You'd get significant depression in solitary confinement too.

Also PLoS one is basically not peer reviewed - they accept every paper after a short review.

Speculation: conflation of his reasonable and factual statement with the ostensibly similar far-right talking point that the cure (social distancing) is worse than the disease.

Expressing skepticism surrounding the efficiency of social distancing, masks, "non essential business" and all these lockdowns is not a "far right" talking point. None of our response was in any playbook for this level of threat. We threw out all our pandemic planning in a fit on hysteria and panic.

To this day we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all, let alone enough to justify their social costs. Same with social distancing or even masks for that matter. The fact that all this can be considered an uncontrolled experiment on unwilling participants is not "far right" thinking.

You're absolutely right. This kind of misinformation isn't limited to the far right.

> To this day we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all,

LOL, what? This is a truly astonishingly statement.

Literally every place that instituted lockdowns saw a drop in COVID transmission, and every place that reduced or eliminated lockdowns saw an increase.

This isn't even controversial. It's an application of the basic germ theory of infectious transmission.

You can't seriously be making this claim in good faith, can you?

Where is your studies showing these restrictions worked well enough to justify their immense costs to society? They don’t exist. To date I’ve yet to see a single cost benefit analysis done for any of this. It simply wasn’t allowed to be done… you’d get shouted down by the mob.

It worries me greatly how little critical thinking has been applied to the last 17+ months. It’s appeals to authority all the way down.

Show me the proof this stuff worked… and even then we didn’t know it would work going in, which makes it incredibly ethically (and morally) challenged. The last 17 months have shown me the depths of what humanity can do when gripped with fear and hysteria… it is pretty terrifying.

And predictably the goalposts shift.

First it was that we "cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all".

Now it's that the results don't "justify their immense costs to society".

> and even then we didn’t know it would work going in,

Again: Lockdowns are a basic application of germ theory.

The only way they could not work is if infection didn't pass from human to human but was transmitted via miasma or aether.

You could absolutely make valid arguments for or against specific lockdown policy choices (i.e. capacity limits, sizes of gatherings, types of businesses affected, etc).

But lockdowns in general? There's piles of evidence that shows they're extremely effective. Heck, in my own city, we saw a massive spike brewing prior to Christmas, and once a lockdown was instituted, the numbers immediately began to fall. That pattern is repeated anywhere you care to look.

I honestly refuse to spend any time citing data for you, as I do not believe for a second that you're arguing in good faith. If you really wanted to find facts, you could easily dig them up. That you haven't done so tells me everything about your willingness to question your own beliefs.

> The only way they could not work is if infection didn't pass from human to human but was transmitted via miasma or aether.

A public measure and overall behavior are two different things. Lockdown as a behavior is clearly effective in theory and practice. But as public measure, in many cases people stopped to comply sufficiently so that at best you see a flatting effect.

You wouldn’t try to fight HIV with monogamy (as measure). It’s just against human nature of a sufficiently large part of the population.

That isn’t proof. I could very easily claim it was seasonality or things well beyond our control that caused cases to go down. And I am probably right. The charts and graphs all follow the same basic pattern everywhere in the world regardless of restrictions in place. Clearly if lockdowns worked so well you’d see orders of magnitude difference between a place like Florida or Sweden compared to California or New York.

The burden of proof is upon those forcing it upon us and so far, crickets from all around. It’s truly insane how nobody is allowed call out the mounds of public data suggesting the effects of lockdowns or any of our non pharmaceutical interventions are minimal at best… we pissed away well over a year of people’s lives for basically nothing.

Show me they work. And show me they worked well enough to justify the extreme damage they caused to society. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the evidence?

And even if you take the person from Florida who was arrested’s claims as true, it doesn’t change my argument at all. The shape of their curve matches everybody else’s curve no matter whose dataset you look at. If lockdowns worked in any meaningful fashion, why does New York, California, Arizona, South Dakota and Florida all have the same curves?

I assert the lockdowns and masks did very little. Mere rain dances performed by frightened people who fooled themselves into thinking mankind could somehow control an airborne respiratory virus. It’s peak human arrogance.

If that makes me a right winger in your eyes, so be it.

If you actually want to know, the answer is "look at excess deaths." You can game the numbers for confirmed COVID deaths by doing less testing but it's a lot harder to hide the raw number of people dying. Per NYT[1], as of March 6, 2021 (which is when their data ends), Florida had 31,616 confirmed COVID deaths and 35,900 excess deaths (1.14 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,671 excess deaths per million) and California had 51,974 COVID / 69,800 excess (1.34 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,767 excess deaths per million). Since then California's wave has subsided a bit faster than Florida's but either way the difference in outcomes between the two states is very small.

> California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns.

This is true of New York. It is not true of California.

California was not hit particularly hard before it could implement lockdowns, and in fact before winter of 2020 it was doing much better than most states. In the first 6 months after people started taking COVID seriously (mid March 2020 to mid September 2020), about 15,000 Californians died of confirmed COVID cases, or about 375 people per million (and excess deaths track at pretty much a constant multiple with the level of confirmed COVID deaths). Since mid October, there have been another 48,000 confirmed COVID deaths in California. 35,000 of those happened in the 3 month period between December 1 2020 and March 1 2021. Not coincidentally, that period is also when restrictions were at their most severe: starting around November 25, outdoor dining was banned, parks and beaches and campgrounds were closed, a curfew was put into effect, travel was restricted, and so on. Cases continued to rise for the following month after that, peaking in early January.

Really, there is significant reason to doubt that government-imposed restrictions (as opposed to behavior changes people were going to make whether they were mandatory or not), as they were actually implemented in the US, had very much positive impact at all. It's not so much a question of "are the deaths ok?" as it is one of "is this actually helping, or is it just doing something visible so that the politicians can say they tried?".

I know this is an emotionally charged topic, and we probably won't have a clear picture of what worked and didn't work for at least a few years. But certainly government-mandated restrictions were not a slam-dunk obviously effective and worthwhile solution in the way that vaccines were.

It seems intellectually lazy and the epitome of condescension to cast away all criticism in this way. As those opposing arguments are always beyond the pale and not worthy of thought.

The overwhelming feeling I get from this type of person: "there's no possibility I'm wrong."

This isn't 2020 anymore, we should be able to take a sober look at what likely worked (universal mask-wearing, vaccines, border closures, quick contract tracing) and what may not have worked (closing otherwise safe outdoor spaces, obsessive surface cleaning, the "6-foot-rule") without judgement now.

This level of misinformation is no longer rational. You question that not meeting others in person can have an effect? It’s getting close to denying germ theory. Maybe it’s all bad vapors?

Sure, we can’t exactly specify the effect of different measures. But there’s plenty of evidence that they work, collectively. And the only method to come up for evidence regarding measures of this nature is to try them. You can’t do a lockdown study in a lab.

As to negative effects, we know that GDP recovers fast and suicide rates actually didn’t rise, despite constant assertions od the opposite.

That is absolutely not true, PLOS ONE has proper peer-review, their review guidelines just focus on technical soundness and de-emphasize subjective noteworthiness.

(As a personal anecdote, I managed to get one of my papers rejected from PLOS ONE once...)

40yo, not over weight, was at the gym 4 days a week, could squat and deadlift 50kg, very active life.

Only 'pre existing' was coeliac disease and very very mild asthma. Like barely ever took a blue inhaler but had one in the house. Other that That fit and healthy and very active.

Inital covid as bad, but after 2 weeks was nearly back to normal, then breathing got worse, heart rate all over the place, numbness, brain fog etc. Only just getting back to normal now but still not ready for exercise yet.

Presumably you can tease that out to some degree by comparing to folks who didn't have COVID.

Clearly if all the actually essential things like education, housing and healthcare are manifestly unaffordable - it's not a matter of prediction - it's already here.

Conveniently these things are generally left out of the CPI that people use to claim whether inflation is happening.

I guess it must have to do with the progress of humanity. Life has become so good that even relatively small dangers are becoming the only ones left. Or kind of like the misery of the wealthy.

Any sense of proportion has gone down the drain.

presumably if this is an issue at all - it'd be because most people are "locked into" the spike protein as the original antigen, as opposed to those naturally infected and therefore carrying a immune repetoire against however many 10+ other proteins in sars-cov-2.

My logic is 'crossing the road is completely reasonable, doesn't harm anyone, people should be allowed to get to the other side of the road'. That logic doesn't follow to speeding, which is dangerous and selfish.

Do you realise it's not a crime in other countries? It's not in the UK and yet we have a lower road-death rate than the US. What are jaywalking laws for anyway?

Putting oneself in the path of a multi-ton vehicle that doesn't expect you to be there and placing the onus on them to avoid committing vehicular manslaughter when you could use a space explicitly designated for pedestrians is, in fact, dangerous and selfish.

The higher road-death rate in the US might be the reason these laws exist, rather than a symptom of the laws - or are you suggesting that making jaywalking a crime increases road deaths?

I’d say it’s because the roads are obviously designed to accommodate automobile traffic. Virtually all modern roads are absolutely designed car-first and it’s apparent that people on-foot aren’t meant to travel on them, except on the sidewalk.

Additionally, a “road” that is only for people and bicycles is typically just called a trail or a path. At least that’s the case where I live. If it’s surrounded by buildings then they call it a plaza.

The deciding factor should be if the law contributes to civil order, or reduces injury.

But you want to ban the pedestrians from the road - you don’t want ‘just as much right’ to the road - you want more right to it. You want the entire length of a block and think pedestrians should just have tiny crossing points.

> The deciding factor should be if the law contributes to civil order, or reduces injury.

But it doesn’t - we do fine without it in the UK.

I’m just against the framing of this as cars vs. people.

I guess traveling safely is unpopular on HN, just like in SF.

The UK has a much smaller population with more public transit, and the cities like London are so densely packed with slow-moving traffic that it's unlikely to lead to deaths. Comparing metrics without context isn't much of an argument against stopping unsafe crossings.

A human being walking around and crossing with some basic looking both ways is not a danger to anyone.

Cars are driven by people, so it's humans in cars vs humans on foot. Both can create danger to each other. Just because you can safely do something doesn't override the reason and spirit of the law.

Jaywalking is a tiny niche of a massive amount of rules that govern how we interact with each other safely. You're really not going to have a problem jaywalking unless you do it unsafely in the first place, and if you do then there's liability and enforcement ready to apply.

If you want to argue that its about cross-modalities then why have train crossings? Just let cars drive across the tracks if they think its safe. Now surely you can see why that might be an issue?

The whole point of these laws is to create safety by reducing unpredictable events. Again, it doesn't mean you can't safely ignore the laws (even most of the time), but that's not what the law is for. It's ironic that you mention reasonableness and yet have a completely unreasonable understanding of the rules.

Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.