Hacker News Reader

Comment by JambalayaJim | Hacker News Reader

Our lockdowns simply can’t be worse in the future, at least not in living memory. The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

View on HN

If people behaved rationally and with empathy we wouldn't need to lock down. But because we have a bunch of selfish pricks we'll always need lock downs. People cannot be trusted to do what it is good for the whole if it even slightly inconveniences the individual. In western culture(The United States in particular), I don't see that changing any time soon.

Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.

With 20/20 hindsight, what proved to be the tradeoffs between lockdowns and not?

With the power of hindsight, we can rely on all-cause excess mortality data since 2020 to see how effective the lockdowns were, and whether the extreme disruption to daily life was worth it. See this study[0] that showcases Sweden, whose public health policy around Covid was basically a big shrug, with the idea that it was pointless to try and control the spread of a highly transmissible respiratory virus. It has fewer cumulative excess deaths compared to its neighbors Norway, Finland, and Denmark; all highly developed countries with similar demographics and cultures as Sweden, but with much stricter restrictions.

Within the US, a recent Lancet study[1] showed that when adjusted for a variety of health factors (age, rates of diabetes, etc.) -- that is, if every state had the same distribution of health profiles within its population -- then Florida, which had no restrictions on everyday life since later in 2020, had a lower cumulative death rate than California, which had some levels of mandatory masking even earlier in 2023 as well as a higher overall vaccination rate[2].

Looking at all-cause excess mortality is useful, since it avoids the question of who really died "of" Covid vs. "with" Covid, and takes into account the ways that lockdowns were harmful to health (e.g. drug overdose deaths from loneliness and despair).

The available data indicates that the biggest determinant of how susceptible a population was to Covid is its age and overall health (which the US fares quite poorly against many other countries, being both older and more unhealthy on average), and that lockdowns were more or less ineffective in saving lives. And that's even without thinking of the generation of children who grew up during those lockdowns, whose schooling is several years behind and will carry that burden for the rest of their lives.

[0]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

To be clear, it was never to hide out or wait for COVID to leave. It was mostly to slow the spread, limit demand on our medical resources, and to ramp up time to ensure we tackled it with robust medical science. Unfortunately, most states in the country don't actually "believe" in science because Yahweh bro.

> The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

If another disease like the first COVID wave comes along I'll damn well vote out any politician who doesn't support lockdowns.

When there is a super virulent disease spreading rapidly that we don't know the long term effects of (and we still don't years later!) a lockdown is the logical response until we have some idea wtf is going on.

And I’ll do the opposite.

The thing is, we relied on the novelty of something like covid to enforce lockdowns in the first place. Without that overblown fear, voluntary compliance simply won’t be there.

And any government that wants to impose lockdowns will be forced to implement a military response, akin to what China did during covid. That kind of response + hindsight to how useless it is won’t go well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com