I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale. It's trivially true that if you as an individual avoid all contact with others during a flu season, you won't catch the flu. You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers.
My own government got very excited by the prospect of dictatorial central planning that lockdown mania created an enabling environment for and immediately set about writing all kinds of complicated rules about what food and clothing people were allowed to buy, as well as putting a prohibition on alcohol & cigarettes and imposing a curfew. Pandemic response immediately became a vehicle for imposing by fiat whatever pet policies ministers could vaguely link to it. Years later, they've all been rolled back, but the damage was done, and everyone still caught Covid.[1]
I definitely agree about the schizophrenic restrictions - buying food is fine but God forbid you want to buy socks in the middle of winter (which are sold in the same store)
Similar things happened in Québec. There was a curfew, unless you had to walk the dog. You couldn't buy certain products, but the stores were as much as crowded.
If it was that deadly and every knew someone who died, they wouldn't go outside.
I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale.
This is not a popular opinion but I think the fundamental mistake of lockdowns, at least in North America, was starting from a top-down approach instead of bottom-up. People are going to act like selfish assholes. We ordered them not to. I think instead of threats, we should have aligned their selfish interests with the public good by making it easy to sue someone for infecting you. Could you prove that in court? 99% of the time absolutely not. But the fear that killing other people might hit them in the pocket book would, in my opinion, have made a lot of the assholes put on a mask or skip that concert.
Agreed, the cost should have been borne by those who did not take sufficient measures to reduce transmission. Similar to how, when you do something dumb in the ocean and need a rescue, you pay the coast guard back if they determine negligence.
It was negligent to live as if there weren’t a huge pandemic.
I was thinking a legal framework analogous to the one used in Texas where regular citizens could obtain ten thousand dollars by suing women who had abortions. Sort of a "turnabout is fair play" approach.
> You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers.
I don't understand what point you tried to make. There were naturally essential workers that were excluded from the lockdown. So what? What's your point?
> My own government got very excited by the prospect of dictatorial (...)
I'm going to cut you right there because you're diving into loony conspiracy territory, and one which was already widely proven to be utter nonsense.
The point of lockdowns is to hinder the spread of a disease so that emergency services had a better chance of coping with the demand without being overwhelmed.
Where I lived, the local government had to commandeer a sporting venue to temporarily store dead bodies. Because hospitals and mortuaries found themselves over capacity.
Some responsible people staid home voluntarily. Others could not stay home because they were front line workers. And then there were the sociopaths and morons who even went out of their way to violate even basic health and safety rules, such as spitting on people on the street.
Lockdowns were sold to the people as something that would stop the spread. If you can get every infected person to infect less than one other person on average, you can stop the spread of an infectious disease completely. At least in theory.
There are two variables here. How infectious the disease is and which percentage of the population can isolate themselves at home without society breaking down.
If everybody stays home you don't have hospitals, you don't have electricity, nobody picks up the garbage, and people will go hungry. Needless to say, that doesn't work. So what percentage of people still need to go to work? And it turns out you need a lot of people to work. From elderly care to daycare, from hospitals to supermarkets and their entire supply chain. And those people will inevitably get sick and infect their family and so the spread continues.
And how infectious is covid? Very, and variants increasingly so.
Which means you can use measures to slow down a disease like covid, but you have no chance of stopping it completely. And that's something some governments refused to accept, and they enacted a ton of erratic and ineffective countermeasures in a desperate attempt to do something impossible, instead of taking a more measured approach focused on slowing down the spread and increasing hospital capacity.
Some people will insist that government policy was in fact reasonable and measured, but it really wasn't. Deutsche Bahn still required masking in January. This year. 2023. I kid you not. It's totally absurd.
> Lockdowns were sold to the people as something that would stop the spread. If you can get every infected person to infect less than one other person on average, you can stop the spread of an infectious disease completely. At least in theory.
No, I do not think so. The curve in "flatten the curve" was referred to the daily number of cases, and the impact it's growth had on saturating health care services. Lockdowns hindered the spread so that services could be able to respond to the daily inflow of new cases.
> If everybody stays home you don't have hospitals, you don't have electricity, nobody picks up the garbage, and people will go hungry.
This is a totally disingenuous and completely wrong strawman, and one that springs either from intentional ignorance or outright bad faith.
No, you don't lock people up and expect everyone to stay in house arrest. You are pretending that the whole concept of "essential workers" didn't existed, let alone was a central point of lockdowns. People were arguing if occupation X or Y should or should not be classified as an essential worker explicitly because that meant either the workers should or should not stay at home.
It was to slow the spread. It was as the parent comment said - to slow the rate of hospitalization so the medical system wouldn't collapse and have needless excess death from lack of capacity.
You're making all valid points and all those points were immediately clear at the start of the lockdowns, for anyone who would listen. Problem is, a lot of people are simply unable to listen to reasonable arguments. That was a problem back then, and they'll remain convinced of their own opinions even in when they are proven to be wrong over and over. It's like people who are religious. You can't reason them out of it.
My own government got very excited by the prospect of dictatorial central planning that lockdown mania created an enabling environment for and immediately set about writing all kinds of complicated rules about what food and clothing people were allowed to buy, as well as putting a prohibition on alcohol & cigarettes and imposing a curfew. Pandemic response immediately became a vehicle for imposing by fiat whatever pet policies ministers could vaguely link to it. Years later, they've all been rolled back, but the damage was done, and everyone still caught Covid.[1]
[1]: https://www.groundup.org.za/article/nearly-everyone-in-south...