreciate their intention to help and to not question the effect.
I am a pragmatist, so I don’t care about intention, only the effect, and in the case of the US specifically, the effect of the federal government and medical establishment response at every point in this pandemic has been a disaster. I honestly cannot point to one thing that wasn’t a total clusterfuck.
There has to be a bit of survivorship bias here, surely? There must be some things that we got right, but then promptly forgot all about because of everything else going on?
"There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission"
Sigh :( There is actually an enormous amount of doubt about this. The Nature article is a small improvement in accuracy from their previous positions, but is still fundamentally incorrect and shows that the scientific elites are still in denial about the depths of their failure.
If their beliefs about lockdown effectiveness and necessity were anywhere near accurate, Sweden would have the highest COVID death tolls out there. In fact they sit at the bottom of the European COVID mortality league table, with both far less impact from COVID countermeasures and also some of the lowest COVID mortality.
The studies claiming lockdowns work are junk science. They typically reach their conclusions by comparing actual mortality to predictions from models and then observing the models predicted far more. They go from this to "lockdowns work". This isn't a valid inference because the gap can also be explained by the models being wrong, as indeed they were proven to be many times.
Lockdowns are highly effective in models that assume extremely localized and transient transmission, a.k.a. the droplet model. In the real world they appear to have no effect on COVID and this is best explained by transmission being dominated by aerosols. In the aerosol model SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas. It can hang in the air for long periods, enter via the eyeballs and spread through air ducts. This model should have been seriously considered by scientists at every point because SARS-1 appears to have spread this way, but they ignored it. Instead epidemiologists simply assumed a particular form of transmission, along with many other things.
65 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadI thought having two submissions of the same URL wasn't possible.
(Not that the article doesn't deserve it; it is well worth reading.)
It's worth reading the article though - it's quit enlightening. The pros and cons of lockdowns are complex to evaluate.
There are many things we could do in society that would be extremely effective from a medical standpoint but are nonetheless unethical and therefore not done (organ harvesting from deceased prisoners for instance).
Except it wasn't voluntary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns_by_country
Was it justified? I believe quite a lot of it was, but it did happen.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/11/20/ohio-curfew...
No conflict of interest there. Move along....
Plus, this is still a hot political issue and my trust of these defenses of lockdowns is so thin now, I am not going to take any of these studies seriously until at least ~5-10 years later in retrospective.
You got it right but backwards. It’s the radicalized (though not so small) conspiracy-minded minority instructing their politicians to ignore health guidance and requirements.
In Republican areas, resistance to vaccines seemed to be at an irrational level, where Democrat areas seems to have enforced lockdowns, maskwearing etc to an extent where it caused much more harm than good. (Mental illness, loss of learning for school children, economic disruption, etc.)
The majority fixated on a solution that was always a bad idea and went rabid trying to force it on everyone… something called “mass formation psychosis”.
https://www.wmar2news.com/news/coronavirus/johns-hopkins-uni...
Ignoring their counsel and doing the opposite was literally the wisest thing to do. The only thing they got somewhat correct was the vaccine and even that they flubbed badly.
This does not even begin to address the reality that many public officials disregarded the regulations. They, too, realized it was garbage.
1) Masks only have a limited effect. If the messsage were that masks provided protection (similar to condoms, say), people might feel they didn't have to socially distance while wearing them. Instead of thinking like a mask like a condom, it provides protection (to use a similar metaphor) more akin to pulling out.
2) Early on, there were not enough masks available. It was important at the time to avoid creating a panic buying, as that might prevent those who really needed them from being able to get hold of them.
As for the masks, they completely ignored other hazards now becoming more well known. The amount of micro-plastics and fibers in the lungs is going to be awful long-term and it gets worse the more we know.
I was saying #2 even as it happened, though. To me it was always obvious that masks would provide _some_ protection, just not perfect protection.
> As for the masks, they completely ignored other hazards now becoming more well known. The amount of micro-plastics and fibers in the lungs is going to be awful long-term and it gets worse the more we know.
As we started to understand the mortality rate from covid, this becomes a good point. During the first couple of months, though, while deaths were still rising exponentially (also corresponding to the time slot where we were told NOT to wear mask), we did not know the real mortality rate. It could have been significantly higher than it turned out to be.
Still, during those months, there were not enough of the masks to go around.
But the article isn't about HIV or monkeypox.
"Hey, that politician/"health official" told me and my family that we can't go to school or work, and we have to wear masks everywhere and stay 6 feet away from everyone. So why do I see those same politicians/"health officials" breaking their own rules, partying with people, unmasked, shoulder to shoulder, as if the so-called "life or death" rules only apply to everyone else?"
Or, how about this question:
"Hey, how come my kids and I can't go to work or school, but Hollywood studios are getting exemptions from those rules to keep filming? Isn't my ability to provide for my family, or my child to learn just as important as Tom Cruise's desire to finish filming Top Gun, or the Academy Awards' desire to put on their vapid showcase of gaudy wealth and unhinged political virtue-signaling?"
No scientist is going to link those things to the COVID response, because the link is too vague. And there is a chance that maybe all this stuff was going to happen anyway and the timing is a coincidence.
But there is a good reason that "freedom" is a higher civilisational value in the west than "be healthy". Allowing small councils to decide that people can't go to church, meet their neighbours or run a business is a very effective way to bring down a civilisation. It is impossible to do that and enjoy a high standard of living.
A million people died (and more are still dying! the pandemic is not over!) in the US alone, even with the partially-effective measures we took.
Imagine if we hadn't even tried to reduce transmission. Hospitals would have been rapidly overwhelmed (many already got overwhelmed at the peaks, others came very close), and even people who could have been treated—both for COVID and for other health issues—would have died because they couldn't get access.
What are the negative economic impacts of having, say, 3% of your population (10 million people) die over a two-year span?
What are the negative economic impacts of the terrible psychological toll of all that loss? And of the government and other institutions just...not caring?
The other problem is that it isn’t true. Florida has had 10,000 deaths less than California, despite no lockdown and more old people.
Ah, but we did see it. In Italy in the first week of March 2020, we saw what an unchecked epidemic looked like. The health care system was overwhelmed and in chaos. Funeral services couldn't keep up because people were dying in large numbers.
> Florida ... no lockdown
Here's a story about the Florida lockdown being lifted: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/florida-lifts-covid-19-restric...
The differences in approach between US states aren't as big as you remember them.
would is definitive. You don’t know that, and there seems to be plenty of real world examples of hard Covid mitigation policies to soft Covid mitigation policies that indicates it’s not that simple.
Could it have been worse? Sure, but frankly it could have been better too with less lockdown.
How exactly is it that you think lockdowns influenced Vladimir Putin to do that?
Possibly that destablisied the Russian economy, spooked Putin, and convinced Russian high command that a desperate gamble was needed to try and unite the public against a foreign foe. China could do something similar, Xi wanting to unite the people behind a patriotic war to distract from a Hindenburg-style economic explosion.
The protests in the US got noticeably more violent in the US around the same time as the lockdowns which is probably related to the economic stresses of the shut-down-the-economy policies. I imagine it would be worse in countries that aren't democracies; there are less outlets for the anger.
And it seems obvious to me that we're feeling the snap-back effect of all the oil fields being shut down, + the inflation from rather extreme money handouts during the pandemic. A lot of the current economic troubles (which would also tend to contribute to people feeling stressed and war-like) are probably linked to the lockdowns through that mechanism.
The original Crimea annexation didn't have all these headlines of global food shortages and energy crisii either, raising the questions of "why is this time so much worse?" and "why is this escalating?".
You can blame Putin if you want, but lets be real - economic stresses are a big factor in war and peace.
Economic considerations would have been a great reason to not start a war.
COVID-19 did not cause food shortages and an energy crisis. The war did.
Putin has been running Russia for more than 20 years. So while he may or may not believe that, the timing of war starting right after the COVID pandemic is at least a little suspicious.
> COVID-19 did not cause food shortages and an energy crisis. The war did.
The crippling sanctions that Russia is imposing on the West are certainly the first order cause, but we must nevertheless observe that under more ordinary conditions maybe there would be some slack elsewhere in the world that could make up a bit more of the difference. We were seeing signs of food and energy pressure before the war. It has been brewing for a while now.
https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/podcast-russia-expert-di...
"Dr Schimpfössl said Putin had been “extremely isolated” during the pandemic, with very few people allowed to see him in his “bunker”. She added: “It might well be, as bizarre as it sounds and unimaginable as it might be, that he is losing it and courting advice from people who have such fear of him that they would say what he wanted to hear.”"
The invasion of Ukraine appears to have caught even Putin's generals by total surprise. It was quite clearly not well planned and Putin was over-confident to an extreme degree, i.e. he did not fully understand the situation his military was truly in. Putin is nearly 70. During COVID he became a lockdown paranoiac even by the standards of the time. As a consequence his ability to absorb information or check things for himself would have been much reduced.
https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_putin-bismarck-a...
Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, is taking far more stringent precautions than most of his global counterparts to prevent getting the coronavirus. Kremlin spokesmen Dmitry Peskov this week confirmed that anyone wanting to see the Russian president has to walk through a futuristic "disinfection tunnel," where they're sprayed with an aerosol mist. In April, it was confirmed that anyone wanting to see Putin has to undergo a test for the virus beforehand.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/08/vladimir-putin...
"Russia’s leader is using a five-metre table for one-on-one meetings, but is it just a super-cautious Covid measure?"
The theory is interesting, but I see it as a theory of how the epidemic caused paranoia, not of how lockdowns caused paranoia.
There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission, but I question the more subtle impacts and true long term cost. I state this knowing the leaders in place will never be assigned any responsibility and will be long gone when we start to ask why...
That’s true - there’s no evidence if you aren’t looking.
Thus, they were able to say countless things and rebut the critics with “there’s no evidence of that.” There’s no evidence that an lockdown will cause massive suffering or severe economic downturns that don’t recover easily, or that it will make a potential war easier. And here we are.
Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling.
But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).
I feel like I say this a lot on HN, but there seems to be an attitude among political folk in the last 20-25 years that intent is more important than effect.
The effect can be a complete disaster but the politicos expect the public to appreciate their intention to help and to not question the effect.
I am a pragmatist, so I don’t care about intention, only the effect, and in the case of the US specifically, the effect of the federal government and medical establishment response at every point in this pandemic has been a disaster. I honestly cannot point to one thing that wasn’t a total clusterfuck.
Sigh :( There is actually an enormous amount of doubt about this. The Nature article is a small improvement in accuracy from their previous positions, but is still fundamentally incorrect and shows that the scientific elites are still in denial about the depths of their failure.
If their beliefs about lockdown effectiveness and necessity were anywhere near accurate, Sweden would have the highest COVID death tolls out there. In fact they sit at the bottom of the European COVID mortality league table, with both far less impact from COVID countermeasures and also some of the lowest COVID mortality.
The studies claiming lockdowns work are junk science. They typically reach their conclusions by comparing actual mortality to predictions from models and then observing the models predicted far more. They go from this to "lockdowns work". This isn't a valid inference because the gap can also be explained by the models being wrong, as indeed they were proven to be many times.
Lockdowns are highly effective in models that assume extremely localized and transient transmission, a.k.a. the droplet model. In the real world they appear to have no effect on COVID and this is best explained by transmission being dominated by aerosols. In the aerosol model SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas. It can hang in the air for long periods, enter via the eyeballs and spread through air ducts. This model should have been seriously considered by scientists at every point because SARS-1 appears to have spread this way, but they ignored it. Instead epidemiologists simply assumed a particular form of transmission, along with many other things.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/