Bad lockdowns are bad, yes. Good lockdowns have had amazing impacts in many places.

Australia is a good example. Victoria had out of control community spread (~100 infections a day), so locked down for 3 months. This meant no visitors at home, no going to work unless one of a few specific reasons, no general retail, masks mandated at all times outside the house, no travelling more than 5k for any reason, no travelling for exercise.

They got rid of it. This is what lockdown means. This is what the science shows us is effective. Wearing a mask and office jobs being done from home is not a lockdown.

Saying badly implemented lockdowns don't work so why bother is the attitude that is killing thousands of people a day.

I dont disagree with the theory of a lockdown when necessary, but now that I look back at our year in the US...it now seems so obvious that this was never going to work. This place is simply too big with too many selfish idiots that want to do their own thing for how virulent COVID is. Leadership is a huge failure that didn't help at all, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we'd be in the same exact position of an uncontrolled spread even if we had a different sitting president with different views. 330 million people spread out across 50 states, across various local governments, some of who might not care as much is just too many people to get on the same page regardless of the message from the top.

Australia is 7% of the population of the US. Barely a comparison

Strong lockdown is literally illegal in the US, violating freedoms that have been through the courts many times. It has nothing to do with selfishness. The government could never impose it, and they knew that. In the US many rights are near absolute in almost all circumstances, including the current ones.

You may disagree with those freedoms but they are a matter of law. They cannot be erased when they are inconvenient, it would render the judiciary irrelevant.

We shouldn’t be saying “Lockdowns don’t work,” because thanks to the idiots we really aren’t doing any kind of real lockdown. We should instead be saying “Uncoordinated and unenforced public health policy and lack of federal leadership doesn’t work.”

If your policy depends on everyone doing the right thing, it's awful policy.

Lockdowns have never been done in human history. They've never been possible, really; if there were no internet, it wouldn't even have been considered as a possibility. It takes a lot of hubris to claim that lockdowns were/are guaranteed to work. It is totally uncharted territory.

This is false.

Lockdowns have been done repeatedly across the full time and space of human history. HN had a link just last week about one of the most well known, for bubonic plague, in Sardinia In 1582: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210107-the-432-year-old...

They've just been used incredibly successfully in AU and NZ.

So your evidence to support a global, state-enforced lockdown is one case in Sardinia from 450 years ago?

If Trump had demanded a full lockdown in March like you're suggesting, it would have been opposed by everyone.

You could just read the article to understand that this wasn't an isolated case, but the start of a general approach to public health, indeed even the phrase "quarantine":

>Lockdowns were not unique to Alghero. "In Florence, for example, they imposed a total quarantine of the city in the spring of 1631," says John Henderson, a professor of Italian Renaissance history at Birkbeck, University of London. And just as today, rule-breaking was common.

>"Over the year from the summer of 1630 to the summer of 1631, I found something like about 550 different cases that people were prosecuted for, for various infringements of the public health regulations," says Henderson. For most of that time, the city wasn't in full lockdown, but people were expected to self-isolate for 40 days if a member of their household was suspected of having the plague, and taken to hospital. This is where the word "quarantine" comes from – "quaranta giorni" means "40 days" in Italian.

Lockdowns like this have continued to be a part in public health approaches to infectious disease around the world.

The fact that a majority of Americans, convinced of their exceptionalism in every way, would oppose such an approach doesn't mean that it is inherently impossible or nonfunctional.

Unenforced policies depend on everyone doing the right thing, and we agree they are doomed to fail. If there was any enforcement at all they could have made a dent. There are plenty of other policies in the USA that are effective because we manage to enforce. Do you know anybody who got a ticket for violating stay-at-home? I don’t.

All of those policies were developed over time and required buy in over a long period of time.

There is no timeline where the American public buys into the lockdowns that would be necessary in February 2020, which is when they would have had to happen.

I don’t believe that. The vast majority of people this past year understood the seriousness, behaved well, did the right thing voluntarily, and likely would have supported a real stay-at-home order if it would mean the idiots also had to behave. We just didn’t try it because we are cursed with cowardly leadership.

> The vast majority of people this past year understood the seriousness, behaved well, did the right thing voluntarily

I don't buy that. Where do you live? I spent a couple of months over the summer in Texas (in a non liberal part) and there were like a grand total of 2 people who took any of it seriously. I think its evident based on what happened here that the majority didn't really care, but even if you happen to be right, we don't need a majority, we need 100%. Just go back to early February 2020 and remember that timeline. It only took 1-2 people, then there were 10, then 100, etc. It's exponential.

I think your only bet here with a majority (let's conservatively say 60% of people in agreeance with the severity of the virus) is to stop all international/domestic travel completely for a few months. Stop all flights, no interstate travel. Nothing at all, a complete military lockdown. That is the absolute only way to have stopped the spread, akin to what China did. And I simply don't buy that the USA in 2020 would do that without anything short of a revolt.

We never quite did enough in NYC. One gym in Williamsburg stayed open even during March and just kept paying the fine. There just hasn't been that much enforcement. We came to the conclusion that we experienced a real lockdown instead of a short stint of heightened delivery use. It's absurd that indoor/outdoor dining is still allowed (also that restaurants can't get support). In my experience as a 20-something, most of my friends have been hanging (even house-partying!) indoors maskless, and it too leaves me at a loss for words. The "well I already tested positive" mentality is pretty common. Meanwhile my partner and family in Asia participate in heightened levels of lockdown when getting a fraction of the cases we get on a good day.

Agreed with you 100%.

The outdoor dining in tents drives me up a wall. Like, there is no way that's better than eating indoors.

I've had an unusual amount of travel during covid, so I've had occasion to be in sf (2 mos), SD (1 mo), LA (3 mos), and NYC (3 mos). Leaving compliance aside, since my skewed samples wouldn't be very helpful, policy and enforcement in NYC seem to have been way more lax than all the parts of CA I was in.

When were you in NYC? During the first 3-5 months of COVID, NYC was a complete ghost town with nothing open aside from essential stores. Once we got our numbers down to some of the lowest in the country (compared to other cities with similar populations), everything then became lax again, and now it's sort of this half-assed situation as I described above. Cases out of control, but you're still allowed to do various things that seemingly havent been very well thought out

On the policy/enforcement side, NY had indoor dining open until wayy later than CA did in early winter, despite having worse numbers and a much worse trajectory. (CA overtook NY again and now SoCal is screwed, but this was before that).

I do think that there's some non-trade-off potential here via the micro-targeting approach they started while I was there. I was living in Soho around the time that Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn were having outbreaks, and I really appreciated that neighborhoods super far from me with relatively little cross-travel (esp with the low subway ridership at the time) didn't unnecessarily fuck up my ability to go for dinner with a friend. By contrast, LA/CA tends to shut things down at a much higher level, so outbreaks in East LA affect policy in my parents' neighborhood on the Western border of LA County.

At the state level: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...

I might feel the same way if we weren't rolling out some very effective vaccines over the next several months. Just from a personal safety perspective, loosening up now risks being the soldier who dies in the last week of the war.

Depends. I know for me, under 50, not an essential worker or healthcare employee, in mismanaged California, I’m probably not eligible for the vaccine for another year, so I’m not really in the last week of the war.