This is wrong. We are not forced to be inside because of the virus. It would have been totally possible to have this pandemic going on with zero lockdowns, which would have probably led to worse health effects, and less-bad economic effects.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people claim that we must lock down or that the virus is forcing us to do this or that, as opposed to it being a political choice based on tradeoffs.
In fact, I predict that after things open up, they will not shut back down, no matter how bad the second wave of the outbreak gets. People simply won't accept it.
Define restrictions. There is a large area between lockdown and doing nothing. Anytime I see people arguing about 'restrictions', it's usually a straw man of going back to a total lockdown. No one is talking about doing that nationally, and even locally it would only be in extreme cases of uncontrolled community spread.
If we hadn't politicized the virus every step of the way, we could have adopted some simple mitigation measures that would have already gotten us back to some level of normal. A national strategy of masks and distance could have kept things mostly open/got things re-opened. If people were generally trying to limit the spread, testing and contact tracing would work to control outbreaks.
Instead the US has a patchwork of rules with uncertain national leadership hoping the virus just disappears. All we have done is extend the time we have to deal with this mess, and possibly cause more deaths than necessary.
And, I just saw that the POTUS once again tweets it's just like the flu (which doesn't kill 100k Americans/year), further downplaying and extending how long any COVID recovery will take.
Ultimately, the 'economic devastation' you mention is not from the lockdowns, but our complete ineptitude around dealing with pandemic.
Studies like this show that this is a false choice, there is no real option to 'choose the economy' for example. As we saw from studies of the Spanish Flu, cities with late and light lockdowns actually suffered more economically than cities that locked down earlier and tighter because the effects of an un checked (or less well managed) outbreak that lasted longer were so devastating. More people sick and dying is a huge drag on activity, including all the people that have to look after them, and people self-isolate anyway out of fear. Pandemics like this are a juggernaut, there's no real option to ignore and carry on.
The real problem is that we should have locked down differently. Lockdowns were absolutely necessary, but the way which we locked down - what was allowed / restricted and the way we emotionally dealt with the pandemic - was really, really bad.
- Half-assed enforcement, mainly using shame and fear. This leads to good people overcompensating and assholes ignoring the restrictions. Any level of lockdown is better if it's actually enforced on everyone.
- Allowing and restricting all the wrong things. Boston had indoor bars and restaurants allowed but closed schools and gyms, WTF? People continue to work in-person but all leisure activities are cancelled. So (combined with bad enforcement) you are hurting good people and not actually mitigating the virus at the same time.
- Worst of all, not the actual restrictions, but the hopelessness everyone expresses towards them. "Welp, looks like we have to isolate and be depressed for the next 6 months". You can hang out and have fun without spreading the virus, but most people don't even try.
Lockdown without adequate support to mitigate the known negative effects, sure. We know what can happen from a lockdown and can plan accordingly. We also know the long term effects of flu (not nearly as severe as what known about Covid, so even loosely comparing the two is irresponsible).
We may overreact for the unknown effects of Covid, but it's sure convenient to say we should do nothing instead and oops later if you underestimated (which is interestingly exactly what happened at that start of the pandemic and got us to our current death rates). Sad that your preference is all for the sake of leisure and convenience, perpetuating a system dependent on low wage service laborers that are offered no choice in the matter.
We have other options, but a flat refusal to offer or consider any does indeed leave every man for himself. But careful what you ask for, because when you force people into such desperation they will only put up with so much before deciding to take back or destroy it all.
Because we don't/can't do perfect lock-downs -- everyone literally stays home for two-to-six weeks and doesn't move from their home -- you can really think of lock-downs as doing two things.
1. It effectively reduces your population.
Not everyone can stay home, because we still have stuff that has to get done, but say 80-90% of your population can stay home, because they're retired or they have a white collar job that allows them to work from home or because they're children and school is closed or because they've been fired because no one is buying what their job is selling.
This means that instead of 85% of your population needing to catch the disease for it to burn itself out, you're only waiting for it to go through 85% of 10% of your population before it burns itself out. (Unfortunately, because that 10% includes the people who take care of the 0.5% of the population that is most vulnerable, this still kind of sucks for that 0.5%, and you're really waiting for it to go through like 10.5% of your population.)
You'll still see increasing deaths during a lock-down until all of the grocery store workers and doctors and firefighters who are still pretty exposed out in the world catch it and some of them die. This also sucks and is kind of unfair, especially since some of the jobs which are pretty essential weren't particularly great before the pandemic.
2. It effectively reduces the R0 of the disease even among the essential personnel.
The R0 of a disease (last estimated at 5.7 for the coronavirus) is not constant, but depends on the conditions it is spreading in. Even among the essential personnel still out there risking exposure, the R0 is lower with everything shut down than it would be without the lock down, because the lock down still reduces the number of people each essential worker comes into contact with on a given day. Dropping off packages at a hundred doors a day puts you in marginal contact with a lot of people, but it's still less than if you did that and then went out to a bar and a restaurant and a movie afterwards.
Suppose the lock down is dropping the R0 among the active population from 5.7 to 2; that's still not great, but that means that instead of 85% of the 10% of the population still out in the world catching the disease, only 50% of the 10% will be expected to catch it. This is more awesome and less unfair, and also protects the vulnerable populations that come into contact with the essential workforce.
So our imperfect lock downs don't stop the disease cold in its tracks, but it does probably reduce the number of people we expect to catch it from 85% of the population to -- if we're lucky -- 5% of the population.
It stops being "your body" when you're walking around being a vector. I have to get groceries. At my last job, I had to go into the office. Regardless of my risk model, there are reasons I cannot stay home. You are making the decision for everyone around you, and whenever I see someone indoors exercising their freedom to not wear a mask, I wish they could see the cost of that "freedom".
The compromise would have been to actually enforce the lockdown so it can end in 3 weeks. Having a couple of weeks where people still went to bars and ordered takeout was not a lockdown. At least not in the sense that a virus would care about. Plenty of countries did a hard lockdown and enjoyed normal activities afterwards but no, because the "land of the free" can't do a public health (or allow poor people in other countries to get vaccines) we globally got to have multiple waves. You're saying it's not about compliance, but in the countries where people complied they are enjoying a freedom we still are not.
It's better in science to have a false positive than a false negative. Had we not even done that half-assed few months of quasi-confinement (no indoor dining, curbside pickup, no movies, work remotely, otherwise go wild!) the deaths would have been much higher. Remember, we only went into that soft lockdown once cases had started to spike. The federal government knew about it earlier. You don't have to know jack shit about a virus to know that it's probably a good idea to minimize person-person contact until you know jack shit about it? I don't know, I guess that's "radical" in the US, the idea that you might have to make some sacrifices for your neighbors or community or city or state or country.
If you want to lockdown, you can lockdown, and now you are safe. You don't need others to do so, the virus does not travel through windows and walls.
As such the stance is definitionally illogical which makes it flippant - it falls apart under even mild scrutiny.
I've seen about a billion variations on it now, it just gets boring to bat them off. e.g. "if the healthcare system is overwhelmed, you'll die in a minor car crash, so don't go outside, then you won't drive your car or stand near cars, then you can't die in a minor car crash anyway, err... but lockdown though!".
It's tautologically broken. The basic premise is of "not doing X, in order to not do X".
What exactly do you mean by "actually locked down"? That 100% of the population would be prohibited from leaving their homes? What about food? What about medical emergencies? What about a house burning down or a tree falling on the roof? What if a watermain bursts? There are endless edge cases that keep the virus around so when the lockdown ends, all you've done is delayed host exposure a bit. And this ignores the possibility of animals serving as reservoirs of the virus. It also ignores multi-family housing. What if most of the people on the 3rd floor have COVID the first week and then it spreads to the 4th floor the next week, the 5th floor the next, and so on? Now you have people exiting the lockdown who have just been infected and can spread it all over the place.
The only thing a lockdown can do is slow things down in order to have time to get more prepared. The notion that the virus can be extinguished by lockdowns simply is not workable. It's an idea that is attractive because it's simple but only because it ignores the logistic realities of a planet with nearly eight billion people, or on the national level, 330 million people.
It's a false choice. Allowing a pandemic to run rampant would wreck the economy for a lot longer than an effective lockdown. Especially now that a lot of younger people are showing up in ICUs.
China is already done with the hard part. Lock down, get the virus under control, make a lot of test kits, and before long you can rely on mass screening, contract tracing, and targeted isolation, and get people back to work.
> Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.
The choice between "saving people" vs "economy" is a false choice. Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run. People that live in fear of the virus will not consume, and lockdowns reduce the amount of time that the virus is out there.
You can force people to go back to work, but you can't force people to consume.
Exactly and by not locking down properly we have managed to extend the pandemic in the US and its associated quasi lock down leading to our current situation. I agree with your response.
If the lockdown is ineffective, there's not point in doing it so whatever.
If the lockdown is effective, you kill the exponential spread. This is good, but if there's no exponential spread, you haven't actually infected many people at all. When you lift the lockdown, you're close to the same level of vulnerability as when you began. For a virus like this, you likely cannot 'eradicate it' by keeping the lockdown ongoing.
There's no middle ground where you slowly build up immunity across the population at a level hospitals can support. We can't turn the economy off and on again until the virus has had burst spread either.
The lockdown makes a lot of sense for 3 reasons: to learn more about the disease, to gather more PPE for doctors, and to reformat critical systems to run with a healthier population. It's not a bad idea. But it's utility is going to run lower while the cost gets higher. We need to address that.
The virus is obviously for some of the economic impact and the lockdown is obviously responsible for some of the economic impact.
There are plenty of cities and counties which have 0 recorded cases which are going on two months of lockdown at this point. Please realize that people are dying in those cities Because of the lockdown, and lives are being destroyed. As you say, The lockdown might very well be better for the economy in the long run, but the root cause will not be eliminated. That does not mean that there couldn’t have been or can’t be a better version of the lockdown that is less destructive
You seem to think I'm advocating for hard lockdown, which I never said.
I see this pattern in COVID discussions all the time. Someone claims COVID is overblown, people push back, then the response is always "yeah but lockdowns are horrible!". It's largely a strawman.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people claim that we must lock down or that the virus is forcing us to do this or that, as opposed to it being a political choice based on tradeoffs.
In fact, I predict that after things open up, they will not shut back down, no matter how bad the second wave of the outbreak gets. People simply won't accept it.
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