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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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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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