Not my fault if you refuse to read. Nothing you're writing is in response to my posts.

At no point did I ever imply that we should do absolutely nothing.

Again, to me it's a mere technicality between enforced or advisable lockdowns. The purpose is set people apart to break the virus transmission chain. It's only political extremists and conspirationists making a big deal out of it.

P.S. On my country there's only advisable lockdown and anti-governors/mayors hysteria are probably even bigger than in the US. Clearly enforced lockdown is not the issue.

This is why science depends on modeling. Or see the famous paper, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/

Social distancing has been around for hundreds of years. There is a ton of academic research on the subject. Also, the absence of academic research (obviously a function of timing) does not mean that there isn't strong evidence that stay-at-home orders have reduced the rate of transmission. I think it's pretty obvious that the orders have done just that.

Says the person who has precisely zero knowledge.

I bet you're a climate-change denier, a smoking-causes-cancer denier, and a flat-earther too. Cause the people who know stuff are all wrong!

Then you're not paying attention.

Death and new-infection rates have PLUNGED in all of the big former hotspots that cracked down...Italy, Spain, New York, Seattle.

The modelling you are obsessed with is forecasting one particular cause of death - COVID-19. There is no consideration given to what other causes of death may be impacted by changing the variables used in the model.

For example, I can create a model for eradicating my house of termites. The model would certainly agree that a fast solution to this problem would be to burn the house down. Per your logic then this is a valid solution and anyone questioning it is just ignoring the models/"science".

There is far more nuance in the world than any single model can account for. I don't reject the COVID-19 modelling, but it's just one of the many pieces of data that we should use to determine what the proper course of action is.

Compared to what? What’s the control?

That's the problem. It's easy to site an awful lot of examples of highly unintelligent advice from various states and the federal governments and that's why "intelligent" people are increasingly skeptical and unwilling to follow government advice uncritically.

Examples:

- Masks don't do anything and shouldn't be worn

- Let's send people leaving the hospital but still infectious back to the nursing homes whence they came

- It's risky to enjoy, and therefore you will be banned from all manner of solo outdoor activities or activities involving just you and the people with whom you live (like sitting in the middle of a lake fishing in your family boat)

- Group activities involving 10 or fewer strangers are fine and permitted.

- If the feds don't hand us 30,000 respirators people are gonna DIE (actually, it turns out, avoiding putting people on invasive ventillation may be the better way to manage them).

And they are NOT changing these policies inspite of more information. In too many cases they are stubbornly sticking to the ridiculous orders they've promulgated.

No, he's just a business as usual, don't mess with my income and the ways I enjoy spending it self-centered plutocrat.

Death and new-infection rates simulatenously plunged in the non-hotspots, too. Even those that didn't have strict lockdowns.

There's zero academic literature; politicians are just choosing the safest political option. To be fair, it would be impossible to have scholarship at this point, but it's disingenuous to claim that the lockdowns have had a measurable positive effect absent evidence.

Yes, economic modeling would be good too. I don't dispute that. But economic modeling is even more difficult because it basically is completely dependent on policy decisions, which are in principle completely controllable (whereas we don't really get to change the properties of a disease), but also very political. Economic policy in the US has led to a lot of unemployment. In other countries (e.g. Germany), not so much. Would that indicate that a lockdown may be the correct course of action in Germany but not the US?

What places were hotspots, with infection rates >10% (like NYC or Lombardy), but didn't institute any restrictions? Possibly Stockholm?

I'm very curious to see what happens in Belarus, although I don't know that we can trust data coming out of there.

I don't think you understand the concept of a control group. What you're asking for would literally require an alternate reality...science fiction.

But we can certainly track infection rates based on what we know...hence the rules and advice coming from the CDC and others.

The evidence is there. You just aren't paying enough attention.

Take a look at the UK, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and come of the low-compliance US states.

I realize you'll never change your view...Crawford latches onto an idea and never gives up.

They've gotten some things wrong, and learned as they've gone. But the need for social distancing and staying at home etc., have been right all along.

If some places let you meet in groups of 10, that's MUCH safer than groups of 50. Contact danger is exponential, and the models show this clearly. The debate is more about the nuances.

No, I’m none of those things.

What evidence? How is that even possible, to create peer-reviewed studies in a matter of weeks?

Again, if there's any evidence, let's see it. Show us the academic literature suggesting that relative lives saved are postively correlated with relative stringency of lockdown.

People think lockdowns work because logically they think they should work. But there’s obviously no way to assess the counterfactuals. We don’t know how much hygiene or masks or reduced physical contact plays a role. We don’t know how much self-isolation of people who know they are vulnerable matters, or how little it matters what anyone else does.

And we can never really lock everyone down anyway. You have millions of “essential” workers out and about, people still shop, people still get deliveries carried by drivers who are potential carriers. People are not going to stop meeting friends in “small groups” (which tomorrow will be different groups of 3-4 people, until the number of contacts grows exponentially anyway).

So all any of this is doing is slowing the rate at which the virus spreads. Which is good, and important to the extent that, we we were all told, there was a risk that the health system would be overwhelmed and lots of people would die who could otherwise be saved. But as long as it stays below that crisis level, it doesn’t actually benefit us to slow the spread further. That just prolongs the other damage caused by this whole situation.

This thing is going to kill a lot of people, it was always going to kill a lot of people. There is a cost/benefit analysis to be done and you can’t spend unlimited amounts of money and impose serious damage to everyone’s career, happiness, etc in a futile attempt to save every life.

Crawford, this peer review thing is your latest "latch onto" idea, I get it. For one, CDC's recommendations come from the sum total of available information and analysis...including a massive amount of peer review. Two, much of this stuff CAN'T be peer reviewed, unless we have access to parallel universes, since there are too many other variables...even if you're willing to sacrifice a city or two.

But let's hear your plan anyway. What cities should have served as controls, not shutting down, with the known extreme likelihood that this would kill probably more than 1% of their populations? Who do you want to sacrifice?

10023, you're right that it's about slowing. But it's also about greatly reducing the number of infections period. The US' reported infections are about 0.5% of the population, and we can guess (with sampling) about the real rate, which is likely north of 1%. We don't need to hit 70%...why not keep it to a small fraction of that?

Smarter people than you or me are on this.