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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.
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.
As a COVID Never Forget, Never Forgive type, I feel an obligation to eat crow when this subtopic comes up. I think it was Scott Alexander that said something about the Noble Mask Lie being mostly wrong but yes people would wear them incorrectly; I agreed that yeah N95s are tricky to get exactly right but surely people will were surgical masks fine, and that's better than nothing.
Boy howdy was I wrong. Watching people wear their mask below their nose squashed what little hope I had for a lot of people. Absolute theatre.
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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.
I was going to post this. I was in China for basically all of Covid. and they were able to stop the spread, it probably wasn't worth it but they could do it. But they would literally send a city of millions into lockdown over single digit case numbers. The two weeks after they lifted were like a ghost town as everyone got sick with Covid. My local bank had to shutdown because too many employees were sick.
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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.
It is funny that you bring up Peru. I have (thorough a strange set of coincidences) spent the first big lockdown wave in Peru for many months and nothing I have experienced later on in Europe (definitely not trivial) even came close to the intensity of the Peruvian lockdown. How do you know about this if I may ask?
Peru drew my attention by topping the league tables for lockdown deaths per capita for much of 2020 and 2021 And by a huge margin, too. A fact that so-called expects were curiously incurious about considering how severe Peru's lockdown was. So I looked into it a little. Nothing in great detail, only what's available via a cursory look at what restrictions were in place, for how long, and what the results were.
You should see some of the strange excuses for Peru's bad performance that came up in the rare case it even was mentioned. Basically saying Peru did bad because it's a developing country... While neglecting that every developing country did less bad, and that the top 10 at the time was all developed countries with the sole exception of Peru way out front.
Interesting. Peru in my experience is a much poorer country than its economic numbers suggest due to the nature of its mining wealth and extreme plutocratic capture. You do feel the difference clearly just being there vs being in other countries with supposedly similar gdp/ppp per capita.
I do remember that the lockdown started about the same days as in most of Europe and it was really harsh in theory. No travel between cities/provinces or abroad. Every store not selling food closed. Constant police harassment on the street. Double masking mandatory basically everywhere etc. But I was watching Peruvian TV at the time and I also remember convoys of thousands of desperate people walking 100s kms to go back to their home villages as they were destitute in the cities without work. And every other store reopened in a week and started selling some sort of foodstuff to be allowed to operate. Many locals were secretly still doing their professions. The amount of misery around was really palpable and sad. I believe a lot of lower middle class people survived because the government allowed dipping into your mandatory pension contributions, which of course will have consequences later on..
Also at the time I assumed the corona death numbers there had some relation to the general dirtiness/dustiness/dryness and high altitude of almost the entire country. Your lungs take a real beating just being outside for while, I cannot imagine living in a Peruvian city my entire life. My nose starts bleeding regularly everytime I spend some time on the street.
Very late reply because I forgot to respond, but...
Interesting. Peru in my experience is a much poorer country than its economic numbers suggest due to the nature of its mining wealth and extreme plutocratic capture. You do feel the difference clearly just being there vs being in other countries with supposedly similar gdp/ppp per capita.
The general trend for covid is that the poorer a country is, the better it does. So anything along the lines of Peru being poorer than the data suggests makes their outlier status even more extreme.
Yes, Peru's lockdown was also unusually early relative to the arrival of covid in the country, within 9 days of first being detected. If the UK was so early, it would have entered lockdown on February 8th.
Altitude has been given as an explanation, but isn't a good one, as there are other countries with higher average altitudes, Bhutan, Nepal and Tajikistan to name 3. None of which performed anywhere near as bad as Peru.
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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'.
Randall Munroe (xkcd) touched on this in 2014, in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, responding to Sarah Ewart's question "If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn’t the common cold be wiped out?".
The conclusion was that it would cause trillions of dollars in economic damage, and wouldn't be effective due to people with compromised immune systems acting as reservoirs.
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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.
There are plenty of ways a disease can spread without human contact without breaking physics.
I am not suggesting that any of these specifically apply to covid. Only that you shouldn't assume diseases follow such a trivial model as you outlined. And the empirical failure of modelling which assumes as you do to predict what happens should be a clue that maybe there's a missing piece of the puzzle here.
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