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So in that case, you're willing to say that under current conditions in the US, mask wearing and restrictions on things like dining are pointless, right? If "lockdown" can only be expected to produce results in its strongest form and we can't do that, that seems like the logical conclusion.



Any improvement over nothing is worth having. Just because the large number of lockdown deniers make the kinds of lockdowns seen elsewhere in the developed world impossible, doesn’t mean the level of compliance that is possible isn’t worthwhile.

The experience from the Spanish Flu, which seems to have similar overall lethality, is instructive. Many developed countries managed to lock down to some extent and keep the death rate from around 0.5% to 1.5% of the population. India failed to manage any significant lockdown at all and the death rate was a staggering 5% of the population.


> Any improvement over nothing is worth having.

Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations. The costs in terms of lost educations, lost careers, mental health, isolation, etc, etc, etc.... those all have to be factored into the equation. Sadly we are 11 months into this and people are still pretending like there are no costs.

To make lockdowns worthwhile, you'd have to demonstrate orders of magnitude fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Haggling over which country or state did better than the other by 5% or 8% simply means that even if the lockdowns worked, their benefits are almost certainly not worth the costs.

The impacts of lockdowns (or any NPI) should be clear as day to the common person looking at the data. Thus far, all I see are people nit-picking tiny differences between regions. Which to me is a very strong indicator that they were not worth the cost at all.

In short, your line of thinking is a perfect demonstration of covid myopia. Nothing else but covid has mattered for 11 months. I strongly assert that covid myopia is a disease far worse than the virus. Civilizations in the future will remember this period for our myopic focus on one specific risk to the exclusion of everything else--the virus itself will be but a small footnote in history.


> Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations.

As far as monetary costs go this is really easy to do if you just force businesses to close and send them on their way with a pittance. Is there anything you can’t afford, as long as someone else is picking up the tab?


> Any improvement over nothing is worth having. Just because the large number of lockdown deniers make the kinds of lockdowns seen elsewhere in the developed world impossible, doesn’t mean the level of compliance that is possible isn’t worthwhile.

Great, so we agree that at any given level of lockdown, we should see some kind of marginal benefit vs less lockdown, right? So it does in fact make sense to compare outcomes between California, New York, and Florida?


It makes sense given the level of actual compliance with lockdown restrictions yes. It's the behaviour that matters not the rules. As I said previously and we seem to agree, rates of compliance in the US generally are relatively low and that varies even within the US. Demographics is an issue, for example California has several very large low income urban sprawls where lockdown compliance was minimal.

I'm making no moral judgement here, people are under severe hardship and we all have to make our decisions on our own circumstances, but it is what it is. What we do also has an impact on others.


I’d be hesitant to call the issue preventing simply closing up for a few weeks (which I agree should have happened) “lockdown deniers”. We’re had mass protests and riots by the same people apparently for the lockdowns and the more recent scandals with politicians of all stripes caught breaking their own restrictions on indoor dining, not wearing masks, or breaking travel recommendations to fly to vacation homes. The problem there’s a myriad of problems, the most original likely being that covid got politicized in the first place.


That’s like saying that failing to stop your car before you crash means you shouldn’t bother braking at all. Masks have repeatedly been shown to work, indoor dining has repeatedly been shown to be high risk in addition to being an optional luxury, and there’s no world in which we want more spread even if we’d prefer less.


All those things could be true and perhaps banning indoor dining does slow the spread. But is it worth the cost? Why do all these discussions focus only on solving for covid and completely ignoring the costs?

If banning indoor dining across the state of California results in one fewer person getting hospitalized is it worth it? What if it keeps 10 people out of the hospital?

More generalized, how much benefit does a blanket lockdown have to provide for it to be worth the immense costs. I'm using "cost", by the way, inthe most holistic hippy way possible. Costs include:

-- destroyed mental health

-- Peoples life work getting shut down by the government

-- careers development stalled

-- childhood education

-- Cancer research getting sidelined

-- Preventative healthcare checkups being skipped

-- Lost milestones like prom, graduation, awkward teenage dating not happening

-- pets not getting routine care because vet appointments are now a pain in the ass

-- car oil changes being deferred by 3 months

-- adoptions not being performed

-- dating lives being put on hold

-- people putting off having kids

-- infants not seeing human faces can't be good news

-- physical health being put on hold (closed gyms)

-- and on and on and on. It doesn't take much imagination to see the costs are tremendous.

I assert for a lockdown to be worthwhile it has to have such a profound impact on the trajectory of the virus that it is indisputable to the common person. Not only that, but it has to be orders of magnitude better than no lockdown.

If somebody is going to argue "see, lockdowns work... this region did 5% better than that region"... I just roll me eyes. It just means we flushed 11 months of people's lives down the toilet for almost no real gain.


It’s not like saying that, because nobody has claimed that crashing into another car at 5 mph is the same as crashing into it at 60. When you claim that only “hard lockdowns” (and note the circular reasoning inherent) can have the measurable effects claimed ahead of time, that’s what you’re saying.


Nobody has tried to claim that at any point in this thread. You are the only one trying to reduce this to a two-sided issue, which it's not.


Not pointless. It we obviously aren’t in “lockdown”. Go to a restaurant and you’ll see dozens of people eating indoors without masks on.




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