[josephg]

For a lockdown to be effective, it didn't need to shut down the city completely. Just do enough to get R0 (the avg number of people who each person infects) below 1. This causes the case numbers to drop exponentially. And when case numbers are small enough, contact tracing can be used.

[spookthesunset]

You assume that lockdowns actually work. We have three years of evidence to suggest otherwise. And if that isn’t enough there is this gem of a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/

Turns out that even after seventeen weeks of complete isolation in Antarctica you can still catch the common cold…

So yeah… you can’t stop Mother Nature no matter how hard you try.

[josephg]

Do we? Case numbers in Melbourne seemed to go down a few weeks after we went into hard lockdown, each and every time we did it.

It could have been a coincidence each time, but I’d need some good studies to convince me.

[mike_hearn]

It was a coincidence each time. The problem is that epidemic waves last a certain amount of time, and politicians tend to enact lockdown after a certain amount of delay because they want to be sure it's really going up and have to wait a few days for the announcements to propagate etc, and then you have to wait a short period before you expect any impact anyway. And then that's when the epidemic naturally goes into decline.

It's trivial to prove this because waves last roughly the same amount of time everywhere, so you can just compare places that went into lockdown with places that didn't and see what happens. The answer is that the waves are the same size and shape regardless of what governments do.

You can also do a regression analysis on "strictness indexes" and case counts, which also yields no correlation. There are such studies:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

"Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate"

https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC...

"Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people"

But you don't need studies. The fact that Sweden didn't lock down and yet has some of the lowest COVID mortality in Europe is decisive. Claims about the effects and necessity of lockdowns were universal and made no exception for Sweden, so the existence of even a single counter-example disproves the theories.

[abwizz]

afaik swedes did the lockdown more or less voluntarily.

dunno how much that is true or played into it thou