[heleninboodler]

I agree wholeheartedly with all three of your points. I disagree strongly with one of his positions (I don't think we should be opening schools while the rest of us are locked down), but I too find it very, very encouraging to have a public official obviously using his brain and being honest about the fact that nobody really knows the right answer.

And especially in the context about the use of power, the acknowledgement that imposing a lockdown doesn't actually necessarily change people's behavior all that much is a really good point. We've definitely seen that there are some that will intentionally do the opposite if they feel their freedoms are being impinged upon, so if it's not going to actually make an improvement, the gesture could be a huge mistake.

[snickms]

As some people are claiming doubt as to the effectiveness of lockdowns, let me point you to the Australian stats: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...

It worked particularly well in Victoria, where a second lockdown turned a ~700 case per day nightmare into 38 straight days of no deaths or locally acquired cases.

New Zealand also used a lockdown strategy. stats: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...

Suicide rates in the most affected Australian states were surprising: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/09/suici...

The lockdowns were terrible for many people - for all the reasons you can imagine. On the other hand, I doubt anyone here would now argue that those crazy times were a mistake.

[heleninboodler]

I think it's fairly clear that lockdowns that actually lock people down are undeniably effective. The question is really whether or not imposing a lockdown in any given population will actually result in people cooperating, which I think is debatable for a lot of parts of the US, where we are taught to take a lot of pride in our inability to be controlled. I think the acknowledgement that a lockdown doesn't necessarily have the effect you think it will is a recognition of that cultural phenomenon.

[sdoering]

Yesterday there were some interesting stats shown for Germany. Before the 2nd soft lockdown in November the age bracket of 20 - 35 was the 2nd highest in terms of infections per 100k (within the last 7 days). Only topped by the age bracket 80+.

During our second lockdown the increase in cases did slow down a bit, but only a bit. One could argue, that the soft lockdown didn't really work that well, as it didn't turn the ship around.

The interesting part of the statistics was, that the age bracket of 20 - 35 was the only one with reduced infection numbers during the 2nd (soft) lockdown. So all positive effects from this age group were totally negated by every other age bracket - be it school children (massively increased numbers due to open schools), of kinder garden kids (same with open). Or also older people seemingly (no idea of the reasons) contracting Sars-CoV-2 at an increased rate during the soft lockdown.

I have no idea for why these other age brackets have increased numbers. Could be that these are also the age brackets were you find the most critics, but that is just a totally unproven hypothesis of mine.

Could be that behavior changed in regards to the first lockdown and people do not keep their social distancing as much as they did (that is just anecdotal evidence from encountering people not keeping their distance while grocery shopping).

[yorwba]

At least in Berlin, it was the same during the first lockdown: infections among younger people peaked one or two weeks earlier than among older people.

You can see this very well in the heatmap of cases by age group here: https://www.berlin.de/corona/lagebericht/desktop/corona.html...

[remote_phone]

Places like UK did a hard lockdown for 6 weeks and kept schools open. It completely worked. Yes, kids can transmit the virus, but it appears that as long as the ADULTS limit their interaction with other adults, kids have only a limited way of encountering infections.

[jeffbee]

Didn't UK have either the worst or second-worst outcome among all European nations?

[AlphaSite]

Yes, but it doesn't really disprove the assertion that lockdown's work. It more proves that the other approaches they tried either dont work or weren't applied effectively.

[koheripbal]

I suppose, but it also means that the conclusion above (that lockdowns excluding schools works) isn't based on any evidence.

[leoedin]

To be clear, the UK entered a lockdown excluding schools on the 5th of November.

Within a week, positive tests started declining significantly. The lockdown ended on the 2nd of December.

Within a week, positive tests started going up again.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/08/covid-cases-an...

There is plenty of evidence that lockdowns do work. Whether they make sense from an economic or overall quality of life perspective is a separate issue. But they work.

[koheripbal]

I think you're misinterpreting my comment. I'm not saying lockdowns don't work. I'm saying that there is no evidence that lockdowns that contain exceptions for school aren't significantly worse than lockdowns that include schools.

...because there is no data.

[jacobush]

Sweden did sort of a lockdown excluding schools up to pupils age 16.

[glitchcrab]

Yeah please don't use us as an example - the UK has handled this terribly.

[michaelt]

Take a look at the data here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare - for example, the "Patients in hospital" data.

The UK's number of COVID-19 patients in hospital peaked at 19,500 in mid-April and fell to 800 by the start of September.

That's despite things like the 'eat out to help out' scheme that ran until the end of August.

Schools and colleges re-opened in September [1] and the government started "encouraging" workers back to offices [2] - and admittedly, by the end of September patients in hospital had only risen to 2,400.

But by mid-November we see the second wave peaking at 16,500 hospitalised. Today, as we come out of the second lockdown, there are still 15,000 patients in hospital.

The UK has not demonstrated that schools can safely be kept open.

Unfortunately, as the geniuses in government decided to reopen schools and universities and offices all at the same time, it's difficult to directly attribute the second wave to any single policy decision.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/schools-and-colleges-to-r... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53942542

[disgruntledphd2]

The Irish government kept schools open, moved almost all universities online, and encouraged/required workers to work from home.

From our data, it doesn't appear that schools were a massive driver of transmission.

We know that kids don't spread it as much as they do the flu, so on balance, keeping schools open seems like the better course of action as long as it's not a major driver of infection rates.

[leoedin]

Hospitalised cases lag infections by weeks. For some reason you're completely ignoring the positive test results, which show a very clear correlation with lockdowns.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/08/covid-cases-an...

We shouldn't expect hospitalised cases to fall immediately - although they have been falling for the past week or so. Lockdowns - even excluding schools - clearly are effective at reducing transmission rates below 1. Unfortunately the lesser measures we're currently under don't seem to be - as cases have plateaued and are starting to rise again.

[michaelt]

> For some reason you're completely ignoring the positive test results

For a good reason.

By almost all the statistics, the second wave hasn't been as bad as the first. Comparing peaks, measures like "Deaths within 28 days of positive test" (942 vs 486) and "Weekly deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate" (9,495 vs 3,371) and "Patients in hospital" (19,518 vs 16,421) and "Patients in mechanical ventilation beds" (3,252 vs 1,461) say the second peak was about half the height of the first one.

On the other hand, "Cases by date reported" peaked at 5,113 in the first lockdown and 25,329 in the second lockdown - making the second wave 5x higher than the first. Presumably due to a lack of test capacity.

If I'd chosen the one metric which makes the second wave look 5x the first instead of 0.5x, that'd be a pretty deceptive way of describing the results of government policy (although technically accurate).

[roenxi]

'Works' is what happened to Ebola - near total containment outside of a rather poor part of the world.

There is a major complaint here against the lockdowns. They have positive and negative outcomes and there is very little evidence that the two sides have been weighed against each other. The scale of the damage done by our response is too great to accept best effort attempts to control the disease. The standard of the response needs to be excellence, not competence.

We also can't discount the possibility that there were easier, less invasive measures than lockdowns that captured a lot of the benefit without the costs. It has been a chaotic year but there is no natural law that says every time there is a pandemic the only option is to scuttle the economic ship.

[bluescrn]

The 2nd UK lockdown wasn’t all that effective. Schools open = all the pain for significantly reduced gain.

[ithkuil]

On italy they only opened schools for children in age groups for which having them at home would be a major burden for working parents (either work from home or essential workers).

Arguably this reduced the pain, while also reducing the effectiveness of the lockdown measures. It's a fine balancing act. It's hard to compute precisely, we're not yet good at it as a society. That said, expecting people to work while having children at home and at the same expecting grandparents to stay isolated, puts people on a very tough spot. How do people cope with that in places that kindergartens are still closed?

[fludlight]

Kid1->Kid2->Parents-of-kid2 transmission sounds like it would lead to a lot of orphans. Did it? What's the lag on the statistics on that subject?

Outcomes are also not binary (life or death). There is also the possibility of a gamut of lifelong health problems from, e.g. scarred lungs, for both kids and parents.

[remote_phone]

Most parents of school kids are younger than the 60. That age group has less than 0.2% death rate.

[p4coder]

My daughter's school has 2000 kids. 4000 parents. In Santa Clara county the death rate for 40-60 is .5% [1] That would mean 20 parents dead if everyone gets it. Many of the households in immigrant families are multi generational. That will have a multiplying effect.

[1] 12.7% deaths and 29.1% cases https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-demogra...

[nkurz]

While it's still going to be a very real number, I think you are overestimating the number of deaths considerably. I appreciate that you provided a link, but I don't think that source includes the information you would need to make the estimate you are looking for.

First, I think that you are implicitly assuming that there are an equal number of people in each age category. In addition to the percentages you quote, you also need to know the percentage of the population per age range. Second, the "case" rate is the not the same as the "infection" rate, as it only includes confirmed cases. It's usually assumed that for each confirmed case, there is some unknown multiple of this number of infected individuals.

Eyeballing the chart here (and realizing that Santa Clara might not match these numbers, and guessing equal number in the relevant 5 year age ranges) a better estimate of the death rate for the 40-60 year old group is probably something around .15%: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatalit...

[p4coder]

I simply did percent_dead times num_dead/percent_cases times num_cases. That leads to ~0.5%. I agree with you that IFR is unknowable without very thorough sero-survey. So all we have is CFR to go on. The ratio depends on population age and test availability etc.