[pbourke]

> Outside of the island nations and China, deaths have a weak correlation with public policy.

South Korea, Vietnam, Finland, Norway and Thailand are not island nations and yet have a rate of death an order of magnitude lower than the US.

[salmon30salmon]

South Korea is basically an island. Their only border is an impregnable military zone. Norway and Finland speak more to density than their geography.

But yeah, we need to learn what was different in Vietnam and Thailand. Vietnam is especially interesting, but it could be easily argued that one of their tools is unavailable here (forced detention at camps for the infected)

[pbourke]

Chalking anything up to geography or density seems like a reach. Ireland and the UK are islands and are doing rather poorly. South Korea has high density. Canada has low density, but a highly urbanized population. It’s done better than the US which has similar urbanization but worse than the nations that I mentioned earlier.

[toast0]

England is an island in geography, but it has a lot of truck (lorry) traffic to and from the continent, via ferries and the rail line under the channel. It's not just containerized freight, the trucks with drivers drive on and drive off the other modes of transit.

Being an island isn't required; you need effective border controls, and effective control of population behavior. It's just a lot easier to have effective border control with an island; but England certainly didn't make use of that possibility.

[salmon30salmon]

Right it's pretty fucking willy-nilly no matter the conditions you are testing for correlation. The nations you mentioned all had pretty different public responses as well.

That is why I think it's dangerous to proclaim lockdowns are a panacea because with a few exceptions you end up with similar results but a fucked economy

[pksebben]

how is that more dangerous than avoiding a lockdown claiming that public policy doesn't matter? In what ways is the economy killing people right now?

[salmon30salmon]

Suicides are way up. So are overdoses.

But the real tragedy is the lack of support for third world countries due to the contraction of the global economy. Millions will die due to a reduction in vaccines and treatable illnesses in the developing world. Millions. But it seems we are okay with that as long as _we_ don't get covid

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's dangerous because poorly executed lockdowns can be counterproductive. New cases are currently higher in many locked-down states than they are in Florida - this is of course a multifactorial process, but part of the story has to be that people have stopped complying with the lockdowns.

[DiogenesKynikos]

It's relatively simple: lockdowns are effective to the extent that they reduce contacts between people. In countries that actually implemented strict lockdowns that substantially reduced contacts between people, transmission fell, R went below 1, and the epidemic receded.

The most effective strategy for countries that have large numbers of cases is to go into a strict lockdown, in order to bring case numbers down as quickly as possible. Then they can reopen to a much larger extent than they would otherwise be able to. China and several other countries have successfully done this.