Item — HN Reader

Vaccines and mass masking work.

Lockdowns not so much:

"Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm the notion that lockdowns – at least in the spring of 2020 – had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 3.2% compared to the most lenient COVID-19 policy. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective" (p. 58)

[0] - https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/06/A-Systematic...

4 comments

What are the plausible explanations for how strict lockdowns wouldn't significantly slow down infections for a respiratory disease? Is it basically just that the lockdown strictness, duration, and enforcement is never sufficient to make a difference for such a highly contagious disease? Like there basically isn't a sufficient decrease in the number of person-to-person contacts to meaningfully change the end result of "everyone gets infected"?

(I'm not asking about the other negative effects of lockdowns not directly related to the spread of disease, which is obviously also relevant to the broader discussion.)

Aerosol spread, not droplet. Hangs in the air for hours and can spread far and wide.

That's why ventilation works so well, it replaces the air with air that doesn't have the virus in it, then sunlight kills the virus sent outside.

It can partly be that lots of people will self isolate, so imposed restrictions don't reduce their contact any further.

I'm not sure the definition of lockdown, but it appeared effective in Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

And China, which went from an out-of-control virus that looked about to burn through the country in early 2020 to effectively zero COVID with just a few weeks of high-compliance lockdowns.

Until omicron, anyway.

The idea that cutting social contact does not restrict transmission of a respiratory disease, and then by extension illness and death is rather fanciful.

The problem with these sorts of debates is that someone comes along and dumps a reference from a single opinionated, controversial paper that they've seen somewhere and declares that something is the absolute truth.

Here's a reference with quotes from scientists disputing that paper with a lot of links to papers showing a different conclusion.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-prep...

Studies on mass masking tend to get similar results: they don't work either.