Comment by realjhol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by realjhol | Hacker News Reader

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> Lockdowns did help flatten the curve, many countries health systems were overwhelmed regardless, but without lockdowns the fatalities and outcomes for severe cases would have been an order of magnitude worse.

There's no evidence to support this assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary e.g. Sweden.

> It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks."

But a lot of what spread around was fake:

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cor...

https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/nypost-fake-news-people-dyin...

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Burning-bodies-Mass-graves-Ec...

https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/kamloops-mass-grave-debunked-b...

https://reason.com/2020/04/10/no-nyc-is-not-running-out-of-b...

> Look at the hell china is going through right now

The hell is of the chinese governments own making. A Zero COVID policy cannot possibly work.

>There's no evidence to support this assertion

Like all your other assertions this one feels self serving for your point of view when a rudimentary google search provides references to the alternative.

Consensus on efficacy of lockdowns flattening the curve with relevant bibliography.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4

N of 1 as in what worked in Sweden (ranked 3rd in the global healthcare index and has a population lower than some cities in india) does not in any way shape or form meaningfully imply what would be good for the rest of the world (though it might certainly inform it)

I wasn't referring to the presence of fake/false/sensational/agenda driven narratives or your allusion to them, I was referring to your following offhanded assertions.

" Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity.

That was the claim, certainly. But as we predicted, this never actually happened anywhere in the world - not even in places where people live in poverty, and healthcare is virtually non-existant."

It's arguments like this one in Nature that destroy confidence in public health. You claimed the article reflected a consensus, but it starts by saying that lots of papers show no lockdown effect and there's no agreement!

Also read the citations. They make a lot of uncited assertions (worthless), and then their primary evidence is Flaxman et al, it's a joke paper. Read it, they made a model that predicted 3 million deaths and when it didn't happen said lockdowns were the reason. Their methodology is wack. They had to hide Sweden from some of their graphs because it broke their model, they had to claim that shutting major sport/music events was magically effective in Sweden but nowhere else because their model just assigned all the reduction to whatever the last government decision happened to be. Google for it to find more criticism of their methods. Nature do admit the paper was criticized but don't tell you the type of problems.

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