It's an argument you have to accept on some level, unless you propose to make more radical changes to society. How many thousands of people could we have saved from car accidents in 2019 by banning nonessential driving?
> unless you propose to make more radical changes to society. How many thousands of people could we have saved from car accidents in 2019 by banning nonessential driving?
I'm pretty sure that mandating driver's license to be able to drive, and passing laws and regulations to enforce the use and adoption of safety systems such as seat belts, air bags, and helmets, not to mention criminalizing wreck less driving, is a pretty radical change to society.
With covid19 all people is asked to do is wear a mask and practice social distancing.
No, in Scotland for weeks I couldnt visit friends, and still cant drive more than 5 miles for social reasons.
We could make those things permenant, it would really reduce road traffic deaths if noone could socially drive more than 5 miles, or drive to visit friends.
The official stay at home order where I live forbids me from visting my family. I'm ignoring that part of it - everyone I know is, at this point - but it's a much more severe imposition than the phrase "practice social distancing" makes it sound.
You do agree that a temporary emergency measure that is expected to take between a few weeks and a couple of months doesn't come close to compare with all the driving regulation, don't you agree?
I mean, Spain had to endure a couple of months of isolation and we don't see Spaniards complaining that it's the end of the world.
At a fundamental level, yes. By degree of magnitude not even in the same galaxy. If you take a 200 million mile road trip you might contribute to one death, vs. going to a party and risk contracting and spreading a pandemic that has has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Remember, the game plan that virologists came up with for COVID acknowledged that most people will get it eventually. The point of the lockdowns was not to eliminate spread, which is impossible, but to not overwhelm the system.
And also to provide time for treatments to appear, with the eventual prospect of a vaccine.
And also to avoid panic and shortages of essentials caused by mass avoidable deaths and work absenteeism, both of which would have been the inevitable and predictable outcome of attempting to carry on as normal.
IMO the argument is already over. In fact there shouldn't have been an argument at all. There was never a rational case for trying to avoid lockdown, or failing to test/trace, or setting up other basic mitigation measures - either on humanitarian or on economic grounds.
> In fact there shouldn't have been an argument at all.
This is an awful way of thinking.
> There was never a rational case for trying to avoid lockdown
This is untrue. Many virologists and epidemiologists made rational cases against lockdowns. Sweden followed the strategy of Anders Tegnell, who is a renowned epidemiologist. The case for or against lockdowns was ultimately decided by the perception of public opinion, with politicians trading off the risk of "having done too little" versus "having done too much".
The New York times is spinning a narrative that Sweden, because of no lockdown whatsoever, had a really bad outcome. It's just not true. The amount of deaths controlled for population is lower than in Spain, France or the UK, all of which had a total lockdown. Their current fatality cases are near zero. Their economic contraction is half that of the rest of the EU.
First of all no, not lower than France's, but it was much lower for a while. Secondly, their economic contraction might be somewhat less, yet the death toll compared to Norway much higher, which did not suffer much worse economically. The question boils down was it worth for a modest economical benefit allow 5000 people to die or not. Some people think it is okay, most do not.
> Secondly, their economic contraction might be somewhat less, yet the death toll compared to Norway much higher, which did not suffer much worse economically.
This is cherry-picking. You can always tell if somebody is making a bad argument when they pick Norway - a sparsely populated oil-rich welfare state - for a comparison.
> The question boils down was it worth for a modest economical benefit allow 5000 people to die or not. Some people think it is okay, most do not.
No, that's an oversimplification. You are assuming that the lockdowns could've prevented these deaths, yet we have other countries that had strict lockdowns and that had similar death rates.
You also have countries like Germany and Netherlands with modest lockdowns and lower death rates.
There are a lot of factors at play here and the numbers are all over the place, but there is no evidence that lockdowns actually do better in the long run. Part of the problem is that most countries did do some form of lockdown, so Sweden is one of few in the control group.
No, comparisons with Norway are just a pet peeve of mine.
It doesn't really matter anyway, I already admitted that countries like Germany and Netherlands did have fewer deaths with modest lockdowns. These are samples in favor of a lockdown.
However, there are also countries like France, Spain and UK that had the strictest lockdown, yet they had higher death rates. Those hint at strict lockdowns being no more effective than modest lockdowns when compared against Germany, or even being completely inneffective when compared against Sweden.
There is no clear correlation between having a lockdown and having fewer deaths, so you can't claim that Sweden would've had a far different result with a lockdown. That's just an unknown, there are many more factors at play.
Also, the costs aren't just economic. Lockdowns are a severe restriction of civil rights. There's a great deal of suffering caused by lockdowns. They can destroy livelihoods. They limit medical care. There's more domestic violence, more suicides, more depression.
Unknown, but highly probable. It is like saying, yea it is unknown if you press the light switch and the light would turn on. Unknown yes, highly probable - yes. Lockdowns have been since medeival times and always turned out to be a working soluction.
"Everyone gets COVID" is not an unavoidable eventuality. The spread of the virus can be attenuated enough so that it a decreasing amount of people, and eventually a vaccine can be developed.
The plan is/was also to understand it, find effective protocols for managing it, etc.
(And we also have pretty good chances of coming up with a vaccine in about 1 year.) It's not "just the same amount of death, but slower, so the crematoriums don't get overwhelmed".
...pretty good chances of coming up with a vaccine in about 1 year.
This is just wishful thinking. We've never had effective vaccines for this sort of virus. (The yearly flu vaccine is like 30% effective.) Sure lots of research groups are working on vaccines, but many of them are academics who have no particular duty to work on research likely to have an immediate payoff. The researchers who do have such a duty, i.e. those who work for private drug firms, are mostly developing treatments like the antiviral remdesivir. Effective treatments of various sorts are closer than any vaccine, for COVID-19. IMHO, the most likely eventual winner will be a scaled-up version of the convalescent plasma therapy, which unlike the current version will be able to produce effective antibodies without drawing blood from humans.
At least one phase 3 clinical trial is about to start this month. I too am surprised that the one year estimate is not complete nonsense, but it seems it's not. (Of course the mRNA vector might simply not pan out, but there are still others currently undergoing phase 2.)
Efficacy is always a question, sure, yet it seems the spike protein is stable (conserved across mutations).
If the mRNA stuff works well then it'll likely work for the flu too. (It be easy to pack one shot full if flu strains.)
My understanding is that the spike protein already mutated in the human population, some time in January or early February. Researchers who started work on earlier samples had to start over because the later spike protein version has such superior fitness that it has largely replaced the earlier version in the wild.
So, stability over e.g. a month doesn't guarantee stability over longer terms.
> Covid (any vaccine based treatment really) is even more difficult as you need to wait for six months to assess transmission.
Technically, you don't. There are volunteers ready to get infected with SARS-CoV2 and I wouldn't put my money on "ethics" standing in the way in this case.
It also completely ignores the knock on effect of increased poor health due to COVID. Organ damage leads to reduced quality of life and economic output.
