It’s not a moot point. Worldwide COVID cases are still at near-record highs. Many Asian countries which had previously been doing quite well (e.g. Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand) are experinecing spikes and have to decide what to do now. E.g. Taiwan is currently reporting several hundred cases a day of B.1.1.7 with less than <1% of the population being even partially vaccinated and now has to decide what sorts of restrictions to enact, for how long, and what the goal should be.
I can agree with Noah on this topic. Australia has practiced severe lock-downs whenever the virus shows up.......and the government has funded the resulting economic pain with an (initially at least) generous wages supplement for idled ("non-essential") workers.
Yet Australia's economy has performed relatively well, suffering only one quarter of negative growth, and now back to c.5.5% unemployment, (from a high of c.10% at the beginning of the pandemic). Needless to say, Australia's vaccination program is progressing at a very leisurely rate.
But note, I'm an MMTer. The whole globe's non-essential economy should have been locked down and managed with IMS and BIS money printing.....I reckon 3 million lives could have been saved (ignoring, for the sake of the argument, the negative effects on some families being cooped-up with one another for an extended period of time..)
Focusing on cases was a very silly, selfish thing to do from the start and had Australia done nothing then it's unlikely that they would have noticed the difference in deaths. The lockdowns were anything but 'good'. Other countries like Malaysia found significantly higher cases yet the death rate is about the same. Sweden made mistakes with care homes so saw excess deaths amongst that age group. However, the percentage increase in deaths for Sweden in 2020 is close to Australia's in 2019.
Australia is a privileged country and people wanted to spend. Australia didn't suffer much of a downturn comparatively during the GFC. As borders were closed, the spending was just done locally. Had the country remained open and the government and media's message been very different, then the spending would have been high throughout without having to go through that contraction.
"Focusing on cases was a very silly, selfish thing to do from the start and had Australia done nothing then it's unlikely that they would have noticed the difference in deaths. " We see in India what 'do nothing' actually accomplishes.
Please. India and Australia weren't at all comparable. Delhi which has seen most of the issues has very toxic air, had locked down, and had opened an oxygen bar before covid. The pollution levels have risen sharply. Many doctors haven't properly treated the typical respiratory illnesses and people from surrounding areas go to Delhi hospitals which has put pressure on hospitals. They are also currently troubled by mucormycosis.
This is what often happens with lockdown critics, The special pleading comes out in both directions. Back when India was looking good, the the story is "look how lockdowns aren't needed" as while India had one early one, it then stopped and celebrated its 'victory' over Covid. Now that all hell is breaking loose, it's 'toxic air', pollution levels, poorly trained doctors etc etc. How quickly we forget even in the US we heard about oxygen crises as some states were running short of oxygen supplies.
It's very simple, communicable diseases spread slower when humans do less communicable things. Hence lockdowns work. Hence the optimal policy is to lockdown to *get rid* of Covid so not only can you open up again but you don't have to worry about the virus coming back.
But it's not that simple. Humans do things without lockdowns. If you get on a bus and someone is sitting in a seat with puffy read eyes and a running nose, you don't sit anywhere near them do you?
There is a decent body of research showing that lockdowns have not had much effect in many places. It seems something was happening before lockdowns that halted the virus. What that is is up for conjecture, but most guess it is the lighter restrictions and people generally being more careful like I described above.
All lockdowns did, at least in New Zealand, was make massive super spreader events across the country, called supermarkets. There was no control in them, no one was keeping distance, everyone was in a stressed and agitated state (which inhibits the immune system) and if any super spreader had gone to a supermarket they could easily have infected hundreds of people. I observed people who appeared sick although it was hard to tell given the feeling of panic and doom forced on us by a sensationalist media and irresponsible reliance on poor models that no one seemed to understand.
And your argument makes no sense. If India dealt with a first wave without any real lockdowns and then didn't deal with a second wave so well, when they again didn't really lockdown, that provides some support for lockdowns having questionable effect. How does it support lockdowns except with the curious logic that "something didn't happen that might have done something, therefore that something works".
This sets aside the fact that India is a third world country, massively corrupt, they cannot lockdown as people are too poor, and their hospitals will be overrun very easily because they are poor and don't have much of a health system.
Nevermind, the fact that 5000 dead a day is not hugely significant in a country where around 25 000 people die everyday normally. More numbers provided without context.
I think the only thing India provides support for is that they need a better health system and more wealth generally. But if those problems were easy to fix then they probably would have fixed them.
"Humans do things without lockdowns. If you get on a bus and someone is sitting in a seat with puffy read eyes and a running nose, you don't sit anywhere near them do you?" Works ok for a disease that is almost all symptomatic when it spreads, Covid is not and in reality most viruses are not. We see R0 in many places oscillating up and down usually getting to a crises at around 1.5. If you hear about cases, odds are many people have been exposed without realizing it and pulling back (i.e. going out less) is going to take longer to pull it back down.
"There is a decent body of research showing that lockdowns have not had much effect in many places." Not really. You can't really do research like this unless you can identify the level of infection in two different nations over time and track the results of different policies.
New Zealand achieved zero Covid and had fewer days of lockdown than most other nations. On top of that, once they got ZeroCovid they did not need any restrictions other than quarantining those entering for 14 days. No masks, indoor dining opened, even concerts.
If India's problem is less wealth and a bad healthcare system, why did infection explode only now? Did India suddenly get poorer, sicker and have fewer doctors than a year ago? India's population is actually much younger than the US and even Europe. Of course if there's a button you can push to make their system better, then pushing it would help but here the old lessons of history hold better. You stop a plague to deal with it for the same reason you put a fire out when it appears in your house sooner rather than later.
Lockdowns for India were devastating for the poor. The toxic air and poorly trained doctors were issues before covid. The pollution has gotten even worse recently.
The only benefit of lockdown for India was that the air quality in Delhi improved significantly. But cars and factories had to go back so the air quality went back to what it was. Lockdowns do not work and 'getting rid' of covid is this very simplistic way of thinking that is short sighted and ignores the immense harms of lockdowns.
Except as Noah demonstrated, no such immense harms can be demonstrated. As he points out, you will get either lockdown and less virus or virtual lockdown and more virus but what is not an available option is to save the economy by asking people to just keep going out like nothing is happening. They won't.
"'getting rid' of covid is this very simplistic way of thinking that is short sighted" Putting a fire out today rather than letting it grow is indeed short term. Seeing a deranged driver coming at you driving the wrong way on the street and you swerving out of the way is short term thinking. If you can't do short term thinking right you're not going to have much of a long term to demonstrate any value there.
MMT is nonsense and in defiance of all historical support. Hardly surprising that an acolyte of that pseudo economic drivel would support lockdowns.
But hey global debt has risen by 20 odd trillion in 2020. So I guess we will see who is right. Inflation is poking it's head up everywhere. So I guess now all governments need to do is raise taxes across the board and everything will be better according to MMT?
The idea that you can print money with little constraint, towards full employment is just garbage. This is just another branch of flailing pseudointellectualism that economics is employing to try and give itself a mathematical (and therefore scientific) reputation.
Central banks have been a disaster way to accommodative and they have massively increased the gap between rich and poor.
I suspect MMT will be consigned to the same place as efficient market hypothesis before to long, but I guess the next year or two will tell us for sure.
Spoken by an anti-lockdown criminal (content with 3 million avoidable covid deaths), who knows nothing about MMT.
For your education: the idea is that you (ie the sovereign currency-issuing government) can "print money" constrained by what is available for sale in the nation's currency.
Obviously during a lockdown of the non-essential economy. government can corner the economy's essential production, to ensure everyone can survive (pay their essential living costs).
Yes, this pandemic will blow mainstream neo-Keynesian/neo-liberal economics out of the water, as governments are forced to pay down public debt owed to wealthy private interests amid ever spiraling inequality - debt which governments should never have issued in the first place, since they could have supported idled workers in lock-downs without taxing or borrowing from the private sector.
Good one. You are truly arrogant if you believe you have some solution which would have saved those three million lives. I have never said I am content with deaths, but death is a reality, it comes to us all and context matters.
I understand plenty about economics and MMT.
What is criminal is simpletons like you who have just enough knowledge to make yourselves look stupid but hide behind pseudo scientific nonsense like epidemiological modeling and MMT.
There is a difference between not understanding something and understanding it and realizing it is stupid.
I understand perfectly what the "idea" behind MMT is. It's just that it's a dumb idea.
The US can, in theory print as much money as it wants because it has the reserve currency. If Australia prints all the money it wants it will debase it's currency and the value of it will fall against the USD. It's what happens when interest rates are cut, or at least it was before we went to the zero interest rate / negative interest rate, bizzaro world we have now.
Then when Australia wants to buy oil, or anything else measured in USD (and most international products and services are measured in USD) the cost of that will increase. That is inflationary. Simple.
This sets aside all the hyper inflationary events caused by money printing throughout history and the terrible damage they did to society, the Weimar republic being the obvious one. But there are many, many more.
You also do not understand debt. It is not money. It is not an instrument. It is a contract, a promise. A promise that if you give the US government x now, then they will pay you back, when the time on the contract has expired x + the agreed interest rate. Debt is backed by a promise not by pseudo intellectual monetary nonsense. If no one trusts the promise any more than you can print them all you want they will have no value.
MMT is just more have your cake and eat it jiggery wokery. The way to generate wealth has never changed. Hard work, some smarts, some good luck, help at the right times, generating productivity and then excess as savings to be re-invested elsewhere. That is what got us to where we are today. Not adding zeros to pieces of paper or computer screens. Saying "this time it's different" doesn't make it different.
And you are completely making stuff up, which I guess is what you have to do when you have no realisation of how little you know. Governments don't owe money to "wealthy private interests". The largest holder of US treasuries aside from the Federal reserve is the Japanese Government which is well in excess of a trillion but China also owns in excess of a trillion. The Fed holds around 7 trillion in treasuries which means the US owes about 30% of it's debt to itself. So where are those "wealthy private interests" you are talking about?
Talk about conspiracy theory.
The US has been "monetising it's debt" since the GFC to the tune of many trillions. The "stimmies" paid to Americans all come from massive deficit spending which is again, in effect printing money.
Lockdown of the "non essential economy". Good one central planner. Who decides what is essential and what is not. You? The government department of essential things?
And what is non-essential about the business owner who has ploughed their heart and soul and savings into their business and has real meaningful relationships with their customers? And has been doing that for 20 years. How do you measure the essentialness of relationships? Of being part of a community? Of sponsering the local sports team, or helping troubled kids with their first job? Or all the things a business provides that is not what it sells?
But we shouldn't worry about that because it's too hard to think about and hey, you've got all this printed money right?
All any of our interventions have done is increase the gap between the rich and the poor drastically. In 2020 the wealth of the top 20% of Americans increased, for the other 80% it decreased.
In New Zealand who supposedly did great during the pandemic, house prices in 2020 increased by over 20%, while money was printed to pay people to lockdown. Great if you already have wealth and a house. Not so great for all the poor people who do not.
In NZ unemployment is now higher then before the lockdowns (which were enacted when cases were already falling) and about 58 billion has been spent on keeping borders closed and paying people to stay home and do nothing and increasing the gap between rich and poor. This is a colossal waste of resource.
If New Zealand did the same as Sweden in terms of covid deaths it would have about 7000 dead. That's a little over 8 million spent, per person saved. The average New Zealander (if you add in the total value of the median house price) earns just over 3 million in their life time. Explain to me how spending nearly three times the amount an average person generates GROSS in their ENTIRE WORKING LIFETIME represents a sensible investment of our finite resources? And a very high proportion of those "lives saved" would have been dead by now without covid anyway.
210 500 children in New Zealand live in poverty. The amount New Zealand spent on covid, an amount that is mainly saving already very sick and elderly people (and only delaying many of their deaths by months or at best a year), represents a little over 275 000 dollars per child in poverty.
To be frank I think the best thing for society to do would have been to go along as we were, protect those old and sick as best we could and spend that 275 000 on each and every one of those children in poverty. We should not have let them miss the two months or more they missed off school when we know the damage to life time outcomes missing school causes and how that hits the poor even harder than the rest. By any measure this would have had a far more positive impact on society than what we have now.
I would argue that people like you are the criminals. Your simple minded, one dimensional view of the world means that you don't even debate the morality of borrowing from the young to fund the old and sick while about 18% of New Zealand kids don't get enough to eat and live in damp, cold miserable homes. And of course they will be expected to pay for those old and sick lives later through taxes. Is that fair? I dunno, but I think we should be asking the question.
But you aren't challenged by those people. Because they have no voice. They are kids so they aren't here reading the nonsense you are talking and arguing their corner. And the poor kids don't have a device to connect to the internet, and even if they did they don't have an internet connection. Their poor parents aren't here either they are either working two crappy jobs (three before lockdown but as they work the jobs that are first to go, like cleaners, now they are down to two or one) having to take food parcels from foodbanks and generally worrying about getting through tomorrow.
Unfortunately they don't have time to convince selfish, coddled, heartless, middle class people who can work from home, and virtue signal their "caring" on instagram, people who have no idea about them, and couldn't care less, as long as the value of their assets keep rising. The same people who then have the temerity to describe people like me as "only concerned with money" when I criticize the closure of society. As if an economy is just about fat cats making outrageous profits.
A school is part of the economy. A museum. A university. A road to the beach. A cafe. A museum. A hospital. A Music Venue. A Park. A Sportsground.
People who do not understand this and then attempt to take the moral high ground are the criminals.
You should feel ashamed. Your contempt for the vulnerable is disgusting.
Your ignorance is disgraceful. Read Stephanie Kelton's bestseller 'The Deficit Myth'. Weimar republic? Give me a break, if a nation has to pay war reparations AND suffer confiscation of it's productive capacity (when the French confiscated Ruhr valley factories) of course hyperinflation will be the result. As for the covid-19 death toll, it should never have surpassed 100,000, by which time governments would have become aware a total lock-down of the non-essential economy was required....governments which have the capacity to change the digits in the bank accounts of idled workers, to fund their essential living expenses for the period of the pandemic until vaccination of the population is achieved.
The responsibility for 3 million dead is on mainstream flat-earth economists like yourself. Sovereign currency-issuing governments did not need to borrow money from anyone. Sleep well tonight if you can.
I don't see how ignorance can be disgraceful as ignorance is not knowing and I can't know everything.
What has what the money spent on to do with anything? If the Weimar republic was printing it's money to build hospitals that would not have lead to hyperinflation? So it matters what the money is printed for that's what you are saying? If it's useful things you won't get hyperinflation. If it's reparations or because you lost some industrial base you need to replace it will lead to hyperinflation. Sure makes so much more sense now.
And what about Zimbabwe? The French republic? Spain after the discovery of South America? Various Roman republics that debased their coinage? Why did they also all end in hyperinflation and economic ruin?
Non essential what does that mean and who decides? And what is the amount for "essential living expenses"? And what mechanism does the government have to add some zeroes in bank accounts? And could this have really been figured out very quickly without causing different problems?
And essential workers couldn't spread the virus? If lockdowns work they have to be like China with welded closed doors and blokwarts to spy on people and make sure they are complying. If you lock down all the country who does the essential stuff? And then what stops them spreading it?
And what about liberties and freedoms that the West has slowly built over thousands of years? These are our insurances against people like Xi or Stalin. The cost of that insurance is we don't really do things like lockdowns well. So do we become more dictatorial like China? Or do we accept that "if we trade a little bit of liberty for a little bit of safety we deserve neither"? Clearly you want more safety over liberty so why don't you go live in China, they have done a great job of controlling the virus. Or North Korea they have no virus according to them. Why don't you live there?
And can you print a few zeroes onto kids school education? You can print them up some social interactions with their peers? And an economy is just a big machine right. Stop it, print some money, pull a lever here or there, start it again, no problem. Does printing a few zeros help mental health, or physical exercise in a West riddled with obesity?
So many questions in something complex as a society and MMT has no real answers aside from debasing our means of exchange.
The responsibility for three million dead likely has to do with Chinese gain of function research and shoddy practices in their labs.
The only thing that stops me sleeping is the damage done by pseudo intellectual nonsense like MMT.
Glad you now understand Weimar; next, Zimbabwe: food production collapsed owing to political reasons, the government attempted to print money to pay for diminishing food production.
Hyper-inflation is always a result of loss of productivity for whatever reason, including the decline of empire in the face of increasing external competition).
As to what money is: you can read Warren Mosler's '7 deadly innocent frauds of economic policy', free on the internet.
In essence, sovereign currency-issuing governments are constrained by *resources*, not money or debt....debt they don't need to issue; the need for balanced government budgets is a ruse - a fraud - perpetrated on an uncomprehending public. We find that difficult to understand because private sector players, ie, households, businesses, you and me, ARE constrained by money and debt.
As for "freedom": you want to be "free" to spread a highly contagious virus which is c.10x as deadly as the flu? (whatever its origin, which has yet to be determined).
The data on this provides a shockingly clear picture, crazy that this is a bit of a heterodox opinion (both US left and right seem to agree that lockdowns hurt the economy, right just thinks it was bad and the left is naive/decadent for not caring, while left thinks it was good and the right is heartless for being ok with more deaths to preserve the econ).
"In the end, the economy is made up of human beings, and valuing those human beings is pretty much the best thing you can do for your economy".
It's unfortunate that the US left doesn't make arguments in these terms more often when this is clearly the case for not just lockdowns but healthcare, cash relief, green energy etc etc etc. I feel like it would be far more convincing to people on the right/center (the few who would listen, anyway) rather than turn it into a moralizing "I care about people over profits" situation. There's probably an argument you can make that for the left's prestige economy and virtue signaling purposes it is more useful to frame things in this way though.
The problem with this article - and with lockdowns in general - is that they assume they can control exponential growth. It's been pretty well established that in most cases COVID-19 follows a logistic curve (in terms of cumulative cases and deaths). In order to stop a spike in cases and deaths you need to two things to work out for you. Firstly you need to get the timing of the lockdown correct and - more importantly - the lockdown has to take R below one.
There are some very big issues with this approach. One is that all three lockdowns, COVID *INFECTIONS* (i.e. day 0 of a covid case) have peaked before lockdown measures took place. Professor Simon Wood of the University of Edinburgh has done some excellent work on this (https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~swood34/). It appears that we are as good at timing lockdowns as investors are at timing the market.
Secondly and more controversially, lockdowns are not effective in reducing infections. They do not work. If we examine the November lockdown we see that there is only a small decrease in infections after a lockdown is imposed. In the March and January lockdowns, infections were already decreasing in the days before lockdown and the R value was also decreasing prior to lockdown. Lockdowns may increase the rate at which R decreases (dR/dt), but the evidence for this is slim at best. For evidence of all of this, see these two graphs from Simon Wood (https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~swood34/epidemic.png). Further evidence for lockdown 3 can be found here: https://thecritic.co.uk/seven-indictors-that-show-infections-were-falling-before-lockdown-3-0/.
In London, cases were increasing rapidly in certain boroughs towards the end of the November lockdown. While the B117 variant and schools being open may have been factor in this, it further weakens the case for lockdowns.
Despite all of this evidence against lockdowns, let us assume that they work to some extent. In order to justify them, the government must demonstrate the benefits of the lockdown outweigh the costs. Miles et al examined this and found that "The lowest estimate for lockdown costs incurred was 40% higher than highest benefits from avoiding the worst mortality case scenario at full life expectancy tariff and in more realistic estimations they were over 5 times higher." (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/ijcp.13674).
It appears that there are only two viable approaches to fighting COVID-19, the first being the zero covid approach used by Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The option is light touch approach of the US (Texas and Florida in particular) and Sweden. Anything in-between is likely to lead to more job losses and non-COVID excess deaths while doing almost nothing to slow down this disease.
Although having said that, "zero Covid" is in practice impossible, hence why governments pursuing this will almost certainly set themselves up for a fall - as we are seeing in Taiwan now. You cannot keep promising an electorate the physically impossible and hope that it never catches up with you.
Zero-covid for eternity is impossible, but it's certainly possible until you develop, mass produce and distribute a vaccine. Australia and South Korea are evidence of this. Australia is making 1m doses/week of the AstraZeneca vaccine. South Korea is also locally producing vaccines. Both countries will exit the pandemic very soon with very few deaths.
They have also had far fewer lockdowns than the UK which has been almost perpetually under lockdown since March 2020, with an exception for the period between June 2020 - October 2020.
As for Taiwan, they will either suppress their spike in cases back to zero or they will
have one brief wave before they reach herd immunity through vaccination.
If the UK had started its vaccination program in June and finished in September, we would have around 40k deaths rather than the nearly 130k deaths we have now.
Cases were always a bad metric. Australia has a death rate that is close to Malaysia's despite all the cases. South Korea relied on test and trace but that failed and they saw cases rise months later. Singapore which has a population comparable to NZ found all those cases yet the death rate is about the same. Australia isn't letting people leave the country without government permission even with vaccinations and is planning on keeping borders closed until mid 2022. One of the state borders was closed for most of this and only opened relatively recently. The UK has been able to travel for most of this and mandatory hotel quarantines (which are only practiced by a few countries) were only introduced this year.
Taiwan has one of the lowest testing rates and has relied on test and trace. Had they tested as much as Australia then they would have found more cases. Their recent cases were considered to be untraceable and so it is believed that covid has been circulation for months.
I think it is a risky and costly game to pretend to people you can get to no cases. Remember, we are talking here about no *cases*, not no deaths. And the cost of attempting to do so is HUGE. Taiwan has not let any foreigners in, pretty much, for a year. This is in no way sustainable. The Hong Kong government has vacillated, but has gone much the same way. If they had never promised "no cases" but stuck to minimising serious cases / deaths, things would be much better.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I am saying zero covid is impossible in perpetuity but very possible and desirable for periods between 6-12 months. The cost is not huge. Australia's GDP shrunk 1.1% in 2020, Taiwan grew by 3%, South Korea declined by 1% while the UK shrunk by 10%. The UK has over 130k deaths, the 3 other countries have 2832 deaths (Australia 910, South Korea 1903, Taiwan 12).
In future, a zero disease approach will become the standard approach to pandemics. Countries who cannot achieve this will adopt the Swedish model of voluntary restrictions.
You probably won't even have to close your borders, but rely on enhanced screening and quarantine for international travel. A negative PCR test before flying + negative PCR test on arrival + screening by sniffer dogs (Finland is using dogs to sniff out covid with a >98% success rate) + 10 day quarantine with an exit on day 5 providing you test negative. The protection that these measures would provide would be multiplicative. You would also ban travel to the countries worst affected by any new disease.
The most important thing would be to act quickly and implement these measures as soon as a new pathogen emerges (i.e. exercising the precautionary principle). Nassim Taleb has written about this at length.
I get that this is true for a hypothetical future - but it is not true now.
I would dispute the idea that zero cases becomes the paradigm for the future unless there are some incredible scientific and technological breakthroughs in the coming years. What will, I think, be the future (for now) is a groundswell of public opinion saying "never again" to widespread, comprehensive lockdowns unless there is a substantially better medical argument for it than there was this time.
In other words, I think the Swedish / Texas model will by far become the norm. The one thing your generally balanced comments omit is the factor of public sentiment.
Not really, at least not in the UK. Over here people have been incredible supportive of the lockdowns. In parliament, only 30 MPs (mostly backbench libertarian tories) provide any sort of opposition to the government.
I mean, just looking at this again, the main issue with this is that as you wrote in your original reply, post hoc actions invariably produce no positive results. Closing borders, a negative PCR test, sniffer dogs and quarantine ALL can only be implemented after a virus of this kind has been a) identified to exist at all and b) can be properly tested. But as in the case of Covid, it takes months for this to occur and your comments on why lockdowns don't work apply equally to any retrospective policy you then go on to advocate.
The only answer is to implement total short term paralysis of closed borders and lockdowns as occurred in Australia - but I do not believe public opinion will support this. People will ask - with some justification - "there has to be a better way than this".
All the evidence about the severity of this virus in China was in January and the beginning of February. They knew that the R number was over 2.5 and the only reasonable conclusion to this was that the virus would spread worldwide. They watched China lockdown over 60 million people in Hubei province - they even welded some apartment doors shut. They saw China building a new hospital in Wuhan in just two weeks.
The evidence was there, but we thought that somehow that it wouldn't happen to us. We listened to the people that dismissed covid as little worse than a bad flu because it allowed us to remain in our comfort zone. We only took action in March because we could not ignore the evidence proving that covid was a severe disease as it has arrived in the West and was posing a direct danger to ourselves and our healthcare systems.
In terms of public support see my other comment. In future people will remember this pandemic and will want to avoid any new ones. Just as people who grew up during the Great Depression tended to be more fiscally conservative and frugal, the majority of people who have lived through this pandemic will have little trouble supporting the actions necessary to stop the next one.
In my original reply, I was criticising the oscillating lockdown/open up strategies employed in the UK and much of the world. Their are only two options that have proven to have worked - zero covid and voluntary restrictions.
Zero covid countries have largely stopped community transmission of the virus. Most of their cases are imported. Countries pursuing a Swedish approach have limited damage to their economies at the cost of higher cases and deaths. One model is not necessarily better than the other because zero covid might not be possible in some countries, especially in the Schengen zone in the EU.
I suppose there is a contradiction between my criticism of oscillating lockdowns and my support for zero covid because the strategies employed by both appear to be quite similar.
There is a difference because zero covid employs enhanced testing and contact tracing isolate ALL covid cases and their contacts, while oscillating lockdown strategies merely try to stop the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.
When we look at the pandemic in the UK more closely it becomes apparent why we failed and the policy differences between the UK and Australia/New Zealand. The most important reasons I think are these:
We had the belief in February/March that there was nothing we could do to stop the pandemic or slow it down. We did not try to test people coming into the country, and we didn't restrict international travel. There was a belief that the virus would not be very serious and we could get to herd immunity easily.
This led to a huge spike in infections in late March and a nationwide lockdown being imposed on 23 March. This was partially in response to a controversial paper by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, which predicted that the NHS would quickly be overwhelmed and we could have as many as 250k to 500k deaths in this first wave.
The zero covid countries didn't wait for widespread community transmission to occur. They acted quickly in restricting international travel, they had functional test and trace systems that identified and cut transmissions chains quickly. The UK was struggling to administer more than 3 tests per confirmed case, where as South Korea was conducting over 100. When you know where the virus is and who has it, you can stop it with it with effective contract tracing and isolation.
When we did recognise these facts, we did a very bad job of testing tracing and isolating. As discussed above, our testing was woeful. We only reached a 5% positivity rate on the 8th May, 2 months after the pandemic in the UK had begun. South Korea has never exceeded this threshold for the duration of the pandemic. The reason why we want a positivity rate of under 5% is that this is the minimum threshold at which the WHO thinks that a testing system is finding most of the infections occurring in a country.
The test, trace and isolate system in the UK was run by Dido Harding, an utter idiot whose greatest achievement to date was running a telephone and broadband company (Talktalk) which had the worst customer service in the industry and had been hacked by a teenager who stole the personal details of hundreds of thousands of customers. She only got the job because she was friends with Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister.
This resulted in 1) most coronavirus cases weren't identified, 2) of those which were identified their close contacts could not found or contacted in many cases. Modelling has shown the 80-90% of close contacts of ALL new COVID cases need to be identified and contracted for a test and trace system to work. As far as I am aware the contracting system has never achieved this.
The final nail in the coffin was that isolations were not enforced. There was no support system for people who had to self isolate. This resulted in an estimate of only 10% of people self isolating for the recommended 14 days. Cases were particularly high in more deprived and ethnic minority communities as a result.
They adopted face masks and social distancing faster than we did. They understood the importance of ventilation in indoor spaces. We did not have a mask mandate until June and did not recognise the importance of indoor transmission until very recently.
The UK also missed a huge opportunity suppress cases to zero in the summer of 2020. Daily cases were very low at the time making it easier to eliminate community transmission.
We did not do this for two reasons. The first was a bogus belief that we had reached herd immunity after the first wave and the second was that any spike in infections could be contained using so called circuit breaker lockdowns of two weeks. The government did not understand that once cases begin spiking (above 2-3000 cases per day) it becomes impossible to control the pandemic.
Imagine that you have 5000 cases a day and that each case has 10 contacts. It takes 1 hour to identify a contact and to tell them to self isolate. You need 6300 people working full time to do this. This only an example using hypothetical numbers, but it illustrates how outbreaks can quickly spiral out of control. When you factor in things like the fact you won't be able to identify all cases, not all close contacts will be reached and not all close contacts/people who have covid will self isolate, the threshold is even lower, probably closer to 3000 cases/day.
This is why we have failed stop this virus and is a huge reason why we have 130k deaths and one of the worst declines in GDP of any OECD country in 2020.
Most of the epidemiological analysis relies on a single Reuters article for 'copious evidence'. There are now about 30 publications from scientists documenting the failures if lockdowns, which are not even dismissed but remain entirely unaddressed. Moreover, comparing Sweden with its neighbours is premature given that the lockdowns are likely to have long-term effects. Though similar pairings, such as Brazil and Peru would draw the opposite conclusions. It's not clear why Sweden is an outlier here, and why if you remove Stockholm, the death rates by area are about the same as its neighbours. One is invariably drawn to Sweden's absurdly lose classification of COVID deaths, which does not require COVID to feature on the death certificate, and if you are hit by a bus but test positive on the slab, you are added to those statistics... Though if I recall, lockdowns were also put in place to stop the overwhelming of the healthcare system, which did not occur in Sweden, rather making the suggestion Sweden's policy is a failure 'a moot point'. Further, this article fails to take into account Quality Adjusted Life Years. Every death of a 30 year old steals more prospective life from a population than the death of a moribund 80 year old. The lockdown in France is estimated to have robbed the population of 10x as many QALY.
The, conjecture, thought experiments, comparison to the Spanish flu are all entirely erroneous. This article is a great example of how data-illiteracy, buffered by bad ideas and a few choice media articles, can be used to justify about anything. The presupposition built upon here (lockdowns preserve life) is in fact supported entirely by another article, written by someone who has probably never read beyond the abstract in their life. Journalists have a notoriously difficult time with scientific articles I have noticed. If 'Yes, lockdowns are good' then this article should be peppered with supporting studies and soothing excerpts. Instead we see a possible 7% reduction in transmission, I do hope it was worth it, given that reducing transmission between those under 50y/o achieves essentially nothing in real-life terms.
For all the economic justification of lockdown, they were meant to protect life. More or less, they failed. There is no correlation between lockdown stringency and deaths per capita, no matter what individual anecdotes may be used to argue otherwise. Given their failure in this, I regard assertions that lockdowns may have saved us all money as ludicrous. I am no economist, so I will bite my tongue on the alleged fiscal concepts here, but I am pretty swift with biology and psychology. The author comes so damned close, but in the end utterly misses that *fear*, stoked by the media and various ideologues, is the main determining factor here, and that lockdowns can in some instances cause a reduction in *fear* (something scientists intentionally cultivated). Much as twisted ankle can be resolved by amputating a leg.
I have always found truth, no matter how unimaginably awful, provides a cold, cutting clarity that is the antithesis of fear. I wish we had focused a little more on truth, as we were in the fortunate position where it was definitely not unimaginably awful.
While I generally think lockdowns were justified, we will need some time before the entirety of the pros and cons will be tallied. In particular, a large percentage of the low-risk population is only now slowly waddling out of their apartments, significantly fatter and less in shape than one year ago. Many good habits were dropped, and poor ones picked up, and we will inherit a legacy of poor health for years to come. More than a few are coming out psychologically scarred. Many kids lost a year of education. Anecdotally, I see that some young adults have grown cynical about government, and such attitudes might come define their generation. And I fear that the EU might have come through fatally weakened. So, yes, two cheers for the lockdown.
I think the point about children losing education is a big one. Millions of children will effectively be held back a year because of the lock down and the effects on future productivity have yet to be measured
Dollars to donuts I'd bet it falls out on class lines. Go forward 25 years and if you can do a survey of individual productivity versus where people grew up and if they grew up in a school shutdown state, a half-half state or one that kep them open as much as possible, you're still going to find having advantaged parents gave you more of a boost than min. school shutdown. In fact, I suspect you'll have a hard time finding an effect even on disadvantaged backgrounds from shutdown states versus non-shutdown states.
Good one, you like to just make stuff up or do you actually do any research?
Perhaps the OECD are just another bunch of righty moaners who should have just shut their mouths and done what the government said, like a good little drone.
You were the one making the 25 year prediction based on no evidence other than your opinion. And then in some bizzare logical gymnastics you tell me to go fuck myself because I can't look 25 years into the future.
I certainly can't but then you were the one making the 25 year prediction with nothing to support it not me.
I actually provided some evidence from what I guess is a reasonably reputable institution.
The OECD study quite clearly states that they expect "long term economic impacts of coronavirus..... I mean you don't even have to read the whole thing it's all their in the title.
Well dude you're the one who submitted a study, clearly unaware absent a time machine no such study can be done.
Most of this stuff is impossible speculation. I remember one guy who was posting some idiot story about school closure lowering lifespan. How was the study done? They looked at HS dropouts from 1960 or so compared to HS grads. Dropouts lived shorter hence they conclude for every X months a kid isn't in school, he will die Y days sooner. Of course it didn't consider that maybe the last half century plus was unique to the next half centure. It didn't consider that many would go onto graduate HS and would enter a working world where online work would be very common while it didn't exist in 1960.
Like I said, my understanding in this regard is anecdotal. Still, what I heard ran in the opposite direction. Frankly, I'd be surprised if the average kid / young adult felt that lockdowns should have been stricter. Then again, maybe I don't get out enough. In fact, I don't get out enough: life is still pretty restricted in my neck of the woods.
As a young adult, my experience is opposite to this. To the extent that the response to COVID made me more cynical about the (US) government, it was mostly because of its mismanagement of the response to the pandemic, including lax enforcement of the lockdown (plus turning it into a political issue, guaranteeing that a lot of people would refuse to follow it) as well as the way it handled testing (the method of testing the CDC developed was fully developed & publicized by the end of January, but throughout February, the CDC made a relatively small number of tests, many of which didn't work, made it difficult for people to get tests, & banned researchers, hospitals, &c. who had developed effective tests from using them) & vaccine development (tests of vaccine effectiveness did not use human challenge trials, though these would have sped up the process of testing & there were large numbers of people willing to volunteer (https://web.archive.org/web/20200701035742/https://1daysooner.org/ says 30108 people had signed up to volunteer for any such trial by the beginning of July), & the FDA unnecessarily delayed authorization of the vaccines once trials were complete (https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/04/how-key-decisions-slowed-fdas-review-of-covid-19-vaccine-but-also-gave-it-important-data/)). However, this is merely anecdotal.
Ultimately I just have anecdotes as well, but as a young adult myself (early 20s) all of my friends have spent the last year complaining about the government not being strict enough.
What bad habits did they pick up? If anything I saw people practicing heathier behaviors during the pandemic. Lots more people walking, less eating at restaurants, lots of people I know picked up meditation and study.
It's rather easy to find stories of people gaining weight (so bad habits of eating too much and exercising too little), and of drinking too much. And I've read mixed reports on drug use. I don't really think any of this is controversial.
I live in Ireland, with one of the longest/strictest lockdown in the world.
If you compare Ireland's covid death rate to Sweden's, and account for the higher >65 population in Sweden (due to emigration from Ireland in the 1950s), there is almost no difference.
I can tell you from living thru the lockdown in Ireland, it is having devastating effects on our economy (especially small businesses), our young people, our mental health and drug/alcohol abuse.
From my experience in Ireland, it seems Sweden got it pretty right.
-- that because actual reductions in social interaction depended largely on voluntary action, independent of what lockdown regulations were imposed, the marginal health impact of imposing lockdown regulations was small
-- that the QALY cost of lockdown regulations was nonetheless large because they made life under those stricter regulatory regimes qualitatively much worse, even relative to an appropriate counterfactual baseline, and even though they had little impact on GDP
-- and that therefore lockdowns cost more QALYs than they saved.
There are a lot of possible ways you could challenge this thesis, but I don't see you doing that convincingly here.
I should declare bias here, btw: on libertarian grounds I think that Sweden's approach was the right one despite the figures you cite. I think that the additional deaths Sweden suffered were well worth it in order to leave their population so much freer than that of other developed countries for a year-plus, even though that freedom didn't show up in the GDP figures. But I can understand how others would have a different value tradeoff, for sure.
I feel like it depends mostly on if the citizens feel safe since that correlates heavily with GDP. If we're wanting to focus on that, I'd think the move would be to fully inform people of the proper danger, and then see how it goes. I'm not certain where the line that the tradeoff is most ideal is, but I could see either way tbh, leaning towards tactical lockdowns for areas that are seeing case spikes.
Test and trace for a virus that is spread by droplets and is aerosolised was silly from the start. And especially silly given the hysteria over fomite transmission.
Lockdowns caused deaths. People avoided restaurants out of fear which was a problem because of lockdowns and the hysteria. Sweden's economy is rebounding better than expected and will probably surpass pre-covid levels. In Africa, Tanzania stayed the most open and saw an increase in GDP. Tell the poor countries where people suffered even more under lockdown that lockdowns were 'good'. Singapore shows that lockdowns of their migrant population did not reduce transmission.
"Test and trace for a virus that is spread by droplets and is aerosolised was silly from the start."
Um, no; test and trace works just fine for diseases spread by droplets/aerosol. It works for *measles*, f-gawsh's sakes, which has a vastly higher R0 value than COVID.
And the nations that promptly initiated it make a very familiar list; NZ, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea... even here in Canada, the provinces that contained the virus best were our Atlantic provinces, who created such schemes.
Test-and-trace failed in the US because adequate containment wasn't even tried thanks to the Lord of Misrule in the White House and deeply-fractured state politics, in my opinion.
Test and Trace had nothing to do with New Zealand's covid response. New Zealand is a relatively sparsely populated island that is neither on the way anywhere nor near anyone. It closed it's borders in time, just. There was no test and trace at the time it closed it's borders and went into lockdowns. And lockdowns did not "flatten the curve", they were already flattening anyway.
Test and Trace might work with an aerosol virus when levels are very low.
so what makes you think it could ever have been under control given it may have been around nearly a year before first cases were observed in the US and Europe? The pro lockdowners are all about well you have to lockdown early so when? November 2019? September 2019? Earlier still. When we have no idea anything is even happening? Should we lockdown now in case something else is out there we don't know about?
I think a problem between pro and anti lockdown is a fundamental difference in understanding of how the world works. I understand from chaos theory at the macro and quantum uncertainty at the micro, that the universe is unpredictable. I accept we know far less than there is to know and there are things, many, many things we cannot control because we do not understand them.
That is not to say we should do nothing. It is to say we should be prepared for emergencies and stand by ready to intervene when we have a good idea that intervention will help. It's called "masterful inactivity".
Interventions often make things worse. Especially in complex situations where small changes in input can give wildly unpredictable changes in output. It really is often better to do nothing.
There was never any evidence lockdowns worked aside from China and the CCP are surely one of the most untrustworthy governments on earth. It's hardly surprising that they would claim they did a great job at supressing the virus. Do you believe they would honestly say they had not done a great job if they had not?
The vast majority of the rest of the "evidence" is flimsy modelling papers that assume lockdowns work. An assumption that something works is not evidence that it works. Anyone who takes the papers of Flaxmen et el seriously really need to carefully understand their methodology.
You do know that New Zealand has over 5 million citizens and they don't all live on range stations, right? Wellington and Auckland have a fair few high-rises within their city limits. They did use track & trace to contain the minor outbreaks that made it through their initial defences.
Also, you really aren't using the chaos theory jargon properly... plus there is ample evidence that distancing measure significantly affect COVID's R(e). Look at the Atlantic Bubble in my home and native land, Canada, or the current decline in transmission rate here in Ontario after our 2-month stay at home order... after stupidly opening too much in February leading to a runaway of outbreaks by mid-March.
Yes I am aware that NZ has 5 million citizens as I live in the country.
I don't know what a range station is. Do you mean a farm perhaps? Or a sheep station?
I am uncertain of what a few skyscrapers in Auckland means? Auckland has 1.1 million people over a little more than 1000 square kilometers. It is not dense by any standards. It has a single international airport and very little in public transport. So I am not sure what your point is, both Auckland and NZ are relatively sparsely populated. there are just a few international airports, but most traffic goes through just one, Auckland. And none of those airports are on the way to anywhere else.
This is opposed to European countries with much larger cities, much more densely populated, much more public transport, many, many, more airports and many are on the way to other places, so much higher through traffic.
Our political leaders are happy to take credit for what happened here, but it was lucky geography that allowed us to close the borders in time.
I didn't really use any Chaos Theory jargon I simply said the implication of chaos theory is you cannot model something this complex. That remains the case unless you can show me how it's possible to model a human population, undergoing a pandemic without bifurcation. Bifurcation, there you go, there is some chaos theory jargon for you!
But in any of my earlier posts, where is the jargon and how am I using it incorrectly?
You provide no data so I cannot comment on what you claim happened in Canada. If you have ample evidence please provide it I would be happy to look at actual evidence.
Considering all the hysteria about catching the virus from passing strangers, most cases are asymptomatic or will be mild and indistinguishable from other viruses, people disinfecting their groceries in the US, test and trace had very little value. Using contact tracing and mass testing to make people self isolate when they're not sick is just absurd. It takes time to contact trace and by the time that contacts are contacted, they might as use a coin toss. Measles is rare in the US and usually has visible symptoms that are relatively distinguishable. Contact tracing doesn't even work all that well for measles.
I am from Australia. Even despite testing everything that moved and contact tracing, they still found traces of covid in wastewater in areas where there was presumably no transmission. Australia has performed 12M tests in a population of 25.7M so mass testing found the cases. Taiwan has done considerably less testing than most countries. South Korea was praised for their test and tracing in April but then admitted that they had missed cases and cases went up with more testing. Germany hired 16k contact tracers yet cases went up afterwards.
Covid was in countries for months before anybody bothered testing for it. So it was already widespread which rendered contact tracing futile.
Taiwan is going into lockdown now because they found untraceable cases. It is believed that covid has been circulating for months there. Taiwan has only done 571,000 tests and has one of the lowest testing rates.
What about the argument that Texas and Florida had less lockdowns and had the same amount or less deaths than California? What would the cause for this be? One factor that I've heard is that California has the highest rate of multi generational families living in homes. Any thoughts on this?
Lying with statistics? The Florida numbers are heavily doctored. Before anyone dissects that data it can't be used for anything other than political stunts.
we throwin them out too? honestly it would be surprising if anyone didn’t fudge their numbers to some extent, which is to say if you’re gonna throw out some states because it’s politically convenient to your argument, likely you’d have to throw it all out
Have not read Wells' article, but can reply to the main point you make: Yes.
People in different countries/economies/cultures will have different outlooks/outcomes, possibly randomly or maybe not. I expect different cultures may have different opinions about what 'lockdown' even means. Lockdowns look to have worked in Viet Nam, where one member of my family has lived for years. Lockdowns there are real – not the theatrical things we saw in most of the US.
This is an interesting discussion. I am ambiguous about the lockdowns based on experience of various places, but nonetheless I feel there are two methodological problems with what is being portrayed here.
I don't think there is much mainstream debate over whether or not lockdowns reduced Covid infections - I can assume they did. The question at the beginning though was a legitimate one, which is not whether Covid infections would change but whether that in fact meant anything. In any medical emergency, people - especially the most vulnerable people - will stay at home (we will get to that further, below). Throughout the event we have seen that Covid is a condition whose effects do skew towards certain groups, particularly the old and those suffering with any form of respiratory weakness. What we have not seen is the effects of what creating "bubbles" for the vulnerable would have led to, instead of general lockdowns.
Of course regardless of this, implementation in the US is difficult, but elsewhere the experiment could have been clearer (in Japan for instance), so it is a pity that we do not have any evidence. This, by the way, is also the key point about vaccines, which are of course not there to reduce cases to "zero", since this will never happen; rather they are there to reduce the link between cases and serious conditions and death.
The second is on the economic impacts. I'm afraid that in this part, the author is somewhat guilty of goal-seeking what he wants. First, the fact that Sweden has performed economically significantly better than much of Europe - including countries considered to have had a "good Covid" such as Germany, is surely more telling than the comparison with Scandinavian peers. Secondly, the issue Sweden has had is that whilst its own economy remained relatively open, it is precisely because that of its neighbours did not which has caused a negative impact on GDP. Never has the effects of cross-border trade been more apparent than here, where both on a retail basis and wholesale basis, lockdowns in your neighbour spread, virus-like, to your own economy. There was no way for Sweden to not suffer and it is disingenuous to pretend that the benchmark for measuring the relative economic success of her non-lockdown is either zero or something close to it. The fact is that looking at lockdown countries, there simply is no good example of anyone who "got it right".
But there is a more particular point which one can infer from the mixed versions of what occurred in Asia, for instance Hong Kong where there was never actually a proper lockdown and companies continued as they wanted to. And this is that, as the author notes, during a well-publicised pandemic, people do their best to remain home anyway. And that's all fine and good, and natural. But the difference between a company that locks its employees out completely, versus one which decides to continue running a skeleton staff throughout, will be demonstrated best through the resilience of the bounceback which occurs afterwards. As a corporate man myself, the difference between a 70% work abstinence (Sweden) and a 75% "lockdown" (Denmark) is huge. By and large, the same 25% of the economy will be functioning in both scenarios - but the sliver of incremental private sector operations alive in the 70% scenario makes all the difference to a company when, down the road, it wants to open up again.
It is probably too early to get the full effects of this, but I suspect I say nothing controversial in saying that the US will bounce back further and faster than many OECD peers precisely because it only went through a patchwork of half-hearted lockdowns and continuity was not lost as much. The same vaguely applies to Britain's messy lockdown policy - whereas locked down countries such as Germany or Italy will suffer longer and deeper.
That's certainly a good part of it (and of course one thing to thank Trump for). But these are all connected issues. The reason all right of centre governments focused on vaccination as an answer and all left of centre governments focused on containment speaks to where their sympathies lie. But the vaccine focus was always the more long-term, sustainable one compared to the containment battle - and those governments which can last the course will be, as Boris is being, rewarded by the electorate.
I'm not sure you can really claim Biden's administration is a Covid actor. By and large we can only refer to governments in power during 2020. At that time the Democrats in general were big containment advocates - I do not recall anyone being big on the vaccine route since I suspect most did not have Trump's faith that a vaccine would be produced in time for any political use.
I am not saying that administration would have executed it well, but Trump always put vaccines ahead of containment, very openly so, and of course the US is benefiting from his borderline unethical pursuit of vaccine development and inventory stockpiling.
The EU will suffer economically more than the US and the UK because the EU nations have forfeited their currency sovereignty and are subject to asinine ECB enforced rules re "balanced budgets". In fact this pandemic may collapse the EU, if Italy - its 3rd biggest member, is forced into even more austerity as its government is supposed to repay debt in the face of high unemployment.
The only reason the EU survived the GFC was that the ECB broke all the rules about member states' debt/GDP ratios and bought public debt.
Well yes, that's what you've written above. And I wrote that the Germany comparison is more telling. But what is your basis for comparing with the Scandies?
Sorry, I shouldn't have been so curt. Anyway, Sweden is geographically close to the other Scandinavian countries. Its population level and density is closer to theirs than to Germany's. If there is any genetic susceptibility/immunity they will likely share it (but not Germany). If there is any regional pre-existing resistance due to other coronaviruses (something that's still being debated), the other Scandies will share it and Germany will not. Scandinavian countries have similar culture as well.
I think the "culture" point is going to take us down a rabbit hole. For the rest, you are still failing to address the point of why it is that other countries which have had lockdowns, performed comparatively worse.
Remember, my point here is not that Sweden had a great lockdown per se. I am saying it is erroneous to point to Denmark and claim that they definitely got it "right", since you are unable yet to extract the reasons they were able to keep the economy going whilst Germany was not. And it's not like Denmark and Germany are millions of miles away from each other.
You should look at a map. Denmark is very close to Germany in fact it shares a land border. Linguistically Sweden, Norway and Denmark all speak Germanic languages while Finnish is related to Basque. Iceland is nowhere near any of them.
Swedens population and distribution is actually very close to Scotland, which did about the same as the UK in terms of covid (so worse than Sweden).
The idea that the Germans and Danes would not share genetic susceptibility when they share a large land border seems a real logical stretch. How do you propose that Denmark would have some regional something that would protect it against coronavirus and that would be shared with Sweden (or not) but not with Germany?
It's ironic that you would cast a bald assertion of dishonesty against an article that substantiates its data and interpretations with links to sources. And those links in turn document with further citations and evidence, often to peer-reviewed research.
Perhaps you would like to respond with some substantive analysis that demonstrates rather than simply asserts that the author is 1) wrong, and 2) knows it. If so, we might be able to join you in your assessment of dishonesty. If you leave us with nothing more, we must conclude that you are expressing merely an unfounded opinion, a "gut feeling."
Important point is that lockdowns by themselves will not end the pandemic. I'm in Thailand and the government had very strict lockdowns and kept the numbers low.
Of course, you can't lockdown forever, and as measures ease, numbers go up. Because the government didn't try very hard to procure vaccines and instead decided to have one royally-owned company do all the manufacturing, there won't be vaccines for a while.
All this is to say that lockdowns are effective, yes, but you can't lockdown forever. Lockdowns + vaccines is the answer.
This is an important discussion, and an interesting perspective. What the article misses when comparing the scandinavian countries is the export dependence. The export-to-gdp ratio of sweden in 2017 was 45%, norway 36%, denmark 55%. So while that ratio does not directly determine a ranking, it seems impossible to discuss the economy without mentioning trade.
The data on deaths in Sweden is clear, but I don't think you can tell which US states had more restrictions and lockdowns based on their death rates. Why is that?
I think there is a way to do it fairly but it would require some crunching:
1. Give each state a 'practice' one, that would be their first surge in cases with decline...call it preseason.
2. Then compare states by surges after their first one. This will work for about a year although as new drugs/treatments went online and the very high death rate among older nursing home residents stopped, comparing death rates this will will start to get muddled.
This type of analysis hasn't been done yet. I see lockdown skeptics and anti-maskers love to leave data untouched since NJ-NY got hit hard very early. But ironically this would have been infections produced when the states were not wearing masks and doing lockdown. Before the first lockdown, everyone in the US was Sweden.
Bollicks. So no one was working from home. No one was being cautious. The media wasn't talking about covid all the time. It was just nothing and then lockdown and then suddenly everyone new about covid.
And the comparison has been done Florida relaxed restrictions. California doubled down. Florida did broadly better in spite of an older population, and being flooded by holiday goers.
That's a funny (and immature) way to end your post, considering you're ignoring all the data in the article we're posting on. And Florida's roughly in the middle of states on Covid deaths per capita-- nothing to cheer about. But you're absolutely right-- the friends who died and the family members who were hospitalized-- all just a creation if the media. Never happened.
"But you're absolutely right-- the friends who died and the family members who were hospitalized-- all just a creation if the media. Never happened."
No where ever have I said anything like that. So you can make things up and credit them to me if you think that makes you clever, or better informed or what ever it is you think you are achieving. And then call me immature.
Who said anything about cheering? This is how poor this debate is. I do not revel in death. I want society to do the best for everyone. Not just middle class people who can afford to stay at home and who's kids have access to devices and internet. Not just for very sick, very old people who will only live a few months, maybe a year longer to live anyway.
I accept that we live in a finite world. Society cannot save everyone. We cannot win every battle.
Society is also complex. Interventions often have huge unintended consequences. Lockdowns do harm. To boil me down to callousness or to make out I'm hiding from the truth, when Noahs post seems to imply lockdowns broadly did no real harm seems at the very least disingenuous. And I would posit, an indictment of the fact that I doubt there are many poor people, or children or poor children reading this site and in a position to argue their own corner.
I argue for them. You can all pretend like they don't exist but if you believe that the impacts on a poor child of missing school for a year will be reflected in GDP figures from the last couple of months, AND that their lifetimes will not be affected by this then all I can say is that UNICEF, The United Nations and The OECD all strongly disagree with you. And Noah mentioned none of that.
The poor, and children and in particular poor children are also vulnerable groups.
But poor people are just a creation of the media right? They never really happened
Again as you seem to purposefully have ignored you assume Covid hit uniformly over all communities at the exact same time, it did not. While Italy was falling apart, the UK had its head in the sand. As NY suffered the first onslaught, the South didn't feel much until the summer.
I've demonstrated to you how you can do a fair test of the effectiveness of different communities by looking at their death rate *after* they experienced their first wave. You choose to ignore that. Your article does demonstrate how problematic these comparisons are. One state has a lot of old people, another does not. If you have a lot of old people but manage to keep nusing homes clear of virus, you'll do a lot better than a state whose nursing homes fall (here having a delayed wave gives on an advantage since they can prepare for things like sealing off nursing homes). Also there's a massive advantage in 'going later' rather than first since treatments improve over time.
I assume nothing. Italy did not fall apart. Lombardy got hammered. The rest of Italy was unspectacular. And in fact this applies to Sweden. Stockholm got hit hard, the rest of Sweden not much.
I did not ignore anything but you have demonstrated nothing. When did the first wave start? How do you define that? When did it end? How do you define that? A demonstration would surely mean you did something and showed me. Have you done the study yourself? Not that I am aware of so what have you demonstrated to me?
In any case I will make the point of my other post that has many references. There is an excellent study from Denmark. It is regions within a region some that stayed in moderate restrictions others that moved up to severe restrictions. No difference in outcomes either measured by cases or deaths.
This is not the final answer. This does not prove lockdowns do not work. But there is more than enough evidence they do not for a deep look and more debate. To just say they work is also not the final answer.
"When did the first wave start? How do you define that? When did it end? How do you define that?"
Very easy, graph cases in a community, the first wave will be the increase of the first hill or mountain. It ends when the line goes down from there until it either hits the original low or turns around and climbs again for a second wave.
"just say they work is also not the final answer." Any declaration that they don't work runs up against the problem that a reasonable explanation has to be presented why they don't work. It's a bit like being a physics grad student monitoring gravity in a dozen cities around the world. One day the monitor in Cairo reports zero. You do not simply note that gravity vanished in Cairo for one day.
I'd think one issue is the lack of travel restrictions between US states, while European countries increased border restrictions. Any US analysis needs to consider that NJ and NY had bad death rates due to being hit early in the pandemic, and then instituted relatively strict lock downs. San Francisco is an example of an area with stricter lock downs before their pandemic really got going that did relatively well.
It’s not a moot point. Worldwide COVID cases are still at near-record highs. Many Asian countries which had previously been doing quite well (e.g. Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand) are experinecing spikes and have to decide what to do now. E.g. Taiwan is currently reporting several hundred cases a day of B.1.1.7 with less than <1% of the population being even partially vaccinated and now has to decide what sorts of restrictions to enact, for how long, and what the goal should be.
I can agree with Noah on this topic. Australia has practiced severe lock-downs whenever the virus shows up.......and the government has funded the resulting economic pain with an (initially at least) generous wages supplement for idled ("non-essential") workers.
Yet Australia's economy has performed relatively well, suffering only one quarter of negative growth, and now back to c.5.5% unemployment, (from a high of c.10% at the beginning of the pandemic). Needless to say, Australia's vaccination program is progressing at a very leisurely rate.
But note, I'm an MMTer. The whole globe's non-essential economy should have been locked down and managed with IMS and BIS money printing.....I reckon 3 million lives could have been saved (ignoring, for the sake of the argument, the negative effects on some families being cooped-up with one another for an extended period of time..)
Focusing on cases was a very silly, selfish thing to do from the start and had Australia done nothing then it's unlikely that they would have noticed the difference in deaths. The lockdowns were anything but 'good'. Other countries like Malaysia found significantly higher cases yet the death rate is about the same. Sweden made mistakes with care homes so saw excess deaths amongst that age group. However, the percentage increase in deaths for Sweden in 2020 is close to Australia's in 2019.
Australia is a privileged country and people wanted to spend. Australia didn't suffer much of a downturn comparatively during the GFC. As borders were closed, the spending was just done locally. Had the country remained open and the government and media's message been very different, then the spending would have been high throughout without having to go through that contraction.
"Focusing on cases was a very silly, selfish thing to do from the start and had Australia done nothing then it's unlikely that they would have noticed the difference in deaths. " We see in India what 'do nothing' actually accomplishes.
Please. India and Australia weren't at all comparable. Delhi which has seen most of the issues has very toxic air, had locked down, and had opened an oxygen bar before covid. The pollution levels have risen sharply. Many doctors haven't properly treated the typical respiratory illnesses and people from surrounding areas go to Delhi hospitals which has put pressure on hospitals. They are also currently troubled by mucormycosis.
This is what often happens with lockdown critics, The special pleading comes out in both directions. Back when India was looking good, the the story is "look how lockdowns aren't needed" as while India had one early one, it then stopped and celebrated its 'victory' over Covid. Now that all hell is breaking loose, it's 'toxic air', pollution levels, poorly trained doctors etc etc. How quickly we forget even in the US we heard about oxygen crises as some states were running short of oxygen supplies.
It's very simple, communicable diseases spread slower when humans do less communicable things. Hence lockdowns work. Hence the optimal policy is to lockdown to *get rid* of Covid so not only can you open up again but you don't have to worry about the virus coming back.
But it's not that simple. Humans do things without lockdowns. If you get on a bus and someone is sitting in a seat with puffy read eyes and a running nose, you don't sit anywhere near them do you?
There is a decent body of research showing that lockdowns have not had much effect in many places. It seems something was happening before lockdowns that halted the virus. What that is is up for conjecture, but most guess it is the lighter restrictions and people generally being more careful like I described above.
All lockdowns did, at least in New Zealand, was make massive super spreader events across the country, called supermarkets. There was no control in them, no one was keeping distance, everyone was in a stressed and agitated state (which inhibits the immune system) and if any super spreader had gone to a supermarket they could easily have infected hundreds of people. I observed people who appeared sick although it was hard to tell given the feeling of panic and doom forced on us by a sensationalist media and irresponsible reliance on poor models that no one seemed to understand.
And your argument makes no sense. If India dealt with a first wave without any real lockdowns and then didn't deal with a second wave so well, when they again didn't really lockdown, that provides some support for lockdowns having questionable effect. How does it support lockdowns except with the curious logic that "something didn't happen that might have done something, therefore that something works".
This sets aside the fact that India is a third world country, massively corrupt, they cannot lockdown as people are too poor, and their hospitals will be overrun very easily because they are poor and don't have much of a health system.
Nevermind, the fact that 5000 dead a day is not hugely significant in a country where around 25 000 people die everyday normally. More numbers provided without context.
I think the only thing India provides support for is that they need a better health system and more wealth generally. But if those problems were easy to fix then they probably would have fixed them.
"Humans do things without lockdowns. If you get on a bus and someone is sitting in a seat with puffy read eyes and a running nose, you don't sit anywhere near them do you?" Works ok for a disease that is almost all symptomatic when it spreads, Covid is not and in reality most viruses are not. We see R0 in many places oscillating up and down usually getting to a crises at around 1.5. If you hear about cases, odds are many people have been exposed without realizing it and pulling back (i.e. going out less) is going to take longer to pull it back down.
"There is a decent body of research showing that lockdowns have not had much effect in many places." Not really. You can't really do research like this unless you can identify the level of infection in two different nations over time and track the results of different policies.
New Zealand achieved zero Covid and had fewer days of lockdown than most other nations. On top of that, once they got ZeroCovid they did not need any restrictions other than quarantining those entering for 14 days. No masks, indoor dining opened, even concerts.
If India's problem is less wealth and a bad healthcare system, why did infection explode only now? Did India suddenly get poorer, sicker and have fewer doctors than a year ago? India's population is actually much younger than the US and even Europe. Of course if there's a button you can push to make their system better, then pushing it would help but here the old lessons of history hold better. You stop a plague to deal with it for the same reason you put a fire out when it appears in your house sooner rather than later.
Lockdowns for India were devastating for the poor. The toxic air and poorly trained doctors were issues before covid. The pollution has gotten even worse recently.
The only benefit of lockdown for India was that the air quality in Delhi improved significantly. But cars and factories had to go back so the air quality went back to what it was. Lockdowns do not work and 'getting rid' of covid is this very simplistic way of thinking that is short sighted and ignores the immense harms of lockdowns.
Except as Noah demonstrated, no such immense harms can be demonstrated. As he points out, you will get either lockdown and less virus or virtual lockdown and more virus but what is not an available option is to save the economy by asking people to just keep going out like nothing is happening. They won't.
"'getting rid' of covid is this very simplistic way of thinking that is short sighted" Putting a fire out today rather than letting it grow is indeed short term. Seeing a deranged driver coming at you driving the wrong way on the street and you swerving out of the way is short term thinking. If you can't do short term thinking right you're not going to have much of a long term to demonstrate any value there.
MMT is nonsense and in defiance of all historical support. Hardly surprising that an acolyte of that pseudo economic drivel would support lockdowns.
But hey global debt has risen by 20 odd trillion in 2020. So I guess we will see who is right. Inflation is poking it's head up everywhere. So I guess now all governments need to do is raise taxes across the board and everything will be better according to MMT?
The idea that you can print money with little constraint, towards full employment is just garbage. This is just another branch of flailing pseudointellectualism that economics is employing to try and give itself a mathematical (and therefore scientific) reputation.
Central banks have been a disaster way to accommodative and they have massively increased the gap between rich and poor.
I suspect MMT will be consigned to the same place as efficient market hypothesis before to long, but I guess the next year or two will tell us for sure.
Spoken by an anti-lockdown criminal (content with 3 million avoidable covid deaths), who knows nothing about MMT.
For your education: the idea is that you (ie the sovereign currency-issuing government) can "print money" constrained by what is available for sale in the nation's currency.
Obviously during a lockdown of the non-essential economy. government can corner the economy's essential production, to ensure everyone can survive (pay their essential living costs).
http://www.rossgittins.com/2021/03/funding-budget-by-printing-money-is.html
Yes, this pandemic will blow mainstream neo-Keynesian/neo-liberal economics out of the water, as governments are forced to pay down public debt owed to wealthy private interests amid ever spiraling inequality - debt which governments should never have issued in the first place, since they could have supported idled workers in lock-downs without taxing or borrowing from the private sector.
Good one. You are truly arrogant if you believe you have some solution which would have saved those three million lives. I have never said I am content with deaths, but death is a reality, it comes to us all and context matters.
I understand plenty about economics and MMT.
What is criminal is simpletons like you who have just enough knowledge to make yourselves look stupid but hide behind pseudo scientific nonsense like epidemiological modeling and MMT.
There is a difference between not understanding something and understanding it and realizing it is stupid.
I understand perfectly what the "idea" behind MMT is. It's just that it's a dumb idea.
The US can, in theory print as much money as it wants because it has the reserve currency. If Australia prints all the money it wants it will debase it's currency and the value of it will fall against the USD. It's what happens when interest rates are cut, or at least it was before we went to the zero interest rate / negative interest rate, bizzaro world we have now.
Then when Australia wants to buy oil, or anything else measured in USD (and most international products and services are measured in USD) the cost of that will increase. That is inflationary. Simple.
This sets aside all the hyper inflationary events caused by money printing throughout history and the terrible damage they did to society, the Weimar republic being the obvious one. But there are many, many more.
You also do not understand debt. It is not money. It is not an instrument. It is a contract, a promise. A promise that if you give the US government x now, then they will pay you back, when the time on the contract has expired x + the agreed interest rate. Debt is backed by a promise not by pseudo intellectual monetary nonsense. If no one trusts the promise any more than you can print them all you want they will have no value.
MMT is just more have your cake and eat it jiggery wokery. The way to generate wealth has never changed. Hard work, some smarts, some good luck, help at the right times, generating productivity and then excess as savings to be re-invested elsewhere. That is what got us to where we are today. Not adding zeros to pieces of paper or computer screens. Saying "this time it's different" doesn't make it different.
And you are completely making stuff up, which I guess is what you have to do when you have no realisation of how little you know. Governments don't owe money to "wealthy private interests". The largest holder of US treasuries aside from the Federal reserve is the Japanese Government which is well in excess of a trillion but China also owns in excess of a trillion. The Fed holds around 7 trillion in treasuries which means the US owes about 30% of it's debt to itself. So where are those "wealthy private interests" you are talking about?
Talk about conspiracy theory.
The US has been "monetising it's debt" since the GFC to the tune of many trillions. The "stimmies" paid to Americans all come from massive deficit spending which is again, in effect printing money.
Lockdown of the "non essential economy". Good one central planner. Who decides what is essential and what is not. You? The government department of essential things?
And what is non-essential about the business owner who has ploughed their heart and soul and savings into their business and has real meaningful relationships with their customers? And has been doing that for 20 years. How do you measure the essentialness of relationships? Of being part of a community? Of sponsering the local sports team, or helping troubled kids with their first job? Or all the things a business provides that is not what it sells?
But we shouldn't worry about that because it's too hard to think about and hey, you've got all this printed money right?
All any of our interventions have done is increase the gap between the rich and the poor drastically. In 2020 the wealth of the top 20% of Americans increased, for the other 80% it decreased.
In New Zealand who supposedly did great during the pandemic, house prices in 2020 increased by over 20%, while money was printed to pay people to lockdown. Great if you already have wealth and a house. Not so great for all the poor people who do not.
In NZ unemployment is now higher then before the lockdowns (which were enacted when cases were already falling) and about 58 billion has been spent on keeping borders closed and paying people to stay home and do nothing and increasing the gap between rich and poor. This is a colossal waste of resource.
If New Zealand did the same as Sweden in terms of covid deaths it would have about 7000 dead. That's a little over 8 million spent, per person saved. The average New Zealander (if you add in the total value of the median house price) earns just over 3 million in their life time. Explain to me how spending nearly three times the amount an average person generates GROSS in their ENTIRE WORKING LIFETIME represents a sensible investment of our finite resources? And a very high proportion of those "lives saved" would have been dead by now without covid anyway.
210 500 children in New Zealand live in poverty. The amount New Zealand spent on covid, an amount that is mainly saving already very sick and elderly people (and only delaying many of their deaths by months or at best a year), represents a little over 275 000 dollars per child in poverty.
To be frank I think the best thing for society to do would have been to go along as we were, protect those old and sick as best we could and spend that 275 000 on each and every one of those children in poverty. We should not have let them miss the two months or more they missed off school when we know the damage to life time outcomes missing school causes and how that hits the poor even harder than the rest. By any measure this would have had a far more positive impact on society than what we have now.
I would argue that people like you are the criminals. Your simple minded, one dimensional view of the world means that you don't even debate the morality of borrowing from the young to fund the old and sick while about 18% of New Zealand kids don't get enough to eat and live in damp, cold miserable homes. And of course they will be expected to pay for those old and sick lives later through taxes. Is that fair? I dunno, but I think we should be asking the question.
But you aren't challenged by those people. Because they have no voice. They are kids so they aren't here reading the nonsense you are talking and arguing their corner. And the poor kids don't have a device to connect to the internet, and even if they did they don't have an internet connection. Their poor parents aren't here either they are either working two crappy jobs (three before lockdown but as they work the jobs that are first to go, like cleaners, now they are down to two or one) having to take food parcels from foodbanks and generally worrying about getting through tomorrow.
Unfortunately they don't have time to convince selfish, coddled, heartless, middle class people who can work from home, and virtue signal their "caring" on instagram, people who have no idea about them, and couldn't care less, as long as the value of their assets keep rising. The same people who then have the temerity to describe people like me as "only concerned with money" when I criticize the closure of society. As if an economy is just about fat cats making outrageous profits.
A school is part of the economy. A museum. A university. A road to the beach. A cafe. A museum. A hospital. A Music Venue. A Park. A Sportsground.
People who do not understand this and then attempt to take the moral high ground are the criminals.
You should feel ashamed. Your contempt for the vulnerable is disgusting.
Your ignorance is disgraceful. Read Stephanie Kelton's bestseller 'The Deficit Myth'. Weimar republic? Give me a break, if a nation has to pay war reparations AND suffer confiscation of it's productive capacity (when the French confiscated Ruhr valley factories) of course hyperinflation will be the result. As for the covid-19 death toll, it should never have surpassed 100,000, by which time governments would have become aware a total lock-down of the non-essential economy was required....governments which have the capacity to change the digits in the bank accounts of idled workers, to fund their essential living expenses for the period of the pandemic until vaccination of the population is achieved.
The responsibility for 3 million dead is on mainstream flat-earth economists like yourself. Sovereign currency-issuing governments did not need to borrow money from anyone. Sleep well tonight if you can.
I don't see how ignorance can be disgraceful as ignorance is not knowing and I can't know everything.
What has what the money spent on to do with anything? If the Weimar republic was printing it's money to build hospitals that would not have lead to hyperinflation? So it matters what the money is printed for that's what you are saying? If it's useful things you won't get hyperinflation. If it's reparations or because you lost some industrial base you need to replace it will lead to hyperinflation. Sure makes so much more sense now.
And what about Zimbabwe? The French republic? Spain after the discovery of South America? Various Roman republics that debased their coinage? Why did they also all end in hyperinflation and economic ruin?
Non essential what does that mean and who decides? And what is the amount for "essential living expenses"? And what mechanism does the government have to add some zeroes in bank accounts? And could this have really been figured out very quickly without causing different problems?
And essential workers couldn't spread the virus? If lockdowns work they have to be like China with welded closed doors and blokwarts to spy on people and make sure they are complying. If you lock down all the country who does the essential stuff? And then what stops them spreading it?
And what about liberties and freedoms that the West has slowly built over thousands of years? These are our insurances against people like Xi or Stalin. The cost of that insurance is we don't really do things like lockdowns well. So do we become more dictatorial like China? Or do we accept that "if we trade a little bit of liberty for a little bit of safety we deserve neither"? Clearly you want more safety over liberty so why don't you go live in China, they have done a great job of controlling the virus. Or North Korea they have no virus according to them. Why don't you live there?
And can you print a few zeroes onto kids school education? You can print them up some social interactions with their peers? And an economy is just a big machine right. Stop it, print some money, pull a lever here or there, start it again, no problem. Does printing a few zeros help mental health, or physical exercise in a West riddled with obesity?
So many questions in something complex as a society and MMT has no real answers aside from debasing our means of exchange.
The responsibility for three million dead likely has to do with Chinese gain of function research and shoddy practices in their labs.
The only thing that stops me sleeping is the damage done by pseudo intellectual nonsense like MMT.
Glad you now understand Weimar; next, Zimbabwe: food production collapsed owing to political reasons, the government attempted to print money to pay for diminishing food production.
Hyper-inflation is always a result of loss of productivity for whatever reason, including the decline of empire in the face of increasing external competition).
As to what money is: you can read Warren Mosler's '7 deadly innocent frauds of economic policy', free on the internet.
In essence, sovereign currency-issuing governments are constrained by *resources*, not money or debt....debt they don't need to issue; the need for balanced government budgets is a ruse - a fraud - perpetrated on an uncomprehending public. We find that difficult to understand because private sector players, ie, households, businesses, you and me, ARE constrained by money and debt.
As for "freedom": you want to be "free" to spread a highly contagious virus which is c.10x as deadly as the flu? (whatever its origin, which has yet to be determined).
🙄🤦♂️
The data on this provides a shockingly clear picture, crazy that this is a bit of a heterodox opinion (both US left and right seem to agree that lockdowns hurt the economy, right just thinks it was bad and the left is naive/decadent for not caring, while left thinks it was good and the right is heartless for being ok with more deaths to preserve the econ).
"In the end, the economy is made up of human beings, and valuing those human beings is pretty much the best thing you can do for your economy".
It's unfortunate that the US left doesn't make arguments in these terms more often when this is clearly the case for not just lockdowns but healthcare, cash relief, green energy etc etc etc. I feel like it would be far more convincing to people on the right/center (the few who would listen, anyway) rather than turn it into a moralizing "I care about people over profits" situation. There's probably an argument you can make that for the left's prestige economy and virtue signaling purposes it is more useful to frame things in this way though.
The problem with this article - and with lockdowns in general - is that they assume they can control exponential growth. It's been pretty well established that in most cases COVID-19 follows a logistic curve (in terms of cumulative cases and deaths). In order to stop a spike in cases and deaths you need to two things to work out for you. Firstly you need to get the timing of the lockdown correct and - more importantly - the lockdown has to take R below one.
There are some very big issues with this approach. One is that all three lockdowns, COVID *INFECTIONS* (i.e. day 0 of a covid case) have peaked before lockdown measures took place. Professor Simon Wood of the University of Edinburgh has done some excellent work on this (https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~swood34/). It appears that we are as good at timing lockdowns as investors are at timing the market.
Secondly and more controversially, lockdowns are not effective in reducing infections. They do not work. If we examine the November lockdown we see that there is only a small decrease in infections after a lockdown is imposed. In the March and January lockdowns, infections were already decreasing in the days before lockdown and the R value was also decreasing prior to lockdown. Lockdowns may increase the rate at which R decreases (dR/dt), but the evidence for this is slim at best. For evidence of all of this, see these two graphs from Simon Wood (https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~swood34/epidemic.png). Further evidence for lockdown 3 can be found here: https://thecritic.co.uk/seven-indictors-that-show-infections-were-falling-before-lockdown-3-0/.
On a more local level, we see such proof for this again and again in the failed local lockdowns in Leicester and the north of England (https://unherd.com/thepost/the-leicester-lockdown-was-not-necessary/ and https://unherd.com/thepost/where-is-the-evidence-that-the-tier-three-strategy-works/).
In London, cases were increasing rapidly in certain boroughs towards the end of the November lockdown. While the B117 variant and schools being open may have been factor in this, it further weakens the case for lockdowns.
A collection of 35 papers have also reached similar conclusions: https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-coronavirus-the-evidence/
Despite all of this evidence against lockdowns, let us assume that they work to some extent. In order to justify them, the government must demonstrate the benefits of the lockdown outweigh the costs. Miles et al examined this and found that "The lowest estimate for lockdown costs incurred was 40% higher than highest benefits from avoiding the worst mortality case scenario at full life expectancy tariff and in more realistic estimations they were over 5 times higher." (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/ijcp.13674).
It appears that there are only two viable approaches to fighting COVID-19, the first being the zero covid approach used by Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The option is light touch approach of the US (Texas and Florida in particular) and Sweden. Anything in-between is likely to lead to more job losses and non-COVID excess deaths while doing almost nothing to slow down this disease.
I also think this is the most defensible view based on what we know now.
Although having said that, "zero Covid" is in practice impossible, hence why governments pursuing this will almost certainly set themselves up for a fall - as we are seeing in Taiwan now. You cannot keep promising an electorate the physically impossible and hope that it never catches up with you.
Zero-covid for eternity is impossible, but it's certainly possible until you develop, mass produce and distribute a vaccine. Australia and South Korea are evidence of this. Australia is making 1m doses/week of the AstraZeneca vaccine. South Korea is also locally producing vaccines. Both countries will exit the pandemic very soon with very few deaths.
They have also had far fewer lockdowns than the UK which has been almost perpetually under lockdown since March 2020, with an exception for the period between June 2020 - October 2020.
As for Taiwan, they will either suppress their spike in cases back to zero or they will
have one brief wave before they reach herd immunity through vaccination.
In the future, mRNA vaccines will be deployable within 100 days (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/uk-pm-boris-johnson-announces-100-day-target-to-develop-new-vaccines.html). This means that the "zero covid" period for any disease will be 5-6 months long (3 months for development, 2-3 months for mass vaccination).
If the UK had started its vaccination program in June and finished in September, we would have around 40k deaths rather than the nearly 130k deaths we have now.
Cases were always a bad metric. Australia has a death rate that is close to Malaysia's despite all the cases. South Korea relied on test and trace but that failed and they saw cases rise months later. Singapore which has a population comparable to NZ found all those cases yet the death rate is about the same. Australia isn't letting people leave the country without government permission even with vaccinations and is planning on keeping borders closed until mid 2022. One of the state borders was closed for most of this and only opened relatively recently. The UK has been able to travel for most of this and mandatory hotel quarantines (which are only practiced by a few countries) were only introduced this year.
Taiwan has one of the lowest testing rates and has relied on test and trace. Had they tested as much as Australia then they would have found more cases. Their recent cases were considered to be untraceable and so it is believed that covid has been circulation for months.
I think it is a risky and costly game to pretend to people you can get to no cases. Remember, we are talking here about no *cases*, not no deaths. And the cost of attempting to do so is HUGE. Taiwan has not let any foreigners in, pretty much, for a year. This is in no way sustainable. The Hong Kong government has vacillated, but has gone much the same way. If they had never promised "no cases" but stuck to minimising serious cases / deaths, things would be much better.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I am saying zero covid is impossible in perpetuity but very possible and desirable for periods between 6-12 months. The cost is not huge. Australia's GDP shrunk 1.1% in 2020, Taiwan grew by 3%, South Korea declined by 1% while the UK shrunk by 10%. The UK has over 130k deaths, the 3 other countries have 2832 deaths (Australia 910, South Korea 1903, Taiwan 12).
In future, a zero disease approach will become the standard approach to pandemics. Countries who cannot achieve this will adopt the Swedish model of voluntary restrictions.
You probably won't even have to close your borders, but rely on enhanced screening and quarantine for international travel. A negative PCR test before flying + negative PCR test on arrival + screening by sniffer dogs (Finland is using dogs to sniff out covid with a >98% success rate) + 10 day quarantine with an exit on day 5 providing you test negative. The protection that these measures would provide would be multiplicative. You would also ban travel to the countries worst affected by any new disease.
The most important thing would be to act quickly and implement these measures as soon as a new pathogen emerges (i.e. exercising the precautionary principle). Nassim Taleb has written about this at length.
I get that this is true for a hypothetical future - but it is not true now.
I would dispute the idea that zero cases becomes the paradigm for the future unless there are some incredible scientific and technological breakthroughs in the coming years. What will, I think, be the future (for now) is a groundswell of public opinion saying "never again" to widespread, comprehensive lockdowns unless there is a substantially better medical argument for it than there was this time.
In other words, I think the Swedish / Texas model will by far become the norm. The one thing your generally balanced comments omit is the factor of public sentiment.
Not really, at least not in the UK. Over here people have been incredible supportive of the lockdowns. In parliament, only 30 MPs (mostly backbench libertarian tories) provide any sort of opposition to the government.
"Four in five (79 per cent) of English adults support the new [January] national lockdown, and nearly two in three (62 per cent) believe the government reacted too slowly in implementing stricter restrictions to control coronavirus, according to polling." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/lockdown-coronavirus-poll-survey-covid-b1782520.html
January lockdown vote 524 in favour vs 16 against. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2021/jan/06/how-did-your-mp-vote-on-the-coronavirus-lockdown-regulations
I mean, just looking at this again, the main issue with this is that as you wrote in your original reply, post hoc actions invariably produce no positive results. Closing borders, a negative PCR test, sniffer dogs and quarantine ALL can only be implemented after a virus of this kind has been a) identified to exist at all and b) can be properly tested. But as in the case of Covid, it takes months for this to occur and your comments on why lockdowns don't work apply equally to any retrospective policy you then go on to advocate.
The only answer is to implement total short term paralysis of closed borders and lockdowns as occurred in Australia - but I do not believe public opinion will support this. People will ask - with some justification - "there has to be a better way than this".
All the evidence about the severity of this virus in China was in January and the beginning of February. They knew that the R number was over 2.5 and the only reasonable conclusion to this was that the virus would spread worldwide. They watched China lockdown over 60 million people in Hubei province - they even welded some apartment doors shut. They saw China building a new hospital in Wuhan in just two weeks.
The evidence was there, but we thought that somehow that it wouldn't happen to us. We listened to the people that dismissed covid as little worse than a bad flu because it allowed us to remain in our comfort zone. We only took action in March because we could not ignore the evidence proving that covid was a severe disease as it has arrived in the West and was posing a direct danger to ourselves and our healthcare systems.
In terms of public support see my other comment. In future people will remember this pandemic and will want to avoid any new ones. Just as people who grew up during the Great Depression tended to be more fiscally conservative and frugal, the majority of people who have lived through this pandemic will have little trouble supporting the actions necessary to stop the next one.
In my original reply, I was criticising the oscillating lockdown/open up strategies employed in the UK and much of the world. Their are only two options that have proven to have worked - zero covid and voluntary restrictions.
Zero covid countries have largely stopped community transmission of the virus. Most of their cases are imported. Countries pursuing a Swedish approach have limited damage to their economies at the cost of higher cases and deaths. One model is not necessarily better than the other because zero covid might not be possible in some countries, especially in the Schengen zone in the EU.
I suppose there is a contradiction between my criticism of oscillating lockdowns and my support for zero covid because the strategies employed by both appear to be quite similar.
There is a difference because zero covid employs enhanced testing and contact tracing isolate ALL covid cases and their contacts, while oscillating lockdown strategies merely try to stop the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.
When we look at the pandemic in the UK more closely it becomes apparent why we failed and the policy differences between the UK and Australia/New Zealand. The most important reasons I think are these:
We had the belief in February/March that there was nothing we could do to stop the pandemic or slow it down. We did not try to test people coming into the country, and we didn't restrict international travel. There was a belief that the virus would not be very serious and we could get to herd immunity easily.
This led to a huge spike in infections in late March and a nationwide lockdown being imposed on 23 March. This was partially in response to a controversial paper by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, which predicted that the NHS would quickly be overwhelmed and we could have as many as 250k to 500k deaths in this first wave.
The zero covid countries didn't wait for widespread community transmission to occur. They acted quickly in restricting international travel, they had functional test and trace systems that identified and cut transmissions chains quickly. The UK was struggling to administer more than 3 tests per confirmed case, where as South Korea was conducting over 100. When you know where the virus is and who has it, you can stop it with it with effective contract tracing and isolation.
When we did recognise these facts, we did a very bad job of testing tracing and isolating. As discussed above, our testing was woeful. We only reached a 5% positivity rate on the 8th May, 2 months after the pandemic in the UK had begun. South Korea has never exceeded this threshold for the duration of the pandemic. The reason why we want a positivity rate of under 5% is that this is the minimum threshold at which the WHO thinks that a testing system is finding most of the infections occurring in a country.
The test, trace and isolate system in the UK was run by Dido Harding, an utter idiot whose greatest achievement to date was running a telephone and broadband company (Talktalk) which had the worst customer service in the industry and had been hacked by a teenager who stole the personal details of hundreds of thousands of customers. She only got the job because she was friends with Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister.
This resulted in 1) most coronavirus cases weren't identified, 2) of those which were identified their close contacts could not found or contacted in many cases. Modelling has shown the 80-90% of close contacts of ALL new COVID cases need to be identified and contracted for a test and trace system to work. As far as I am aware the contracting system has never achieved this.
The final nail in the coffin was that isolations were not enforced. There was no support system for people who had to self isolate. This resulted in an estimate of only 10% of people self isolating for the recommended 14 days. Cases were particularly high in more deprived and ethnic minority communities as a result.
They adopted face masks and social distancing faster than we did. They understood the importance of ventilation in indoor spaces. We did not have a mask mandate until June and did not recognise the importance of indoor transmission until very recently.
The UK also missed a huge opportunity suppress cases to zero in the summer of 2020. Daily cases were very low at the time making it easier to eliminate community transmission.
We did not do this for two reasons. The first was a bogus belief that we had reached herd immunity after the first wave and the second was that any spike in infections could be contained using so called circuit breaker lockdowns of two weeks. The government did not understand that once cases begin spiking (above 2-3000 cases per day) it becomes impossible to control the pandemic.
Imagine that you have 5000 cases a day and that each case has 10 contacts. It takes 1 hour to identify a contact and to tell them to self isolate. You need 6300 people working full time to do this. This only an example using hypothetical numbers, but it illustrates how outbreaks can quickly spiral out of control. When you factor in things like the fact you won't be able to identify all cases, not all close contacts will be reached and not all close contacts/people who have covid will self isolate, the threshold is even lower, probably closer to 3000 cases/day.
This is why we have failed stop this virus and is a huge reason why we have 130k deaths and one of the worst declines in GDP of any OECD country in 2020.
This I agree with. Either extremes or nothing.
For non-UK readers, I am mainly referring to the UK in the comment above.
Most of the epidemiological analysis relies on a single Reuters article for 'copious evidence'. There are now about 30 publications from scientists documenting the failures if lockdowns, which are not even dismissed but remain entirely unaddressed. Moreover, comparing Sweden with its neighbours is premature given that the lockdowns are likely to have long-term effects. Though similar pairings, such as Brazil and Peru would draw the opposite conclusions. It's not clear why Sweden is an outlier here, and why if you remove Stockholm, the death rates by area are about the same as its neighbours. One is invariably drawn to Sweden's absurdly lose classification of COVID deaths, which does not require COVID to feature on the death certificate, and if you are hit by a bus but test positive on the slab, you are added to those statistics... Though if I recall, lockdowns were also put in place to stop the overwhelming of the healthcare system, which did not occur in Sweden, rather making the suggestion Sweden's policy is a failure 'a moot point'. Further, this article fails to take into account Quality Adjusted Life Years. Every death of a 30 year old steals more prospective life from a population than the death of a moribund 80 year old. The lockdown in France is estimated to have robbed the population of 10x as many QALY.
The, conjecture, thought experiments, comparison to the Spanish flu are all entirely erroneous. This article is a great example of how data-illiteracy, buffered by bad ideas and a few choice media articles, can be used to justify about anything. The presupposition built upon here (lockdowns preserve life) is in fact supported entirely by another article, written by someone who has probably never read beyond the abstract in their life. Journalists have a notoriously difficult time with scientific articles I have noticed. If 'Yes, lockdowns are good' then this article should be peppered with supporting studies and soothing excerpts. Instead we see a possible 7% reduction in transmission, I do hope it was worth it, given that reducing transmission between those under 50y/o achieves essentially nothing in real-life terms.
For all the economic justification of lockdown, they were meant to protect life. More or less, they failed. There is no correlation between lockdown stringency and deaths per capita, no matter what individual anecdotes may be used to argue otherwise. Given their failure in this, I regard assertions that lockdowns may have saved us all money as ludicrous. I am no economist, so I will bite my tongue on the alleged fiscal concepts here, but I am pretty swift with biology and psychology. The author comes so damned close, but in the end utterly misses that *fear*, stoked by the media and various ideologues, is the main determining factor here, and that lockdowns can in some instances cause a reduction in *fear* (something scientists intentionally cultivated). Much as twisted ankle can be resolved by amputating a leg.
I have always found truth, no matter how unimaginably awful, provides a cold, cutting clarity that is the antithesis of fear. I wish we had focused a little more on truth, as we were in the fortunate position where it was definitely not unimaginably awful.
While I generally think lockdowns were justified, we will need some time before the entirety of the pros and cons will be tallied. In particular, a large percentage of the low-risk population is only now slowly waddling out of their apartments, significantly fatter and less in shape than one year ago. Many good habits were dropped, and poor ones picked up, and we will inherit a legacy of poor health for years to come. More than a few are coming out psychologically scarred. Many kids lost a year of education. Anecdotally, I see that some young adults have grown cynical about government, and such attitudes might come define their generation. And I fear that the EU might have come through fatally weakened. So, yes, two cheers for the lockdown.
I think the point about children losing education is a big one. Millions of children will effectively be held back a year because of the lock down and the effects on future productivity have yet to be measured
Dollars to donuts I'd bet it falls out on class lines. Go forward 25 years and if you can do a survey of individual productivity versus where people grew up and if they grew up in a school shutdown state, a half-half state or one that kep them open as much as possible, you're still going to find having advantaged parents gave you more of a boost than min. school shutdown. In fact, I suspect you'll have a hard time finding an effect even on disadvantaged backgrounds from shutdown states versus non-shutdown states.
Good one, you like to just make stuff up or do you actually do any research?
Perhaps the OECD are just another bunch of righty moaners who should have just shut their mouths and done what the government said, like a good little drone.
https://www.oecd.org/education/The-economic-impacts-of-coronavirus-covid-19-learning-losses.pdf
Wait? You have research from 25 years in the future? Good work Doc Brown. Ohhh wait, you don't, go fuck yourself then.
You were the one making the 25 year prediction based on no evidence other than your opinion. And then in some bizzare logical gymnastics you tell me to go fuck myself because I can't look 25 years into the future.
I certainly can't but then you were the one making the 25 year prediction with nothing to support it not me.
I actually provided some evidence from what I guess is a reasonably reputable institution.
The OECD study quite clearly states that they expect "long term economic impacts of coronavirus..... I mean you don't even have to read the whole thing it's all their in the title.
Well dude you're the one who submitted a study, clearly unaware absent a time machine no such study can be done.
Most of this stuff is impossible speculation. I remember one guy who was posting some idiot story about school closure lowering lifespan. How was the study done? They looked at HS dropouts from 1960 or so compared to HS grads. Dropouts lived shorter hence they conclude for every X months a kid isn't in school, he will die Y days sooner. Of course it didn't consider that maybe the last half century plus was unique to the next half centure. It didn't consider that many would go onto graduate HS and would enter a working world where online work would be very common while it didn't exist in 1960.
> some young adults have grown cynical about government
If this is true, it’s true because governments did not do a stronger job to shut things down, rather than because they were too strict.
Like I said, my understanding in this regard is anecdotal. Still, what I heard ran in the opposite direction. Frankly, I'd be surprised if the average kid / young adult felt that lockdowns should have been stricter. Then again, maybe I don't get out enough. In fact, I don't get out enough: life is still pretty restricted in my neck of the woods.
As a young adult, my experience is opposite to this. To the extent that the response to COVID made me more cynical about the (US) government, it was mostly because of its mismanagement of the response to the pandemic, including lax enforcement of the lockdown (plus turning it into a political issue, guaranteeing that a lot of people would refuse to follow it) as well as the way it handled testing (the method of testing the CDC developed was fully developed & publicized by the end of January, but throughout February, the CDC made a relatively small number of tests, many of which didn't work, made it difficult for people to get tests, & banned researchers, hospitals, &c. who had developed effective tests from using them) & vaccine development (tests of vaccine effectiveness did not use human challenge trials, though these would have sped up the process of testing & there were large numbers of people willing to volunteer (https://web.archive.org/web/20200701035742/https://1daysooner.org/ says 30108 people had signed up to volunteer for any such trial by the beginning of July), & the FDA unnecessarily delayed authorization of the vaccines once trials were complete (https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/04/how-key-decisions-slowed-fdas-review-of-covid-19-vaccine-but-also-gave-it-important-data/)). However, this is merely anecdotal.
Ultimately I just have anecdotes as well, but as a young adult myself (early 20s) all of my friends have spent the last year complaining about the government not being strict enough.
What bad habits did they pick up? If anything I saw people practicing heathier behaviors during the pandemic. Lots more people walking, less eating at restaurants, lots of people I know picked up meditation and study.
It's rather easy to find stories of people gaining weight (so bad habits of eating too much and exercising too little), and of drinking too much. And I've read mixed reports on drug use. I don't really think any of this is controversial.
I think your analysis their can be phrased as anecdotal.
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2021/data-charts-march-weight-change
Here's a fairly recent article from the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/26/us-health-weight-gain-exercise-pandemic-consequences
I live in Ireland, with one of the longest/strictest lockdown in the world.
If you compare Ireland's covid death rate to Sweden's, and account for the higher >65 population in Sweden (due to emigration from Ireland in the 1950s), there is almost no difference.
I can tell you from living thru the lockdown in Ireland, it is having devastating effects on our economy (especially small businesses), our young people, our mental health and drug/alcohol abuse.
From my experience in Ireland, it seems Sweden got it pretty right.
This would have been a stronger article if it engaged with the strongest recent academic criticisms of lockdowns, e.g.
http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf
Allen's thesis, as I understand it, is:
-- that because actual reductions in social interaction depended largely on voluntary action, independent of what lockdown regulations were imposed, the marginal health impact of imposing lockdown regulations was small
-- that the QALY cost of lockdown regulations was nonetheless large because they made life under those stricter regulatory regimes qualitatively much worse, even relative to an appropriate counterfactual baseline, and even though they had little impact on GDP
-- and that therefore lockdowns cost more QALYs than they saved.
There are a lot of possible ways you could challenge this thesis, but I don't see you doing that convincingly here.
I should declare bias here, btw: on libertarian grounds I think that Sweden's approach was the right one despite the figures you cite. I think that the additional deaths Sweden suffered were well worth it in order to leave their population so much freer than that of other developed countries for a year-plus, even though that freedom didn't show up in the GDP figures. But I can understand how others would have a different value tradeoff, for sure.
I feel like it depends mostly on if the citizens feel safe since that correlates heavily with GDP. If we're wanting to focus on that, I'd think the move would be to fully inform people of the proper danger, and then see how it goes. I'm not certain where the line that the tradeoff is most ideal is, but I could see either way tbh, leaning towards tactical lockdowns for areas that are seeing case spikes.
Test and trace for a virus that is spread by droplets and is aerosolised was silly from the start. And especially silly given the hysteria over fomite transmission.
Lockdowns caused deaths. People avoided restaurants out of fear which was a problem because of lockdowns and the hysteria. Sweden's economy is rebounding better than expected and will probably surpass pre-covid levels. In Africa, Tanzania stayed the most open and saw an increase in GDP. Tell the poor countries where people suffered even more under lockdown that lockdowns were 'good'. Singapore shows that lockdowns of their migrant population did not reduce transmission.
"Test and trace for a virus that is spread by droplets and is aerosolised was silly from the start."
Um, no; test and trace works just fine for diseases spread by droplets/aerosol. It works for *measles*, f-gawsh's sakes, which has a vastly higher R0 value than COVID.
And the nations that promptly initiated it make a very familiar list; NZ, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea... even here in Canada, the provinces that contained the virus best were our Atlantic provinces, who created such schemes.
Test-and-trace failed in the US because adequate containment wasn't even tried thanks to the Lord of Misrule in the White House and deeply-fractured state politics, in my opinion.
-- Steve
Test and Trace had nothing to do with New Zealand's covid response. New Zealand is a relatively sparsely populated island that is neither on the way anywhere nor near anyone. It closed it's borders in time, just. There was no test and trace at the time it closed it's borders and went into lockdowns. And lockdowns did not "flatten the curve", they were already flattening anyway.
Test and Trace might work with an aerosol virus when levels are very low.
But covid was already in Brasil in November 2019:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v1
In Italy in September 2019:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33752533/
and possibly as early as March 2019 in Barcelona:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1
so what makes you think it could ever have been under control given it may have been around nearly a year before first cases were observed in the US and Europe? The pro lockdowners are all about well you have to lockdown early so when? November 2019? September 2019? Earlier still. When we have no idea anything is even happening? Should we lockdown now in case something else is out there we don't know about?
I think a problem between pro and anti lockdown is a fundamental difference in understanding of how the world works. I understand from chaos theory at the macro and quantum uncertainty at the micro, that the universe is unpredictable. I accept we know far less than there is to know and there are things, many, many things we cannot control because we do not understand them.
That is not to say we should do nothing. It is to say we should be prepared for emergencies and stand by ready to intervene when we have a good idea that intervention will help. It's called "masterful inactivity".
Interventions often make things worse. Especially in complex situations where small changes in input can give wildly unpredictable changes in output. It really is often better to do nothing.
There was never any evidence lockdowns worked aside from China and the CCP are surely one of the most untrustworthy governments on earth. It's hardly surprising that they would claim they did a great job at supressing the virus. Do you believe they would honestly say they had not done a great job if they had not?
The vast majority of the rest of the "evidence" is flimsy modelling papers that assume lockdowns work. An assumption that something works is not evidence that it works. Anyone who takes the papers of Flaxmen et el seriously really need to carefully understand their methodology.
You do know that New Zealand has over 5 million citizens and they don't all live on range stations, right? Wellington and Auckland have a fair few high-rises within their city limits. They did use track & trace to contain the minor outbreaks that made it through their initial defences.
Also, you really aren't using the chaos theory jargon properly... plus there is ample evidence that distancing measure significantly affect COVID's R(e). Look at the Atlantic Bubble in my home and native land, Canada, or the current decline in transmission rate here in Ontario after our 2-month stay at home order... after stupidly opening too much in February leading to a runaway of outbreaks by mid-March.
-- Steve
Yes I am aware that NZ has 5 million citizens as I live in the country.
I don't know what a range station is. Do you mean a farm perhaps? Or a sheep station?
I am uncertain of what a few skyscrapers in Auckland means? Auckland has 1.1 million people over a little more than 1000 square kilometers. It is not dense by any standards. It has a single international airport and very little in public transport. So I am not sure what your point is, both Auckland and NZ are relatively sparsely populated. there are just a few international airports, but most traffic goes through just one, Auckland. And none of those airports are on the way to anywhere else.
This is opposed to European countries with much larger cities, much more densely populated, much more public transport, many, many, more airports and many are on the way to other places, so much higher through traffic.
Our political leaders are happy to take credit for what happened here, but it was lucky geography that allowed us to close the borders in time.
I didn't really use any Chaos Theory jargon I simply said the implication of chaos theory is you cannot model something this complex. That remains the case unless you can show me how it's possible to model a human population, undergoing a pandemic without bifurcation. Bifurcation, there you go, there is some chaos theory jargon for you!
But in any of my earlier posts, where is the jargon and how am I using it incorrectly?
You provide no data so I cannot comment on what you claim happened in Canada. If you have ample evidence please provide it I would be happy to look at actual evidence.
Considering all the hysteria about catching the virus from passing strangers, most cases are asymptomatic or will be mild and indistinguishable from other viruses, people disinfecting their groceries in the US, test and trace had very little value. Using contact tracing and mass testing to make people self isolate when they're not sick is just absurd. It takes time to contact trace and by the time that contacts are contacted, they might as use a coin toss. Measles is rare in the US and usually has visible symptoms that are relatively distinguishable. Contact tracing doesn't even work all that well for measles.
I am from Australia. Even despite testing everything that moved and contact tracing, they still found traces of covid in wastewater in areas where there was presumably no transmission. Australia has performed 12M tests in a population of 25.7M so mass testing found the cases. Taiwan has done considerably less testing than most countries. South Korea was praised for their test and tracing in April but then admitted that they had missed cases and cases went up with more testing. Germany hired 16k contact tracers yet cases went up afterwards.
Covid was in countries for months before anybody bothered testing for it. So it was already widespread which rendered contact tracing futile.
Taiwan is going into lockdown now because they found untraceable cases. It is believed that covid has been circulating for months there. Taiwan has only done 571,000 tests and has one of the lowest testing rates.
Hey Noah,
What about the argument that Texas and Florida had less lockdowns and had the same amount or less deaths than California? What would the cause for this be? One factor that I've heard is that California has the highest rate of multi generational families living in homes. Any thoughts on this?
Lying with statistics? The Florida numbers are heavily doctored. Before anyone dissects that data it can't be used for anything other than political stunts.
Evidence? References? Anything other then something you just made up right now?
There isn’t any evidence that the numbers in Florida have been doctored. Florida’s data is considered to be amongst the best.
ROFL.
New York lied about its numbers too
And?
we throwin them out too? honestly it would be surprising if anyone didn’t fudge their numbers to some extent, which is to say if you’re gonna throw out some states because it’s politically convenient to your argument, likely you’d have to throw it all out
What argument is that?
By the looks of it NY didn't doctor their numbers anywhere close to what Florida did.
Evidence? Do you actually have any evidence?
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/florida-covid-19-deaths
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/04/florida-governor-rob-desantis-covid-investigation-misled-public
That's an older article. This new research is what's referenced, and yes they did fudge the numbers (surprise!).
"The impact of COVID-19 on mortality is significantly greater than the official COVID-19 data suggest."
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306130
Hum noah,
Did you read David Wallace Wells's piece ?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/how-the-west-lost-covid-19.html
Several ideas in this paper:
- its not that easy to explain geographical differences in covid deaths mortality and non pharmaceutical interventions do not necessarily explain them
- a single set of policies can work at a given location, not in every country
- all of that is complicated
enjoy the reading, i think DW Wells is worth reading in general and if you have time would like your feddback on this paper :)
Have not read Wells' article, but can reply to the main point you make: Yes.
People in different countries/economies/cultures will have different outlooks/outcomes, possibly randomly or maybe not. I expect different cultures may have different opinions about what 'lockdown' even means. Lockdowns look to have worked in Viet Nam, where one member of my family has lived for years. Lockdowns there are real – not the theatrical things we saw in most of the US.
People Gonna Do What People Gonna Do.
This is an interesting discussion. I am ambiguous about the lockdowns based on experience of various places, but nonetheless I feel there are two methodological problems with what is being portrayed here.
I don't think there is much mainstream debate over whether or not lockdowns reduced Covid infections - I can assume they did. The question at the beginning though was a legitimate one, which is not whether Covid infections would change but whether that in fact meant anything. In any medical emergency, people - especially the most vulnerable people - will stay at home (we will get to that further, below). Throughout the event we have seen that Covid is a condition whose effects do skew towards certain groups, particularly the old and those suffering with any form of respiratory weakness. What we have not seen is the effects of what creating "bubbles" for the vulnerable would have led to, instead of general lockdowns.
Of course regardless of this, implementation in the US is difficult, but elsewhere the experiment could have been clearer (in Japan for instance), so it is a pity that we do not have any evidence. This, by the way, is also the key point about vaccines, which are of course not there to reduce cases to "zero", since this will never happen; rather they are there to reduce the link between cases and serious conditions and death.
The second is on the economic impacts. I'm afraid that in this part, the author is somewhat guilty of goal-seeking what he wants. First, the fact that Sweden has performed economically significantly better than much of Europe - including countries considered to have had a "good Covid" such as Germany, is surely more telling than the comparison with Scandinavian peers. Secondly, the issue Sweden has had is that whilst its own economy remained relatively open, it is precisely because that of its neighbours did not which has caused a negative impact on GDP. Never has the effects of cross-border trade been more apparent than here, where both on a retail basis and wholesale basis, lockdowns in your neighbour spread, virus-like, to your own economy. There was no way for Sweden to not suffer and it is disingenuous to pretend that the benchmark for measuring the relative economic success of her non-lockdown is either zero or something close to it. The fact is that looking at lockdown countries, there simply is no good example of anyone who "got it right".
But there is a more particular point which one can infer from the mixed versions of what occurred in Asia, for instance Hong Kong where there was never actually a proper lockdown and companies continued as they wanted to. And this is that, as the author notes, during a well-publicised pandemic, people do their best to remain home anyway. And that's all fine and good, and natural. But the difference between a company that locks its employees out completely, versus one which decides to continue running a skeleton staff throughout, will be demonstrated best through the resilience of the bounceback which occurs afterwards. As a corporate man myself, the difference between a 70% work abstinence (Sweden) and a 75% "lockdown" (Denmark) is huge. By and large, the same 25% of the economy will be functioning in both scenarios - but the sliver of incremental private sector operations alive in the 70% scenario makes all the difference to a company when, down the road, it wants to open up again.
It is probably too early to get the full effects of this, but I suspect I say nothing controversial in saying that the US will bounce back further and faster than many OECD peers precisely because it only went through a patchwork of half-hearted lockdowns and continuity was not lost as much. The same vaguely applies to Britain's messy lockdown policy - whereas locked down countries such as Germany or Italy will suffer longer and deeper.
I think the reason the U.S. will bounce back faster is because of our awesome vaccination program!
That's certainly a good part of it (and of course one thing to thank Trump for). But these are all connected issues. The reason all right of centre governments focused on vaccination as an answer and all left of centre governments focused on containment speaks to where their sympathies lie. But the vaccine focus was always the more long-term, sustainable one compared to the containment battle - and those governments which can last the course will be, as Boris is being, rewarded by the electorate.
Biden's is a left-of-center government, and has focused on vaccination rather than on containment.
I'm not sure you can really claim Biden's administration is a Covid actor. By and large we can only refer to governments in power during 2020. At that time the Democrats in general were big containment advocates - I do not recall anyone being big on the vaccine route since I suspect most did not have Trump's faith that a vaccine would be produced in time for any political use.
The Trump administration did not focus on vaccine distribution. Biden made it the top priority from day 1.
I mean, it was literally his stated focus in terms of Covid:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/trump-says-coronavirus-task-force-will-keep-working-indefinitely-with-a-focus-on-vaccines-and-reopening.html
I am not saying that administration would have executed it well, but Trump always put vaccines ahead of containment, very openly so, and of course the US is benefiting from his borderline unethical pursuit of vaccine development and inventory stockpiling.
You are a total douchebag. I hope you die of syphilis.
The purchasing was really good. The program decent.
The EU will pass the US in 1-2 weeks for the first dose since the US is slowing down and the EU speeding up.
Thank Trump then you commie asshole!
The EU will suffer economically more than the US and the UK because the EU nations have forfeited their currency sovereignty and are subject to asinine ECB enforced rules re "balanced budgets". In fact this pandemic may collapse the EU, if Italy - its 3rd biggest member, is forced into even more austerity as its government is supposed to repay debt in the face of high unemployment.
The only reason the EU survived the GFC was that the ECB broke all the rules about member states' debt/GDP ratios and bought public debt.
Well yes, that's what you've written above. And I wrote that the Germany comparison is more telling. But what is your basis for comparing with the Scandies?
Sorry, I shouldn't have been so curt. Anyway, Sweden is geographically close to the other Scandinavian countries. Its population level and density is closer to theirs than to Germany's. If there is any genetic susceptibility/immunity they will likely share it (but not Germany). If there is any regional pre-existing resistance due to other coronaviruses (something that's still being debated), the other Scandies will share it and Germany will not. Scandinavian countries have similar culture as well.
I think the "culture" point is going to take us down a rabbit hole. For the rest, you are still failing to address the point of why it is that other countries which have had lockdowns, performed comparatively worse.
Remember, my point here is not that Sweden had a great lockdown per se. I am saying it is erroneous to point to Denmark and claim that they definitely got it "right", since you are unable yet to extract the reasons they were able to keep the economy going whilst Germany was not. And it's not like Denmark and Germany are millions of miles away from each other.
We know why Germany's economy suffered; it was because Europe's economy suffered, and Germany sells lots of stuff to Europe.
In fact, Germany's economy suffered less than its neighbors'.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/germany-economy-shrank-by-just-5-in-2020-amid-covid-19
The German lockdown was/is also lighter than that of most large European countries.
Because it's not so heavily reliant on services ...
You should look at a map. Denmark is very close to Germany in fact it shares a land border. Linguistically Sweden, Norway and Denmark all speak Germanic languages while Finnish is related to Basque. Iceland is nowhere near any of them.
Swedens population and distribution is actually very close to Scotland, which did about the same as the UK in terms of covid (so worse than Sweden).
The idea that the Germans and Danes would not share genetic susceptibility when they share a large land border seems a real logical stretch. How do you propose that Denmark would have some regional something that would protect it against coronavirus and that would be shared with Sweden (or not) but not with Germany?
This entire post is thoroughly dishonest. Then again, I expect nothing less.
It's ironic that you would cast a bald assertion of dishonesty against an article that substantiates its data and interpretations with links to sources. And those links in turn document with further citations and evidence, often to peer-reviewed research.
Perhaps you would like to respond with some substantive analysis that demonstrates rather than simply asserts that the author is 1) wrong, and 2) knows it. If so, we might be able to join you in your assessment of dishonesty. If you leave us with nothing more, we must conclude that you are expressing merely an unfounded opinion, a "gut feeling."
Almost every single claim in this post is not just wrong, it's obviously, glaringly, totally wrong.
Important point is that lockdowns by themselves will not end the pandemic. I'm in Thailand and the government had very strict lockdowns and kept the numbers low.
Of course, you can't lockdown forever, and as measures ease, numbers go up. Because the government didn't try very hard to procure vaccines and instead decided to have one royally-owned company do all the manufacturing, there won't be vaccines for a while.
All this is to say that lockdowns are effective, yes, but you can't lockdown forever. Lockdowns + vaccines is the answer.
This is an important discussion, and an interesting perspective. What the article misses when comparing the scandinavian countries is the export dependence. The export-to-gdp ratio of sweden in 2017 was 45%, norway 36%, denmark 55%. So while that ratio does not directly determine a ranking, it seems impossible to discuss the economy without mentioning trade.
Norway's GDP is largely oil. Composition of GDP matters.
The data on deaths in Sweden is clear, but I don't think you can tell which US states had more restrictions and lockdowns based on their death rates. Why is that?
Clear how? After looking at the various ways of counting I'm more leaning towards nothing is clear.
I think there is a way to do it fairly but it would require some crunching:
1. Give each state a 'practice' one, that would be their first surge in cases with decline...call it preseason.
2. Then compare states by surges after their first one. This will work for about a year although as new drugs/treatments went online and the very high death rate among older nursing home residents stopped, comparing death rates this will will start to get muddled.
This type of analysis hasn't been done yet. I see lockdown skeptics and anti-maskers love to leave data untouched since NJ-NY got hit hard very early. But ironically this would have been infections produced when the states were not wearing masks and doing lockdown. Before the first lockdown, everyone in the US was Sweden.
Bollicks. So no one was working from home. No one was being cautious. The media wasn't talking about covid all the time. It was just nothing and then lockdown and then suddenly everyone new about covid.
And the comparison has been done Florida relaxed restrictions. California doubled down. Florida did broadly better in spite of an older population, and being flooded by holiday goers.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-florida-versus-california-showdown/
But hey keep hanging in there, if you believe in something you can ignore any data you like.
That's a funny (and immature) way to end your post, considering you're ignoring all the data in the article we're posting on. And Florida's roughly in the middle of states on Covid deaths per capita-- nothing to cheer about. But you're absolutely right-- the friends who died and the family members who were hospitalized-- all just a creation if the media. Never happened.
"But you're absolutely right-- the friends who died and the family members who were hospitalized-- all just a creation if the media. Never happened."
No where ever have I said anything like that. So you can make things up and credit them to me if you think that makes you clever, or better informed or what ever it is you think you are achieving. And then call me immature.
Who said anything about cheering? This is how poor this debate is. I do not revel in death. I want society to do the best for everyone. Not just middle class people who can afford to stay at home and who's kids have access to devices and internet. Not just for very sick, very old people who will only live a few months, maybe a year longer to live anyway.
I accept that we live in a finite world. Society cannot save everyone. We cannot win every battle.
Society is also complex. Interventions often have huge unintended consequences. Lockdowns do harm. To boil me down to callousness or to make out I'm hiding from the truth, when Noahs post seems to imply lockdowns broadly did no real harm seems at the very least disingenuous. And I would posit, an indictment of the fact that I doubt there are many poor people, or children or poor children reading this site and in a position to argue their own corner.
I argue for them. You can all pretend like they don't exist but if you believe that the impacts on a poor child of missing school for a year will be reflected in GDP figures from the last couple of months, AND that their lifetimes will not be affected by this then all I can say is that UNICEF, The United Nations and The OECD all strongly disagree with you. And Noah mentioned none of that.
The poor, and children and in particular poor children are also vulnerable groups.
But poor people are just a creation of the media right? They never really happened
Again as you seem to purposefully have ignored you assume Covid hit uniformly over all communities at the exact same time, it did not. While Italy was falling apart, the UK had its head in the sand. As NY suffered the first onslaught, the South didn't feel much until the summer.
I've demonstrated to you how you can do a fair test of the effectiveness of different communities by looking at their death rate *after* they experienced their first wave. You choose to ignore that. Your article does demonstrate how problematic these comparisons are. One state has a lot of old people, another does not. If you have a lot of old people but manage to keep nusing homes clear of virus, you'll do a lot better than a state whose nursing homes fall (here having a delayed wave gives on an advantage since they can prepare for things like sealing off nursing homes). Also there's a massive advantage in 'going later' rather than first since treatments improve over time.
I assume nothing. Italy did not fall apart. Lombardy got hammered. The rest of Italy was unspectacular. And in fact this applies to Sweden. Stockholm got hit hard, the rest of Sweden not much.
I did not ignore anything but you have demonstrated nothing. When did the first wave start? How do you define that? When did it end? How do you define that? A demonstration would surely mean you did something and showed me. Have you done the study yourself? Not that I am aware of so what have you demonstrated to me?
In any case I will make the point of my other post that has many references. There is an excellent study from Denmark. It is regions within a region some that stayed in moderate restrictions others that moved up to severe restrictions. No difference in outcomes either measured by cases or deaths.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.28.20248936v1
This is not the final answer. This does not prove lockdowns do not work. But there is more than enough evidence they do not for a deep look and more debate. To just say they work is also not the final answer.
That's exactly what you assume.
"When did the first wave start? How do you define that? When did it end? How do you define that?"
Very easy, graph cases in a community, the first wave will be the increase of the first hill or mountain. It ends when the line goes down from there until it either hits the original low or turns around and climbs again for a second wave.
"just say they work is also not the final answer." Any declaration that they don't work runs up against the problem that a reasonable explanation has to be presented why they don't work. It's a bit like being a physics grad student monitoring gravity in a dozen cities around the world. One day the monitor in Cairo reports zero. You do not simply note that gravity vanished in Cairo for one day.
This is the Moops principle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0uYJjDHeDU
I'd think one issue is the lack of travel restrictions between US states, while European countries increased border restrictions. Any US analysis needs to consider that NJ and NY had bad death rates due to being hit early in the pandemic, and then instituted relatively strict lock downs. San Francisco is an example of an area with stricter lock downs before their pandemic really got going that did relatively well.