It is possible that just enough people got scared well before the lockdown that the lockdown didn’t make as much difference as one might expect.
In the UK, some opinion polls have found that older people are really pretty scared of catching this thing. Those who have the option to do so have changed the way they do things.
The R number is very sensitive to behaviour.
Otherwise, what other explanation is there? A huge level of herd immunity? There is no evidence of that. Rising ambient temperatures? Australia is the contrary data for that.
Peter wrote:
I don’t think so
What seems to be obvious, is that these spikes of excess mortally, in Italy, now in the UK, in a smaller scale in Netherlands, happen a few weeks after lockdowns.
“A friend who is a radiologist in central London was on call last weekend and said how patients were coming in more sick than normal. They are leaving it later and later to seek help, she said, because of a reluctance to attend hospital.”
“Clinics have been cancelled or rescheduled; 2.1 million non-urgent operations have been postponed for three months, while routine tests and screening programmes are suspended. While provision has been made for some NHS cancer patients to receive their treatment in private clinics, many others have had chemotherapy and radio- therapy suspended — even palliative treatment in some tragic cases.”
So not only lockdowns have yet to be proven to save a single live, they destroy livelihoods, cause untold suffering, erode civil liberties, and kill thousands.
Can I say yet again, that never was this done in history, and the world is just blindly copying China?
hmng wrote:
So not only lockdowns have yet to be proven to save a single live, they destroy livelihoods, cause untold suffering, erode civil liberties, and kill thousands.
There is absolutely no basis for this outrageous claim. The lives saved by lockdown measures are impossible to measure directly, you would have to have two regions of similar health system capacity, with similar socioeconomic conditions and the same exposure to SARS2-COV. Then one of them would have to go into lockdown and the other wouldn’t.
Only then would you be able to measure (roughly) the number of lives saved. As that is obviously not going to happen, you can estimate the number of people saved by calculating the Nr. of deaths with the original R number (around 2,5) and with the current ones (depending on your location, currently 1,1 where I live).
MedEwok wrote:
are impossible to measure directly
So how can you prove it saved a single live?
The latest UK data for excess deaths shows there are some which cannot be accounted for by the number of death certificates with “virus” written on them. But it is a minority, and virus related deaths are likely to be under-reported substantially, especially ones in care homes, because up to now nobody was doing tests on them.
For sure there will be new deaths caused by people not going to hospital with other conditions, or even having had their treatment or procedure cancelled. But it’s not many because nearly all UK hospitals have plenty of spare capacity. One could argue that a lot of this capacity was created by dumping geriatric patients into care homes.
Again:
“And given the extraordinary harm they cause – social, economic, mental and physical health – we should set the bar very high as a burden of proof. The impact should be unignorable, impossible to miss: not invisible.”
dublinpilot wrote:
So why are the number of new cases in Italy not falling off a cliff? Instead we see a slow and gradual decline.
I think because you need a very aggressive R = 0.8 after intervention to get a sudden sharp decline, R = 1 will only guarantee a gradual decline on new cases and a very flat peak, obviously real data has time lags and R fluctuates depending if it the sun, rain and police are outside 
Peter wrote:
The R number is very sensitive to behaviour.
Let say these go from R=10. to R=0. at the collective level when things get personal at every individual level
Just downloaded and installed the brand new “Big Brother” app released today
MedEwok wrote:
the kids will spread it like wildfire if given a chance
Experience shows this is not happening.
Why, is going to be a most interesting discovery, because normally kids spread everything that’s going.
Just spoken to the UPS delivery guy. Several of their drivers have died of this recently. All in London. But not a single postman in the Brighton area (Sussex has a very low % of cases).
