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I don't think the optimal covid response involved lockdowns, but that doesn't mean the best case is "midwit morons". A week / month-long lockdown wouldn't have been that bad - even lockdowns as they were just weren't that bad compared to the 200-year history of american political/economic mistakes!
Covid's mortality rate was, on a log scale, only a bit worse than the flu. Diseases with 10-100x higher mortality rates can exist - smallpox, the original SARS, etc - and lockdowns would be justified for those.
Quite to the contrary, these would have been the worst lockdowns. They would incur extreme costs while at best postponing the epidemic for a week or a month. The strongest argument for lockdowns was "flatten the curve" until you compare the capacity of hospitals vs infection rate and find out that it would take years of lockdowns for hospitals to churn through all the cases. Anybody with two brain cells knew that lockdowns will not be there just for a week or a month, that was deliberate tactic in order to persuade population and opposition to accept them. Once the laws and edicts passed lockdowns became what they were.
Also another point that passed by a lot of people was that the early ancestral strain had R0 of around 2.8 and I remember reading about how lockdowns may be able to push that bellow one. The delta strain had R0 of over 5.0 and no amount of reasonable lockdowns or masking could flatten that one: lockdown delta was basically as if no measures ancestral strain. But by then the idiocy was already entrenched, washing of hands, lockdowns and masks were turned basically into religious ritual - something akin to killing cats during plague. Something has to be done, lockdowns are something so let's do it.
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lockdowns do not work with flus irrelevant of the cost of them
the best case for the people who pushed lockdowns is they're midwit morons who were duped into believing dumb things; it only gets worse from there by assigning them nefarious actions to protect themselves, seize power, etc.
lockdowns were not a part of any pandemic planning guidelines in early 2020 because of their enormous cost and the lack of evidence supporting their efficacy; this was all changed, on a dime, and trying to determine exactly what caused public health derps to launch into a society-wide experiment with incredibly high costs is difficult but it cannot be because of good literature about costs and effects because it did not exist
what do you think was the economic cost of lockdowns in the USA (which continue to accrue)? if it's not over at least $5,000,000,000,000, we're not being serious about the economic costs alone with those costs continuing to accrue
smallpox was not stopped with lockdowns and historical evidence does not support the claim they worked at all let alone "were justified"
the original sars sputtered out in almost all places without lockdowns at all making any claims lockdowns were needed to be bunk
your comments rely on assumptions which are simply false; perhaps you can come up with some real disease or make up a hypothetical one which justifies a lockdown
any disease which is deadly enough to justify lockdowns wouldn't need lockdowns because people would voluntarily do it themselves just like they did in the early days of the covid hysteria
the comparison would be between what people do voluntarily and what people do in a government thug enforced lockdown; the more justified a lockdown would be, the smaller the difference in any proposed benefit from the lockdowns
and even if one were to come up with a hypothetical which just-so justifies lockdowns, the history of failure by the public health establishment w/re covid demonstrates they are fundamentally incapable of making the right call and nothing at all which has happened since their catastrophic failure has changed to think they would be any better in the future
Sources on pre-2020 pandemic planning and the evidence against lockdowns?
Wasn't the original SARS contained because, unlike COVID-19, people weren't contagious before they got symptoms?
I don't play the sources game for lower comments, but doubly so when the sources demands are one-sided and/or for easily findable materials (e.g., pandemic guidelines in 2019)
no
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