6 ms·

In America we were already in such a weird situation I doubt anything would’ve truly been 100% effective. It’s interesting to hear these different perspectives

In America we were already in such a weird situation I doubt anything would’ve truly been 100% effective. It’s interesting to hear these different perspectives though

AlchemistCamp 4y ago
To be clear, I think that lockdowns are a gross affront to civil liberties and unjustified for anything under a 10 (and probably even) 20 percent lethality rate. My opinion at the time (when vaccines looked very distant) was that places like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea could still control the pandemic via border quarantines and contact tracing (which happened) and that places like the US also could also achieve good results via mass testing (which didn’t happen). It would have taken about a billion tests per week, but the US certainly had the industrial capacity do it. The problem, IMO, was lack of state capacity. Even as the pandemic spread around the world, the FDA continued processing applications for PPE producers, vaccines and everything else at the same sluggish rate (of a 6+ months delay) that it had been. Tyler Cowen spoke at length about this on various economics and other podcasts.
- ryanobjc 4y ago
  Which btw in the early days, think early march 2020, a 10% ifr was still on the table. Italy and wuhan (incomplete) data was … not encouraging. And remember that SARS-cov-1 had an ifr of 40%. And was spread by fomites. So in early 2020, with limited data - china really screwed is here - the initial lockdowns in places like SF Bay Area made sense. But the lockdown didn’t persist of course and realistically speaking people always had freedom of movement: the police were NOT and we’re directed to not aggressively ticket/arrest: all those contacts just increased the chance of infection anyways. Now as for the rest of the US I disavow what happened there.

6 ms·

In America we were already in such a weird situation I doubt anything would’ve truly been 100% effective. It’s interesting to hear these different perspectives

by code_runner 4y ago

In America we were already in such a weird situation I doubt anything would’ve truly been 100% effective. It’s interesting to hear these different perspectives though

AlchemistCamp 4y ago
To be clear, I think that lockdowns are a gross affront to civil liberties and unjustified for anything under a 10 (and probably even) 20 percent lethality rate. My opinion at the time (when vaccines looked very distant) was that places like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea could still control the pandemic via border quarantines and contact tracing (which happened) and that places like the US also could also achieve good results via mass testing (which didn’t happen). It would have taken about a billion tests per week, but the US certainly had the industrial capacity do it. The problem, IMO, was lack of state capacity. Even as the pandemic spread around the world, the FDA continued processing applications for PPE producers, vaccines and everything else at the same sluggish rate (of a 6+ months delay) that it had been. Tyler Cowen spoke at length about this on various economics and other podcasts.
- ryanobjc 4y ago
  Which btw in the early days, think early march 2020, a 10% ifr was still on the table. Italy and wuhan (incomplete) data was … not encouraging. And remember that SARS-cov-1 had an ifr of 40%. And was spread by fomites. So in early 2020, with limited data - china really screwed is here - the initial lockdowns in places like SF Bay Area made sense. But the lockdown didn’t persist of course and realistically speaking people always had freedom of movement: the police were NOT and we’re directed to not aggressively ticket/arrest: all those contacts just increased the chance of infection anyways. Now as for the rest of the US I disavow what happened there.