Do Lockdowns Work?

Post Reply New Topic

California has one of the strictest lockdowns in the U.S. But they also have one of the highest number of COVID cases.

So perhaps it is wise to step back for a second and determine how effective lockdowns are.

Earlier this week, the California surpassed 2 million confirmed cases and beds at many intensive care units are running dangerously low. In Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the virus in California, the county Department of Public Health on Thursday said around 14,000 residents were testing positive for COVID-19 each day and hospitals were admitting 1,000 new coronavirus patients daily.

From my perspective, the broader questions is how is the virus transmitted.

We were originally told that the virus was transmitted by touch. Someone sneezed and the viral particles fell to the floor or landed on objects like doorknobs. We then touched the object and then touched our nose or mouth and became infected. Now we know that in not the primary transmission route. It does occur but is rather minor. Thus all this emphasis on hand sanitizers and washing your hands a million times a day is mostly wasted energy. Viral transmission by hand only becomes a primary transmission route in high humidity environments like the tropics.

We were told then that everyone needs to wear mask to prevent viral particles in large droplet forms from infecting us. Someone sneezes, we breathe in the particles and become infected. Social distancing is important because the heavy particles fall to the ground quickly. So if you keep your distance, you should be safe. But we are not safe, people are still getting infected.

That brings the third form of transmission. The one no one talks about. This is aerosol transmission. These particles are ultrafine. They are lighter than feathers and float in the air for hours. We walk through an area where an infected person was talking a hour ago and breathe in these microscopic particles and we become infected. These particles can be picked up by ventilation systems, air conditioning systems by heating systems and spread hundreds of feet. It is very much an invisible enemy. It is everywhere. Someone holds a conference or a meeting and all it takes is one infected person to infect almost everyone in the conference.

So if the political leaders fail to address the aerosol transmission threat, then it is like a little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dyke to prevent the water from breaking through when in reality the entire dyke is about to collapse. That is what lockdowns do.

But the aerosol threat can be minimized though engineering that currently exist. It can be controlled by understanding the threat and taking effective steps to control it. It is done by using the right kind of mask like N95s; using humidifiers in the wintertime to keep indoor humidity levels above 40 percent to add weight to these aerosols and force them to fall from the air to the floor quickly; it can be dealt with by using HEPA filters to trap and scrub the viruses in the air; it can be done using UVC light in HVAC or stand alone systems to scrub the air of viruses and kill them dead; and it can done by ventilating indoor space to remove high concentrations of viruses that build up in enclosed spaces.

What good does a mask mandate do; if it requires people to wear the wrong type of masks.

I am not sure. I think in this case, people may be panicking because of the new UK variant.

But so long as people follow the guidelines from their health officials, everything should be OK.

Maybe if people would actually cooperate, but it seems that we have enough people who refuse to follow any sort of guidelines or anything that I don’t think we’ll ever actually know whether anything really works or not

Just because there is a lockdown doesn't means people are unable to go and see their families. I mean how are they going to enforce this? Pull every car over they see on the road and question their whereabouts? Are they going to patrol neighborhood streets and look for homes with extra cars and question that family?


It's like when I used to work at the International airport here for janitorial training, it was impossible to clean restrooms because everyone would ignore the closed sign and just go in and do their business. I have no idea how my husband did it but this would have driven me insane and shut me down. Some idiot at my work once flushed a bunch of forks down the toilet (could have been a child as well) and it caused the whole sewage system to back up so all the restrooms in the building were out of order and only one set of restrooms at the west end were only available. Many people couldn't even wait ten minutes for me to clean it and they kept walking in there so finally in rage I stormed out and said I am not stocking or cleaning it until everyone quits walking in there and I said this to couple of the customers. I had an outburst. This is how the lockdown is working, people are ignoring it.

I think lockdowns are effective up to a certain point. The question is, does the damage caused by the lockdowns outweigh their effectiveness?

They work to isolate people.
They work to inconvenience.
They work to close down businesses.
They work to worsen mental and dental health.
They work to contolllllllll

Lockdowns have worked well in Australia, so far.
They were implemented early and very hard, including state-funded hotel quarantines for all travellers in the early weeks.
In one controversial move in the state of Victoria, as their second wave started ramping up, they put public housing blocks with several thousand residents under an immediate lockdown with no-one allowed out.
So it was harsh, but the result was impressive:

On my experience here, it seems to me that the temporary pain of an effectively-implemented hard lockdown is worthwhile if it brings us back to near-normal so much sooner. But it's hard to say if that holds true in other countries where the case numbers are so much higher than we have here.

I read an interesting article this morning about the role "cancel-culture" played in this pandemic:

My correspondents’ fear was obvious: Say the wrong thing online, and have your life destroyed. Cancel culture has permeated everything, including debates over how to deal with the pandemic. Schools had been open in other countries for months, and they were all reporting lower positivity rates than their surrounding communities. My arguments were measured and evidence-based: The data were making the case for reopening schools all by themselves. Yet most of the rest of the media seemed determined to tell the story from only one perspective: that of lockdown hard-liners, not least teacher-union bosses. This paper aside, very few outlets pushed for school openings.

On the left, the conversation is heavily policed, with clear red lines drawn around "unacceptable" opinion.

Reopening schools was treated as "irresponsible," even though the numbers said otherwise. It wasn’t until Oct. 9 when things began to shift. That’s when a piece headlined "Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders" appeared in The Atlantic. The piece didn’t exactly break new ground. What mattered is that it appeared in a liberal publication. That made it OK to believe and say what even many liberal parents knew but didn’t dare voice. A month later, The New York Times ran an article arguing "Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges" — thus ­"authorizing" the view that had been apparent to any layperson paying attention to the data. But by then, millions of kids had had their educations and lives disrupted, causing harm whose magnitude we haven’t begun to tally.

Our moment of woke conformity threatens anyone who even thinks about stepping out of line. The consequence in a pandemic is that dumb regulations are permitted to stand, because few dare question them. There is one right answer, one correct opinion, one acceptable position, and everyone on the left has to speak univocally in favor of it and against all others.

Very few on the left have pointed out that, hey, these lockdowns don’t seem to be working at all. The groupthink on the left is fiercely enforced. One liberal mom who frequently engages me online, anonymously, told me she’s afraid of having her livelihood targeted for speaking out on schools. "I will not use my real name and identity, because it is widely known that the activist community purposely baits people with racially charged statements, for the sole purpose of trapping someone and reporting their content to an employer."

And it’s not just about schools. New York City restaurants remain closed for indoor dining, even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s own statistics show they account for 1.4 percent of cases. Indoor dining ­remains open in the rest of the state, despite their case numbers being higher than in the city. There has been no pushback against this, neither from liberal outlets nor most Democratic politicians. The "Believe in Science" political mantra trumps everything, not least actual scientific reasoning. There’s no introspection on why mostly locked-down New York and California have more cases than mostly open Florida.

Free discourse is important because it helps to prevent bad ideas from blossoming and spreading. But when people fear having their lives destroyed for just about any outlier opinion, we end up in the situation where elected officials have their awful, failing policies protected.

Source: How cancel culture keeps COVID-19 lockdown-doubters silent

According to Dr. Qanta Ahmed, pulmonologist at NYU Langone, underused rapid antigen tests and lack of interest in cleaning indoor air are the two missing pieces amid the deadly, novel coronavirus pandemic. Ahmed said rapid antigen testing can help detect virus outbreaks and clusters to better tailor quarantines, especially in California. "We’ve got no ability of detecting that right now in the United States because we’re not using rapid antigen testing," Ahmed added, voicing her increasing skepticism of lockdowns: "[There is] no imagination for new approaches. Rapid antigen testing tailors quarantine," she said. "We’re not tailoring the measures and at the same time we’re destroying our economy," she continued. "I think there’s two pieces missing. One is the rapid antigen testing, the second is zero interest in cleaning indoor air."

Source: US coronavirus response unimaginative, should focus on rapid testing and indoor air: expert

Worked for New Zealand.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.co ... overy/amp/

It worked for Australia and New Zealand. Which means it works on isolated islands with small populations.

Lockdowns worked here in Denmark.

They didn't lock down in neighbouring Sweden, and their death toll per capita is 4 times higher than in Denmark (but still lower than the US).

Worked for Vietnam.
https://www.fes-asia.org/news/life-afte ... ess-story/

Dragonsanddemons’ post of December 26 is absolutely and succinctly correct.
And sad.

And lockdowns worked - extraordinarily well - for China... a country with 4 times the US population and land borders with 14 other countries...

How do we know China is not withholding information?

I'm not a hater of China by any means----but they did seek to hide the fact of COVID-19, to the point where it almost became COVID-20. COVID-19 was officially named on 12/31/2019.