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Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom. This time of year will always remind me of those eerie first couple of weeks of lockdown. The cherry blossom trees, in all their Spring glory, standing lonely in the usually heaving central park at lunch time. Driving down the main motorway in and out of my city and not seeing a single other car at 5pm rush-hour on a weekday. The ease which unfounded terror was spread through the population during those weeks was eye-opening. The unquestioning acquiescence of all my fellow citizens made me realise for the first time just how subject to the whims of authority this society was and just how fragile and precious was my own freedom.
For the first couple of weeks, as the virus’s spread through Europe was meticulously tracked and broadcast, as carefully curated images of overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins were plastered across our screens, although I was already vehemently arguing against any imposed restrictions, I still retained some sympathy for the scared and frightened masses. But as the early data coming out of Italy and other places started to emerge and was so evidently at odds with the fearmongering propaganda all around me, my sympathy quickly gave way first to bewilderment and then slowly to anger.
As The Science™ took deeper hold and lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve turned into lockdown for the summer turned into second lockdown turned into third lockdown and still the people clamoured for more restrictions and railed angrily against even the mildest suggestion that maybe we should ease up on the tyranny. Any moment now, I thought, surely any moment now the people will break and rise up against this imprisonment. All their lives they’ve been told that they live in a free democracy and now they’re happy to be essentially locked inside their homes, told they can’t visit friends and family, told they can’t touch or hug their family members, even if they’re dying, while with their own eyes they should be able to see that the virus for which all this suffering is supposed to be in honour of is so much less potent than they were told, while with their own eyes they should be able to see the hypocrisy of being ordered that grandparents are not to hold or even visit their new-born grandchildren while thousands marched shoulder to shoulder in the streets in celebration protest of the death of a criminal in a land 4,000 miles away. But no, the people never rose up. As Orwell, who understood the crowd better than any, once observed “Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock” and so it proved as my cowed peers meekly submitted to every curtailment of their freedom.
I will always remember lying in an empty field, reading a book in the warm sunshine and being buzzed by a police helicopter for being outdoors while not undertaking my mandated single-allotted daily exercise. I will always remember being told by the police to move on while sat in the deserted central park. I will always remember the multiple other times I was interrogated by the police for not cowering at home like a good citizen. I will always remember the fear in the eyes of my brother’s girlfriend as she shied away from anybody who got within two metres of her. I will always remember the depths of persuasion I had to employ to convince two of my friends to come and spend a night in the countryside with me during summer 2020, and the lies they had to tell their mothers to even be allowed out (and back in) their homes. I will always remember my work colleague who got suspended for hugging another colleague. I will always remember being kept apart from my partner in a foreign country due to closed borders. I will always remember being told by my own parents that I was not welcome in their house.
Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom and life has returned to normal. The traffic is heavy and the parks are busy again. The Black Mirror-esque dystopian future that we got a horrifying glimpse of has faded away. Even the predictable economic and public-health consequences of lockdown have somewhat smoothed out. Covid came up in conversation the other day and my dad glibly remarked, “Covid? That’s ancient history now!” The world has moved on but, for me, the memory of Covid lockdowns still dominates my outlook. There is still a deep rage within me at the brutal illustration of the state’s power to strip away my freedom, cheered on wholeheartedly by the electorate. There is still a disbelieving resentment at how readily the populace succumbed to government control and willingly followed directives that just six months previous they would have loudly decried as inhumane. The hypocrisy of lockdown policies was responsible for a violent swing in my own politics, from casual left-wing socialist to hard libertarian, but most of all the lockdowns destroyed my faith in my fellow humans. The stark demonstration of just how easily manufactured-fear convinced the country to follow ridiculous commands replaced my underlying faith & trust in humanity with a smouldering disdain. The betrayal of even my own family, as they chose to follow the orders of tyrants and closed the door on their own child, drove a dagger into my heart.
I remember the lockdowns and I’m still angry.
General comment on this thread, not a warning for any individual in particular:
Rarely do I see so many reports on posts that are almost entirely "This guy's opinion makes me mad."
The thread is interesting and obviously evokes lots of feelings. What depresses me about it is not any of the discourse about Covid and vaccinations and lockdowns. It's the constant reminder that on a forum where people supposedly value free speech, the average poster still just wants everyone they disagree with to be shut up.
Contemplate that while whining about vaccinations and lockdowns.
I’m surprised that tensions are running so high in this thread (myself included). Meanwhile this forum has unusually civil discussions on many topics that would devolve into nasty flame wars pretty much anywhere else.
I joined TheMotte right around the start of Covid. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people did. It was one of the last places where people could talk freely about things that were radically changing their daily life. There was never anything like Covid before and hopefully never will be again.
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That's an interesting perspective. I'm angry not because of the lockdowns, but because of the ignorance, politically-motivated thinking, and the incompetence.
As some choice examples of incompetence, I remember when the CDC and FDA blocked independent PCR tests, requiring that all coronavirus samples be shipped to Atlanta for testing. Then the "public health professionals" and the "medical ethicists" decried individual screening, as people cannot be trusted to interpret test results for themselves.
The CDC argued against testing symptomatic individuals in the general population for "wuhan flu", then declared that there was "no evidence of domestic transmission". The NPR listeners in my circles twisted themselves into knots explaining why private testing for novel diseases of pandemic concern is bad, actually, and also argued that the CDC was being intentionally hobbled by Trump.
Then the CDC required that private tests be validated against their in-house test suite - which contained faulty reagents.
Then the CDC rescued a bunch of Americans from Wuhan, put them together in group quarantine for 2 weeks, and didn't test them for a disease which spreads very well in confined spaces and has a 1-2 week incubation period. If a single person had been infected, they would have infected the whole group, then promptly been discharged into the population. We don't know whether this happened, because they were never tested.
USCIS started implementing epidemiological questionaires for people on planes, but there was no enforcement of quarantines, and the illicit means to walk across the borders were still available. I think the combination of pro-"open borders" with pro-"epidemiological controls" is a type of doublethink, but I'm the outgroup.
Then CDC and "public health experts" insisted that the disease wasn't airborne, despite strong epidemiological studies from other countries demonstrating airborne-only transmission: spread between members of a choir who had been religious about handwashing, examples of people infecting each other by walking past each other on the underground, a Daegu call center and a Daegu restaurant where probability of being infected was highly correllated with air handling direction rather than surfaces touched. Despite this, masks were not recommended.
Probably because the Chinese diaspora had already raided all the available mask supply in the continental U.S. and "public health officials" were afraid of inciting racism. I was friends with a member of the Chinese diaspora working for an American subsidiary of a Chinese manufacturing conglomerate. They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.
Then seemingly in April 2020, NYC hospitals were overflowing with positive cases, so they shifted positive cases into nursing homes. I may remind you that even then we knew that "CoViD-19" primarily killed the elderly.
And of course in May we learned that protesting was a public health risk, unless it was protesting for BLM. And in California restaurants and hair stylists were forced to close, unless you were friends with Gavin Newsom.
A lot of these closures would have been unjustifiable were it possible to track and trace efficiently, but there was a "shortage of qualified nurses" and "lack of budget" to do contact tracing as late as August 2020.
At risk of doxxing myself, I was in Korea at the time. In lieu of lockdowns, the Moon administration implemented effective procedures for figuring out who had been exposed, and effective tests to detect illness. (TBF, there was one short lockdown in Daegu before tests were available.) Instead of taking nurses out of patient care and being short on contact tracers, local government administrators were retasked into disease tracking. (Admittedly, this is a lot easier when there is a universal civil service exam: Local government administrators in Korea all pass some threshold of competence.)
Exposed people were identified by credit card purchase databases and CCTV (which were examined by the above administrators), and those individuals got texts asking them to quarantine at home if they were suspected to have been exposed. Breaking a quarantine order was a crime, but also the local government would leave two weeks of food and supplies outside your door so you didn't go hungry or run out of toilet paper.
Instead of banning private testing, the Korean government encouraged private companies and labs to develop tests. We had effective testing by late February, and by late March PCR testing was widely available enough to be required (for free) if you were showing symptoms. Exposed individuals were tested at the beginning and end of their quarantine period.
All people entering the country from abroad were required to test and quarantine, and this was remarkably effective at delaying the entry of new variants until they had evolved lower lethality, and until old people could be immunized.
The highly effective tracking and tracing revealed events with high chances of superspreading: raves and dance clubs, church choirs, "coin-room" (phone booth) karaoke, drunken gatherings. Events with a history of superspreading were banned, but if you weren't a fan of large or drunken gatherings, life mostly went on as normal. (A friend of mine got married in 2020. There was no reception and the audience was limited to 100 people, but the wedding happened in real life and the happy couple has a bunch of unmasked photos.)
In lieu of allowing the Chinese diaspora to buy and export all the available medical masks, the government requisitioned Samsung to quietly buy a few thousand tons of meltblown fiber, and banned export when it was becoming a problem. Starting in March/April, everyone in the country could visit a pharmacy with their national ID to receive two N95 masks per week. This was actually effective at minimizing transmission on the subway, and hospital staff were able to get their allocation, too.
In late 2020 there was a presidential election, and it was held in well-ventilated outdoor tents with free gloves and masks provided instead of by legalizing mail-in voting and the resultant loss of trust in voting systems.
It wasn't perfect: masks were required in parks / when outside, which is not a time of high transmission. Kids still did school on zoom. Workplaces installed infrared cameras at the entrance, which wasn't very effective. Daily epidemiological questionnaires were required to pass newly installed turnstiles at my workplace, and those access controls have persisted and made visiting old coworkers impossible. The rest of the testing and tracing Orwellian panopticon was only easy to dismantle because it was expensive and time consuming, and I think people were justified in their concerns that it might not be dismantled.
But I guess my point is that the US (and the UK) completely fudged it up when it came to lockdowns. There were demonstrated means available to achieve both disease control and functional life, but the US government is too incompetent, ignorant, and (likely) corrupt.
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I feel like I am now probably in the Covid denier anti-vaxx camp. And I believe it’s correct. I have a reasonable basis for believing I am usually smarter than others, but I think the true science says it was rational that I locked in before lock-downs but quit doing anything 2 months later (as an under 40 not fat person). I only got vaccinated once because I had an asymptomatic covid case and the first jab (probably signaling an immune response from having covid) knocked me out for 2 days. Which to me both signaled I had immunity and it’s just stupid to take a shot that puts you in bed.
Locking down did make sense to me as we didn’t have a full understanding of the virus for a few weeks.
Questions I would asks would be why were politicians probably a full week late shutting down. And why did locking down, 5 doses of vaccine (for younger people), wearing a stupid cotton masks became things for so long. Was it:
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Covid lockdowns were directly responsible for the end of my dream career, my marriage, and my faith in humanity. Six years later, I share in your anger as I navigate a similar PTSD this time of year.
I can match you 2 for 3 although I did pretty much stop dating as well.
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The people didn't rise up, as they were told that these are temporary measures, which they indeed were, stupid as many of them were. The conspiracy theory crowd - insofar as it still remembers Covid and hasn't moved out to other topics - tends to nowadays just take continuous victory laps over how "conspiracy theorists are still 100% correct" whenever some authority admits that some of the measures were less-well-than-thought out or there's news about lab leak possibility being considered or whatever. However, they confidently predicted that the sheeple are wrong about all this being temporary and its just going to be an endless cycle of lockdowns and mandatory vaxx from here to eternity. It wasn't. That probably has a lot to do with why it's been forgotten so quickly (it shouldn't be, it should be pored over in detail for lessons on how to answer similar crises better in the future.)
I think you’re correct that the claims of “temporary measures” was why people didn’t rebel. It’s how most tyrannies begin. No dictator has ever marched to the steps of his Capitol claiming that he’s going to permanently end all civil rights and liberties, it’s always claimed as a temporary measure needed to meet some crisis and of course everyone should go along until the danger is passed. Humans are simply not built for recognizing that first step as the danger it is. I think most of it goes back to our beginning as humans in tribes. A claim of lions in the bushes turns off the rational brain and moves humans back to Stone Age tribes where the strong guy will save us if we do exactly what they say.
It’s one reason I am democracy skeptical. Most humans are better off being a follower and not suited at all to lead or build or invent. We are 90% peasants and a couple of inventors and thinkers and leaders. Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?
I'm sure the remnants of the Ancien Régime were asking themselves the same question all those years in Austria.
To give you a less quippy answer, I think the most persuasive argument for me is a moral one. People should have a say and a stake in how their lives are run. I'm not confident enough to claim it's a universal, but I think it's not a controversial claim to say the majority of humanity has an instinctual desire to be the masters of their own destiny, whatever compromises they have to make of their autonomy in the current socio-political-economic structure of the world. I mean, freedom is arguably the single most popular ideological concept there's ever been, with all but the most extreme authoritarians and totalitarians at least attempting to appeal to it. I think it's fundamentally a right you deserve, to at least have the modicum of political power your suffrage gives you in modern liberal democracies. I'd prefer much more devolved and local systems, though.
But for those who don't share my moral principles, how about avoiding violent, anti-elite revolutions? Do you really want to go back to killing hundreds of thousands of peasants because it's important to keep a rich, powerful guys club exclusive? Not to mention that, poor short-term electoral incentives to policy aside, democratic regimes tend to have much better long term capacity to self-correct. Whereas if dear leader decides to wage a hopeless, 13-year-long failing war to retain a pointless colonial empire, there's no formal, reliable mechanism to force a change of leadership or even policy. Have you always approved of your mayor, your governor, your president? Have you ever wanted somebody else in charge? And if the answer is yes, are you prepared to plan and execute a revolution or coup of your own, or to participate in or support one?
If not, I would suggest you are either one of the peasants, or you do, in fact, actually like the idea of democracy.
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Given how much effort went into censoring the views they were right about, the victory laps are completely justified, even if you can find some they were wrong about.
Yes its not the being right that makes me angry. Its the continued lying. Nature still won't publish the lab leak evidence. Apparently (according to Matt Ridley) they went from "not enough evidence" to "everybody already knows this no point in publishing it." I'm angry because my government paid to make the common cold MORE contagious, released it on the world, lied about it, made a vaccine that didn't work and was worse than the cold, and lied some more. And told anyone that objected toany of this that they were outre and people should exclude them.
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Most conspiracy theorists correctly recognized that the lockdowns were too retarded to be the new equilibrium(and indeed, one merely needed to remember things over the course of several weeks to recognize that). They may have predicted other outcomes from the lockdowns that did not happen, but not 'lockdowns forever'.
The dumbest COVID conspiracy that I widely heard IRL was that Tom Wolf imposed the restrictions because he hated the bar and restaurant industry and wanted to kill it entirely. These same people said he needed to be voted out during the next election and were disappointed when I told them that he was already on his second term, confirming that they had no idea about state politics whatsoever.
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Overall it was amusing to witness, there were so many absurdities I'm sure that most will be forgotten, if they aren't already. For me this was the highlight of the whole thing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E2yXwUm5TNs
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I personally think that COVID appeared plausibly enough like an apocalyptic bioweapon that Trump should have taken just about any measure necessary, no matter how authoritarian, including martial law and suspension of elections, to minimize its spread. But I also think that if he'd even leaned in that direction, it would simply have been the left rather than the right convinced in the end that it was some kind of tyrannical hoax.
I mean, that's exactly what the Left did, initially. When the idea of Covid effectively being a Chinese-derived flu and talk of ceasing travel/immigration from Asian countries, it was the Left as a whole piling out and going on about hugging a Chinese person today.
Then, when it finally arrived, the Left were the ones driving Lockdown efforts, with the Right being turned into Covid-deniers.
And then BLM happened. And we all know how that turned out. So...
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I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late. There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually, and all any lockdown measures did was "flatten the curve". Which they did do, but with great cost and little benefit. As soon as we lost containment it would have been better to focus on ramping up healthcare readiness and otherwise let people and the economy get on with their lives.
And if Trump was actually a giga genius he would have gone authoritarian just to get the left going anti-lockdown and then let their control of the media make that spread and dominate the manufactured consensus. Sure the right-wing would be mad at the left for spreading disease and killing their grandparents, but that happened anyway and the economy would be in much better shape.
Plenty of countries where it didn't (Korea, Japan, Taiwan being the clear-cut cases). That no western country managed the pandemic as well as those three was a policy choice.
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You know, while COVID was a bad time in India, the sheer poverty of the country saved us from the ridiculously prolonged lockdowns. Sure, we had them for maybe 2 or 3 months in early 2020, and then another one in late 2020 or early 2021 for the delta wave (much worse than the first one). But it quickly became apparent that society and the government itself would collapse if the majority of people weren't allowed to work. Also, it turned out that the revenue from liquor taxes was rather load bearing for the budget, and awkward adjustments were made quite quickly. The average person stopped regularly masking by early 2021, though I still had to wear one (and wanted to) till the middle of the year.
It's unfortunate that I was deemed an essential worker and had to suffer through it all, including work in overloaded Covid ICUs. We literally ran out of oxygen. The crematoria really did melt from overuse. N95s? I got one every month and had to wash it well past the point of usefulness. Caught the damn bug 4 times at the very least, and that's only considering the times I bothered to get tested. I could have used a break.
Anyway, I think it quickly became clear by the middle of 2020, well past reasonable doubt, that blanket lockdowns made little sense, and that only the elderly and sick needed special attention. What a farce.
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I remember a friend in the extra-lockdown-loving Australia being told by police to hurry home by curfew. He'd gone out to get some Taco Bell and got a bunch of shit for it.
The average Australian spent less time locked down that the average Brit or American - only Melbourne had an extra-long lockdown.
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Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID. I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic. The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines or effective antivirals, and there was a real fear of running out of ventilators.
Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly. Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool). Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary. And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.
Covid was built on a lie. We knew the hysteria was overblown not in mid 2020, but in March, before the first lockdowns in the western world, with the Diamond Princess. We knew it posed no danger to young, healthy people. We knew it was less contagious than commonly claimed. And the establishment just went and lied, lied, lied to push an agenda.
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Wow. Are you incapable of just admitting you were wrong and apologize?
It is honestly incredible how wrong so many you were and how much damage it caused. And instead of any of you ever admitting you were wrong, you just make up nonsense as to why, if you think about it, you weren't really wrong and also even if you were it's totally understandable and also it was probably inevitable anyway and it's not as bad as burning down entire towns with all the people in it in 1348 so stop being a baby.
Not a single thing in this comment is accurate. No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID and if you seriously believe that do you think without the totalitarian response it would have been worse? The diagnosis and testing and classification were knowingly bad and they did it because it gave them horrendously exaggerated numbers which they wanted. And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN. World governments had plans for this exact event which they tossed out the window to launch on worldwide experiments and they all cowardly crowded along since being wrong when everyone is wrong is the least dangerous path. Lockdowns and quarantines are not the same thing. Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better. We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about. The covid injections cause more harm than it abates. The lockdowns didn't stop after 2 weeks to flatten the curve, they continued long after even the propaganda couldn't convincingly lie about it.
Never take complaints or arguments from covid zealots about human rights or laws seriously because they've already demonstrated the very low bar at which they will toss all that out the window. And they will do it again.
This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.
I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.
Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.
Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.
However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.
I find these 'I'm one of the reasonable ones' posts so tiresome because the status quo will lump you in with other dissidents to discredit you no matter how many times you post comments like these. It doesn't matter how much you ridicule and insult the people further down the "conspiracy nut" totem pole than you. Your only defense is just being correct and telling the truth.
I think part of this is my shorthand is leading to confusion.
Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were lower in February 2020 through at least April 2020 than previous years. This is findable data which I looked up years ago. You can think it's ridiculous all you like, but you are wrong and that is a true statement.
the dancing nurse/doctor phenomenon makes more sense (and you can just look into the periphery of the videos) when you realize part of the reason is the hospitals were not full, the pop-up tent hospitals were empty, and the hospital ships were empty
my claim is ventilators were overused and this overuse caused people to die
ventilators are dangerous and should only be used when the downsides of their lack of use are dire
in the early days of the covid hysteria, they were regularly being used on people when they shouldn't have been for various reasons but the result was people who would have lived otherwise fell into the ventilator spiral where they declined and then died
and this is why the protocol for their use w/re COVID19 treatment was significantly changed in the summer of 2020 which substantially reduced their use
have you ever heard of the 1976 flu vaccine which was pulled from use?
well shucks, this cannot be because it has the word "vaccine" in the name!
I get it dude, but these slimy 'I'm one of the reasonable ones!' posts gain you nothing and just make holding dissident beliefs harder and more costly as it reinforces exactly what you're complaining about.
After all: you're the conspiracy nutjob who thinks there was some crazzzzzzzzzzzzed conspiracy at local, state, and federal government and their corresponding institutions and people lied repeatedly about facts and stats on the ground and the known effects of lockdowns! I'm one of the reasonable ones, I don't believe lockdowns are the greatest crimes against humanity outside of war. Please don't lump me in with people like you.
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This is pretty close to COVID being fake. The costs were deliberately overblown (faked) in order to justify the intervention. It's manufacturing consent, and it's clear if you have eyes to see.
This is also deliberate as part of the same manufacturing of consent. This is how the demos is led around. This is how you condition people to hate, by providing approved targets and encouraging marginalization.
I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.
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Believing wrong things about 5G is less nuts than wanting to imprison the entire planet over a spicy cold. Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced. They're wrong but they're better than the other, more dangerously wrong group that actually got to call the shots.
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This really stuck with me. As clear as day that the "cure" was worse than the disease. Same with Remdisivir, I think, that also caused a lot of deaths.
I'd love to speculate, so I'll start. It was because if there were treatments, the vaccine couldn't be pushed through in an emergency fashion. The vaccine needed to be pushed through, the emergency measures were the only way to do it, and therefore no alternative treatment could ever be allowed.
If you had to guess what happened to the few whistleblowers in late March who claimed the ventilator protocol was killing people, do you think it was 1) they were hailed as heroes for risking their careers and employment to save the lives of their patients or 2) they were fired, informally blacklisted by their state medical board and couldn't get employment elsewhere, and had their licenses threatened?
The protocol was changed shortly afterwards, but that started what would become a pattern: any licensed professional who came out against policies which were killing people would have their lives destroyed by public health institutions, the media, and state licensing boards. Any deviation from the approved message would be severely punished.
I'm honestly unsure. The powers that be appeared to have a strong interest in doing whatever to continue the emergency. Laws, constitutions, human rights, didn't matter much for multiple years there and courts simply refused to issue holdings restricting executive power w/re public health insanity. I seriously doubt an admission of an effective treatment would have stopped emergency approval/usage of stuff like remdeathivir or the injections many months later.
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Probably true. It was less.
Why do you think early admissions were down? Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?
The effectiveness of drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine could not be repeated in larger, more rigorous trials. I don't think Ivermectin particularly should've been demonized the way that it was, but it just wasn't what it needed to be.
I don't think they do. If you have data to the contrary then I will try to look at it.
That stat may or may not be true, I'd have to look at the data.
Keep in mind that the system can be overwhelmed with admissions dramatically down - entire surgical floors that should be filled with boring wound care and uncomplicated recovery being replaced with 1/4 of that but actually real sick respiratory patients is already enough to fuck everything up.
An increase in ICU level care but no ICU beds? Disaster.
Kill the variety and easy cases and things get fucked real fast.
All kinds of tensions like that caused problems.
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because hospitals keep track of this data, local governments collect it, and publish it and you can just go look at the data
one of the reasons all those nurse/doctor dance videos caught on is because hospitals across the country didn't have many people in them and they had nothing else to do
have you looked?
you either undermine the need for lockdowns because hospitals are not overrun or you undermine the need for lockdowns by claiming people were staying home anyway
wrong
had that one handy
not easily at hand, have you looked?
generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up
I'm not denying the claim that hospitals had an initial decrease in admissions. I'm granting it. I grant the claim. I'm asking why you think that is. Is it because everyone all of the sudden starting feeling fantastic when covid hit the states, or do you think people (even sick ones) actually quarantined themselves and stayed at home because they were scared of the virus's impact and the potential of being further exposed after seeing the news out of Europe? Do you think that is possible?
Yes, I had that one handy too. It used to be called ivmmeta. I used it to make the same argument you're making right now. There is no doubt these studies portray a marked improvement when ivermectin is used, but when you scratch past the surface and look at the critiques, the benefit from ivermectin in these studies isn't so clear. Many of these studies had issues with their methodology. There appears some benefit in symptom relief, but in terms of mortality, its observed benefits in symptom management did not significantly influence critical clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients. These outcomes, in comparison to monoclonal antibodies are not significant.
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The kinds of people who would make that data have long since burned whatever credibility they have left.
That's the biggest part of the problem. Nobody has been hanged over this shit. Hell, nobody has even been shamed, tried, jailed, or punished. Fauci got a blanket pardon on the way out the door!
So while I'm sure your request seems reasonable to you, I hope you understand how I see you, and how you're seen more broadly. It's not reasonable, and it's not worth engaging with because it will ultimately boil down to appeals to authority.
Yes, they destroyed their credibility, but what data do you or others have to counter their data when it comes to vaccines? I'm not coming here to deny that a blanket vaccine mandate, and lockdowns, and the messaging from the public health apparatus were bad, but arguments about the vaccine causing "more harm than it abates" is absurd to me unless you have something to suggest otherwise.
Yes, it seems I am only checking most of the boxes in your purity test, and not all of them. A grave sin.
Why would I address data from people with no credibility? I don't have to take their data at face value, since they're fucking liars with no credibility, that's the point. The null hypothesis is fuck off, I don't want any. The experiment is trusting these charlatans ever again.
You don't have to address the data from people who have no credibility. Provide data that refutes the noncredible people.
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This is so absurd in the face of all the news I remember from the early days of the pandemic. Where did you see this information?
Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good? This also goes against all information that I have seen.
I’m no Covid zealot. I have little emotion about the pandemic other than relief that it’s over, and concern that the next one will be far worse, that governments will be too cowardly to enact the measures necessary to deal with it due to the increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists.
A lot of the "covid vaccines might be bad, actually" data comes from the military. Infertility claims doubled in the year after vaccination. Women with completely steady cycles (in my entire life I'd never had a late period. as a teen it was every four weeks during chemistry on thursday, that predictable) had their cycles thrown off for months. Young men (again, the military data) had a ridiculous amount of heart complications. The MRNA processes hadn't been tested enough, and MRNA trials since covid have been pulled for having too many side effects. Never taking another MRNA shot again personally.
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Hospitals were overwhelmed.... in villages in Italy where the average age was over 80. Some of those images were later recycled and falsely claimed to be hospitals in the US.
Bergamo, where most of the viral images of overwhelmed hospitals came from, is a municipality of 120,000 people with a metro area population of c. 500,000, unless you consider the whole Bergamo area a suburb of Milan. The population within city limits is 25.4% over 65, which is only marginally more geriatric than Italy as a whole.
I don't know why Bergamo was such a mess, although I suspect the answer is "they were the first city other than Wuhan to be hit badly and had no clue what they were doing".
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Have you ever looked?
Yes. The evidence of it being merely a wash is strongest in those with poor immune responses like the very elderly, but even there it doesn't have a significant positive effect on infection let alone mortality. Anyone under the age of approx. 75, it causes harm on net. It's honestly criminal it was ever approved generally for minors let alone babies where there is just no good argument at all w/re to health.
Hopefully that social capital has been burned for at least a generation.
generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up
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Perhaps you lot should have thought about that before deciding to shut the world down over a virus that was dangerous enough to cancel normal life but not dangerous enough to release a vaccine before it was politically opportune.
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Presumably, all the tiktoks and instagram reels nurses were making of hospitals completely empty of anything other than medical staff, occasionally interrupted by liking and reposting that stupid "comic book hereos bowing in respect to the real heroes" one-panel. And the completely unused medical aid ship in New York. If you saw bona fide crowded hospitals, then I can only assume you were watching stock footage, and not actual, real-time footage of hosptial admissions.
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Dateline 1348: The vast majority of the Holy Roman Empire towns established flagellant parades, because something had to be done.
Far less damaging, and probably more effective, than lockdowns.
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As a matter of fact, we had vaccine candidates on March 9 (2020), and had confirmed immune response in mice and started testing them in humans by April 23.
As a matter of law, it was simply illegal to give or sell the vaccines that we did have to non-test-subjects before efficacy testing finished, and on top of that it was illegal to recruit test subjects with a plan of "expose healthy volunteers to Covid deliberately and immediately under medical supervision" rather than "wait for six or seven months for a decent sample size to be exposed to Covid incidentally and unexpectedly out in the wild", so efficacy testing wasn't finished and mass manufacturing couldn't even be begun until cumulative world excess mortality was well over a million and rapidly growing.
As a matter of deduction, totalitarianism did not outperform freedom here. It killed millions, and got away with it only because it had already managed to strangle the globe so thoroughly (even in the United States!) that freedom was never tried.
What was stopping a pharma company from declaring their vaccine open to the public, as long as you signed up for their trial*?
*requires a deposit equal to the retail price of the vaccine
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Regarding challenge trials, 1Day Sooner came into being as a result of our clear failure here. COVID was a ridiculously good candidate for challenge trials: a disease that spreads quickly, so every day matters, and which is dangerous to one segment of the population but relatively harmless to everyone else. Our global failure here doesn't speak well for our prospects if a genuinely dangerous plague comes along. (Imagine if the disease had a 30% fatality rate to everyone. Challenge trials would be even more important, and a lot harder to justify ethically.)
I guess the most optimistic take is that if a real threat to society comes along (i.e. a plague which doesn't mostly just replace the "cause of death" for unhealthy seniors), we might actually be spurred to take appropriate measures. It's "only" the threat of creeping totalitarianism which we utterly failed at, enthusiastically cheering on lockdowns and unpersoning anybody who said "uh, wait a minute".
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0.44% of the world? Almost certainly not true; the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship full of old people, had less than that. We get 7.1 million from WHO. Anything more goes down to counting excess deaths, which is both unreliable and also counts excess deaths due to lockdowns.
Diamond Princess had 712 confirmed cases and 14 deaths, a 2% mortality rate, which indeed makes sense for a ship full of old people.
Diamond Princess had 3,711 on board and 14 deaths, a rate of 0.38%. The 0.44% I gave was mortality due to COVID (36 million divided by 8.1 billion), not case fatality.
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Yes, it only goes to less than that after adjusting for the Diamond Princess passenger list being unusually old, then consider the counterfactual that matches global population demographics.
Still, there are places that have more official covid deaths (and even more excess mortality) than the Diamond Princess (or any other statistical analysis of age-stratified mortality) should allow. Peru, for one. Back in mid-2021 when I was meticulously keeping track of the relevant stats, Peru had:
Mainstream reasons offered for this failure are ad-hoc, post-hoc, and treat things that are common to all undeveloped countries as somehow being the cause of Peru's unique poor performance. Something went horribly wrong in Peru. And the best hypothesis standing for what happened is those unusually extreme, early, and lengthy lockdowns.
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Is this meant to be an argument in favour of the lockdowns that did nothing to stop them dying?
Nuking ourselves would also have been something to do. Doesn't make it a good idea.
Wrong.
There is absolutely no historical precedent for the totalitarianism of the Covid Lockdowns. None at all, as much as some of those responsible tried to claim as such for legitimacy. And the reason should be pretty obvious, too. A stay at home policy imposed on a subsistence agriculture society would be an omnicidal disruption to the food supply.
If this justifies lockdown, then I would prefer burning the entire internet to the ground just to remove the justification.
I’m capable of being persuaded that lockdowns were ineffective and other measures would have been better, but you should lead with figures and statistics, not anger over the tyranny of stay-at-home orders. Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.
I spent 6 years leading with figures and statistics. Perhaps those who locked us down could provide theirs first for once. After all, they're the ones who were in charge.
But if you insist...
When you crunch the numbers on age stratified covid mortality compared and remaining life expectancy by age, you find that each covid infection is equivalent to 15 life days being lost. Therefore the absolute best case scenario for lockdowns, going from 100% of the population being infected to 0%, only gives everyone an extra 0.04 QALY per capita. Add in the reality that even lockdown proponents did not suggest this sort of swing in percentage infected would occur, and it's more like 0.02 QALY per capita. This is an incredibly small budget.
For comparison if you do a lockdown that lasts 200 days (about the UK's duration of stay at home policy, but not all restrictions) and make the incredibly generous assumption that lockdowns only reduce quality of life by 5%, that is 0.03 QALY lost per capita.
Nothing about this approach to public health is novel. QALYs is standard public health fare. I am not the only one to make this sort of observation. Caplan has and gets referenced here, and so has Scott
And again
Those implementing lockdowns would either be aware of the QALY implications, in which case they were malicious, or not aware, in which case they were incompetent to such a degree that their refusal to immediately resign from their post was malicious.
I made a more realistic model with the final results of the UK's cumulative lockdowns here: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18492
Note this entire exercise depends on the axiom that lockdowns actually reduced covid deaths as advertised. The experience of Sweden would suggest otherwise.
It feels almost too late to bother, but I do hope to one day write this all out in a lengthy blog post that explains every step in excruciating detail. Any omission here is just because I'm not going to write that blog post today.
The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage. A very real possibility at the time, given just how fast the disease was spreading and the amount of people expressing debilitating or life threatening symptoms. Instead of everyone falling ill during the same short timespan, the course of the pandemic was spread out over a longer period, allowing time to adapt and treat serious cases as they came in. Incidentally, this also bought time to develop a vaccine, resulting in less people becoming sick than would have otherwise been expected.
I will grant you that the lockdowns did not directly save lives compared to risking infections. Covid is not the bubonic plaque that so many make it out to be. To many, it was in fact no worse than the flu. But the effect of overloaded hospitals had the potential to be immense. Tons of people would have been unable to work as important operations were postponed. Healthcare workers would have been worn out and more likely to become sick themselves.
Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals. Modern morals dictate that if there is a path to treat everyone, then we must follow it. Even if it results in lowered quality of life for others.
You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely. The numbers of infected were constantly going up, breaking news showed bodies being transported through the streets, and anyone with a connection to healthcare (whether it be as doctor or patient) could see the situation slowly spiraling out of control. The public demanded action. History tells us that the main way to stop infection is to isolate the sick. So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"
Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments. And as I outlined above, there were legitimate arguments here. In retrospect, they may not have been sufficient, and we can hope that we will make better decisions in the future. I personally hope for hospitals that have the resources to handle sudden influxes in patients without resorting to triage. But in the end, our leaders were under pressure to act rapidly, and this was the best answer they could come up with at the time.
The UK did lockdowns. Did not overload hospitals. But achieved the same negative outcomes we would have gotten from overloaded hospitals, as they just stopped treating patients instead.
Given the lack of empirical evidence that lockdowns slowed the spread in the UK compared to countries that did not lock down, why even propose this as the "point" of lockdowns? What mechanism is there for lockdowns to achieve this when they don't slow covid? Less traffic accidents to deal with?
This is not true.
Firstly because no hospital invests infinite resources in a given patient.
Secondly because NICE specifically prevents certain treatments from being offered in the UK on the basis that they are not cost-effective.
Well the end result was most of the politicians responsible got booted out by the public as a result of the catastrophic economic and social effects of their lockdowns, even if most voters failed to recognize that lockdowns were the cause.
Who gave them the impression that lockdowns would slow it down?
Sweden had no such difficulty in not locking down. They simply chose not to lock down, and wow, lockdowns didn't happen. What a surprise.
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What you post was the pravda. The claims that the Very Smart People made to support lockdowns.
They were patent nonsense, and they were always patent nonsense. The hammer and anvil didn't work and could not have, if they disease had followed the models the epidemiologists were using. In fact, it did not, and the epidemiologists continued to use those models (with more and more bizarre parameters, as shown by the Canadian COVID people constantly showing hockey sticks which never materialized). The lockdowns were not a good faith mistake. They were something some people wanted and were willing to manufacture theories and evidence to support, and to stick to long after it was clear none of that was true.
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Your current attitude is holier-than-thou smugness. Not exactly any better. The anti-science vaccine denying populists were right, and their prescriptions were better than listing to 'science.'
Even the appeal to 'science' disgusts me. There is no such this as science! There are people making arguments, and there are people countering there arguments, and there are people shouting down their arguments.
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and in the same vein, repeating debunked propaganda you remember from the covid hysteria will convince no one and just get pattern-matched with other covid zealots who aren't interested in being convinced anyway
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But did you see where he said he was like, in a field, around nobody, and that was still not good enough?
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COVID lockdowns were a beautiful example of the most important thing in modern democracy, compromise. The lockdowns in many western nations were strong enough to be annoying at best and oppressive at their worst, while also not being nearly good enough to actually contain virus spread much. In fact due to political pressure, governments would run completely hypocritical programs at the same time like the eat out to help out campaign. Government lockdowns hurt restaurants, so the government subsidized not locking down and instead going into restaurants. Genius!
Full lockdowns are obviously successful in controlling spread. Virus particles aren't magic, they don't teleport from person to person. If people avoid interaction and have physical barriers and disinfectant, it will work. Even masks seem to work quite well ... except for the pesky issue that people aren't perfect. They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.
Full authoritarian enforcement could in theory work, but instead we went with half measures that are the worst of both worlds. We lost time with our families and our friends and our loved ones, while also still spreading the virus around cause there was too many holes in the lockdowns.
Another example of bad results from compromise I always like to use here is bike lanes. There's all sorts of ways to do them and some are way better than others. The common "compromise" solution is the shoulder, bike lane or buffered bike lane methods in that image. But those suck for bikers, they're terrifying to use. The whole time you're scared of a car side swipping you because there's giant machines going 40 mph zooming past your frail human body. I would never use those. Meanwhile when I vacationed in Hilton Head, I rented a bike and was happy to use it to get around to the store and beach near my rental house. At least where I was staying they were seperated from the road and felt safe but those are more expensive and take up a lot more room to do so you either have to be a vacation area like Hilton Head (and even then, the main parts of the city still seemed mostly car centric) or have a strong biker culture. Otherwise you get the shitty compromise solutions at best where drivers lose space and would be bikers still don't feel safe to bike.
Rent control is another example I love to use. City politicians are stuck between the stereotypical NIMBY homeowners who want their property value to go up (but also no property tax increases!!) and no more development, while renters don't want their rent to surge up every year and want stable places to live. The renter class is also typically blind to why rents are going up so while there's political pressure to "do something", it's not necessarily pressure to upzone and allow development. Still at the end of the day it's is impossible to make both happy, but they're still both gonna be voting. So what do many politicians opt for instead? Rent control. You make the current tenants happy while not having to upset the homeowner NIMBYs, and the long term political and economic costs are abstract enough that only the weird policy wanks and nerds will oppose you.
Compromise is often pretty great though and I don't think we should be down on it just because there are flaws. Allowing people to have some wins with peace makes them unlikely to turn violent, and it forcibly moderates the idealogues and extremists to match closer to the center. I prefer our compromise society to any dictatorship. We really do get the best of both worlds in most cases. But sometimes, like with COVID or bike lanes or housing supply, half measures are actually worse than either.
I agree with this. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but travel back to the pandemic itself where government officials had insane levels of pressure coming from every direction. In a pandemic under a democracy, how do you keep:
Add to this the crazy amount of data coming from every which way (including social media stoking the fire) and the constant comparisons to neighbouring nations who were either doing it right or wrong and it's no wonder that such a shit show of half-measures ensued.
Especially important to note that most shutdowns and closures were state/local government decisions to begin with, it wasn't the president deciding things, it was your state legislatures and your local mayor/city council. Heck Biden was even trying to get schools to reopen right after inauguration but it didn't really matter much because school lockdowns are and were mostly a local government decision. Not to mention the staffing shortages, sometimes even schools that had previously reopened had to go back to remote because they just didn't have the people. Some states were even mobilizing their national guard because of staffing issues.
Polling from the early time period also suggest that the lockdowns were widely popular too. Even four years later, public support for closures and mandatory masking in public during the pandemic were popular among the majority of Americans looking back.
So not only do you not have control over the lockdowns from a federal perspective, but you're also dealing with most Americans wanting them at the time to begin with!
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It's unlikely for a driver to do that unless they are malicious, drunk, or distracted. The actual danger is at intersections, which separated bike lanes do nothing to protect.
Drunk or distracted alone is terrifyingly common, but even if the statistics aren't that bad the psychological effect of being right next to cars zooming by you still exists and it's why I would never go out riding like that.
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I don't think any authoritarian societies really did better with lockdowns except maybe in projecting the fantasy that they were followed.
I guess what I'm starting to think is, lockdowns don't really work in theory because the amount of social distancing you need to contain a virus is greater than people can actually really sustain. You can maybe sustain some amount over a small period of time. But anything that approaches solitary confinement, which is essentially what is needed for the theory to work, is impossible. It seems to hit up against some kind of soft biological limit because we need to spend time with other people. And in practice people created enough exceptions within the ideal of a lockdown that the virus could never be stopped.
I think with an authoritarian country like e.g. China they could pretend to have more rigorous lockdowns. And their draconian government could even keep the charade going at great cost long after it stopped working. But I'm not sure they actually got any better results.
China actually did succeed pretty well for quite a while, and we can know this by looking at the surge that happened after they ended lockdowns.
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Britain ceased to be a democracy for much of 2020 and 2021 due to a combination of cancelled elections and the executive usurping power in a self-coup via the Coronavirus Act 2020. Britain also saw some of the most strict, severe lockdowns in the world. Stricter than Korea, Japan, and at a national level (though some cities there were worse), China. The list of countries that were stricter than Britain is a mix of other western countries, alongside a few eclectic examples like Peru.
Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread, starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.
The evidence of a full lockdowns is extremely obvious, virus particles are not magic and there must be some level of barrier that if consistently maintained would prevent their spread.
The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.
Which is the entire point being made in my comment, there are some things where half measures don't work. Non full lockdowns are a bucket with a hole at the bottom of it, maybe if you have enough bucket bottom you can slow the leak but all the water will get out eventually. So if you want to carry a bunch of water with you (prevent the spread in this analogy), you need the full bucket (full secure uber authoritarian lockdown).
Yes, if we sealed everyone in their own pharoah's tomb the virus would die out pretty quickly. Not least because everybody would die, mostly from other things. We kinda need other people to live. The question is 'can we stop viral spread at a level that's realistic to maintain', to which the answer is 'no'.
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That's a hypothesis, not evidence...
And that's why. If you can't test something how can you possibly claim to have evidence of what it would do?
I think it is a fair baseline that COVID must follow the laws of physics and therefore spreads through some kind of physical means. And thus if that physical means wasn't possible (either through blocking it enough, distance, or other factors), it would not be able to spread.
That a full lockdown is impractical, comes with severe downsides, and isn't worth the costs doesn't change that.
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