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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

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.

I do remember that the lockdown started about the same days as in most of Europe and it was really harsh in theory.

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.

Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread,

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.

starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.

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'.

We kinda need other people to live.

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.

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.

That's a hypothesis, not evidence...

The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.

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.

  1. The pathogen could already be everywhere and humans only develop disease when some condition causes them to become susceptible.
  2. The pathogen could be in the environment outside of humans so human contact isn't required.
  3. The pathogen could have an incubation period long enough that even those in isolation can appear to catch it.

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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