This is the obvious response and I am confused every time I see an article criticizing these lockdowns. They all seem to be written from the American herd immunity point of view, neglecting that we paved the way to herd immunity with the bodies of a million of our own citizens.
You do realise that there can be multiple purposes for an action? The most pressing at the time the lock down was implemented was preventing the hospital system being overwhelmed, but there are others like allowing time for better treatments to be developed.
Looking at the infection rates even in Europe the idea of herd immunity was always doomed. Not even Sweden is anywhere near herd immunity and their economy is as trashed as their neighbours.
If you're going to make an argument that lockdowns shouldn't have happened based on herd immunity, arguing that herd immunity measures are nonsensical doesn't really help your case...
Yes, we are considerably closer to immunity from death from disease now that vaccinations are in place. That also doesn't make your argument we needed more people to catch the disease when it was relatively deadly any stronger.
It's not "rocket science" or any kind of science when you insist that your stats work except when they don't, and that lockdown timings both didn't let enough people get the disease and let too many people get the disease.
>It's basically condemning them to working nonstop for months if not years
how come? wouldn't without lockdown the herd immunity with that R0 would come in like 2-3 months (and during that period the vulnerable people would have to be locked down), while with lockdown we're already 3 months into it without reasonable lockdown based endgame in sight?
It’s also unclear whether the lockdown is accomplishing anything. We have enormous economic damage, lots of boredom, no dramatic decrease of cases in most places, an unimpressive amount of progress toward herd immunity, and no meaningful increase in testing, prevention, treatment ability, or clever policies from any level of US leadership.
In other words, what have we accomplished by locking everything down? Delaying large numbers of deaths by a few months?
Extending the lockdowns until we maybe have a vaccine in 2021 does not seem like a great idea.
Genuinely curious; where is the evidence and statistical analysis that shows the variance of infection rates across the world can be explained solely (or overwhelmingly, as you suggest) by lockdowns?
Just so you know, around 3 million people die in the US every year, many of the million people you expect to die would have ended up being counted in that 3 million background statistic.
More importantly, herd immunity is the ONLY solution on the table right now, the lockdown is not about stopping the virus in its tracks. It is about spreading it out over a period of time.
I would argue that's entirely the wrong conversation. First off the argument is in bad faith. The argument was don't lock down and protect the vulnerable populations. But then no actual policies/money were put forward to protect them.
Second, this as with most issues isn't a black and white issue. There were good policies and bad policies and we need to figure out which things worked and which ones didn't. The biggest question we need to ask is how much do we want to spend on public health.
Third, this argument isn't taking into account viral mutation. A Billion test tubes walking around is going to produce much more mutation than a Million.
And Last look at most of the Asian countries, which had much stronger lock down policies, Deaths/100k compared to the US.
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.
They don’t have yet herd immunity and their results are worse with respect to all comparable countries that had a lockdown. What you say is categorically false.
Oh wow this is such an idiotic article I do not know what to say. One of the excuses they used is that hey the virus is already here and spreading so why the lockdowns?
Your last paragraph demonstrates a number of profound and fundamental misunderstandings.
First, herd immunity does not benefit from more bodies per se. You are portraying it as some sort of wall, where taking members out of the wall reduces the effectiveness. It is not like that at all. The proportion of previously exposed individuals required for herd immunity effects goes down as the frequency of potential spreading interactions goes down.
Second, there is no correlation between lockdown and lower vitamin D.
Third, we have clear data showing a profound reduction in the spread of other respiratory viruses (RSV, rhino, influenza). So, we have had many fewer deaths during lockdown that in previous years. A win, and yet you characterize it as a loss. Odd.
There was an episode on Planet Money that ran cost benefit analysis and their conclusion was that it makes sense to lock down because just trying to get to herd immunity will cost more.
The point of locking down everyone is to slow down the spread of the virus through the entire population, which protects the high-risk people from accidental exposure, until a vaccine can be developed and deployed. That way we get herd immunity without killing the percentage of people who can't survive a full infection, but will be just fine with a vaccination.
Having healthy people isolated is not about protecting the healthy people. It's about stopping the healthy people from spreading the disease to the high-risk people.
Ok, fair enough. To be honest though, this quote that you just posted:
"Lockdowns also took place in nations around the earth with entirely different economic and governmental systems to the US, so unless you're a believer in some sort of hidden global order that managed to get the Chinese, the Norwegians, the Germans and the US to all do more or less the same thing, then the existence of lockdowns seems to A LOT more to do with a virus than some cover up of contemporary capitalism."
That makes a ton of sense and is a great argument! I wish you had replied to the original comment with this instead. I know you aren't arguing in bad faith, and I apologize for being a stickler on this.
Yes, basically everywhere lockdown started as a “flattening the curve” and then at some point became “everyone needs to be kept out of harms way until everyone is vaccinated”.
That isn’t an American experience it was the same almost everywhere lock down was initiated.
So I am not sure it makes sense to blame it on Trump haters.
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