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Comment by random314 | Hacker News Reader

The lockdown prevents severe mutations from replicating because of lockdowns. Milder mutations don't result in lockdowns hence ...

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Or do lockdowns just prolong the inevitable?

Lockdowns are certainly a prolonging step.

But prolonging the inevitable is still useful, in that it slows down the number of hospitalizations on your march towards the inevitable.

Most hospital systems in the USA are stressed to severe levels. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 even began, and the increased workload from COVID19 is clearly causing problems.

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Slowing things down gives more time for the old patients to leave the hospital, meaning doctors/nurses won't have to work as hard.

It's true on an individual level too: someone who is very sick will stay at home, but someone with a mild head cold will still go out.

There's going to be a negative correlation between severity and something like "velocity" of infected persons.

Which begs the question of the long term utility and effect of symptom suppressing vaccines (that don't prevent transmission).

If a virus that would make make you very sick is contracted by someone who's vaccinated - They will now be in the 2nd category you describe ~'Sick, but not sick enough to stop them going out' -- They're now giving mobility to that virus that it would have otherwise not had (If they weren't vaccinated and were feeling too sick to go out and about)

So by usage of vaccines that only prevent severe symptoms, we pervert that normal negative feedback loop of virus spread and instead set the parameters to be more likely to propagate severe virus' that would usually keep you sick at home.

Vaccines don't suppress symptoms. They prevent symptoms by decreasing the viral load. They prevent transmission in the same way.

No, not _all_ transmission. Neither _all_ symptoms.

But has this been true in practice? Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns? I suppose hypothetically if there’s a new strain with like a 10% fatality rate there will be new extreme measures where that could be the case, but it hasn’t happened yet. Even the extreme early 2020 measures failed to stop the virus.

Which lockdowns in our hemisphere had the goal of stopping the virus? All I know about (or have been part of) never stated that goal, only goal was to break waves and avoid overload of health care systems, which most at least helped with.

And then it goes on because measures are reduced, and zero-covid never was a goal... would even go so far that some few countries pretty successfully did zero-covid strategies and stopped their virus, though sure, that is a pretty futile thing if the world is not "globally" doing this and you are likely not isolating forever/completely - so we just start to live with it.

> Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns?

Statstically speaking, almost surely yes: with millions of infections there are thousands of variants, every day. If somebody was prevented from infecting somebody with their variant (as patient 0) technically we stopped variants with lockdown. Maybe they more favorable for us, maybe they were more dangerous from us.

The mu variant, which caused a lot of worry, went away. It apparently escaped vaccines better than delta but spread much more slowly, so delta out-competed it. Perhaps if there were no restrictions it would have done better. Hard to say though.

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