I think you are very mistaken if you think that.
Lockodwn appeared to work, but given that it takes at least 20 days from catching covid to dying, you can see in many countries that the curves for deaths were flattening off well before lockdown could have been the cause. Uruguay, Japan, Sweden, Belarus didn't lockdown, and don't stand out in any way for their numbers.
Do you honestly think that the lockdowns saved lives, rather than simply delaying deaths for several months? Keep in mind that the lockdowns are merely a rate limit, not a cure.
We are already in an uncontrolled situation re: covid. We are not seeing millions of deaths. In most parts of the country literally nothing is being done, yet we are not seeing bodies piled up in the streets.
I don't think that lockdown is an instant recipe for covid handling success. There are many countries that "performed poorly" despite going into lockdown.
Also, I think you are missing the point. The swedish strategy was based on people following the recommendations over a long period of time. Locking down is not a sustainable strategy, especially when you believe that the pandemic might last for several years.
Clickbait title. The author isn’t saying “lockdowns don’t work“, he is hypothesising that other measures are enough. He bases this on the fact that deaths start dropping 15 days after lockdown when they should only reasonably be expected to start dropping 21 days after lockdown.
Inane argument:
1. many days before a country goes into lockdown, things are bad and people are volunteerily going into lockdown.
2. He would need to wait for more than say 30 days after lockdown to see if lockdown did affect death rate. Especially if the tallying of deaths has many days of lag before numbers get recorded to their real values.
3. He assumes deaths are a wall at 21 days, instead of thinking there could be a spread starting at less than 21 days.
4. When a health system is under stress, perhaps people die quicker than his assumption of 21 days.
Generally a poor article, needs more time and data before he can make even a little sense of the data. Another economist looking at cherry picked data and jumping to conclusions from it.
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You can't make a half-counterfactual comparison like that because the COVID rate may have been impacted by the lockdown.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that lockdowns worked smashingly well. Then, you'd see a) very few COVID deaths and b) relatively more "side effects". That is exactly what you're using to argue that they didn't work.
I don‘t believe you. There‘s no country where the number of cases and deaths didn‘t go down after a strong lockdown. It worked even across the USA in spite of the president demotivating people to do the measures.
The lockdowns work. You‘d have to somehow prove your claim for me to believe you.
lockdown has had no effect on cases/deaths. just look at the data in germany or other countries which have lifted lockdown since 4 weeks. no difference.
Fine but this isn't evidence that lockdowns don't work, they clearly do work, it's just that in many places people put their freedom above other people's chance of getting sick and dying in Covid. If it was a higher risk of death I think that calculus would change.
> The death rates in these countries also peaked about two weeks into lockdown, way too soon for lockdown to have had any impact.
On the contrary, that's exactly what you'd see if lockdown had maximum effect.
Suppose lockdown were totally effective, such that nobody contracted a new infection of the disease after policies become effective. In that best-case situation, the medical system would still have to deal with everyone who contracted the illness up to this point.
Because the virus spreads exponentially, the curve of "newly-contracted infections" would come to a peak just before lockdown and then fall to zero afterwards. Those cases would then go through their normal progression, and some would die -- about two weeks after contracting the illness.
This single observation isn't enough to conclude that lockdown is effective since it doesn't rule out other possibilities for a declining death rate (medical treatments, bad reporting, etc), but it's certainly not evidence against the efficacy of lockdown policies.
> The death rates are also following a similar bell curve across the world, seemingly independent of any lockdown policy.
A "bell curve" for disease progression implies a typical logistic curve for the number of total cases. That in turn implies that the community is nearing a 'herd immunity' level.
No nation in the world has anywhere near 'herd immunity' yet. With the highly-transmissible nature of nCoV, more than half of a population would need to be infected to confer herd immunity.
> The countries that have done well implemented test and trace early,
The problem here is that you can't implement test and trace late. Public health officials have a finite contact-tracing capability. One community transmission exceeds this threshold, the only tool left is lockdown -- specifically to reduce transmission down to the point where tracing is again possible.
I live in Spain. It's about one month and 7 days of lockdown and the official data isn't realistic. Although we are having lower numbers, it will take many months of lockdown to stop having deaths. I don't think this strategy of full lockdown will help, to be honest, we should lockdown risk factor people.
You're cherry picking data points. JP Morgan amongst others have studied all the data and found no correlation or even declines in infection rates before and after lockdowns:
Sweden is about middle of the pack. Most of that is because of the virus getting into care homes, which a lockdown can't prevent anyway given the staff have to come and go, and blocking the elderly from all visits forever is deeply inhumane. Given their age many of them would rather catch the virus than live longer but always be alone, and have said so.
So far it appears lockdowns didn't affect the virus much at all. However, they are definitely killing people if you look at the changes in suicide rates, the backlogs for cancer treatment that have built up and so on.
The problem with believing that Taiwan and South Korea are doing better for fundamental reasons is that it may simply be random. Japan did very little or nothing, probably due to trying to avoid the Olympics getting cancelled, and had similarly good results. The differences in testing levels and definitions between countries alone make comparisons based on reported infection and death rates meaningless.
> The fact that it doubled everyone's risk of dying disproves that.
It really doesn't.
> It would be pretty bold to make that claim. Do you have any reliable source to indicate that it was?
"Pandemics kill people in two ways, said Chris Whitty at the start of the Covid outbreak: directly and indirectly, via disruption.
He was making the case for caution amidst strong public demand for lockdown, stressing the tradeoffs.
While Covid deaths were counted daily, the longer-term effects would take years to come through. The only real way of counting this would be to look at ‘excess deaths’, i.e. how many more people die every month (or year) compared to normal.
That data is now coming through."[0]
EDIT - adding:
"COVID-19 lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions,” according to this peer-reviewed new academic study. The draconian policy failed to significantly reduce deaths while imposing substantial social, cultural, and economic costs.
“This study is the first all-encompassing evaluation of the research on the effectiveness of mandatory restrictions on mortality,” according to one of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Lars Jonung, professor emeritus at the Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies at Sweden’s Lund University, “It demonstrates that lockdowns were a failed promise. They had negligible health effects but disastrous economic, social and political costs to society. Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times.” "
and
"The Herby-Jonung-Hanke meta-analysis found that lockdowns, as reported in studies based on stringency indices in the spring of 2020, reduced mortality by 3.2 per cent when compared to less strict lockdown policies adopted by the likes of Sweden
This means lockdowns prevented 1,700 deaths in England and Wales, 6,000 deaths across Europe, and 4,000 deaths in the United States."
and
"The research concludes that, unless substantial alternative evidence emerges, lockdowns should be ‘rejected out of hand’ to control future pandemics."
Other countries used lockdowns to slow down the spread of covid. But since covid is very contagious, it will eventually infect most of the population, and vulnerable people will eventually die from it.
That's one takeaway: lockdowns only delay the inevitable. Sweden just ripped the bandage off fast, and got all the deaths over with quickly.
As a consequence, there is the other big takeaway, the elephant in the room: covid doesn't kill more people than any other respiratory pathogen.
"There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission"
Sigh :( There is actually an enormous amount of doubt about this. The Nature article is a small improvement in accuracy from their previous positions, but is still fundamentally incorrect and shows that the scientific elites are still in denial about the depths of their failure.
If their beliefs about lockdown effectiveness and necessity were anywhere near accurate, Sweden would have the highest COVID death tolls out there. In fact they sit at the bottom of the European COVID mortality league table, with both far less impact from COVID countermeasures and also some of the lowest COVID mortality.
The studies claiming lockdowns work are junk science. They typically reach their conclusions by comparing actual mortality to predictions from models and then observing the models predicted far more. They go from this to "lockdowns work". This isn't a valid inference because the gap can also be explained by the models being wrong, as indeed they were proven to be many times.
Lockdowns are highly effective in models that assume extremely localized and transient transmission, a.k.a. the droplet model. In the real world they appear to have no effect on COVID and this is best explained by transmission being dominated by aerosols. In the aerosol model SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas. It can hang in the air for long periods, enter via the eyeballs and spread through air ducts. This model should have been seriously considered by scientists at every point because SARS-1 appears to have spread this way, but they ignored it. Instead epidemiologists simply assumed a particular form of transmission, along with many other things.
I think this has to do with chance. They had a very low excess mortality, better than many other countries. Excess mortalitiy is also influenced by different reporting standards but in many cases far more reliable than number of infected and death by Covid.
So yes, it probably worked quite well.
Although New Zealand and Australia also did very well, they have even fewer death compared to previous years. But overall the effectiveness of lockdowns should be put under the scope since an ineffective meassure that poses existential problems for many industries should be considerable at least.
No, the truth is immediately apparent, and the post you're replying to is mentioning part of it: we know how many people died, and have good enough data on causes. Lockdowns caused some deaths, with alcoholism being part of it. It also saved quite a few lives by reducing the number of traffic accidents. And no matter how you slice it, nothing comes close to the number of actual COVID deaths, let alone the number of deaths we would have seen if we had let the first waves infect everyone. That would have been abut 5x as much, or 1.5 million, not including the problem that medical care and the economy would have completely collapsed in such a scenario.
Anyway... "let's wait until we have all the data" has been my favorite losing argument starting in like week 5 of the pandemic, when the deaths started mounting in Sweden.
It's not that clear that a lockdown helps. NY closed the earliest in the US but was the hardest hit nevertheless. It has now mostly reopened and cases aren't going up. Chances are we may have reached herd immunity there.
I have seen recently that serology tests in Italy have shown the same outcome for people who were locked down than essential workers who were not locked down (and mortality stats in the UK told a similar story a couple of months ago).
Also the evolution of deaths in Sweden followed the same shape and timing than all the other european countries who locked down, suggesting the peak had more to do with the natural evolution of the infection than as a result of a lockdown.
And as far as I know, the WHO does not support lockdowns.
I suppose things like how well care homes were protected probably mattered a lot more.
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