[sidibe]

I understand the sentiment, but I think it's pretty clear in retrospect hard lockdowns were the correct way to address this.

This half-assed "wear a mask and social distance if you want" stance just made the economy sputter for a whole a year. I've seen this in France twice, where they've oscillated between doing nothing and doing a lot, a couple brief lockdowns can reverse things quickly even after things have gotten worse than they ever gotten in the USA. In Asia they managed to control the whole thing by trying to squelch it.

[dehrmann]

Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.

You mentioned Asia. I saw this headline today:

"South Korea's Health Minister Describes Seoul As A 'COVID-19 War Zone'"

By US standards, their case count is still incredibly low. The point is they haven't actually been able to contain it, either; they're just acting sooner and more aggressively for the second wave. Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days.

If "half-assed 'wear a mask and social distance if you want'" kept the r0 below 1, lockdown or not, new cases would drop.

What's scarier is that the Bay Area, with ubiquitous masks, good-ish weather, partial closures, and lower population wasn't even able to keep new cases down.

[kiwidrew]

> Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days.

NZ hasn't had any new cases in the general population for quite some time. The cases that NZ has been reporting are all recent arrivals undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine in an isolation facility.

Both Australia and New Zealand have shown (multiple times) that it is entirely possible to completely eradicate this virus using nothing more sophisticated than masks, social distancing, testing, and (targeted) strict lockdowns.

[Mediterraneo10]

Australia and New Zealand are islands where the borders can be closed much more tightly than elsewhere and imported goods arrive mainly through container shipping. In the EU, the need to ensure regular freight truck traffic and move hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from east to west means that a comparable lockdown could not have been achieved.

[atweiden]

> Australia and New Zealand are islands where the borders can be closed much more tightly than elsewhere and imported goods arrive mainly through container shipping. In the EU, the need to ensure regular freight truck traffic and move hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from east to west means that a comparable lockdown could not have been achieved.

I wonder about this. I'd expect freight truck traffic in China to play at least as big of a role in distribution there that it does in Europe. China is a giant connected piece of land, and if their numbers are to be believed even in the slightest, it's clear China was able to keep Covid under control to a much greater extent than the western world.

Australia never fully halted interstate freight truck traffic, as it was deemed essential. I've heard Covid tests were given to truckies at state borders, but that seems possible for US states or European countries to do, even with limited resources. Is freight truck traffic really to blame for Covid spread, then?

And although Australia largely shut itself off from foreign crop labor, and is struggling to harvest crops given this, there's not all that much appreciable damage that I can see. Perhaps this was really a good season to err on the side of going short handed. Prices will go up, but the juice is worth the squeeze, it seems.

Also, Hawaii is an island, as is the UK. Alaska would seem to have similar advantages to an island state. Yet these islands are doing very much more poorly compared to Australia and New Zealand.

[Mediterraneo10]

> It's clear China was able to keep Covid under control

China's lockdown involved e.g. welding the doors of apartment blocks shut and forcing the populace to install a spyware app on their phones. Claiming that a Western country "could have just done like China" is basically saying that that Western country could have just junked all its civil liberties.

> And although Australia largely shut itself off from foreign crop labor, and is struggling to harvest crops given this, there's not all that much appreciable damage that I can see.

Things are different in the EU. After decades of the single market, keeping people fed absolutely relies on getting those harvests done with imported labour.

> I've heard Covid tests were given to truckies at state borders, but that seems possible for US states or European countries to do, even with limited resources.

Tests were in short supply for a long time. By the time they were available, it was too late to lock down as effectively as Oz or NZ. Again, you underestimate just how special those two countries are among Western nations.

[makomk]

Freight truck traffic definitely did play a role in spreading Covid within China - it's how they ended up with an outbreak in Beijing, the city they'd most aggressively protected against the spread of the disease. That outbreak in turn appears to have been seeded by another outbreak that went entirely undetected until it spread to Beijing. China's apparent success in keeping Covid under control is one of the biggest mysteries of the entire pandemic; their methods don't seem like they should work, and every so often there's a little sign that something isn't right like that undetected outbreak.

[atweiden]

> Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.

In Australia, hard lockdown looks like the following:

1. International borders closed to all non-citizens, permanent residents or essential travelers

2. State borders closed per 1

3. City "borders" closed per 1 — happened in Melbourne

4. You can't leave your home for any reason not deemed essential

5. If you do leave your home for an essential reason, you must stay within 5km of your home, or have a job/emergency/essential imperative to travel further away

All of the above is enforced by police officers.

In Melbourne, they even closed off a high-risk, high density building for a while, just because the health authorities deemed it a risk.

Could you expand more on what these European "hard lockdowns" mean? Because at no point during this pandemic has any of the above happened in any American state or city, at least not to my knowledge.

The Australian federal government also enacted Job Keeper to suspend work hours yet keep working people employed, and took additional steps to ensure as many people as possible could remain on lockdown without a source of income. This was as important as — if not more important than — the hard lockdown enforcement measures themselves.

[grecy]

Melbourne in Australia was seeing 600-700 new cases per day in late July/early August.

They went into EXTREMELY hard lockdown for 6-8 weeks, and now they haven't had a single case in four weeks.

https://www.vox.com/2020/12/4/22151242/melbourne-victoria-au...

[strken]

The article says there was no secret sauce, which isn't quite right. Some factors that played a role:

- Australia had had an unusually bad fire season and an associated scandal about the government response: our PM was on holiday in Hawaii while an unprecedented area of land was burning. The framework for state/federal cooperation on disaster management was being revised right as 2020 started, and there was political will for strong measures, such as ignoring WHO recommendations to let international borders stay open.

- Victoria had strong state of emergency/disaster powers, including the right to impose movement restrictions, and clear conditions and precedent for imposing them.

- The states had the power to close their borders, and did so, isolating the second wave to one state. Victoria was the odd one out - the other states set the bar at near-total suppression.

- The lockdown really, really sucked. The Victorian state government relied heavily on the support of the federal government, support from the general populace, and federal spending on income supplements. They still came under enormous pressure to end the lockdown early, even with more federal and individual support than states in the US would have gotten.

[enraged_camel]

>> Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.

Well yeah, after the first wave people threw all caution to the wind and decided to go back to their old habits. So of course cases are surging again.

This isn’t rocket science. Not sure why everyone is pretending there’s some sort of huge mystery. We know how the virus spreads.

[huac]

summer travel to countries like Croatia helped spread the disease among travelers who brought it back to their home countries, as well.

[d23]

This virus has put on bare display just how selfish, unintelligent, and tribalistic we are as a species. Like you say, there is no mystery at this point. We have to face the cold, depressing truth about who we are.

[Bahamut]

> What's scarier is that the Bay Area, with ubiquitous masks, good-ish weather, partial closures, and lower population wasn't even able to keep new cases down.

I’d contest that characterization of the Bay Area - even in Santa Clara County where I live, I’ve not seen ubiquitous mask wearing.

[fermienrico]

I live in the bay area and it is 100% of every single person I've seen outside. I still haven't spotted anyone without a mask besides a runner or someone on a bicycle.

[baskire]

Bay Area has some busy shipping ports and a lot of commerce flowing throw it.

It’s not within the regions power to shut down the state and interstate highways.

Spread was going to come from the rest of the country no matter what they did.

[makomk]

Also, by current US and European standards South Korea is carrying out very few Covid-19 tests, which makes it hard to make a meaningful comparison of case numbers. Well over an order of magnitude less in per-capita terms. I believe they're still not routinely offering testing to people with mild potential symptoms unless they've had recent contact with a known case, and there's evidence that it's in increasingly widespread circulation outside of the network of cases known to contact tracing.

Plus, you've got to remember that disease outbreaks grows exponentially, and exponential growth always has low numbers at the start until it doesn't.

[jeffbee]

That's exactly right. The harm to the economy is not caused by the countermeasures, it is caused by the disease. If you don't beat the disease, you wreck the economy.

[mixmastamyk]

No beating it in a porous country of 330 million people.

[txsoftwaredev]

"Roughly 30,000 restaurants have already closed for good across the country, with more than 110,000 expected to shutter in the next month, according to estimates by the National Restaurant Association. ".

How did a virus cause businesses to close permanently? This doesn't happen during flu season or even with the h1n1 pandemic.

[jeffbee]

H1N1 2009 only killed 12000 Americans. COVID-19 killed 12000 Americans last week. People are avoiding restaurants because their own self-interest keeps them away. They don't want to get a fatal disease that's already killed 1‰ of the country. This aversion has little or nothing to do with government directives.

[Mediterraneo10]

People are not avoiding restaurants. After each temporary lockdown has been lifted in my country, restaurants and pubs immediately went back to full capacity. Also, this summer I found that overlander hotspots -- the places where elderly Europeans go in their camping cars -- were as packed as in any other year with little distancing observed. Certainly some are worried about the virus, but many others are not.

[trhway]

>People are avoiding restaurants

not in Bay Area. These new nice outdoor areas with heaters etc. have been packed all these months.

> This aversion has little or nothing to do with government directives.

the businesses closure is direct result of the government orders. It is evidenced by how people flocked back to businesses when they [partially] opened. A well beyond middle age neighbor drove to San Mateo county for a gym and only 1 hour long line prevented her from going there more.

In Russia they came up with a new word - Coronoia, ie. "Corona + Paranoia", and your post is typical Coronoia style in that it ignores the straight reality and facts which are staring right into the face.

[atweiden]

This is simply illustrative of the fact people are driven by self-interest, and virtually never take group outcomes into consideration when making choices unless forced to under the threat of violence.

[curryst]

Or they simply have a different level of risk tolerance than you. I'm comfortable going out to eat. I live alone, the only people I physically interact with these days are all under the age of 28, anyone in a risk group that I would interact with is back home a thousand or so miles away.

> virtually never take group outcomes into consideration when making choices unless forced to under the threat of violence.

Group outcomes are effectively a moot point. That presumes that the group, as a whole, has an agreed upon preferential outcome, and an agreed upon means of getting there. We do not (and basically never do, when it comes to the group). Some people want more stringent lockdowns, some people just want the lockdowns to be lifted. People who want more stringent lockdowns are averse to the risk of COVID, and are willing to sacrifice some of the joy of life to avoid it. People who want to lift the lockdowns are unperturbed by the risk, or are okay with allowing people to assume that risk to be able to go on with their lives. I don't see a clear winner from a utilitarian perspective; either really bad things happen to a small ratio of people, or mildly bad things happen to everyone. I certainly don't think the gap in net happiness is wide enough to warrant condescension about people ignoring group outcomes.

[trhway]

you have to show what is specific self-interest here and how it conflicts with specific group outcome. Otherwise it is just an old Soviet style propaganda where people were coerced into doing senseless things because of supposed great common good.

[tshaddox]

The virus caused businesses to close permanently by causing would-be customers to stay at home due to fears about the virus. And, of course, other details, like businesses having extremely high rents and operating with very low margin opportunities which contributed to an already high baseline expectation of failure long before COVID.

Yes, undoubtedly government lockdowns cause some additional compliance from businesses and customers, but from what I saw in SF during the early days of the virus, a huge portion of the economical damage to local businesses was done due to the actions of individuals and businesses before the government even got involved with lockdowns.

[paganel]

The Czech Republic and Bulgaria had harder/more restrictive lockdowns during the entire year compared to my country (Romania) and yet they have a death-rate higher than ours. Indeed, they managed to ride the first wave pretty much unscathed, but the second one looks like it hit both of them comparatively harder than it hit us.

[trhway]

it may as well happen that lockdowns put selective pressure on the virus for higher virulence.

Anyway, the government bureaucrats are naturally go for simple short-term game like lockdowns without doing any complex long-term thinking (which for example would be the things like efficient preparation for the second wave and achieving herd immunity with minimal losses and minimizing the total losses).

[edmundsauto]

Do you have any evidence for your first graph, or is it something that you contributed in order to add more zest to your internet comment?

[trhway]

Unfortunately i'm about 160 years too late - the zest was added by Darwin.

Covid itself is a result of such accelerated selection performed in that Wuhan lab - what is called "gain of function" experiments.

A natural example of a global virus evolution phenomenon was observed in the 2nd wave of Spanish flu - that strain was mostly killing by causing hyper-reaction of immune system and especially in the healthy 20-50 years old individuals, as the strains normally killable by immune system were cleaned in the first wave.

While all that is obvious, if you need a reference to authority there is a virus evolution discussion by a Harward guy:

https://myvoice.opindia.com/2020/04/evolution-of-virulence-a...

"Let’s assume that every propagule generated from the quarantined individuals has a very small chance of escaping isolation and infecting someone. Just because the virulent ones can make more propagules, they have a higher chance of surviving than the milder varieties. This means we are giving a selective advantage to the more virulent ones over the milder ones and as a result virus will evolve for increased virulence."

[edmundsauto]

> Covid itself is a result of such accelerated selection performed in that Wuhan lab - what is called "gain of function" experiments.

Are you saying this form of the virus was created in a Wuhan lab? As far as I know, that's 100% dead red conspiracy theory, but I'm open to learn more from reputable sources.

[trhway]

it wasnt created, i.e. it isnt synthetic - in that regard those "debunking" articles are almost correct. The point here is that the "creation" is a red herring. The virus wasn't "created", it was selectively bred for higher virulence among mammals (as a way of getting closer to humans - "gain of function" experiments) like you'd do to get a new apple or corn breed. At some point either an employee got infected (or may be some limited human testing of a "flu" on some easy volunteer-able population like say prisoners as part of the experiments) or a carcass of a lab animal was sold at the market ...

[AnimalMuppet]

I'd like to see actual evidence that Covid does in fact come from "gain of function" experiments in the Wuhan lab. So far as I could see, your reference doesn't do that.

[trhway]

Considering 1. the concerns that had been raised about that research in general (and so such a research was halted in US, and US granted funds to that research in Wuhan instead) as well as about safety specifically in those Wuhan labs and 2. exceptional coincidence in time and space I think the onus in on the labs to prove it isn't their virus or at least come maximally open about their situation. If anything we've so far observed completely opposite - there is absolutely no credible information nor about the labs and the related research nor about virus origination investigation.

[matz1]

What do you mean by "correct" ? It is correct if you assume the hard lockdown doesn't have any downside.

The lockdown is not necessary in the first place.

In most places, hospital are not overloaded. Even in the event of overload, the correct measure should be to increase capacity, do not admit people with mild symptoms, etc.

Case number are misleading, vast majority of the case are not actually sick or only have mild symptoms.

Better test needed to be identify people who actually sick and need intervention.

If anything the lockdown could cause hospital overloaded due to delayed treatment and nurses being furloughed.

[mike_d]

> In most places, hospital are not overloaded

If you speak to any doctor or nurse they will disagree with you. While we might not be at a breaking point for number of beds, the staff that have to put themselves in harms way do have the option to just quit. When that starts happening in mass we are all screwed.

[txsoftwaredev]

I spoke with a nurse while at gym I attend. She spoke about how the hospital she's at is not close to be overwhelmed. She also talked about she doesn't wear a mask outside of her job as they have training and n95 masks which work in a hospital setting. But outside of a hospital environment the masks provide little protection, especially cloth masks.

[taejo]

> But outside of a hospital environment the masks provide little protection, especially cloth masks.

My experience of talking to medical professionals is that they consider a number like 50% reduction in infections "very little protection", because they (correctly) would use a mask providing 99% protection or whatever in any situation where real protection was needed. But outside of a hospital setting, epidemiologically, a 50% or even 20% reduction in reproduction number makes a big difference to the overall dynamics of an outbreak.

[qqqwerty]

A nurse at a gym? Perhaps there is a bit of selection bias in your sample.

Meanwhile, here is a pretty good article about how healthcare workers are handling the pandemic: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/third-sur...

As additional anecdata, the sentiments expressed in the article are in line with what I have been hearing from healthcare professionals in my circle of friends.

[dboreham]

Fox News watching nurse?

[matz1]

Yes I do have couple of nurse friend and doctor, they all thought lockdown measure is way overkill and all this has been greatly overblown. Not to mention the excessive ppe measure/protocol they now have to adopt, its only made their job harder.

[simonbarker87]

I know many doctors and nurses and they are exhausted, over worked and thankful it didn’t get worse than it was

To say that lock down was needless because the worst case scenario isn’t proof the lock down wasn’t needed. It is evidence (not proof mind) that the lockdowns worked.

It’s like saying you didn’t need to save money because you never ran out of money so you didn’t need the savings in the first place

[matz1]

If the healthcare worker is overworked, then the hospital should hire more worker.

Its not like there is not enough healthcare worker looking for employment all over the country.

The lockdown was needless because it is worse than the risk if covid.

[edmundsauto]

They are paying nurses up to $10k per week to travel and work in covid wards. Let me assure you, in America, we have a great shortage of skilled healthcare workers.

[nradov]

The unemployment rate for licensed healthcare providers is very low. There are really no extra physicians out there.

[simonbarker87]

Perhaps your country has a wash of unemployed healthcare workers just waiting in reserve for “their moment” but in the UK there is a shortage of skilled healthcare professionals and we can’t train them as fast as we need them.

[SpicyLemonZest]

In Asia hard lockdowns aren’t seen as a silver bullet, and some countries like Korea never really had one. Centralized quarantine and mandatory symptom checks are believed to be comparably important.

[jusonchan81]

South Korea did have a near perfect compliance in wearing masks outside of your home. I think that’s what helped them keep it fairly under control for such a populous country.

Just to be clear - it was near perfect and not 100%

[dehrmann]

Saw this headline on NPR today: "South Korea's Health Minister Describes Seoul As A 'COVID-19 War Zone'"

[solveit]

Seoul, a city of 10+ million, had 214 new cases today. The health minister's rhetoric only serves to show how well South Korea dealt with the first wave.

[dehrmann]

True, but they haven't been able to control it entirely; cases are definitely rising. Either their measures were effectively enough for summer, but not winter, or people are getting lax in their behavior because of lockdown fatigue.