PeroK said:
We must have learned by now that the key is to act quickly and not wait until the virus is widespread.
This is predicated on the axiom that
there are steps that can be taken to avoid it becoming widespread.
Evidence suggests there is no chance of this.
There have been several countries that have tried total lockdown, one in particular at the far end of every travel route, being New Zealand, that had the most optimum of a good long prewarning. What is happening there now? Despite their heroic efforts to stop it becoming widespread there, and despite the enormous sacrifice of its people to their freedoms, I fear that battle is now lost.
The original prospectus for lockdowns was to avoid the peak of cases, so that hospitals had a chance to deal with the waves. Although there were some rushes on hospitals, nothing like what was planned for. UK 'Nightingale' hospitals went completely unused. Then the lockdown morphed into giving us enough time for vaccinations, which are now widespread. Now we have a lockdown to do, what? To stop it becoming a widespread endemic?
That battle is lost on whether it (and its variants) will become widespread. The question is whether its variants will run out of virility to do much harm, more than any other endemic disease, as they mutate.
What are we actually doing and why? We might well reduce the
rate of cases and mortality, flattening the peaks, but are the magnitude of cases and mortality actually going to be affected in the long run?
New Zealand is a good test case. Its cases are now on the rise. Will it end up low on the deaths-per-million, and gain credit for all that hard work, or just merge into the spectrum of outcomes across the world by the end of next year?
I am lost in the current thinking, I don't understand any of the objectives any more. Saying 'it's to save lives' sounds like a political statement not a scientific one, because you just have to scan the list of countries according to rates of death/M and on the face of it it looks random and uncorrelated to how well or badly or quickly lockdowns were implemented. Some counties that were held up as ideal examples are now bad on the list of deaths/M. Others that looked like a sham are orders of magnitude better.
For example, people laughed at Madagascar when the Gov released a local tea, saying this would stop Covid. They did have a lockdown .. for a couple of weeks, in a couple of larger towns. Well, at 34 deaths per million population, while USA is at 2,400 per million, who is laughing about that now?
Then there was India that initially looked fine and everyone said how well they had done, then it surged and folks said how badly they'd dealt with the second wave, now at 330/M deaths, they're looking pretty good by comparison with USA and, say, UK at 2,100/M.
Iran was slated badly by the international community for not locking down for a long time, and eventually they got all panicky about it. Currently they are at 1,500/M, so hardly doing 'badly' against say Germany that was also held up as an icon of lockdown implementation, now much the same at 1,200/M.
Peru locked down with military force and closed the borders very quickly, now at 6,000/M.
I'm not seeing strong correlations between the massive (or small) impositions on society and 'results'.
We can scientifically rationalise and intellectualise what we should or should not do, but how is it actually translating into real results, or not? Australia has come down very hard on its population and ended up with just 77/M deaths. Is that from vigorously applied lockdowns, or have then been sneaking in some Malagasy tea?
I'm sorry but I am just struggling to see correlations here. As humans we should take responsibility for ourselves, I have taken the vaccinations and I keep away from people, like we all should. But then I always have and being on the autistic spectrum my OCD habits which were once ridiculed have now become normalised.
I think it is unfair to accuse people of not taking the pandemic seriously and becoming 'spreaders' of it. If you worry about it that much, stay at home. If you worry a bit about it and have some perspective, take the vaccines and avoid potentially bad situations. If you couldn't care less about your health, then please sign a thing that says you'd prefer not to be treated in hospital, so I don't find you there if I need it.
It seems to me that the world has lost its perspective. How come the death rate varies by two orders of magnitude across the globe, with the countries practicing the most stringent lock downs appearing at both ends and also in the middle? Likewise the countries with the least stringent lockdowns also appear at both ends of that 2-OOM spectrum? I'm just not seeing a correlation between mortality outcomes and how countries have responded. Sorry. The death rate numbers objectively disclose this.