> In today’s COVID-19 wars, the global scientific divide leans heavily in favor of active, and sometimes even draconian, public health interventions, including widespread locking down of nonessential business, mandating masks, restricting travel and imposing quarantines. On the other side, some doctors, scientists and public health officials are questioning the wisdom of this approach in the face of massive unknowns about their efficacy and in light of the clear and growing evidence that such measures may not be working in some cases, and may also be causing net harm.
It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. We might be wearing masks and washing hands, but I would bet life would be largely the same.
But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy). In some ways, taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics does have measurable benefits in other ways, but you'll get shouted out of the room if you bring up that position even as a hypothetical.
>It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people".
Every dissent winds up getting framed this way. The numbers don't matter. The way you win is by having "your side" be the side who's policy kills people less directly. When you take it to extremes like "make everyone do backbreaking labor and all the health problems that comes with that to save a few dozen kids with cancer" the absurdity becomes obvious. It's maddening but this is the nature of a lot of arguments we have in society today. For example you have Safety Sally wanting to do something that will crush an industry in order to save a few dozen workplace injuries. How many years of life will be lost from all those people's reduced standard of living? Hard to tell. But Safety Sally always wins because she can argue that anyone arguing against her policy is killing people more directly, numbers be damned. Sometimes (e.g. coal industry) the numbers do work out in her favor. Often times it's hard to tell and then you get into arguments about who's analysis is more accurate
In my observation this is just the way that people debate these days. They know that there are one or more contenders in the room but at least one that is in stark contrast to their view. They arrive at the most maximal conclusion possible, apply a moralistic impetus (everyone will die because of you and your ideas), we accept the proverbial threat and move on. If someone who isn't in stark contrast to their opinion continues to object then they just find a way to shove them in the box of whatever that stark contrast group is and follow the normal rules. The really creative part is when their contender also does this. At this point it's a race to the bottom of describing their opponent with various pejoratives and unrelated adjectives or sometimes it's as simple as having the best meme.
As in biology systems societal systems also become more resilient to the difficulties they encounter, so to put it in your own words is completely possible for Safety Sally to enforce restrictions that do kill more people indirectly in the next 10 years but at the same time save way more people in the next 100 years...
To put some examples in the current context: The speed at which medical facilities are researching this virus has never been seen before in the history of mankind, and many of the findings are shreding light on understanding how viruses work (not only this one), including knowledge for when (_not if_) a virus much stronger and infectious that coronavirus pays us a visit.
> we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects
This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention.
Literally every media outlet I have encountered has published extensive coverage of the wider economic, health, social and political impact of the virus itself and the response to it.
The idea that the media did not focus on the second order effects is so obviously wrong it’s hilarious.
And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before.
This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
They didn't have scoreboards overlayed on the news displaying number of suicides, number of business closures, number of lost jobs, number of domestic violence incidents. It was Deaths, and Cases. Every hour, on the hour. The other stuff got covered, but not nearly with the same intensity.
I would agree with you that there is some coverage of these issues...lately. Yesterday for instance CNN ran a story about the suicide trend in Japan. However there was very little coverage of the secondary effects until late in the summer.
> I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything.
We can also compare it to the 1889 "Russian flu" pandemic. It killed about a million people worldwide and in most places there were no significant restrictions on people to control it. There is now circumstantial evidence to indicate that pandemic was not caused by influenza at all, but rather by another coronavirus.
I fail to see how that's evidence of the internet causes people to lock down. Seems more like its evidence that the internet has nothing to do with the lockdown, and other factors control whether societies choose to lock down or not.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but lack of correlation is pretty strong evidence for lack of causation.
I don't think nradov was disagreeing with you. More that they were providing a counterpoint. If anything the fact we have examples swinging both ways makes the argument that internet !~ lockdown even stronger.
I guess life would be largely the same except for the millions of dead people?
In general though, there has been a huge variety of policy responses across the globe and over time, so I'm not sure what you mean be 'we' 'shutting everything down'. My state came closest to shutting everything down for a month or so in the spring, but there has been a constant effort since then to adjust policy to balance health risks and economic/social pain. Italy had a super hard lockdown. South Dakota isn't even wearing masks.
It is also enlightening to consider the success of various strategies too. This will take years to piece together but one comparison from my corner of the globe is the contact tracing in New South Wales and Victoria. In NSW contact tracing successfully prevented a large second wave while in Victoria it did not, and they were forced into a strict lockdown which eventually worked. Remarkably, both states become free of COVID around the same time. There isn't much difference in socioeconomic status or population density between NSW and Victoria so the difference likely lies with the effectiveness of the contact tracing or just good/bad luck.
>> If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything.
Really? Do some digging into historical pandemics. City entrances would be boarded up. Villages might be "shut" and their people would literally starve to death if the they could not sustain themselves. Harbor chains were raised against suspected plague ships. Innocent people were confined to pest hospitals, even exiled to dedicated colonies on remote islands. Londoners once feared being boarded up in their own houses should they get ill. The pre-computer past was full of much more draconean efforts than anything COVID-19 has brought us.
And for all the horrors of being locked indoors with covid, just spend a few minutes reading about the kids polio trapped inside iron lungs. That was within living memory.
You're referencing responses to pandemics from before the germ theory of disease. More recent responses to pandemics were far less restrictive. For example: The Spanish flu was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. It infected 1/3rd of the world and killed 1-6% of the population (depending on which estimate you want to cite). It was a much deadlier virus than covid. It killed the young and healthy at a much greater rate. There was zero chance that a vaccine would be developed. Despite all of those greater dangers, the response of first world countries was to implement similar restrictions to today: encouraging or requiring masks, doing more business outdoors, reducing business occupancy, etc.
To be fair, it's quite unlikely the Spanish Flu was deadlier than COVID. We now know that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 infections are asymptomatic/mild, and those infections are only really identified due to RT-PCR testing. The vast majority of asymptomatic Spanish Flu cases would have been impossible to identify in 1918. We also have access to much faster/more aggressive treatment options than would have been available in 1918/1919. As a global community we were also more tuned into breaking events in Wuhan & prepared more swiftly accordingly (not enough - but that's a different discussion). Comparing oranges to oranges, if SARS-CoV-2 had spread in 1918, it's likely COVID would have been a bigger killer than the Spanish Flu.
It's probably more apt to state that the 1918 Pandemic was worse than the 2019/2020/2021 Pandemic - probably true. Virus to virus? Probably not.
> Comparing oranges to oranges, if SARS-CoV-2 had spread in 1918, it's likely COVID would have been a bigger killer than the Spanish Flu.
The lower bound on Spanish flu's IFR is 3%. Covid's IFR is around 1%, and almost all of that is in old and sick people. Spanish flu killed far more at far younger ages. Had covid hit a century ago, its IFR would likely be lower because those hit worst by the covid (the old and sick) would have already died of something else.
Again, Spanish flu infected 1/3rd of the world and killed at least 1% of the world population. It was the last time in history that human population declined over a year. Even in 3rd world countries, covid can't approach that level of lethality.
It's worth noting that you're comparing the dynamics of a particular pandemic in a particular year - we don't know for sure how the Spanish Flu would have behaved in a different time. There are reasonable theories that the Spanish Flu had been spreading for years prior to 1918 - perhaps as early as 1915, with few noteworthy "pandemic" level deaths before going nuclear in 1918. Even the cities that were hit by the first wave in 1918 tended to do much better, before the more deadly strains began to spread - contrary to pandemic evolution and driven largely by the dynamics of war. 1918 was a perfect shitstorm - malnourishment was rampant at a global level from the prolonged war, young active soldiers carried the infections worldwide, the sickest soldiers (ie, the most deadly viral mutations) were transported to crowded field hospitals, infected soldiers passed on the virus to soldiers recovering from poison gas attacks, the pathogen was not identified for the longest time and bacterial agents were focused on instead, the refusal of national governments to recognize the pandemic, and so on. It's a fair assumption that those conditions would have greatly exacerbated a 1918 COVID pandemic as well. Yes, COVID deaths have been highest in the elderly - but co-morbidity is important as well. A 1918 population would have fared poorly with SARS-CoV-2.
I'm not trying to imply that Spanish Flu was not a killer - my home country of India suffered ~ 13 millions deaths. Yet the policies of the Colonial Administration also made a bad situation much worse. My suspicion is that given those circumstances, COVID would be just as bad, if not worse. At this point we can only speculate.
Which polio epidemic had more restrictions than covid? As far as I can tell, US authorities closed movie theaters and public pools. They also warned people to avoid amusement parks and quarantined families that had confirmed infections. These restrictions only happened in a few cities at a time. That seems far less restrictive than what we're experiencing today, and for a far deadlier disease. The case fatality rate for the 1916 polio epidemic was over 20%, and most of those who survived were paralyzed.
If a pathogen with identical risks and outcomes struck today, I guarantee government restrictions would be greater than in the past.
It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people".
You know what, I call bullshit on this.
It’s pretty easy to argue in favour of or against specific measures when done in good faith and with evidence. What it’s hard to do is engage in this sort of shallow middlebrow meta-argument.
> I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything.
My take on this is that, without the internet, we would (1) either still choose to lock down and cause much greater economic harm[^1], or (2) not choose to lock down and lose more lives. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that we still need to perform a cost–benefit analysis before going into lockdowns. But the internet has lowered the "cost" part of this analysis, by allowing most people to continue to work during lockdowns.
I think another issue is that methods for sharing and debating scientific research needs to catch up to the age of computing. Publishing research in scientific journals has some serious flaws and it would be interesting to incubate some new and improved methods for sharing scientific info and peer review. Not only new means for publishing research and peer review but also a lot of global standardization of medical indications etc. since until recently it’s been a bit of a Wild West.
>But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy).
This is a false dichotomy. Look at the countries that acted quickly and had cooperation from everyone - they have many fewer deaths, and the impact of the pandemic has been much, much less.
We are only in this position we are in because people did not want to cooperate from the start. This attempt to blame the side effects on people advocating for masks is not an accurate depiction of reality. If people had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn't be in the predicament.
Yes, it's very frustrating. Japan is basically open. Restaurants, coffee shops, bars, are full and people have their masks of when in them. Shops are open, movie theaters are open, shopping centers are packed. There, people do have masks on. When someone is without a mask it's usually a non-asian foreigner.
The government even has programs trying to encourage people to go out eating and to travel within the country.
Numbers are very low compared to similar populations elsewhere including deaths so we're not killing people here. At least not yet. They are at their highest rate yet but it's still 1/100th of similar populations in the west.
Japan did aggressive contact tracing (which people actually respect) and there is already a mask wearing culture - people already wore facemasks when feeling ill. In the US there was a plan to send free cloth facemasks to every household that was stopped because it could "cause too much panic".
Americans bring up examples of countries with 10X the discipline, like America would have an infection rate closer to Japan if we _had not_ locked down.
Until we know what Japan did right [0] (or any non-behavioral advantage they may have had) is completely pointless to try to frame them as an example or anything alike.
1. The flattening the curve scientific models all factored in a percentage of non compliance. The actual levels of non compliance was lower than predicted. Blaming non compliant people therefore isn't appropriate
2. Flattening the curve is a strategy to lessen stress on healthcare by lengthening the time that the system can cope with stuff. A steeper curve leads to more deaths but ends quicker.
Thus. Lockdowns and people abiding with the rules does not make it end earlier, we want it to go on as that means a flatter curve.
To say the equivalent of "if you only wore masks this would have ended sooner and we wouldn't need lockdowns" is false but it makes sense at an emotional and behavioural level as most medicines, interventions, treatment promise quick results from compliance. It also more natural to blame people instead of an invisible virus for the crisis.
We want compliance so that it goes on for longer as that means less deaths.
The actual level of non-compliance was lower than predicted during the spring. It's gone up a lot, at least here in the UK. Unfortunately, our entire mainstream media pushed the idea that lockdown fatigue is a lie during the spring for essentially partisan political reasons and can't really back down now.
For a fact? I don't unless it actually happens (schrodinger's cat), but there's a high probability this would be the case rather than not.
Will people still get infected? Yes, I'm sure they will since typical face masks are not P100. But when you're preventing ~80% transfer on an exhale and ~60% on inhale, if both participants had masks on then that filters a lot.
Granted this assumes other precautions would be followed as well since obviously places like bars and restaurants where you have no mask on will continue to be an issue.
It’s just picking and choosing the examples to fit the argument. If your points become more well known there will be new promised lands where things are going well because people over there are doing x.
I'm very pro-mask but cases are skyrocketing everywhere, even in countries like France and Italy where masking is the norm. I don't presume to know how to fix the issue, but virologist knew this was going to happen -- it is called seasonal forcing[1]. There is going to be another spike in a few months again, even with the vaccines and masks.
On top of science, the mask guidance in the US has switched multiple times [2]. We had a chance get this messaging right but we (the Trump administration) completely fucked that up. A lot of US institutions have lost their credibility, and it is not going to be easy for them to get it back.
It interesting though, but here in Central Asia (granted, the data quality is very low, and it is heavily doctored by the government) these days, the number of cases are actually trending down since the arrival of the cold weather. Most probably there is zero seasonality in Covid. I thinks do decrease the spread of infection, and without the situation would have been worse. But compliance level must go above 70-80% IMHO.
Combining that fact and the previous observation by hanniabu:
"many of the people that are against shutdowns (that don't have an ulterior motive) are against them because people are out of work and creates issues with poverty. They are not against it because it doesn't help. So rather than saying no shutdowns, how about we take the proper steps and have a moratorium on rent and mortgages so solve the root of the issue."
inspires me to believe that the brutal and short shutdown, with the planned measures to prevent ordinary people getting penalized during it would in fact be the best treatment imaginable, with the least long term consequences.
But I also imagine enough those who would never be ready to accept such an approach for having huge ideological objections.
Thinking even more about it, some kind of such a response indeed happened in the world and gave the results. Knowing that result and proper planing can surely allow for even less negative effects than those observed.
You could never have a hard enough lockdown to eliminate the virus. As soon as you started to open back up, it would pop up somewhere and start spreading again. The idea that we could have locked down hard for two weeks in March or April and killed it off is fantasy.
This is what China did and it seemed to work pretty well.
Though given how hush hush China is about everything, it's also possible they've had a vaccine they've been using on their population for a while and just deigned not to tell or share.
China, having the hardest and the most restrictive lockdowns, managed something even better than both: binging the numbers to effectively zero, very early. They also managed to maintain the minimum of new cases by mass testing actions when there was a suspicion of the outbreak:
So, no, it wasn't about the vaccines up to now. The measures simply work, proved in Europe, and even in the US, when they are consistently introduced. As simple as that.
As an American living in New Zealand I can attest to the fact that the Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern made mostly good moves by treating COVID seriously and thus winning re-election in a landslide. I cannot say if her decisions helped to squash COVID, but her words and facial expressions were very good politically.
I was in favor of one hard lockdown and strict border controls, and that is mostly what happened. I was not in favor of shutting down butchers, bakers, and green grocers because that just crowded everybody into supermarkets making social distancing difficult and creating long lines at supermarkets. It also crushed several businesses into bankruptcy unnecessarily, caused lots of food to go to waste, and propped up the already-too-powerful supermarket conglomerates.
NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density, a unified jurisdiction, no constitutional restrictions on the government's power, first world medical infrastructure, a timid compliant population that overwhelmingly just does as they are told and doesn't makes a fuss, high social cohesion, double helpings of common sense. Cowardly risk-averse and boring people that will never amount to much more than a hill of beans by American standards, but happy nonetheless [this sentence was meant as tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor, sorry if anyone was offended or took it seriously].
The US does not have the options NZ had. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to enforce a national lockdown, and even local lockdowns are being ruled as unconstitutional. And if you can't do one coordinated severe lockdown to squash it completely and then strictly close your borders requiring two week quarantines for anyone coming in... then I say don't bother with lockdowns at all. Oh, and stop blaming everything on your president.
How do you figure this? Is the US approach courageous?
> NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density
NZ discovered cases just days after the US. The US is also not heavily populated. It depends on the source but NZ is about 15 people per km/2 and the US is about 36 per km/2.
A comparison could be made between Hawaii and NZ, and the contrast in how things have gone is quite something.
> How do you figure this? Is the US approach courageous?
Cowardly is too strong for what I meant to say and I take it back. I meant it in an 'avoiding fighting' sort of way, choosing to not stand up and fight for one's rights, or choosing to give in so as to avoid confrontation, and in direct contrast to Americans seeming to fight over everything to the bitter end, with laywers, wars, refusals to comply, etc. Now that I read the definition, it was far too negatively connotated.
It’s particularly odd to be so down on NZ whilst presumably living in NZ restriction free. Yes, international travel is more restricted than previously - I wish it were more restricted.
I'm not at all down on New Zealand. I love it here and always have. I think you've misunderstood my humor. I consider myself a New Zealander. It was self-deprecating.
My point is that all of this is devilishly multi-variate, and it will be a while before we can disentangle everything and determine what exactly works and why.
People saying "NZ's lockdowns worked" without actually having done the hard part is not helping.
It's not misleading, it's just not as complete as it could be, because population density is a trivial statistic to determine and density of occupied land is much more difficult (for starters you need to define "occupied").
If you have stats on density of occupied land, I'm happy to work with that.
That’s a crazy metric. Is this a thing? How do you define it? Per km? Per metre? Or just by the footprints I make in my carpet? Each gives a very different answer.
Very good point! To avoid anyone having a dead relative, I think we should all stay inside until no one ever dies again, for any reason. If you disagree, you literally want to kill grandma.
I flagged and down voted your comment because it's a low-effort appeal to emotion and attempt to shut down further discussion. We can do better than that.
Which platform has removed questioning of lockdown measures? I see these debates happening daily here, on Twitter, on Facebook, on reddit, and in the mainstream media.
Interesting how this person who was apparently complaining about being oppressed now oppressed himself. Like that comic about the guy sticking a rod in his own wheel.
The initial lockdowns early this year worked quite well...which is why we are able to withstand the subsequent waves because the healthcare systems weren't overwhelmed and we could focus on getting proper clinical treatments created.
I can't find any instance of the scientific community encouraging permanent lockdowns.
The stats I've seen seem to indicate that COVID has behaved (in terms of waning) more seasonally than in response to lockdowns.
For example Sweden, who didn't have lockdowns anything like what we've seen in other countries, have a curve[1] that tapered off too. At deaths per capita, they're lower than UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and many more.
> At deaths per capita, they [ = Sweden] [a]re lower than UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and many more.
Which is not difficult because you picked the worst of the worst to compare them with. Compare them with other nordic countries like Norway or especially Finland and Sweden suddenly looks like a complete failure.
Is it seasonal because of natural yearly weather seasons, or is it because of the growth dynamics?!
Most curves look a lot like an explosion that burns out locally too fast to sustain a continuous fire. This could lead to some kind of seasonal dynamics without external factors.
One exception is maybe Argentina. Since the beginning it was more like a continuous burning fire - until they stopped. What did they do?
You can see normal flu seasons and the out-of-season huge spike. Then you can see subsequent bumps on a per-country basis. Some countries had multiple spikes and lockdowns etc.
Yes, a huge spike which quickly tapers off. You can't kill the most vulnerable in the population multiple times in a year. People don't get vulnerable that quickly.
These charts tell exactly the story I'm telling. The peaks and troughs appear at the same time for countries with strict lockdowns as for those with less strict / non-existent lockdowns.
I don’t know of any country on that list that hasn’t been mitigating infections in some way after the initial surge, so it’s no surprise the spike came down.
You would also expect to get no (average) excess mortality for the year if you just killed off the frail earlier than normal. This is not the case, excess mortality just returned to normal levels. You would need either a spike in the other direction or a step change down to fit with your theory.
You can track the yearly excess mortality data here for a few countries.
> taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics
The black plague -the biggest one we have ever gotten as far as we know- lasted 7 years, I don't think that constitutes under any definition a "one time 'excess deaths' hit"; also I'm pretty sure that given 50% of the population died nobody was free from depression (or loneliness/suicide for that matter) given that in all likelihood half of the people you knew had died when it ended.
It's very hard to dissent against the current narrative because any dissent can easily be framed as "killing people". I blame technology for our current predicament. If we didn't have computers and a global internet, there's no way we would be shutting down everything. We might be wearing masks and washing hands, but I would bet life would be largely the same.
But because technology dangled the carrot of "we can save lives by doing everything virtually with computers" we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects of that (loneliness, depression, suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, economy). In some ways, taking a one time "excess deaths" hit as we have done with past pandemics does have measurable benefits in other ways, but you'll get shouted out of the room if you bring up that position even as a hypothetical.