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Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a lot to learn from this. When you look at different US states and different countries it’s really not clear which measures worked better than others. Germany looked really good for a while but now they have caught up with the rest. Within the US it’s also not clear if the states who had stricter lockdowns did better than others who don’t lock down that much.

It seems everybody gets hit eventually, just at different times.

Let’s hope that there will be an objective evaluation and not just political infighting.

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Atlantic Canada was able to wipe out the virus completely early in the pandemic. But travel keeps bringing it in, causing outbreaks here and there, but each time so far they have gotten The outbreaks under control. Cases per capita are about a tenth of the rest of Canada, which in turn is half of what it is in the us. And ironically, restrictions here are less than in many hard hit areas.

> And ironically, restrictions here are less than in many hard hit areas

What did Atlantic Canada do then?

Have a low population density.

The largest metro area in Atlantic Canada is Halifax, and it's 2/3rd the population of Madison, WI.

How densely populated is this area?

There have already been dozens of objective evaluations that support your intuition. You aren't reading about them because of political infighting: a huge number of powerful people have committed themselves publicly to lockdowns as a solution, and are not interested in people learning the truth.

There's a long list of studies here, many of which are all-country statistical analyses:

https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-co...

A representative paper:

https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC...

"Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people"

Another:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717v...

"Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends"

etc.

There are plans to stop it all in 5 weeks, but the way its treated at the moment might make it last for several years. I still have hope polititians will realise it we cannot take the risk of it mutating every few months.

The virus is going to mutate regardless of what any politicians do, unless the immunity provided by vaccines and natural infections is sufficient to fend off any new variants. The idea that this can be prevented somehow with lockdowns and controls is just a classic case of illusion of control.

"There are plans to stop it all in 5 weeks,"

What plans?

> When you look at different US states and different countries it’s really not clear which measures worked better than others

Only if you ignore the countries where measures actually worked, like New Zealand or Fiji.

I don't think that's fair. It's a little bit easier to control things if you have no land borders and can control entry tightly. That's not an option for countries in almost every other country.

Indeed. Canada was looking much better than the US until approximately September. The number of cases now is 40x in just 5 months.

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