We shouldn’t be saying “Lockdowns don’t work,” because thanks to the idiots we really aren’t doing any kind of real lockdown. We should instead be saying “Uncoordinated and unenforced public health policy and lack of federal leadership doesn’t work.”
If your policy depends on everyone doing the right thing, it's awful policy.
Lockdowns have never been done in human history. They've never been possible, really; if there were no internet, it wouldn't even have been considered as a possibility. It takes a lot of hubris to claim that lockdowns were/are guaranteed to work. It is totally uncharted territory.
Lockdowns have been done repeatedly across the full time and space of human history. HN had a link just last week about one of the most well known, for bubonic plague, in Sardinia In 1582: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210107-the-432-year-old...
They've just been used incredibly successfully in AU and NZ.
You could just read the article to understand that this wasn't an isolated case, but the start of a general approach to public health, indeed even the phrase "quarantine":
>Lockdowns were not unique to Alghero. "In Florence, for example, they imposed a total quarantine of the city in the spring of 1631," says John Henderson, a professor of Italian Renaissance history at Birkbeck, University of London. And just as today, rule-breaking was common.
>"Over the year from the summer of 1630 to the summer of 1631, I found something like about 550 different cases that people were prosecuted for, for various infringements of the public health regulations," says Henderson. For most of that time, the city wasn't in full lockdown, but people were expected to self-isolate for 40 days if a member of their household was suspected of having the plague, and taken to hospital. This is where the word "quarantine" comes from – "quaranta giorni" means "40 days" in Italian.
Lockdowns like this have continued to be a part in public health approaches to infectious disease around the world.
The fact that a majority of Americans, convinced of their exceptionalism in every way, would oppose such an approach doesn't mean that it is inherently impossible or nonfunctional.
Unenforced policies depend on everyone doing the right thing, and we agree they are doomed to fail. If there was any enforcement at all they could have made a dent. There are plenty of other policies in the USA that are effective because we manage to enforce. Do you know anybody who got a ticket for violating stay-at-home? I don’t.
All of those policies were developed over time and required buy in over a long period of time.
There is no timeline where the American public buys into the lockdowns that would be necessary in February 2020, which is when they would have had to happen.
I don’t believe that. The vast majority of people this past year understood the seriousness, behaved well, did the right thing voluntarily, and likely would have supported a real stay-at-home order if it would mean the idiots also had to behave. We just didn’t try it because we are cursed with cowardly leadership.
> The vast majority of people this past year understood the seriousness, behaved well, did the right thing voluntarily
I don't buy that. Where do you live? I spent a couple of months over the summer in Texas (in a non liberal part) and there were like a grand total of 2 people who took any of it seriously. I think its evident based on what happened here that the majority didn't really care, but even if you happen to be right, we don't need a majority, we need 100%. Just go back to early February 2020 and remember that timeline. It only took 1-2 people, then there were 10, then 100, etc. It's exponential.
I think your only bet here with a majority (let's conservatively say 60% of people in agreeance with the severity of the virus) is to stop all international/domestic travel completely for a few months. Stop all flights, no interstate travel. Nothing at all, a complete military lockdown. That is the absolute only way to have stopped the spread, akin to what China did. And I simply don't buy that the USA in 2020 would do that without anything short of a revolt.
