Are lockdowns justified?

[FlatAssembler]

A strict lockdown implemented -at any time- will slow the rate of spread

The evidence tells us otherwise...

Here [in Europe] Lockdown is positive, suggesting that countries that implemented the lockdown have, on average, more New Cases than in countries that did not. This is possibly due to the fact that in the countries that implemented lockdown, the spread of COVID-19 was already advanced compared with other European countries.

And that is a study that is generally supportive of lockdowns. The counter-evidence just cannot be honestly ignored.

have been more useful at the onset

You know, implementing a lockdown over an illness you have no good data about how deadly or contagious it is... maybe that is not a good idea. The majority of the supposed global pandemics, that the experts were warning about, ended up killing less than a thousand people in the USA. It is important not to overreact on rumors. Sure, COVID-19 actually turned out to be deadly (though not nearly as deadly as the early predictions forecasted), but what about all those global pandemics that have not? Implementing a lockdown because of a suspected deadly pandemic does way more harm than good.

the absurd extent that you put work in painting yourself as a doorknob licker?

This is the most ridiculous straw-man I have read in quite some time.

and as far as your "work in the social sciences". Stop it.

I see no reason why. And I also see no reason to think you are familiar with my work. OK, here is the abstract of my newest paper which I am planning to publish:

What will the language we speak now look like in the future? To a large extent, that question is impossible to answer. The vocabulary of our language will gain, but also forget (How many young people today know what a floppy disk is, yet alone what a fiacre is?), words related to technology, the development of which is impossible to predict. The vocabulary of our language will also receive words from languages that will be used in international communication, which is dependent on politics, and it is also impossible to predict long-term (If you told somebody in Roman Empire that, one day, a Germanic language will be a global language, and that most of the languages all over the world will have loan-words from it, they will look at you oddly.). Morphology and syntax follow some scientific laws (analytic languages evolve into agglutinative ones, agglutinative ones evolve into fusional languages, and fusional languages evolve into analytic ones.), but those laws are difficult to model computationally and probably full of exceptions (Armenian language, for example, is an agglutinative language that evolved from the fusional Indo-European proto-language, but there is no reason to think there was a time when it was an analytic language.). Morphology and syntax are also probably somewhat influenced by politics (It seems as though languages with many adult learners, such as English or Late Latin, tend to have simpler morphology but more complicated syntax. Similarly, some syntactic structures that recently appeared in the Croatian language are probably an influence of the English language.). Nevertheless, is it possible to predict how the phonology of a language will develop? Here, I have researched exactly that, I have tried to make a computer model of the phonological evolution of languages. Although I was not particularly successful at that, I believe my work can come helpful to others, at least not to repeat the mistakes I have made, because, as far as I know, nobody has done anything like that. I have also researched whether computer models can be used in etymology, and, related to that, what effect do different parts of the grammar have on the entropy of human languages. I came to the conclusion that, in the Croatian language, phonology takes away 1.62 bits per symbol of entropy of consonant pairs, that syntax takes away 0.21 bits per symbol, and that morphology takes away 1.57 bits per symbol. Only 5.99 bits per symbol of entropy of pairs of consonants is semantics.

So, why should I stop with that?

No covid variants appear to transmit outdoors.

I am quite sure they do spread outdoors somewhat, as Croatia had a spike of COVID cases after the Croatian government organized the commemoration of Vukovar Massacre, which was attended by 30'000 people. Of course, they were quite close to one another there, quite unlike what people otherwise tend to do outside.

Citation needed

Seriously? From a quick Google search:

the number of children and teens hospitalized after suicide attempts went up from 67 in 2019 to 108 in 2020. And October 2020 saw a 250% increase in these numbers over the previous October

And stay-at-home orders make perfect sense otherwise it's not really a lockdown.

Stay-at-home orders are responsible for Vitamin D deficiency, which makes COVID more severe.

Hmmm...it didn't go away last summer.

The cases and mortality from COVID were very low in summer just about everywhere. But, yeah, I guess you haven't even looked at the data, but just looking at left-wing headlines.

Touching infected objects can still spread it.

As I have cited multiple times by now, even CDC admits the risk of getting COVID from touching contaminated objects is very low. It was even on New York Times:

There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface.