19 thoughts on “The Lockdowns”

  1. This should be a wake up call for all of the local FEMA-type departments at city and state levels. People are dying and people Will die in large numbers.

  2. The heart has ACE2 sites, so a spike in heart attacks could also be due in part to CoViD directly. I am trying to do cost-benefit analyses of even the “success” stories like Denmark with about 100 per million CoViD deaths vs more than 5 times that in Sweden and the US. In the process, they tanked their GDP 8% vs Sweden’s 2%. Depending on the life expectancy now of the people who would otherwise have died of CoViD, that could be a bad trade. It is hard to piece together, but I have seen some numbers about age distribution and comorbidities that suggest 2 months and 2 years are not wild estimates. That is, these are likely people who would have died during one of the next few flu seasons. The cost per lifetime equivalent is in the tens or hundreds of millions. Doubling the number of AEDs in a country, for example, could save more for hundreds of thousands per lifetime equivalent.

    1. Why not kill all the octogenarians in Denmark and give their food and houses to starving infants in South Sudan? There are so many QALYs to be gained.

    2. Your analysis would need to consider the number of Covid related deaths by age. It seems that a majority of such deaths are from people in the retirement age. One dirty truth of what Cuomo did to NY was lower the burden of elder care by simply killing them. Then again, Cuomo tanked his economy and killed thousands, before taking action to raise crime levels and then promising higher taxes.

      1. Not only did Cuomo come up with a way to remove over ten thousand people from the state’s Medicare rolls, thus reducing the costs, but he also made sure they will vote for Democrats this fall.

  3. Well the only important lockdown was stopping air travel from China and Europe.
    And biggest failure was WHO not advising such a lockdown {and actually opposing the idea}.
    And the impeachment of Trump would bad enough at anytime, But the crazed Pelosi manage to find the exact worse time to do it.
    It was always possible that the impeachment could occur at worst time for our nation, but mere damage to our political system, was small compared to distracting everyone in the world from important matters.
    Had Pelosi and WHO had done their job, in vaguely competent fashion that would made big difference.
    But expecting Pelosi or WHO to be competent, could the fundamental error. Both have been train wrecks to the world.

    Both are mere echoes from the worst US president is history, president Obama, who has clearly succeeded President Carter. Obama was worse president before it was known he was involved overthrowing US president.
    WHO seems to think it’s primary job is to provide international universal healthcare.
    Why was US funding such delusional Organization unfocused on it’s purpose for it’s existence?
    What would be less delusional is if WHO’s declared one of it’s task was related to colonizing Mars {as that *could be* somehow related to to the topic of pandemics}.

  4. “And the impeachment of Trump would bad enough at anytime, But the crazed Pelosi manage to find the exact worse time to do it.”

    It’s almost like they knew the disease was already spreading near Bill Gates’ house and wanted to ensure no-one else found out before it was too late to stop.

    But I’m sure that’s just one of those conspiracy theories.

  5. One thing to consider about lockdowns; the initial argument for them. It was “two weeks to flatten the curve”. There was a very real risk of health services being overwhelmed, etc. It made sense in such circumstances to briefly lock down to flatten the curve.

    However… all those flatten the curve charts from the authorties showed one thing very clearly – the peak was lower on the flattened curve, but longer – the areas under the flattened curves were the same. So, same number of cases, just spread over more time.

    In other words, their own arguments demonstrated that long-term lockdowns do not work (except to wreck the economy, and a lot of people’s lives). This was, of course, immediately and conveniently forgotten when they decided to move the goalposts.

  6. Hi Arizona CJ. Another advantage to flattening the curve is that it would buy time for hospital systems to increase their ICU capacity. If all states were to achieve early New York, Italian, or Spanish ICU levels then it would have been an absolute catastrophe. Also, if you recall, initially there was a PPE shortage where ICU staff made their own protective suits with garbage bags. Flattening the curve bought time for companies to transition and ramp up the production of PPE.

    We can see by the second wave that a lot of the susceptibles who would eventually go on to catch COVID-19 didn’t catch it during the first wave. So, limiting the spread does spread out the curve while not immunizing the remaining susceptible. So yes, the area under the curve would be the same. But if the curve is spread out far enough then a vaccine could reduce the susceptible population and hence reduce the area under the curve.

    All this is not to say that the negative impact on the economy shouldn’t be considered. It would probably have been smarter to use a more intelligent approach by sequestering the at-risk people and using cheap testing strips (even if they didn’t have high sensitivity) to knock down the prevalence without significantly harming the economy.

  7. DougSpace, agreed!

    I do support the short use of lockdowns in the case where the healthcare services are being overwhelmed.

    What I don’t support is the insanity of perpetual lockdowns – such as some states are suffering.

    I agree with your point on vaccines. That’s a real wildcard, and could indeed change the metric, depending on timescale. Same with a very effective therapy being approved – that too could change the metric.

    I very much agree that defending the high-risk should have been paramount. Instead, we saw infected people being shoved into nursing homes, causing a horrific death toll. To be honest, I’m having a difficult time thinking of an explanation for that that isn’t genocide.

    1. I’ll join in the agreement. Initially, I disagreed completely with any lockdown, even the first two weeks. Statistically speaking, I’m not sure I was wrong. However, my wife, a nurse at a hospital that saw a major spike in early July, noticed something that’s covered by the news but lost or rejected because of all the other misinformation. I’ll characterize simply as this: Like influenza, your chances of getting this disease and needing hospitalization are low, but if you do get it and need hospitalization, you’ll almost certainly need ICU level care.

      For a normal hospital ward, one nurse can handle multiple patients. How many is dependent on available nurses and quality of care, but for sake of argument, lets just say a nominal floor has a patient to nurse ration of 3:1 (wife’s ward is as high as 6:1 as another example). ICU is 1:1 or maybe a fractional 1.2 to 1.5:1. So that covid patient coming in and needing to stay in the hospital will need more resources than the hospital typically can provide.

      Then there is the issue of the spikes. My wife’s 200 bed hospital had as many as 140 covid patients at one time during July. Do lockdowns help maybe prevent this situation? Perhaps. But that’s lost because of the discussion on what actually caused that particular spike. The media/DNC want to blame it on Texas opening up in May, except it was late June when the spike occurred. I’m inclined to believe it was the protest, but those were supposedly peaceful with people practicing social distancing, and just shut-up because those are allowed, until the 2A white supremacist can be blamed for them. If it is indeed the protests, which are being ignored during the lockdowns, then the lockdowns aren’t really stopping spikes.

      Otherwise, quarantine should have always been about protecting the highly at risk. And if the US needs a major social policy change, then it would be the encouragement that people stay home when not feeling well. I understand that would mean all sorts of policies that honestly Hillary championed as first Lady. But it could be done without government dictate and by simply noting to business the benefit of not wiping out operations due to mass infection from a pandemic.

      1. Only a jaded cynic would think that the Democrats sent their fodder out into the streets knowing that they would get sick and make things look worse for Trump. It was a twofor. Race riots and plague.

    1. I agreed with the shutdown initially simply because I put myself in Trump’s place:

      I’m not an epidemiologist. I am told about the Imperial report saying there will be 2 million dead. People telling me that hospitals will be overwhelmed.

      So Trump’s first move – ending inflow of people from China and Europe – Perfect Move.

      But, neither he nor I are in a position to assess the reality of this thing, at the start. We didn’t know that the 0-50 bunch would pretty much get through it without dying. I’m sure he got conflicting opinions.

      So ok when the case numbers started sure instigate lockdowns.

      Sweden did it differently – let’s hear it for diversity of thought.

      So now we know a lot more than we used to. Time to end the lock downs.

  9. Ignorant kiwi wrote: Not according to the sources I’ve found:
    Then links to NY Times.

    NYC has more covid deaths than any other place on the planet, yet the NY Times still praises the mayor and governor. Rationale people know it is a dumb idea to co-locate acutely sick people with those chronically ill, but that’s what NY did, and the Times was fine with it and promoted the nonsense themselves. NY has a covid death rate 3 times higher than the US and 15 times higher than the world. You have to be some level of idiot, Andrew, to use them as your statistical argument in this case.

      1. The NYT and Economist claimed for three years they had sources that proved Trump colluded with Russia. Turns out all their sources relied on the telling of lies from one drunk at a bar.

        If you understood the first thing about science, you would know that the source is always challenged.

        1. So your understanding of the scientific method is to call the intermediate source names? Most people have this weird idea that it’s about testing the data and methodology at the point where it’s generated.

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