Lockdown ‘Worked’ in Some Places, But That Doesn’t Mean It Was Justified
In a recent post, I argued that “lockdown works, or it doesn’t”. My point was that just because lockdowns ‘worked’ in China and a few other places, doesn’t mean they had a large impact in the U.K. or most of Europe. (By ‘worked’ I mean that they stopped the virus in its tracks and kept a lid on further outbreaks.)
Will Jones has taken issue with my premise. He doesn’t think lockdown worked anywhere. On his reading of the evidence, border controls made a difference, but other than that we don’t really know why some countries saw major outbreaks and others didn’t.
As an aside, Will and I agree that regardless of whether lockdowns ‘worked’ in China or elsewhere, it was clearly the wrong policy for countries like Britain. So why discuss the issue at all? Well, if we want to convince the people who think it was the right policy for Britain (of whom there are still very many) we need to have the correct model of the world. We need to be able to explain all the data.
In my post, I cited evidence that several parts of China – including the capital, Beijing – didn’t see a spike in excess mortality until December of 2022. This suggests that essentially all outbreaks in China were contained for three years after the initial one. (Again, I’m not saying China followed the right policy; I’m just describing what I think happened there.)
Will points out that no other country in East Asia had a major outbreak in 2020, suggesting, “East Asia just wasn’t very susceptible to the initial strains.” But even if he’s right, this can’t explain why Beijing had no major outbreaks for three years. It can only explain why they didn’t have one in 2020.
Singapore, another East Asian country with a largely Chinese population, had its first major outbreak in October of 2021. That’s 14 months before Beijing. What does Will think explains this gap? Likewise, Taiwan had its first major outbreak in June of 2022. That’s six months before Beijing. What does he think explains this gap?
The only East Asian country that, to this day, has mysteriously avoided a major outbreak is Japan. (Although the country saw positive excess mortality for the last six months of 2022, there were no obvious spikes). Unlike Singapore and Taiwan, Japan does not have an ethnically Chinese population, so it’s arguably less relevant as a comparison.
Regarding Will’s claim that “East Asia just wasn’t very susceptible to the initial strains”, I would also note that Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea all used both border controls and lockdowns (of varying strictness) in 2020. So the only real mystery, as I’ve mentioned before, is Japan.
In my post, I argued that several countries were able to contain the virus “using a combination of lockdowns and border controls”. While Will accepts that border controls “can be successful, for a time”, he questions whether “lockdowns are pulling any weight, rather than just being there as an unnecessary extra”. So why do I think both are necessary to explain the data?
The reason is that several of the countries that managed to contain the virus using border controls did have outbreaks. It’s just that those outbreaks never snowballed like they did in Britain and most of Europe. My question to Will is: How can you explain why those outbreaks never snowballed other than by invoking lockdown?
Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Singapore and South Korea all had outbreaks in March of 2020. Why did these outbreaks not snowball and lead to spikes in excess mortality?
My explanation is the one I gave in my recent post: “When prevalence was relatively low, countries had a shot at containing Covid, so long as there were strict border controls in place.” After all, such controls can stop new infections being brought in from outside, but they can’t stop infections that were already there from spreading. (Note that I originally made this argument in February of 2021.)
In each country, there was a critical threshold of prevalence below which a lockdown of given strictness could have ‘worked’ (in combination with border controls). Places like Denmark and South Korea only needed relatively mild lockdowns because they acted when prevalence was still low. China needed a much tougher lockdown because by the time they acted prevalence was far higher.
Of course, there’s no way that China’s lockdowns passed a cost-benefit test, let alone a basic human rights test. But it’s hard to explain all the data if you assume they had no impact on viral transmission.
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The author fails to adequately distinguish between raising the drawbridge with the enemies still outside and doing so after the walls are already breached’.
Lockdown was simply evil. I will accept neither justification nor rationalisation.
BINGO. That is the real moral of the story.
Death rate 0.3%. Same as the flu.
2018 flu season, total dead 60.000. No diapers, no LDs, no jibby stabby’s. Fake news lameting the uselessness of the flu stabbies.
Rona 2020-21 total dead from not with….20.000.
LDs do f*ck all except destroy life and kill people.
How many murdered from LDs? 30.000? More than what the Rona killed.
Oh dear god. Will somebody please explain to the author the difference between ‘delaying’ the inevitable course of nature, and ‘escaping’ it? Everybody getting a virus all at once is NOT better than a relatively slow increase in infections leading towards basic immunity in a population when the natural balance between humans and virus is reestablished as it always has been since mankind came about. Probably developed from a virus. Until, of course, viruses encountered a woke civil service and third rate politicians in league with the BBC. What force of nature could possibly resist such intellectual giants?
So true. Some would argue that those countries that delayed it the longest dodged the worst strains and only got the far less deadly Omicron variants. But that is literally nothing more than undeserved dumb luck, benefitting from the rest of the world building herd immunity for them, and nothing to be smug about. They were VERY lucky that all they got was Omicron, and not a deadlier strain. Immunity debt is all too real.
Everybody DID get the virus all at once in Feb/March 2020, not to mention the fact that it had been circulating for at least 6 months by that point.And we were all fine. FOI requests reveal (I can’t remember the exact number) but it was around 1000 people who died OF covid in 2020 in the UK.
Yep, I did a FOI request for my area and calculated there were on average 3/4 of a death per day more in 2020 taking an average of the previous 5 years. That’s not exactly “bring out your dead” is it? Oh and of course there’s no telling what the cause of that “extra” death was.
“I cited evidence that several parts of China – including the capital, Beijing – didn’t see a spike in excess mortality until December of 2022. This suggests that essentially all outbreaks in China were contained for three years after the initial one.
…it’s hard to explain all the data if you assume they had no impact on viral transmission.”
That’s if you assume the figures coming out of China are correct. Perhaps Noah Carl knows something I don’t know about the official statistics from China, but to me that’s an incredible assumption.
Yes, perhaps in China they just weren’t testing and they weren’t making a big deal of it. For most people, COVID is a cold.
I also don’t think we should necessarily expect to be able to explain the progress of an outbreak in terms of government-imposed non-pharmaceutical interventions; perhaps it’s only “hard” to do so because actually they are irrelevant. The politicians of course want you to think that if they press the right button then they can control the outbreak, but the outbreak follows its own curve, which itself is not well explained, for example why doesn’t it infect everybody, like the Imperial College model assumed?
Like on the cruise ship? Where in theory EVERYONE should have had it? Because a lot of people have natural immunity to a related virus – or, more specifically – enough immunity.
I confess, I’m struggling to understand why were having this little rash of articles in which it appears some lockdowns were better than others, (‘better’ by some fractional measure), as if it was the Curates Egg and was ‘Good in parts’. It wasn’t. It was ill conceived at best and entirely counter productive taken in its entirety, which is the only way to take it. As a measure it stands complete or it falls complete. There were no good bits to mitigate the bad, and searching for them, as we are seeing is a fruitless endeavour..
Lockdowns were not intended to stop a cold / ‘flu virus.
Indeed, lockdowns were all pain and no gain.
“As an aside, Will and I agree that regardless of whether lockdowns ‘worked’ in China or elsewhere, it was clearly the wrong policy for countries like Britain. So why discuss the issue at all? Well, if we want to convince the people who think it was the right policy for Britain (of whom there are still very many) we need to have the correct model of the world. We need to be able to explain all the data.”
It was clearly the wrong policy for every country.
We do not need to explain anything – that is a rabbit hole you will not come out of.
The lockdown fascists need to explain why we needed to treat the mild-for-most “covid” differently compared to every other respiratory virus of a similar ilk with which we have coexisted since time immemorial.
I have posted this before, but here is the late Hans Rosling giving his experience of ‘lockdowns’ and acting with urgency. This is from someone with hard earned real world experience which trumps models and ‘studies’ any day. Factulness – Chapter 10 – The Urgency Instinct “If it’s not contagious, then why did you evacuate your children and wife?” asked the mayor of Nacala, eyeing me from a safe distance behind his desk. Out the window, a breathtaking sun was setting over Nacala district and its population of hundreds of thousands of extremely poor people, served by just one doctor – me. Earlier in the day I had arrived back in the city from a poor coastal area in the north named Memba. There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose hundreds of patients with a terrible, unexplained disease that had completely paralyzed their legs within minutes of onset and, in severe cases, made them blind. And the mayor was right; I wasn’t 100% sure it was not contagious. I hadn’t slept the previous night but had stayed up, pouring over my medical textbook, until I had finally concluded that the symptoms I was seeing had not… Read more »
… Fourteen years later, in 1995, the ministers in Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, heard that there was an Ebola outbreak in the city of Kitwik. They got scared. They felt they had to do something. They set up a roadblock. Again, there were unintended consequences. Feeding the people in the capital became a major problem because the rural area that had always supplied most of their processed cassava was on the other side of the disease-stricken area. The city was hungry and started buying all it could from it’s second largest food producing area. Prices skyrocketed, and guess what? A mysterious outbreak of paralyzed legs and blindness followed. Nineteen years after that, in 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the rural north of Liberia. Inexperienced people from rich countries got scared and they all came up with the same idea: a roadblock! At the Ministry of Health, I encountered politicians of a higher quality. They were more experienced, and their experience made them cautious. Their main concern was that roadblocks would destroy the trust of the people abandoned behind them. This would have been absolutely catastrophic: Ebola outbreaks are defeated by contact tracers, who depend on… Read more »
Nothing ‘snowballed’ in the UK, other than media lies, obfuscation and fear-mongering….
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
This FOI to ONS covers Feb 2020 to the end of Dec 2021..the more ‘deadly’ initial Delta wave! Death certificates with only Covid on them…less than 3000 in total…only 239 of which are under 60 years of age.
Anyone who was totally ignoring lockdown as best they could, as I was with like-minded friends and family (as were millions of others) were not suffering from anything…nobody caught anything, nobody died..and that includes an 80+ year old….
Lockdowns, masks, distancing…all psy-ops, and nothing more.
Plus the ‘prevalence’ argument is like a get out of jail free, isn’t it?…..lockdowns worked in 2021, but didn’t in 2022…coz prevalence…LOL!
Nice try Noah but I’m not sure your argument holds. Various countries missed out various ‘waves’. Germany & Austria largely missed the spring 2020 wave. African countries missed most of.
I suspect obesity, diet, sunshine, outdoor lifestyle has a lot to do with it. I simply don’t buy that any NPI had a longterm impact. All fool’s errands.
It depends what you mean by ‘worked’. It did have an effect on our outlook on the structure of politics, in the broadest sense of the term, including that of government, and that of the pharmaceutical trade etc. Whether it ever results in any real benefit, who knows? The net outcome could be different from that intended. A cynic might observe that someone has benefited from it, and will continue to do so.
I suppose the only possible “benefit” of “lockdown” in its various guises is to slow the spread and “flatten the curve” buying health authorities time to invent further justifications for extending the lockdown!
If you include welding doors shut on people, pets killed, and residents so demoralised by being locked in their apartments suicide is the only option.
Lockdowns did not solve anything they just delayed the inevitable at great human cost.
All the lockdowns did was create waves. Had we not been imprisoned and treated like cattle through the summer of 2020, I doubt there would have been a significant second wave – the ‘second wave’ in 2020 was merely the continuation of the first wave, postponed.
Oh my days….’Lockdown’ was house arrest, it was never justified for a ‘virus’ that had a 99.5% survival rate..and within a heartbeat we went from ‘Save Granny’ to ‘Freeze Granny’ as the Govt encouraged families to eat a Christmas dinner with windows wide open! Any articles such as this one need to be derided & rejected as pure and simple nonsense. When a Govt and Health Service proscribe death row drug combinations for the elderly and frail in respiratory distress, you realise it was never about ‘Saving Granny’
We need to identify who was running the psyops and put them in prison. The BBC and the MSM was either running it or colluding in what was in effect, mass murder. Many people watched helplessly as their loved ones died in solitary confinement, because of greed and lies. Never forget.
The big white shinning lie was vaccines were a way out of lockdown. The actual way out of lockdown was omicron and partying in Downing Street.
The Barrington declaration people had it right from the start. The psyops brigade shut them down. People died.
Indeed, I totally agree with you.
Given the variety of forms of lockdown, the different contexts in which they were implemented, and the variations in the virus itself, the data are always going to be ambiguous. This means it’s easy to put your favourite interpretation on the data based on your prior beliefs. I think Noah is doing something valuable. “Do lockdowns work?” is not a very useful question. Clearly, given basic biology, if you separate people strictly enough and consistently enough, then they will not infect each other. Isolation wards are there for a good reason. On the other hand, in at least some cases for Covid, lockdowns did not seem to work in practice, and in other cases it appears that infections were brought under the control by other means. So a more useful question might be “Under what circumstances do lockdowns work?” and Noah is starting to answer that. As Noah appoints out this is completely different from the question “Are lockdowns a good idea?” However, you can imagine a future context where lockdowns, if effective, are more clearly justified. For example, suppose we get a new respiratory virus that is very infectious before it is symptomatic and has the mortality rate of… Read more »
I think Noah is doing something valuable. “Do lockdowns work?” is not a very useful question. Clearly, given basic biology, if you separate people strictly enough and consistently enough, then they will not infect each other.
Basic biology would tell you that people don’t infect people because people are not pathogens. Viruses infect people. Somewhat effective measures at controlling the movements of biologic agents of disease thus look very much different from Corona pandemic theatre politics, eg, keep 2m apart or the rule of six. What’s basically needed here is air tight separation and filtering.
Even this still didn’t work reliably as hospital workers still ended up with Ebola infections. That nothing like this was ever attempted during our so-called Corona pandemic just communicates that the people who staged the theatre damn well knew it was theatre.
If lockdowns do not work, then they are not a good idea.
If lockdowns buy a delay, given the cost benefit analysis conducted by the Netherlands, they are still a bad idea, Euro70bn bad.
In this country, we know lockdown was at least £400bn bad and counting.
You can buy a great deal of delay via isolation units for £400bn.
Really, all this had been considered, lockdowns ruled out, at great length in the preparation of the pandemic contingency plan, the one subsequently defenestrated in a blue funk.
There is no disguising the fact that Bunter, the well named Hancock, the Gumby Brothers, Prof. Pantsdown and other assorted charlatans were all guilty of, at best, potentially actionable gross incompetence.
We had a perfectly good pandemic preparedness plan which if adopted would have worked. Unfortunately common sense, reason and cool heads were thrown out of the window in March 2020.
Actual hard evidence of the efficacy of anything in this sorry tale is in truth non-existent.
the only benefit of the ridiculous lockdowns[a nd the last 3 years ] i can see is that it woke a lot of people up[ including me] to the WEF plans for worldwide control and the dangers of all vaccines, and to how many of our family and friends
don’t seem to be able to think for themselves ,still!
To state this again:
The following sequence of events
1) A policy called lockdown is implemented in a country x.
2) Some event y happens in x.
does not constitute proof that the policy called lockdown caused event y. Especially not, when policies called lockdown are randomly implemented or not implemented at random times all around the globe and event y then either happens or doesn’t happen afterwards, regardless of the specific decision made about the policy called lockdown.
As to all these But why … ? questions, the answer is universally We don’t freakin’ know this! and no amount of speculation will ever change that. We (as human race) are really ignorant about a real lot of things and because of this, a real lot of things happen for reasons we cannot explain, except by making up myths and associated theology.
I think part of the explanation for lower numbers in East Asia was crossimmunity from the previous SARS epidemic.
Taiwan did a lockdown? That would truly be news to 23.5 million Taiwanese, as I can’t seem to recall that happening at any time in the Taiwan of this universe at least. Strict border controls, yes. Lockdowns, no. And barely any school closures either, even early on.
South Korea did a lockdown? Technically yes, but not until MUCH later than most of the rest of the world did.
Singapore did a lockdown? Yes, but nowhere near as strict as China.
And Japan? Obviously no lockdown. They actually had LOTS of cases, even in 2020 when they had deliberately low testing rates. It just wasn’t very deadly over there….until well after the jabs rolled out, go figure.
The biggest “What if” for me is, what if governements actually tried to treat the disease with available treatments. If you got the lurgy, you were supposed to stay at home taking paracetomol, till you were too far gone for treament, then go in the big house to die. There were many world class doctors, sucessfully using Ivermectin, Hydrochlorequin and antibiotics, that would have significantly reduced the seriousness of the illness and brought it into the range of a bad flu season. Who gave out the message of vaccine or die? Who took Ivermectin off the shelves. What sick mind tried to stop people getting a drug with an impecable safety record from being distributed to sick people, or as a prophylactic to well people? I would suggest, very corrupt people. This whole debacle should shine a big spotlight on the evil and corrupt people who made billions out of the misery of people. If we don’t throw these people in prison, they will do it again. UK spent millions, with our best and brightest medical people to have a “pandemic plan”. They were paid by the governemt, not a conspiracy theorist among them. 5 minutes after the pandemic started,… Read more »
Absolutely spot on well said sir!
A quote, on the cessation of the national emergency is USA. They shut down your businesses, your schools, churches, made you say goodbye to loved ones on Zoom calls, took away your child’s education, made every attempt to muzzle you and keep you in fear, injected millions with poison, taught the weak minded to hate, shame, and blame their fellow man, and stole three years of your life. No accountability for any of it. Just a single sentence to spit in your face and sweep it all under the rug before they move on to Part 2.
We’re now getting into the realms of the ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ type discussion. Another desperate attempt to pad out the daily production?
Lockdowns are a disgusting abomination they go against all the rights and freedoms that so many have fought and died for over centuries. There is absolutely NO JUSTIFICATION for them in any way shape or form. As was once said “people who give up freedom for safety deserve neither freedom nor safety”.
And they kill people through suicides, poverty, strokes and heart attacks unattended, cancer consultations cancelled, the list goes on and on. Oh and don’t forget the ruination of the economy or the detrimental effect on our children’s education again the list goes on and on.
Noah’s analysis is too complex and built on doubtful and confusing data with many possible interpretations.
Let’s take a step back. There is no correlation between deaths and lockdown severity. International comparisons, and comparisons between American States, both point to that.
The conclusion has to be that the Communist idea of suspension of human rights and lockdown in response to a pandemic, does not even work.
Noah, this site used to be called “Lockdown Sceptics”. Be a bit more sceptical.
“Noah, this site used to be called “Lockdown Sceptics”. Be a bit more sceptical.”
Absolutely. Though as you pointed out the name has been changed.
What makes anyone think lockdowns worked in China, or we could believe what the Chinese government tell us about the infections or how the virus originated?
Presumaby, a combination of
1) The inability to understand that correlation really doesn’t equal causation.
2) Unwillingness to admit one’s ignorance.
1) is evident from the headline alone: Lockdown ‘worked’ in some places. This really means Sometimes, a policy called lockdown correlated with $something_else and sometimes, it didn’t. And that’s a proof that the policy called lockdown didn’t work. Correlation is a necessary precondition for causation.
If your smart and creative enough you can justify just about anything. The author seems determined to prove that. A healthy dose of common sense is needed for balance which is sorely lacking in this article.
‘The reason is that several of the countries that managed to contain the virus using border controls did have outbreaks. It’s just that those outbreaks never snowballed like they did in Britain and most of Europe.’
What snowballed in Britain was infection statistics in the form of PCR positives, any desired number of which was dialled up, or down, by varying the Ct threshold. The international co-ordination of this approach was extraordinary, but not more so than that of bogusly classifying deaths as ‘of-covid’, or traducing proven treatments and off-label medicines. It was truly a global crime.
As for excess deaths, who trusts figures from China?
And what caused the excess mortality in the UK? In Spring-20 it was focussed persecution of the vulnerable, and at New-Year-21 it was the jabbing. Both times a PCR surge was dialled up just before.
Lockdown did not work, lockdown can never work, especially for a wide-spread airborne disease. That has been the conclusion for many, many years pre covid. What the author ‘forgets’ is the evidence that the covid jab in the first two weeks INCREASES susceptibility. There is then an argument as to whether or not some protection is offered for a short while before that turns negative hence why they then continued to roll out more and more jabs. THAT I would suggest is why there have been outbreaks since the lifting of restrictions and not that the restrictions worked. Why is it so impossible for some to remove all biases when looking at data?