Being an island somewhat helps, but it's not like other countries don't have borders that they can protect. Bureaucracy is pretty low in NZ so we've been able to throw together solutions of screening, etc within matter of a week. Impacted workers got wage subsidy within like 5 days of lockdown started. Heck even Apple took something like 10x longer to release their contact tracing API...
Victoria had VERY had lockdown for months. Borders were shut to most states for months as well.
Aukland also had a hard lockdown for a few weeks.
However, there weren't country wide lockdowns, and they didn't last as long as they have in many other places.
At the same time. Speaking to family in the US, it seems the idea of "lockdown" is open to quite a bit of interpretation. My sister was complaining about the lockdown in California, and in the next sentence was telling me how excited she was to go skiing in a few weeks.....how do you go skiing in Colorado during a lockdown in California?
I don't think your characterisation of the NSW lockdown is entirely accurate, either. We were forbidden from leaving the home except for exercise in the local area within household groups, essential shopping and essential work. Schools were closed except to the children of essential workers, most offices shut down or reduced their capacity, cafes, restaurants, pubs and many other businesses were closed. It was a lockdown.
Restricting the rate at which it can spread through the community coupled with active and aggressive contact tracing certainly seems like it played a significant role. I'd be looking cockeyed at any study that chooses not to include the Australian and NZ datasets without a very robust case about why it's necessary.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484
The argument is the same well-hashed "Sweden is a counterexample" with mathematical window dressing. Bonus points for chopping the Sweden dataset before the big spike in Swedish cases even though the paper was published after the spike and is still being held up as a flagship example half a year after that.
Like the other anti-lockdown papers I've spot checked, I'm not impressed.
However, that doesn't really matter. Sweden is a counter-example because lockdown theory doesn't posit any sort of Swedish exception, so the existence of this place alone disproves the models. Going further or using longer term data is good, but strictly speaking unnecessary.
Also, you're claiming that there was some sort of "big spike" in Swedish cases and that this would change the conclusions. It might do but if Sweden did anything since January it would have been tightening restrictions - around Christmas the international pressure got to their leaders and they started to get tougher, not laxer. So it would be hard to say that this would invalidate the conclusions. At any rate, lockdowns weren't justified on the basis of PCR positive results, they were justified on the grounds of deaths. Swedish death curves are the same as other countries that did hard lockdowns and there has been no big Swedish spike:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
This is important because for Sweden the models predicted predicted ~90,000 deaths from COVID alone, there were 98,000 deaths in total from all causes in 2020. That's clearly a huge miss.
Like the other anti-lockdown papers I've spot checked, I'm not impressed.
And of the papers arguing lockdowns work, they're all free of methodology errors in your view? Because that's definitely not what I've seen. The thing with lockdowns is, it's ultimately very simple. You don't actually need any complex analysis to see the truth. You can just look at the predictions and then go to ourworldindata for the reported curves. You should see huge sudden drops or surges when lockdowns and mask mandates are imposed or released, and it should be visible in all the countries that made changes. Additionally countries that did nothing should be have dramatically bigger curves than those that did lots. You can't see anything like that in the data.
"Lockdown theory" doesn't posit an absence of lockdown variables. Perhaps the straw man you would like to imagine does, but it's alone in this regard. A "Swedish exception" doesn't disprove "lockdown theory" any more than a lottery winner disproves the idea that earning money is generally hard work.
> you're claiming that there was some sort of "big spike" in Swedish cases
April 2020: 800 cases/day <---- paper data ends
November 2020: 3000 cases/day
December 2020: 5000 cases/day
January 2021: 7000 cases/day <--- paper published
Feb 2021: 3000 cases/day
> And of the papers arguing lockdowns work, they're all free of methodology errors in your view?
I've spot checked a couple and the quality of the analysis was considerably higher. They generally rested on much sturdier statistics, like estimating effect size of policy interventions on R, which don't rely on cherry picking pre-spike Swedish data.
> You should see huge sudden drops or surges when lockdowns and mask mandates are imposed or released
No, you would expect to see hard-fought dips in R after major interventions. Booms and crashes will act as a threshold on integrated R because such is the nature of exponential growth.
To be clear, these interventions frequently lead policy -- they can come from other countries, they can happen through policy of major institutions, ad campaigns, even distribution of news stories regarding other countries. Also, policy lags and suffers from inefficacy from people ignoring and even fight mandates, and this particular brand of inefficacy should be factored out for normative purposes. All of this dampens the effect and spreads it out in time. You would expect the dips in R to be messy but measurable given generous windows, and they are.
More than that, virus transmission isn't a cosmic mystery. We know exactly how it happens and the mechanism by which lockdowns impact its transmission is so straightforward that even medieval plague doctors were able to get it correct. The "lockdowns are ineffective" hypothesis needs some serious magical thinking even before you start cherry-picking data and ignoring confounding variables. It seems like an odd hill to die on.
Cutting down on the American workaholic tendency to show up at work on death's door from illness will be useful.
So will a telework shift.
The scary part is the recreational authoritarianism on offer from some quarters.
People weren't following those things seriously
Some people cared, some didn't gave a fuck
The Lancet paper uses data only up to 1st May 2020, so really not much.
One uses the Imperial College model, which, after looking at the published source code, I am near certain is gibberish. My biases aside, peer review showed that it is very sensitive to input parameters, which is incidentally what the linked paper says about lockdown effects, so hard to take seriously IMHO.
Another says that after subtracting the effect of minor restrictions, the major restrictions had no measurable effect. But surely harsher restrictions are only brought in when rates are going up a lot, so maybe these two effects cancel out? Everyone, except Australia and NZ, avoid harsh lockdowns as much as they can.
Meanwhile, in the UK “2nd lockdown”, which was quite light, the overall R coef for Covid dropped below 1, but remained above 1 for the “British variant”, clearly showing that had the lockdown continued as it was, it would not be effective. Also there are just so many conspicuous timings with new cases peaking 1-2 weeks after harsher lockdowns are introduced, I think it’s hard to dismiss out of hand. Yeah, it’s technically possible that the causality isn’t there but I struggle to believe that.