>Implementing any NPIs [Non Pharmaceutical Interventions eg lockdown] was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries
There ARE very mixed results from the More Restrictive NPIs ("mrNPI"s).
I suspect that's because places like the UK (where I am) have pretended to implimented mrNPIs while actually encouraging people to go back to BAU. We're under super double extra serious lockdown here. In practise that means everything is the same as it was in any of the lockdown but some schools are closed for some pupils.
I went out and bought jewellery today (an essential good apparently). After that, I went to the supermarket where even the staff had no masks on.
But our numbers will be pooled with countries where lockdown means more than pubs only doing takeaway...
If a policy is impossible for a given country to carry out, doesn't that suggest that maybe they shouldn't try? I think most people would agree that Prohibition should have delivered several public benefits in theory, but in practice it was beyond the ability of the government to enforce, and a bad policy.
Let's not forget that these mrNPIs have side effects - over 200 million people globally have been thrown into extreme poverty by them, increased deaths of despair, decimation of small business and resulting wealth concentration, etc.
There is a segment of society which believes that obviously mrNPIs are in everyone's best interest, but given that the side effects are well documented and very negative I think the burden of proof should be on the pro lockdown camp to explain why mrNPIs are the best policy intervention. The WHO recommends them only in extreme circumstances. They aren't popular with the public. Surely it's reasonable to consider alternatives (such as improving adherence to WHO recommendations) instead of invoking the alt right bogeyman and shutting down discussion as some are so quick to do.
Prohibition did deliver many public benefits. Not to argue that it was the right choice, but it's worth noting that the research on lockdowns is all being done fast, in the middle of it, and should be taken with some salt. Yes, we have to make decisions based on it, about what we do next, but we can still recognize that we're nowhere near as knowledgeable about this as we will (hopefully) be in a few decades when we've had more time to do research and evaluation.
I never said it was impossible. Quite the opposite: Australia managed it (also, an anglo nation with popularist right wing government, a shitty press etc).
Choosing not to do something is not the same as not being able to do it.
If our "leaders" mastered have the effort for this that we put into the war on drugs or tax cuts for the Uber rich or even farm subsidies, we'd all be in the pub by now.
Edit:
I think issues like this are difficult exactly because we cannot have a compromise solution. A compromise solution (lots of lockdown but not effective lockdown) is worst for everyone.
Mastering lockdowns certainly does not guarantee that everyone gets to go back to the pub. Once you end the lockdown the spread just starts again and you're back at square one.
The WHO has been clear in their recommendation since the beginning. Building effective test/trace/isolate capacity is how you control the spread of Covid. Is there a limited and brief role for lockdowns, business closures, forced stay at home etc., yes in extreme circumstances. Long term no.
I am just paraphrasing the WHO here, and of course anyone is free to disagree with them, but they're hardly known as a paragon of right wing populism.
It's not really true that lockdown cannot open the pubs again, take Australia. Their pubs are open. All because they mastered lockdown.
When a case occurs they close for a bit. But they're open 90% of the time. That a lot more of the time than uk pubs are managing.
I'd accept a working test and trace program too. Like Singapore used.
Don't think me greedy but... We could even do both, as we have more resources than Aus and Singapore combined and we've had a lot more time to do all this.
Once again, I have to ask: why hasn't my government managed such a thing? Could it be that it's impossible (despite Singapore having done it) or are they just too complacent?
Instead were stuck with the shitty parts of a long lockdown (closed pubs) without achieving the desired outcomes (single digit daily death rates).
My best friend is over there. I was in Melbourne when their measures started back in March. I was on one of the last flights back, a few days later, to the uk. Lockdown started here less than a week after they did.
Yet Australia has made a huge success of it. By doing the things we merely talked about. By enforcing basic requirements like masks where we somehow (STILL) can't.
It's very frustrating watching him on the beach while I can't even get a pint...
Trust me I know. I'm FROM Melbourne. My friends and family are all there. I'd love to fly back from the UK right now but with quarantine fees it's about eight thousand dollars.
Looking at the effects per country of the mrNPIs, there's a lot of variation per country. You could probably conclude that more restrictive measures don't work as well in countries with large right wing populist movements whoop don't follow the rules...
While it fits in nicely with a narrative, I think that's actually a pretty big logical leap. In particular, in the US, which arguably has a right wing populist movement, it is liberal urban areas seem to have been some of the hardest hit.
This is probably explainable by correlations between political leanings and population density, but that's beside the point: Is there real evidence for the claim you are making, or does it just fit in conveniently with your worldview and narrative?
Let's pare it back a bit:
There's large per-country variation in the data, and many of the more restrictive measures show significant positive effect in some countries. There is no attempt to control for how successful particular countries were in implementing the policies (which one might code describe as 'non-linear effects,' per the caveats section of the paper).
The US does particularly badly with the more restrictive measures, and has a large segment of the population that denies covid is real and/or anything to worry about. Connecting those dots isn't THAT much of a leap, in the context of an internet forum...
I live in a liberal urban area. We have a ton of right wing people who aren't adhering to even the most basic containment measures. It only takes 50% to 60% of a population to share a certain set of political views for that area to be labeled with said view, but that still leaves a huge portion of the population. And it only takes a relatively small portion of the population ignoring containment measures in order to seriously undermine their effectiveness.
I find the dishonesty the most annoying. My current right wing popularise government lacks the bravery to be honest and say "fuck it". So they're pretending to do things. Then immediately breaking the rules themselves very publically.
People get the message: "this is serious, wink wink, nudge nudge"
FYI the senior author, John Ioannidis, has been making a lot of wild claims about covid prevalence, infectiousness and fatality rates since the pandemic started, and so far most (all?) have turned out to be wrong.
So I would be pretty sceptical about this unless a wide range of experts find this has merit. "Peer-reviewed" does not mean much if it's some third-tier journal or the "peers" were biased.
Sounds like cherry picked data. Australia managed to eradicate the virus through very very strict lockdown, though there has recently been again an uptick in cases.
And in Austria the number of intensive care beds given over to covid 19 was over 90% in some counties and after the latest lockdowns this dropped significantly.
That is exactly you counter cherry picked data. If someone cherry picks data, you show it's cherry picked data by showing your own cherry picked data. I'm not sure you have a point here.
The article actually says a lot the measures work, the results for the most restrictive measures is "mixed". I suspect that is as you say: some places actually follow those rules and they work, other places ignore them and they (unsurprisingly) fail.
Edit, case in point, teachers have had enough of constant U-turns and cancelled and reactivated and re cancelled initiatives:
Maybe I'm blind but I given a diagonal read I couldn't find the sample size. Most of the restrictions were being introduced in the spring and at the same time. This probably leads to some issues: little cross-sectional information to identify the effects of all the different types of lockdowns; limited testing means that we do not know how many cases were there and we only knew of the most severe ones.
I can't get why they would trust data from Iran or even Sweden where it was national policy not to test.
In my country we hit 40% positive tests in november with hospitals full and people dying without being hospitalized which necessitated closing of schools, restaurants and malls, and the numbers six weeks later are down to single digit percentages. Good enough for me.
It would be interesting to reproduce this analysis for first and second waves within the same countries. I could see a few issues with that type of comparison, like the most at risk already having been infected, but those details could be teased out.
There are actually five studies now on this, all show that it has <10% positive effect on spread of covid, and no delta in excess deaths it just changes causes from covid-19 to deaths of despair.
This also claims that the more restrictive measures actually increased the spread:
In none of the 8 countries and in none out of the 16 comparisons (against Sweden or South Korea) were the effects of mrNPIs significantly negative (beneficial). The point estimates were positive (point in the direction of mrNPIs resulting in increased daily growth in cases) in 12 out of 16 comparisons (significantly positive in 3 of the 12, in Spain and in England compared with Sweden). The only country where the point estimates of the effects of mrNPIs were negative in both comparisons was Iran (-0.07 [95CI -0.21 - 0.07] compared with Sweden; -0.02 [95CI -0.28 - 0.25] compared with South Korea).
Certainly in the UK back in March/April a large number of deaths are likely attributable to sick older people being placed back into care homes from hospital to free up capacity
What I see missing from this and several other types of analysis is lockdowns aren’t supposed to be instantly effective. A single infected individual will expose potentially many people in their household. That’s known and accepted, the goal is to stop the spread between groups. Effectively you need to compare infection growth rates 1 month into a lockdown not 1 day.
Unfortunately, US covid data is also really unreliable as the percentage of people diagnosed clearly isn’t constant over the course of the pandemic. Most obviously dips in daily infections and deaths over Thanksgiving and Christmas are clearly artifacts in data collection.
Looking at for example the weekly all-cause deaths in the U.S. shows large spikes corresponding to the 3 waves, but those peaks don’t map to the reported daily COVID deaths. Similarly the rates of COVID hospitalization and deaths don’t map between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...
PS: It’s easy to count the number of positive test results, much harder to accurately estimate total infections over time.
Given only one data point - Sweden's horrible track record compared to its Nordic neighbors, which led to it embarrassingly having to apologize for its lack of lockdowns - it's already far easier to believe that article has chosen bad comparisons rather than that it is right.
And looking at the data they used, this seems even more likely: they investigated only England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South
Korea, Sweden, and the US. Almost all of these countries are outliers - in England, the US, Sweden, Iran and the Netherlands, the government spent a long time advocating AGAINST any measures and claiming that they are not necessary, before doing some kind of abrupt turn. South Korea has the worst case spread out of all the east-asian countries, and it is known for the remarkable detail of its contact tracing and testing - probably the best in the world. The data from Iran is also very hard to trust. Germany has relied a lot on its hospitals and chose to implement rather lax lockdowns compared to many smaller countries. Italy, France and Spain are harder to question, but they were the worst hit countries (except Belgium maybe?) on the continental EU, so they may have special factors that I'm not thinking about.
>Implementing any NPIs [Non Pharmaceutical Interventions eg lockdown] was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries
There ARE very mixed results from the More Restrictive NPIs ("mrNPI"s).
I suspect that's because places like the UK (where I am) have pretended to implimented mrNPIs while actually encouraging people to go back to BAU. We're under super double extra serious lockdown here. In practise that means everything is the same as it was in any of the lockdown but some schools are closed for some pupils.
I went out and bought jewellery today (an essential good apparently). After that, I went to the supermarket where even the staff had no masks on.
But our numbers will be pooled with countries where lockdown means more than pubs only doing takeaway...