For context, in Ireland we are about to come out of a six week lockdown, and reported cases have dropped by about4-4.5x.
Not sure what the hell happened to make the English lockdown so ineffective (and to be fair, it's not like the lockdown is actually ending, it's just becoming more regionalised).
> what the hell happened to make the English lockdown so ineffective
The word "lockdown" is being used for everything from "welding anyone with a fever into their apartment" to "a mild suggestion that people work from home if practical." Any reasonably restrictive lockdown which minimizes time spent outside one's own home and limits travel between regions is, if enforced, going to rapidly reduce R-values, and shortly thereafter, active cases.
Unfortunately, many jurisdictions aren't willing to accept the financial losses from such a lockdown, and so institute something between a token effort and a sham, invariably following it some weeks later with a declaration that "lockdowns don't work."
>Not sure what the hell happened to make the English lockdown so ineffective
From my experience a lot of people are ignoring it. I've been to-the-letter in terms of compliance. Nearly everyone I know hasn't been - they often say "well, yeah, but I know I haven't got it so it's OK", or similar. Some are just flat out deniers. It's not everyone - obviously my experience is only anecdotal - but I think that would explain a lot of it, plus it not really being a lockdown in the true sense.
I think people are just getting fed-up of it, and thinking "We have to start living our lives at some point".
It was easier for people to lockdown when it was sunny and people could help by drinking beer in a national park. Now people just have to stay inside alone, the impact on standard of living is much lower.
If the average person has had a life quality reduction of 1/3 during the pandemic, that's equal to 23m quality-adjusted life years (QALY), or 287,500 lifetimes. Even with way more conservative estimates, death has been massively outweighed by other areas of impact of the pandemic.
I speak to more people now who say "I can't just stay inside for the rest of my life", particularly younger people where the social/life impact of lockdown is higher. It's different being a 22 year old guy locked down on their own in a flat and being asked to see nobody, compared to being a 48 year old guy locked down with their wife and family in a cottage.
It's not reasonable to speak concretely about the result of multiplying a rough estimate by a large number.
Of course, I'm coming at it from a perspective where I don't think the potential deaths from the pandemic are obviously outweighed by other things that have happened since it started.
Much of the economic impact would have come regardless of government actions, and there would likely have been much more death if the spring pauses had not happened (there's been much time for people to make less costly adjustments, treatments have improved, etc.).
> It's not reasonable to speak concretely about the result of multiplying a rough estimate by a large number.
I didn't speak concretely, and it is reasonable if you clearly list your assumptions! But the broader point is that if we were looking at QALY as a measure that's very different to deaths.
> there would likely have been much more death
There might have been more death, but it's also worth considering what this is in terms of net-QALY as the average age of death is >80. If we lock down 30 people for a year to add 3 years of life to someone, is that a good trade?
And now you are being absurd, jumping from 1/3 quality of life reduction as an estimate to locking people down for a year. I'm in the US, where the harshest restriction has been on businesses, people have never been locked in their homes. We've had shelter in place orders and similar, but the enforcement of those amounts to "please".
> "I'm from a different country with low enforcement and a generally nice climate, and can't imagine that being stuck in your home in England and not be allowed to see anyone during the winter can have a negative impact on the quality of life!"
There are lots of more or less correct answers, but:
In this "lockdown," schools remained open, and people were encouraged to go to work if they can't work from home. Restaurants and pubs were closed for dine in service, but they are allowed to do takeaway. "Non-essential" shops were closed, but anecdotally, lot's of non-essential shopping continued at places like supermarkets and hardware stores. Prior to the lockdown, there were already tiered regional restrictions in place, so rather than going from wide open to locked down like in March, we went from somewhat restricted to somewhat more restricted and now we are going back to somewhat restricted.
The schools thing is madness. Teenagers absolutely suck at a) social distancing, b) thinking about others and c) thinking about the consequences of their actions.
The UK is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, 14th according wiki.
Ireland is one of the least densely populated countries in the world 112th.
I see these intercountry comparisions all the time and it makes no sense, every situation is vastly different. I'm in Australia, and know I have it good, but Australia had all the factors going for it, it's easily isolated from inter country travel and it has very sparsely populated cities. It's economy is also propped up with an abundance of natural resources unlike services based economies like the UK.
So, one of the interesting things about Ireland is that part of the Island is still managed by the UK.
So in some sense, we actually have an appropriate control for your assertion that its down to population density.
In general, the data does not support your assertion around population density, as the Republic of Ireland has (post lockdown) a rate of 88.5 per 100k, whereas Northern Ireland has a rate of 2788 per 100k.
Source 1 is showing a sum for the trailing 14 days. Source 2 is showing cumulative statistics for the entire pandemic. Your source 1 even says the UK as a whole is 372.1 per 100k.
Northern Ireland government is an utter mess, the two useless cretans in Stormont couldn't tell their arse from their elbow. McGuinness and Paisley got on better than those other two and they had every reason to hate each other.
Northern Ireland also has loads of inter UK travel every day, I know people who were at some points commuting from London to N.Ireland.
I didn't want to get into a whole explanation for someone, just to make a point about density not being the primary driver in this case (although it definitely has an impact).
Australia on average is very sparsely populated. However, it's also one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and places like central Sydney are hardly "very sparsely populated".
Density is complicated. On one hand, raw population per square kilometer is obviously a useless metric for epidemics. It's trivial to understand that taking a small country with a few cities, and adding a vast uninhabited area will drive people/sq.km towards zero without actually changing the actual density where people live (See Canada, Sweden, Australia and many others).
So it's not people per area. Perhaps a better measure is "mean distance" between people? That means Australia is pretty dense because most people live in dense areas. Urbanization is obviously a much better metric than raw density.
But this also misses another important factor: Australi, and Sweden (which are sparse but urbanized so low pop/sq.qm but low mean distance), unlike the UK is pretty "disconnected". There are clusters with high density, but they are separated by areas of low density.
It's likely better in an epidemic to have 3 cities with 1 million separated from each other, than 30 cities with 100k people each, where people in each cities visit/commute to the next 5 cities. That's what some places like UK/Netherlands/Belgium have. They are extremely dense in the sense that it's always close to the next population center. There are no natural borders or empty spaces.
People from city A work in town B, and some fraction of people in town B work in city C and so on. Towns A and Z are connected by just a few days worth of normal commute for thousands of people.
There are some fairly empty bits of the UK (e.g. there is greater area of peat bogs (9%) than is built up (6%)) - which means the bits of the UK where people live are even more densely populated than you might expect:
The CBD of Syndey is still nowhere near what it was pre covid. Most of the large tech companies are still work from home.
I commute to the CBD every day and it's nowhere near like it was, I can get a seat on the train, even with distancing. I couldn't even get a seat during rush hour before covid.
It's barely a lockdown. People are still working, going to offices, going to school etc.
Our first lockdown was a real lockdown where the streets were a ghost town. Right now you wouldn't even know it was a lockdown, you'd think it was just mild precautions.
it's not really a lockdown, so much is open, a lot of people are still going to work, even in offices. Markets opened here selling Christmas trees and decorations despite the lockdown, shops selling chocolate open and trading as normal, there was even a dancing ELF performance in the city centre here, it's really not much of a lockdown compared to last time.
> "Not sure what the hell happened to make the English lockdown so ineffective"
This lockdown wasn't particularly severe, in terms of rules and enforcement, and anecdotally people haven't been taking it as seriously as the first one.
For example, back in the April lockdown, central London was virtually deserted. Almost all businesses completely closed, and famously crowded locations like Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square were almost completely devoid of people. A very eerie and strange sight!
But this time, the streets have remained pretty busy. Many businesses and offices are open and in the evenings there's a relaxed, festive atmosphere on the streets. Although pubs are restaurants are "closed" inside, they are allowed to sell takeaway food and alcohol. So there are many pubs open in Soho (for example) selling takeaway drinks and people are hanging around outside drinking and eating and having a great time. Street party!
Socially, there also seems to be less fear of the virus than there used to be. During the first lockdown, a lot of people were quite fearful of going out. Now, not so much.
I went for a walk to the town centre during this current "lockdown", and it felt the same as any other year.
Lots of people, festive atmosphere, most shops appeared to be open, coffee shops were open, cafes were open.
The difference was coffee shops and cafes were only doing takeaways and outdoor service. But it's hard to see that from a distance, especially the ones lit and processing orders at the usual counters inside. As a result, people were eating and drinking outside, and it made the seated areas on the streets seem busier than normal.
The pubs were closed, that was the most noticeable thing.
Clothes shops were closed, except M&S which is 80% clothes was open, presumably on the excuse that at the back they sell food. I noticed quite a few other large shops open that seemed "non-essential" to me, but who am I to judge what's essential.
My landlord's property agent was open, which surprised me when they asked me to take a letter there. I asked about that, and they said they are alternating who is in the office each day so there's only half the staff. I'm not convinced they are essential, especially when they seemed to be able to work from home just fine earlier in the year, but it's up to them.
Walking down the street while keeping 2m from other people was difficult even on pedestrianised streets (no vehicles) because of so many people. I didn't see much mask wearing outside - less than in the summer.
It made me quite uncomfortable to be honest; I haven't been out since.
I know that it's more severe in other regions of the UK. But where I live, Oxford, it seemed quite lax. Our case rate here is below average for the country despite a very large number of students.
They must be doing something right, as the figures have started dropping clearly on the charts over the last week. I hope it's because they're being smarter about what to restrict now. Maybe they're actually getting better at this.
The first lockdown in April onwards, everybody stayed at home. Time away from home was rationed. Police stopped people driving around to question what they were up to. Essential workers were the only people allowed to work away from home. Schools shut.
This lockdown was business as usual, with social distancing. The only real limits are how many people can meet up.
It's a farce of a lockdown, so it's only been partially effective.
Edit: Actually, yeah I see your point. To some extent yes, as I'm using the confirmed cases number for Ireland. But when I eyeball the google confirmed cases graph it looks like there's been a 50% reduction in confirmed cases, so my major point still holds.
Lockdown effectiveness sometimes appears to be mysterious without additional data. I live in Portugal and so far the 2nd wave lockdown was not as effective as it should have been, but from what I personally observe people are extremely compliant.
I guess in the case of Portugal family reunions against the government's advice could be a factor. It seems hard to get the relevant data, though.
I am very curious, were any measures taken two-three weeks before the lockdown? Because I saw a graph where cases in Ireland starts to drop literally next day after the introduction of the lockdown, and that, of course does not make any sense, because of the incubation period.
But it's also worth noting that the existence of the lockdown was flagged 10 days before it happened, which presumably changed behaviour by scaring a bunch of people.
Because I'm being colloquial. Hopefully nobody is making important decisions as a result of my HN posts ;) (If you are, contact me and give me some money :))
> and the virus is now in retreat, a large-scale study of more than 100,000 volunteers showed on Monday.
This seems irresponsible by Reuters. Saying the "virus is in retreat" implies that there's some non-zero threshold below which the virus will be eradicated with the passage of time. There is still a massive number of community cases (almost 1000 per 100k according to the article) which threaten to exponentiate again as restrictions are eased.
What determines retreat/threat is the rate of exponential change. The exponential appears to have gone negative, and that looks like retreat to me.
(1000 per 100k is not as significant as it sounds, as 1 per 100k is a similar level of threat if the exponential is positive. That's just a time lag difference of a few weeks.)
For responsibility, you could think of it another way. Saying the "virus is in retreat" implies "lockdown is working - yay!" and might encourage the people currently voting on near-future regional restrictions to carry on because it appears to be working.
Right now, some MPs are threatening to block the government from implementing targeted, regional restrictions for the next couple of months, so the government is having to negotiate for lesser restrictions. Perhaps the Reuters headline will encourage them to keep up the restrictions for a while longer.
I'm resigned to the fact that the replication rate is going to oscillate around one. Every time it gets higher people panic and start shutting down. When it gets lower everybody is clamouring to restart everything.
Our inability to see past the end of next week isn't doing us any favours. God knows how we are going to deal with climate change.
One really weird thing I noticed is when they talk about the limitations they mention issues around sensitivity but there is nothing in the paper that talks about specificity issues. The combination of non-zero false positive rate, lowish real rate in the population ~1% according to the test and testing people without symptoms surely creates a problem with the results. I guess for looking at differences over time this might not be a problem because the specificity/sensitivity issues should be a constant.
There is no evidence available that proves a robust "cause and effect" between the current national lockdown, and the drop in cases. The counter-narrative is that the rate of growth in cases was already reducing throughout the UK before the second national lockdown started (easily independently verifiable using the governments own stats dashboard), and cases plateaued in the early stages of the lockdown - happening too early to be reasonably attributable to the effects of the lockdown starting to bite.
Instead of downvoting why not prove me wrong? My first sentence is as far as I know plain truth, and the second is just describing the popular counter-narrative, not making any claims as to its veracity. When the social ill-effects of a lockdown policy are as severe as they are, we should be able to have a healthy public debate about the balance of harms and under-pinning evidence.
I am not sure why people keep bringing up these "science" arguments. If you don't interact with other human beings or animals, you are not going to contract infectious diseases. It's as simple as that. The question we should be asking what is the price for that? How many people out there want to live a longer (no COVID) but miserable (no human contacts) life? Please let's focus our discussion on that instead of resorting to righteous indignation of others.
> How many people out there want to live a longer (no COVID) but miserable (no human contacts) life?
Almost everyone does if faced with that choice.
But almost nobody is weighing up their own lives against isolation as you have described, deciding they personally would rather die of Covid than spend a lot of time indoors in isolation.
The vast majority of people in favour of mingling with others are doing so on the assumption that they themselves almost certainly won't die or suffer long Covid. They weigh up risks of mingling against protecting someone else, usually nobody in particular except some misleading caricatures, which is a much easier decision in favour of taking risks.
> no human contacts
I have to wonder why people are living to that extreme. Even in the most heavy lockdowns in the UK, it's possible for people to have some human contacts.
Infections peaked before the lockdown according to King's College London's ZOE study (1). Exactly the same for the first lockdown. (2) Infections in most of Western Europe are decreasing at the same time regardless of measures taken or when they were taken. (3)
In a Spanish serological study, people staying home were found to be more infected than those who were essential workers and had to go to work. (4)
Hopefully at some point we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do, after it has implanted in a country. Once it's coronavirus season again, infections will start rising again. It's taboo to say so for some reason...
A fun one for bonus: Six of 12 men wintering at an isolated Antarctic base sequentially developed symptoms and signs of a common cold after 17 weeks of complete isolation (5). If the virus can still spread after 17 weeks of complete isolation in an Antarctic base, it's foolish to think we can suppress coronavirus anywhere now that's it's endemic.
> Hopefully at some point we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do, after it has implanted in a country.
This comment is utterly infuriating. Who is we? Is it epidemiologists? Because I think they would disagree with you. Is it South Korea or New Zealand? They would disagree too.
COVID 19's spread and contagion isn't magic. It's basic germ theory, which we've known for over 100 years. The fact that this defeatist, anti-science sentiment can sit as the most upvoted comment on a site called Hacker News is... a sign of the times.
> Who is we? Is it epidemiologists? Because I think they would disagree with you.
So basically, people who agree with you are “epidemiologists”, and people who show you facts you don’t like are “anti-science”.
What’s infuriating is when someone can post a well-sourced, factual comment, and it gets rejected by people who dismiss any and all facts that don’t fit their pre-determined narrative.
New Zealand (incredibly remote island with 4.8M, less than a few boroughs in London) shut down its borders before coronavirus season (which meant very limited community transmission outside of a few clusters) and did a hard lockdown. Once community spread has taken place (during coronavirus season), it's too late to act.
But if you have any argument other than ad-hominem attacks, please feel free to share and participate in the debate. Your only argument is outrage?
It's shocking that debate is now limited to insulting others of being anti scientific if they don't agree with one's point of view, backed with citations.
The most populated london borough has a population of around 400,000. Quite clearly New Zealand's population is greater than any london borough, or even a few combined.
> shut down its borders before coronavirus season (
LOL, but you were trying to convince people isolation doesn't work and that the virus will just magically continue doing the rounds without any way of stopping it
Conspirationists don't have to make any sense, right?
Regarding your third source: All of the countries you selected on this graph had a strong but not identical drop. Germany for comparison took only very light measures (schools and daycare close to 100% open) and has seen a much smaller drop.
No one spoke about identical drop. They've all dropped, their timelines might be lagging by a few days/weeks but they are all moving in the same direction in roughly the same timeline.
I believe that you made a dishonest selection of countries in your source: You selected countries with similar drops and you then inferred that measures have no impact in the virus. Germany had a ~5% drop, france about a ~60%. Germany has schools and daycare open, France closed them.
None of this is scientifically cause and effect. You are picking correlations which agree with your preferred narrative and extrapolating from there.
There is very strong evidence that the virus is less contagious to/from children and that schools and daycares are not a significant point of transmission.
What I stated was that this person selected data in a way to support their theory and that i could easily select a data point that contradicted his theory. I did not claim that my single example proved some other theory, I did not state a preferred narrative as you claim.
Please have a look at the guidelines, you should try to honestly understand my point.
That is one interpretation of the facts. An alternative one might go something like this:
In early Autumn it was apparent that infection rates were high in the North of England but lower in the (wealthier and economically more productive) South. The UK government adopted a local/regional approach to lockdowns, with the effect that the North was under lockdown-like conditions for most of Autumn. Infection rates began to fall in the North, but simultaneously started rising in the (non-lockdowned) South, though from a lower base. Once infections started rising in the South, the government adopted a national lockdown plan (with, coincidentally, vastly more financial support for firms and individuals). And so the fall in infections we see "before the lockdown" is the effect of the "tier 3" restrictions across the North, with the national lockdown intended to prevent serious increases in the spread of the disease across the South.
I am not saying that this story is true, just that it's an equally good fit for the facts. Presenting statistics is only ever the start of the conversation, not the end, as the statistics do not speak for themselves.
The conclusion doesn't follow. Perhaps the lockdown was the reason people were vigilant? If so, then the mere news of the lockdown made people vigilant and aware of the severity of the situation. It would make sense that peoples' behavior changed early then. And unless one could have conveyed the severity to the population in any other way - the lockdown was "Necessary" even if just as a means of signalling.
I really find it surprising how people will torture data until it shows them the BS they want to believe
You can't assert you passed the peak until a long time after you pass it. Given the primary source, the UK peak was around 2 Nov/3 Nov https://covid.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time Yes, the previous measures might be sufficient and more important than a lockdown
> (2) Infections in most of Western Europe are decreasing at the same time regardless of measures taken or when they were taken.
Except for Sweden, where it kept climbing and climbing, funny.
> we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do
Physical isolation of infected people has been proven to work since the middle ages and the black plague but it seems that the new fashion is to invent some idiotic BS and repeat it as truth such as "the Earth is flat" or "people can be contaminated through closed walls". But if you think it doesn't matter might I suggest you go volunteer in a COVID ward. No masks needed.
> Six of 12 men wintering at an isolated Antarctic base sequentially developed symptoms and signs of a common cold after 17 weeks of complete isolation
If each person is infectious for 5 days, and it takes between 2 to 14 days for incubation, it is not hard to imagine how it goes on for 17 weeks. It might not even have been Covid (or a virus)
Also getting your hand at good data isn't so easy nowadays. E.g. reporting date can be very different from actual date of death. My area once lagged 3 months.
Interesting to read about a peak at the start of November. Some regions of Germany where data for "date of death" is available also show a peak slightly before 1.Nov.
Some regions seem to have a constant lag for reporting. For others the curves using "reporting date" seem to be completely detached from the "date of death" data.
You don't know you passed the peak until you clearly passed the peak. This is not the case so far. (Just take the same graph and ignore the data after a certain date. If you go back to Nov 1, you would have thought you'd be over the peak already, but you arent)
> You don’t know you passed the peak until you clearly passed the peak.
What manner of logic is this? Look at the plot: the daily case numbers are in decline. I don’t know what will happen three weeks from now, but I know that it’s factually incorrect to claim that cases are still increasing.
By the same logic you’re using, the very article this is attached to is nonsense: you don’t know if cases in the UK will go up again tomorrow.
> Hopefully at some point we will understand that the virus will follow its own curve regardless of what we try to do, after it has implanted in a country.
This is just straight up wrong. Many countries like China, Singapore and Australia have gotten sizable outbreaks (tens of thousands of people) under control and effectively eliminated the virus in their territories.
I do agree that half-assed lockdowns are the worst of both worlds: you endure the economic damage of shutdown without putting much of a dent in the case count. That said, with mass vaccination on the horizon, even pushing back the peak by a few months is about to start having real benefits.
> This is just straight up wrong. Many countries like China, Singapore and Australia have gotten sizable outbreaks (tens of thousands of people) under control and effectively eliminated the virus in their territories.
Do you actually believe Chinese numbers...? Unrealistic to compare Australia (which shut down border before it was coronavirus season, hence no community spread) and Singapore (5M people, similar situation with borders shut during non coronavirus season).
The Chinese government isn't Oceania, with a near-total ability to force a narrative that's widely in variance to the facts. For example, just look at how well they've managed to convince the world that the Xinjiang camps don't exists and are fully of happy Uyghurs that are grateful for the education they're getting there.
If China had the same per capita COVID death rate a the US, they'd have had 1.1 million deaths at this point (and the associated stresses on their healthcare system). That's not something they could hide, because that's something my relatives would be able to personally report evidence of (especially since one is basically living in a Chinese hospital right now because of a bowel issue). Instead, they going about their business normally, often without masks, and no one's getting sick from COVID.
For context, in Ireland we are about to come out of a six week lockdown, and reported cases have dropped by about4-4.5x.
Not sure what the hell happened to make the English lockdown so ineffective (and to be fair, it's not like the lockdown is actually ending, it's just becoming more regionalised).