Lootman wrote:So-called Long Covid is a thing. But it was by definition not known about in the first few months of the pandemic. So the lockdown decisions were not based on that issue, and should be judged based on what was known at the time.
Long-term complications are always a risk with any viral disease, and even if you don't know *exactly* how they'll pan out at the beginning, they're a known unknown and as such would always be a factor in risk assessment. It's a bit like option value when assessing the value of an investment, only on the downside (like if there's potential for a lawsuit against the company etc).
So it's something that should be a consideration when assessing the risk, which would tend towards being a bit more cautious until the long-term risk was better characterised, up or down.
Lootman wrote:It seems reasonable to me, now that there is near universal consensus that Covid has reached the point where we can just live with it, to look back and assess which nations under-reacted, which over-reacted, and which got it about right. That assessment should take into account the number of deaths and disabilities, but also the massive cost of shutting down entire countries and economies. And the "winner" may not be the country that had the lowest death rate or the tightest restrictions.
Indeed - but it works the other way, some of the countries with the least economic impact were also the ones that worked hard to minimise Covid - Japan, South Korea etc are obvious examples. And that long-term impact has been known about for a while now, so you have to include it when weighing up the costs and benefits - and the way health effects are calculated, something that damages a 40-something for life "costs" as much as a dozen elderly dying a couple of years before their time. Also it's not just about costly lockdowns - as Asia found, masks are a relatively cheap intervention that is pretty effective, likewise
HEPA filtration pretty much stops in-school transmission and is not that expensive (
Illinois is putting 60,000 HEPA filters in 3,000 schools at a cost of <$500/machine, or $25 per pupil. These are not expensive measures but can have a significant effect in reducing the burden of Covid.
And it's more complicated than a simple on/off analysis of lockdowns, timing matters as well when you're faced with a disease doubling every 3.5 days as Covid was in March 2020. Johnson dithering by a week means that 10,000 cases become 40,000 cases - you can't wait until you have all the evidence, you have to get ahead of these things.
