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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.
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.
Completely false- modern society was quite happy to turn away people from organ transplants and other necessary surgeries if they didn't have the vaccine.
There was a whole Reddit community dedicated to mocking people that died of COVID. Pathetic cretin Jimmy Kimmel mocked them on national TV.
Modern society will absolutely turn people away, as long as they get to feel ideologically justified when they do so.
This is the most polite damning with faint praise I think I've ever heard.
Their best was completely and utterly retarded.
Who was turned away from treatment based on facts that weren't related to their refusal to accept medical procedures?
"If you want to get treated, do what the doctors say" was true long before covid in pretty much any place that had hospitals, to my knowledge.
How many people are still given medical aid despite refusing medical suggestions like losing weight or stopping smoking or ceasing their intake of their drug of choice?
Maybe in the land of the brave and the free the hospitals allow patients to smuggle in McDonalds by the trolley, smoke right in the ward until you can't see the opposite wall or shoot up heroin with the conveniently-available syringes, but I'm used to the kind of hospital that, actually, doesn't allow patients to ignore such medical suggestions during their stay.
Requiring patients to be vaccinated from the virus which is currently being fought against, regardless of how misguided such a fight you believe was in the end, is a perfectly consistent mandate on behalf of a hospital. Why would I want to increase the likelihood of all my staff and patients catching covid on top of whatever illnesses they're already here for?
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