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
That's an empirical question but the evidence is all in favor of it not working to get Rt < 1.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon
Just to clarify, it’s not enough to ‘get Rt<1’ once, like you’re trying to hit a charity-drive target. You’d have to keep it there long enough for the exponential decay to suppress prevalence to controllable/surveillable levels. In tiny NZ i gather this took 4 months.
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Absolutely. That's question two - of course the amount of time you have to keep Rt < 1 depends on how many cases you let into your country in the first place.
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