Are lockdowns justified?

[FlatAssembler]

Detailed answer: You're an idiot.

And what have you accomplished in life so important that you have the right to call me an idiot? At least I have accomplished some things in life I am proud of, such as the papers I have published about linguistics (especially my latest paper about historical phonology I linked in the opening post, which is a product of years of research) and my programming language.

Nothing in our constitution prevents a lockdown

In just about every country today, the constitution guarantees the freedom of assembly.

Did you just say you believe Andrew Cuomo is the person leading the American government? Because he’s only the governor of New York.

As far as I understand it, the Cuomo's policy of putting COVID patients into nursing homes was widespread across the US.

It’s a fairly well-tested working hypothesis that one of the most effective ways to prevent communicable diseases is to keep the communicants away from one another.

Yes, but the question is whether the lockdowns actually achieve that. Like I said in the opening post, many people responded to lockdowns by rushing into grocery stores and buying unreasonable quantities of everyday products, arguably contributing to the spread of COVID.

In the history of natural disasters, there have been mandates that require mandatory evacuations.

As far as I understand it, the policy of locking down the entire population because of the pandemic is a very new one.

America has a 320 million population. 1% of that would still be almost 3 million deaths.

But not everybody would be infected by COVID. At some point, we would reach herd immunity. It is hard to tell how many people need to be infected to reach herd immunity, but it is presumably around 30%.

New Zealand has a pretty strict lockdown policy. Know how many people we’ve lost to COVID? 26.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to be a rule that countries with strict lockdown policies have lower deaths from COVID. What seems to be a far better predictor is life expectancy (more older people in a country, more deaths from COVID) and general health of the population (more people with type-2-diabetes, more deaths from COVID). The reason US had so many COVID deaths is probably the number of people with type-2-diabetes there. I don't know what is causing that massive rise of type-2-diabetes around the world, and especially in the US (where the saturated fat consumption probably reached its peak somewhere in the 1970s and sugar consumption probably reached its peak somewhere in the 1990s), but that is not relevant here.

Any idea how many people you’ve infected?

Do you know how many people with weak immune system you have infected in your lifetime with a disease you had no symptoms of, but which killed those people? See, there has never been time in human history when that danger did not exist. Sure, now that danger is bigger (I don't know exactly how much), but where does one draw the line?

Well, here's one attempt at figuring out how effective "lockdowns" are, judging US states against each other in terms of what limits they take early on and what restrictions they lift later on. It's pretty clear from the data that the states that took the swiftest action the earliest on ended up doing better.

And, as I am sure you know, there have been many similar studies reaching a different conclusion. And, like I have said, I think any such study is fundamentally flawed, if by nothing else, than by lumping good and bad policies together (like the Economic Freedom Index does).

at the moment, according to the latest figures, 2% of all people to develop COVID have died of it, and that's going to be lead to the deaths of a bit less than 6 million in the US alone

As far as I know, modern estimates for the mortality of COVID-19 vary between 0.4% and 0.6%. Also, not everybody is going to end up infected, because of the herd immunity. It is hard to tell how many people need to be infected to reach herd immunity, but it is presumably around 30%.

And as we all know, there's no way to take Vitamin D outside of sunlight. It's not like there's dozens of vitamin supplement makers who manufacture pills that can give people all the Vitamin D they need and then some.

But the problem is that the vast majority of people are not taking them. So, lockdowns may have killed more people than they saved because people did not know they needed to take Vitamin D.

As far as I can tell, the only nation that actually had laws against lockdowns prior to the pandemic is Sweden.

But just about every constitution guarantees the freedom of assembly.

We know that Texas is now restriction-free. Perhaps some others are too. From a scientific viewpoint, this is too early.

How do you know? Texas has been restriction-free for about two weeks now, and deaths from COVID have been decreasing. OK, maybe they will increase after a week, since it takes about three weeks to die from COVID, but I doubt it would increase by a lot.

just because the state advocates rules, does not mean all citizens follow them

Exactly!

And if you are older, that number goes up to 10% plus!

What do you mean? The death rate of coronavirus for those with age more than 70 is around 4.5%, right?

Well, to date 540 thousand Americans (and climbing) are dead because of it

It is actually very hard to estimate how many people died because of COVID-19, rather than with COVID-19.

Are you familiar with Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance?

I don't think it would be a serious problem in an anarchy.