Lockdowns are not bullshit. They are effective, unless we did a half ass job.
We don't have good alternatives to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Edit: this isn't entirely true though, and there is a lot of grey area. For example, correctly masking & social distancing is a good alternative, but only in spaces where people can/are willing to do it properly.
If east asia is the model you want the USA to follow I’m afraid of the politics your generation will bring.
I personally don't even use an Android/eyePhone any more to avoid that dystopia.
Neither can I think of many countries where police are more heavily armed, literally militarized [1], while killing people at rates that can only be estimated, as there are no state or federal statistics on that.
Still doesn't stop some US Americans from seeing the "police state" everywhere, except at home.
Even after over ten thousand people were arrested, thousands injured, many maimed, protesting against exactly that police state and its violence that disproportionately affects black people and other minorities.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Office
If you really dig, you find things like the Flaxman, et. al. paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7) which falls apart if you try to apply it retroactively (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v...) not to mention the huge issues with the methodology (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.58036...)
On social media, people pass around pre-prints like this (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248802v...) on the "long COVID" narrative, which uses the mythology of self reporting on online forums.
There is zero science on the effectiveness of lockdowns what so ever. the Great Barrington Declaration is a scientific counter to any pro-lockdown arguments as well.
Everyone is saying "We didn't lockdown long and hard enough" .. which is just fucking insane at this point. Unless you're an island nation like NZ, there is literally no way to stop a virus that has entered our ecosystem at this scale. It took over 160 years between the development of the Jenner/Smallpox vaccine and its elimination, with a huge 20 year push in the 60s/70s. This thing will be with us for at least a decade or more to come, and we can't continue fooling ourselves into thinking we can just turn off society like gears in a machine with little to no consequences.
Humans are not batteries with an on off switch.
The only variations in the effectiveness of a lockdown strategy should be due to - Household size - Compliance levels - Duration
Covered population, and population density should be completely irrelevant.
You also need a seperate and ongoing strategy to prevent re-introduction, and an outbreak management strategy, but those are seperate concerns.
Ideally, if your neighbouring countries/states/whatever were similarly effective, then re-introduction management shouldn't be too difficult (cf 'pacific travel bubble', etc).
Why does that matter? We can be confident that something is true without being sure why. We aren't sure what dark energy is, but just from empirical evidence we've observed, we do know that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. How is this situation different?