[bitbuilder]

>Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison.

You seem to be forgetting about the sizable percentage of the population that lives alone in their small dwelling. I know a lot of these people and my own anecdata indicates a lot of them are having mental health issues.

>Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility.

Well sure, but I think it would be hard to argue that confinement and the resulting lack of mobility isn't the primary role of a prison.

And even in prison, we let prisoners eat with friends, play sports with friends, work with their friends, visit with family, etc. These are all things most of us felt we couldn't do during the height of lockdown.

And why do we allow prisoners to do all those things? Because we recognize that it's inhumane to deprive people of social interaction for extended periods of time.

To further reinforce this, what do we do when someone's in prison, and we want to punish them more? We decrease their mobility and increase their isolation by putting them in a small room by themselves.

Please note, I'm not arguing that lockdown was the wrong move, or that we shouldn't continue to consider various lockdown measures.

I am saying that we shouldn't be dismissive of concerns about the toll long term isolation is having on people's mental health. And that consideration of various lockdown measures should be taking into account these mental health concerns and weighing them against public health concerns.

[qubex]

I appreciate your nuanced reply, and I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your observations. I am not propounding the view that lockdowns are or would be beneficial, nor even dismissing claims that they might be mentally challenging. I’m just rankled by the dismissive tone of OP and maybe I’ve become hypersensitive to some of the crazy conspiracy-theory-level stuff that’s been going around.

I’m from Italy, though I was in Malta during the time of the latter’s lockdown, so I had it easy while also being intimately exposed to the consequences of one of the West’s harshest and earliest clampdowns. It’s not an experience I would wish on anybody and it’s something I really really hope won’t happen again.

But by analogy to another famously exponential process, when the neutron flux gets frisky you have to damn the consequences to the the power grid and scram in the control rods into the reactor while you still have time to do so. People will suffer mentally, but at least they shall mostly live to tell the tale...

I have not forgotten that house arrest exists and that it is a form of punishment. Restricting mobility most definitely is literally restrictive and the trade-off of public health and rights & freedoms should not be taken lightly. Governments literally ‘grounded’ their citizenry for months on end. It’s not quite as unprecedented as we think (the same policy was widely used during the Spanish Flu pandemic, once it was publicly admitted to be an issue after the War ended).