What I want to argue is that 'lockdowns' can never be justified because any ostensible justification for them is *self-nullifying*, in the sense that it must necessarily invoke a context whose severity is such that the 'lockdown' would not help. But, I don't have the intelligence
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Replying to @soncharm
If you want to make it sound all proper you'd have to create a few fn based on Rt - how much "lockdowns" reduce Rt versus how much Rt goes down from people changing behavior to avoid. Put a value on cases prevented and a cost on the "lockdown". Flawless large calculation
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @soncharm
What you seem to be getting at is that Rt would have to be high for a mild disease for lockdowns to appreciably change Rt in comparison to how people would choose to adapt but since the cost to a lockdown is high you're going to end up with a wasteful lockdown or a pointless one
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @soncharm
The only thing that can change is if you could actually get Rt below 1 - then you could eliminate the virus entirely but people won't comply unless the virus is really scary or you're willing to act like China did.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon
Think I’d add: the difficulty of sustaining Rt<<1 via ‘lockdowns’ isn’t merely that ‘people won’t comply’ out of stubbornness. People *can’t* comply w/full ‘lockdown’; they would literally die. For better or worse we have a way of life leveraged to an interconnected society.
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Replying to @soncharm @CovfefeAnon
Lockdown defenders might then say: oh c’mon we don’t mean FULL lockdown, we’ll allow ‘essential’ stuff. Ok then, bye bye R<<1. Self-nullifying
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Replying to @soncharm @CovfefeAnon
But these are well-trod arguments. The self-nullifying I had in mind is different There’s a tendency now to see or assume rather that ‘lockdown’ must be a tool that is Sensible To Trigger if a disease is Serious Enough, along some imagined continuum of Disease-Seriousness.
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Replying to @soncharm @CovfefeAnon
To people of this view, then, lockdown *must* be Sensible at *some* point, and the only question was whether Wuhan was at that threshold. They might or might not think it was but even some who don’t will say stuff like ‘we didn’t know that at the time, so lockdown made sense’.
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Replying to @soncharm @CovfefeAnon
I am inclined to reject this entire framing. There’s no such threshold at which Lockdown ‘makes sense’, cuz any disease at such a threshold, must be so devastating & apocalyptic that a (attempted) lockdown wouldn’t help, wouldn’t be obeyed, would be a dead-letter, etc.
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There's a multipart test that should be worked out but step 1 of any such test absolutely has to be "does the lockdown reduce Rt below 1?" - if not, then don't do it b/c it's pointless.
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