[throwaway72762]

China did actual lockdowns. The US? Not so much.

Herd immunity? Never happened because infection isn't preventing reinfection with a different strain.

If there had been actual, effective lockdowns early enough they might have worked but by March 2020 the cat was out of the bag. Japan's model of universal masking, testing, and outdoor interaction without lockdowns is the best model for the future.

[bshipp]

I understood the justification and necessity for lockdowns but not only were they too late but they were also infested with political exemptions and even if they had helped they were only ever a temporary solution.

Full lockdowns certainly wouldn't have been allowed to last long enough for the vaccine to be produced, especially if that research, development and production had taken as long as it was initially expected to take.

The western covid public health response was a bit of a disorganized mess, but even there it ended up being remarkably effective. I was amazed that we had almost two years with virtually zero flu infections, which showed the vast difference between the infectiousness of normal influenza and covid. Unfortunately, covid was such a stubbornly infectious little bugger that it only slowed the progression.

[freedude]

"China did actual lockdowns." Yes, they did, and literally made prisoners out of their own people. Which had the unfortunate consequence of killing people for lack of care, food and social contact.

"Herd immunity? Never happened because infection isn't preventing reinfection with a different strain." This is exactly wrong. Once you get covid you may contract a different strain, and if you are a normal healthy individual it will be like a bad cold, if you have symptoms.

[throwaway72762]

Exactly re China: my point is people should stop describing the US response as lockdowns because they literally never happened.

Re reinfection, good luck with that. Every time you catch covid you have a one in ten chance of long covid, and that's the current conservative estimate in meta analyses.

[freedude]

In order to calculate a one in ten chance of anything would require you to know two numbers. In this case, you would need to know the number of people that have contracted Covid and the number of people that have experienced long covid symptoms. I can guarantee there is no possible way to know either number so anything is probably a grossly inadequate estimate depending on bias.