[RacfeelBudkind]

On the other hand Covid-19 would have killed many more people directly if action hadn't been taken to mitigate it's spread. Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread.

In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot of uncertainty in how many people Covid-19 would have killed, it's still certainly higher than the preventative measures.

[sgt101]

I think, very sadly, that India is giving us an insight now. It must be remembered that the situation in India is into a society with some immunity from earlier infections and also some immunity from vaccination (I think ~10% combined) which muddies the water a bit. But, still the picture of an unmoderated c19 epidemic is horrifying.

[petertodd]

Something I haven't found is detailed breakdowns of who is actually being infected this time around.

India did have very strict lockdowns. Yet, very high rates of antibodies were also measured in some areas. Those strict lockdowns may have been successful in shielding some of the population from covid, and that part of the population is getting infected now. India is a very unequal society, with a very wide range of wealth present in the same areas.

In the US in some lockdown states there have been dramatic differences between infection rates between different socioeconomic levels. While in other states that were more open, that has tended to be less true.

[spookthesunset]

> Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread.

It will be decades before we know the answer to this, if we ever do. Trying to justify these lockdowns while in the middle of the storm is fools errand. Heads are running way to hot and brains aren’t thinking clearly.

What we’ve done over the last year represents one of the largest uncontrolled public health experiments ever performed. The best part is all the billions caught up in the experiment never consented and many don’t even know it was an experiment.

Society has never, ever had a pandemic plan that includes what we’ve done over the 14 months.

Only through the passage of time, when all the people who instituted these policies are no longer with us and all the costs of these lockdowns will be laid bare, will history truly be able to judge our actions.

(Personally I think history will take an incredibly dim view of lockdowns and those who enacted them)

[hedora]

The lockdowns weren’t unprecedented. We did something similar in 1918, and it backfired in the same ways. As a bonus, last time, a much more deadly strain emerged and ended up ripping through the population killing young adults and middle aged people.

If they hadn’t locked down for the first wave, they probably would have reached herd immunity before the second, more devastating wave. This time, we have a vaccine, so we’ll probably avoid that, at least.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s a safe bet that people will take a dim view of the 2020 lockdown in hindsight.

[ghaff]

>We did something similar in 1918,

I looked at this a while back and, as far as I can tell, there were relatively limited interventions in the US. If you read beyond the headline of this link [1], for example, it doesn't seem as if you had much in the way of workplace closures and, in general the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" were for a fairly limited period of time. This study concludes they helped but the data is inconsistent and hard to interpret.

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/study-sa...

"The researchers report that all the cities used at least one of the three main categories of NPIs, and 15 used all three at the same time. The most common combination was school closures and public gathering bans, used by 34 cities for a median of 4 weeks. All the cities except New York, Chicago, and New Haven (Conn.) closed their schools for some period of time; the median was 6 weeks."

[allturtles]

You are talking out of both sides of your mouth. How is it that people who think the lockdowns were net beneficial need to wait 'decades' to decide, but you're allowed to conclude now that they were a terrible idea?

It seems to me we should all state our positions now with the information we have available now, and let the future take care of itself.

[CountDrewku]

Because he/she stated it as a personal opinion while the other person said it as a matter of fact that couldn't be questioned.

I'll go a step further and actually suggest that authoritarian lockdown measure haven't done as much as they've been touted as doing. This is pretty easy to see by comparing states with less lockdown measures vs. ones that went full economy shutdown. Most of the "open" states aren't any worse off than the ones who went lockdown crazy and in some cases they're actually better off when you look at spread and death.

[RacfeelBudkind]

> Most of the "open" states aren't any worse off than the ones who went lockdown crazy and in some cases they're actually better off when you look at spread and death.

This could also indicate that states where Covid-19 had a bigger impact responded by enacting stronger mitigations. What makes you prefer your interpretation?

[CountDrewku]

>This could also indicate that states where Covid-19 had a bigger impact responded by enacting stronger mitigations. What makes you prefer your interpretation?

You can say that but there's no data that supports this at all.

[deeg]

What states are you comparing? Massachusetts and NYC locked down pretty hard and their post-April numbers look pretty good compared to, say, Texas, Florida, and South Dakota.

[CountDrewku]

All of them, and since the start of this. I don't know where you're getting your data and why you've decided April numbers are a good measure of how states have done overall. Infection rate is less relevant than deaths anyway. If people are getting infected and recovering it's not really an issue.

NYC(not state) tops the charts for deaths per 100k. Notice how low FL is?

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_deathsper100...

What you can easily notice is that strict lockdown measures don't seem to make any difference at all.

[vmception]

All while the topology in all jurisdictions is so different that it will never be possible to directly compare

[hedora]

In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination, and we apparently did a terrible job keeping it out of nursing homes (so the percentage that caught it that died was higher than it would have been across the whole population).

So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. There were strategies that were developed after the 1918 pandemic that probably would have saved more people than the lockdown at much lower cost, but they were ignored by the politicians. The basic idea was to focus all resources on protecting the vulnerable, and let the disease run its course quickly. Effectively protecting the vulnerable during extended lockdowns is extremely difficult, and the COVID lockdown was no exception.

[runako]

> 2-3x more people, max

Rounding, that's possibly another 1-2 million people. Those are big numbers!

Also one quibble in that most of the US did not have an extended lockdown. Here in GA ours lasted basically a month. As others have said, people voluntarily stayed home, in part because the exponents of letting the disease "run its course" tended to exhibit a level of comfort with millions of deaths that perhaps is not widely shared in the population.

[majormajor]

> So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max.

You are very cavalier with somewhere around 1.1-1.6 million extra deaths, to date. That's your GOOD number?

If that's your anti-intervention argument, I'm unconvinced. Saving a million lives is worth a lot to me.

[sgt101]

>In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination

Where did that number come from?

I have read more like 8% (https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/full...)

So - 2 to 3x... Nope. 8 - 10x.

What I want to know is why you have constructed this belief and want to propagate it when it is refuted by a google search in 10 seconds flat?

[wk_end]

Your article is from last September, using data from last July. It only takes ten seconds to google, but I guess it takes a few more to check timestamps or think critically about the results.

Using more current antibody data, the CDC released updated estimates yesterday [0] that there have been ~115 million actual COVID infections in the US. That makes the 2x-3x number pretty reasonable (especially since herd immunity is supposed to kick in around 70%).

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

[maxerickson]

I wonder if the theory that previously infected people are reacting more strongly to the first doses is true?

I had no real reaction to the first one and a day of increased fatigue so far with the second.

Anecdotally, many more people are having stronger reactions to the second.

[rimliu]

Not sure. Sweden had no strict lockdowns. No mask mandates (only recommendation to use one in public transport during rush hour). They also had a lot of deaths in nursing homes when the COVID first hit. Meanwhile my country (Lithuania) was in strict lockdown last spring and is still in lockdown from the beginning of November. It was made stricter mid-December and only recently some restrictions started to be dropped. So while in strict lockdown we managed to catch-up and surpass Sweden by the number of deaths per million.