Everybody has stopped talking about whether Covid lock-downs are effective or not (thanks christ) but the question has never really been answered. People just moved on to the next controversy.
Most people eventually agreed “probably yes”, therefore governments should be allowed to do them in the future.
Because the answer is not yes or no. The answer is “a bit, but sometimes they work better than other times”.
If anybody tells you “yes” lockdowns are effective, that is a lie. Nobody knows to what extent they are effective, yet.
I’m trying to find a study which can tell us things like
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By what percentage do lockdowns reduce covid infections in the following two weeks?
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How much impact does closing schools have?
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Are they only effective in big cities, or is there any value for rural areas too?
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Is most of the reduction just from closing metros? Or from closing offices? Or something else?
All of this can be extracted from historical data, without doing any experiments.
The crucial thing is to have a control. A study needs to prove a causation between the remedy and the recovery. But there are ways to do that that statisticians know all about. It’s not enough to say that “I had a flu then I took a medicine then I got better so the medicine is effective”.
This article has a small section “Many epidemics, with a single peak” which is interesting. It shows a clever technique which could be used to measure this stuff. But I’m sure there are cleverer and better techniques too.
Has any work been done on this, that anyone has found? It seems to me like the information we most need right now and in the coming decades, to guide policy - to design types of lockdowns which will be least damaging and most effective. But as far as I can find, it’s not being considered at all.
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This guy is always great. But he writes a lot - I just wish I had time to read more of his.
It’s true that people try to simplify things - do we need more lockdown vs less? are lockdowns good vs bad? are you for vs against lockdowns? But the right question is - how can we design effective lockdowns?
Nobody is studying this (very effectively) because we have no proper data on what makes an effective lockdown … or even on how covid is transmitted. It’s IMO a real Emperor’s clothes moment for Science.
Very good point. Too-rigid goevernment rules make society fragile. If there is a mask mandate ( or a vaccine mandate or whatever) then 100% of people all do this one thing … what if masks cause some unforeseen problem? It’s a disaster. But if people are free to make their own judgements, everybody follows slightly different policy … then an unforeseen problem with one policy is not a disaster.
Like that one school which is experimenting with ozone machines. They have the freedom to do that, and it might yield intersting results. If there was a policy that all schools had to do exactly the same thing WRT ozone machines, we lose that chance for creativity and discovery.
I don’t understand this. Does it mean I spend 1 month lockdown for an extra 5% chance in a game of roulette? Does it mean I choose between 21months lockdown or death? I don’t know if it’s too harsh - I think he needs to express it better, like probability of death vs months lockdown.
It’s a good point about timing - that earlier lockdowns are not always better - you have to get the timing right.
And the point about looking at countries. North italy might have very different contageon characteristics from the south - but so might east vs west london - the people on the circle line might need different policy from people on the 12 bus route. It’s useless (or worse than) to look at country-level statistics. If you don’t remember Bayes theorem and Simpson’s paradox, your statistics are lies.
And finally, voluntary behaviour could be responsible for most of the effect attributed to lockdowns - also good point.