Reply to COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.

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Reply to "COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem with this example is that Sweden is a small, culturally homogenous, fairly wealthy country in a northern climate. Would the same approach have the same outcome in the US? Probably not.

Like questions I'd want answered include:

- Did high conscientiousness among Swedish people result in voluntary social distancing during Covid peaks even without lockdowns?

- Did the climate in Sweden, with just a short summer season, allow Sweden to avoid the worst of the pandemic because people there socialize less outside their families in cold months anyway?

- Did Sweden's strong social safety net play a role?

I do tend to think that hard, very restrictive lockdowns likely have less of an effect on death rates than we think, and also that prolonged lockdowns have real costs that we are still reluctant to acknowledge in many cases.[/quote]

The problem is that this is a topic that’s such a magnet for propagandists and kooks that it’s hard to have a rational discussion about this.

We’re the descendants of people who survived endless waves of epidemics.

Chances are that, given a few days’ notice, people will spontaneously, instinctively, ferociously enforce any lockdowns that are really necessary.

The sign that the lockdowns stopped being necessary once we had access to masks is that plenty of ordinary people rebelled against the lockdowns after about two or three weeks.

But, on the other hand, it seems a little silly to judge the people who imposed the lockdowns. For the first few weeks, they had no idea what they were really up against.

And it’s not really fair to compare the United States with another country, because we probably don’t know what combination of virus variants, immune system genes and antibodies people went into the pandemic with.

Maybe the United States had worse results because a tougher strain dominated here, or because we had more people with genes that made them vulnerable to COVID.

Another problem is that it’s easy to assume that anyone who brings up the topic is a Russian or Chinese social media outreach worker who mainly wants to stir up trouble, install a fascist puppet government in Washington and help Putin conquer Europe. [/quote]

I think most people remember and understand the uncertainty that came in the spring of 2020, and can forgive all but the silliest restrictions (e.g., closed playgrounds).

The issue is that many restrictions continued long after that initial knee-jerk reaction to a new risk.[/quote]

They were not silly restrictions.  They were in place to reduce hospitalizations for a highly contagious illness where hospital beds and ventilators were scarce.  If you are so upset over being asked to stay home for a few weeks, you really  need your mental health checked.[/quote]

Other silly ideas we had to deal with: wiping down groceries, decontaminating mail, wiping down grocery carts, wiping down checkout belts, etc.

Activities that temporarily mollified the germaphobes until they thought of new "health precautions."

Remember two weeks to flatten the curve that changed to Zero COVID?[/quote]

Actually doing some stuff like wiping down grocery carts and check out belts is a good practice.[/quote]

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