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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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To quote myself:

Fallacy of ad hoc post hoc justification

As mentioned in the first item, the Covid hawks’ basic model of how a lockdown works assumes a simple linear relationship between how restrictive the lockdown is (and the degree of public compliance) and the rate of cases/hospitalisations/deaths. When a lockdown is implemented, followed by a spike in cases and deaths, the standard response is to blame overly permissive restrictions or poor public compliance. Conversely, if a lockdown is relaxed and there is no spike, this will be attributed to an exceptionally cautious public: an “unofficial” lockdown.

But sooner or later, these simplistic explanations for the failure of the model to describe reality begin to strain credibility, and Covid hawks are forced to introduce additional epicycles into their model. When faced with incontrovertible evidence that cases failed to spike even in the absence of exceptional voluntary compliance, Covid hawks will begrudgingly acknowledge assorted secular factors which likely contributed to the rate of transmission: “lots of people in Sweden live alone”, “Florida is close to the equator”, “there’s a seasonal component to transmission” etc.

The reason this is fallacious is not that these secular factors didn’t contribute to the spread of the virus and rates of hospitalisation and deaths - of course they did. It’s fallacious because these secular factors are only ever considered post hoc, after the limitations of lockdowns and other restrictions have been empirically exposed. Covid hawks never consider in advance of enacting or supporting a lockdown whether or not the lockdown passes a cost-benefit analysis, after taking these secular factors into account. Surely it would be trivial to find or estimate some key metrics about a particular region (the season, presence or absence of land borders, the percentage of adults who live alone, the rate of obesity etc.), estimate the expected “return” of the proposed restrictions, and input all of these variables into a formula which would indicate whether the proposed restrictions will pass a cost-benefit analysis. Many Western governments were already producing models which forecast cases and deaths conditional on the predicted rate of public compliance; what am I proposing seems like a logical extension of the foregoing.

But aggressive Covid hawks are reluctant to acknowledge secular factors which impact upon the rate of Covid transmission, and not just because these other factors complicate their simple, easy to grasp model of the world. Whether or not to enact a lockdown is supposed to be an easy and straightforward question: when you enact a lockdown, cases and deaths go down; when you don’t, they go up. Once you have acknowledged the fact that factors other than the lockdown itself might affect the rate of Covid transmission and serious illness, you’re only a step away from recognising that these other factors might dwarf or even negate the benefits of the lockdown itself. This in turn implies the uncomfortable possibility that locking down might sometimes be a bad thing on net: that you might throw thousands of people out of work or disrupt cancer screenings for weeks at a time for no reason, breaking a dozen eggs with no omelette to show for it.

To avoid confronting this discomfiting conclusion, lockdown proponents are incentivised to downplay the impact of secular factors, or deny them altogether. You will still, to this day*, encounter Australians and New Zealanders who will proudly declare that it was their lockdown measures (and their lockdown measures alone) which got Covid under control within their borders; and who will become very defensive when you suggest that their success with managing Covid might have something to do with the fact that both nations are geographically isolated islands without land borders.

"Lots of people in Sweden live alone" was an ad hoc justification I saw a lot during Covid to explain how the country were able to maintain a low rate of Covid transmission without ever officially locking down. And indeed, this is true. For reference, Sweden's Covid case count and death count per capita currently stands at 269,511 and 2,682, respectively.

After Sweden, the country with second-highest percentage of people living alone is Lithuania, which locked down and nonetheless saw 525,154 Covid cases, and 3,718 Covid deaths per capita. So much for that as a causal explanation.

The picture's not much better when looking at population density in Europe. Directly above Sweden is Latvia, which locked down and whose Covid case and death counts per capita were roughly the same as Lithuania. Next is Estonia (which admittedly did have a slightly lower Covid death count per capita than Sweden), Lithuania, then Montenegro (472,238; 4,532), Belarus (dramatically lower than Sweden on both metrics), then Bulgaria (195,753 cases per capita; 5,661 deaths per capita - literally second-highest in the world after Peru).

This is not to argue that lockdowns exacerbate Covid metrics: it's merely to argue, as @The_Nybbler did above, that a simplistic model of "impose lockdowns in any given country -> Covid cases go down -> Covid deaths go down" is extremely lacking in predictive power, and the effect of lockdowns will likely be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (percentage of population who are obese, average population age etc.). In other words: if you were to show you a list of anonymised countries' Covid cases per capita, Covid deaths per capita and case fatality rates and told you that some of them had locked down and some hadn't: I think you'd find it extremely difficult to identify which was which.

As soon as you say "lockdowns do work in general, but happened not to work in location X because of [ad hoc factor]", consider how easy it was for me to disprove the "Sweden didn't need to lock down because of population density/people living alone" ad hoc hypothesis.

*I published this article over a year ago, but this statement is literally true: earlier today I got into an argument with a guy who argued that of course lockdowns work - look at Australia and New Zealand! His argument, as I understand it, was that lockdowns work when used in concert with strict border controls, but don't work otherwise. Which struck me as an extremely roundabout way of saying "strict border controls are an effective way of stopping the spread of Covid; lockdowns unnecessary".

Well there is also the point that we don’t really care about covid deaths; we care about deaths. Sweden all cause death for the period looks great! Even better than the #s you posted.

You're absolutely right. I noted in another comment that, during the period, Sweden had fewer excess deaths per capita than the EU average.

My recollection is that after Omni wave they had the best #s in Europe.

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