(We should absolutely end lockdowns since they have no empirically demonstrated efficacy versus other alternative policies like centralized quarantining and universal mask requirements) https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1250089695566090241

The reason we should not have lockdowns is not because their economic costs are too large but because they are not actually very good at reducing the number of fatalities.

Cancel school. Restrict large assemblies. Require masks in public. Have excessively generous UI. Test extensively. Trace aggressively. Quarantine centrally.

But maybe don’t fine people for reading a book on the park like DC is doing.

The whole paradigm of “lockdowns are extremely costly but they are a surefire way to reduce spread!”

Countries without lockdowns like Sweden have also had sharp downturns, and none the most successful control cases (Korea, Taiwan, HK) used lockdowns!

There is not actually a trade off to be made here.

Require masks. Cancel assemblies. Require social distancing in workplaces (which will de facto require a lot of teleworking). That stuff will have as much or more of an effect as a lockdown.

I am not arguing that COVID is “just a flu” or that we should place a lower priority on saving lives. I am not arguing for “opening up the economy” because the economic costs were too great. These are absurd positions.

I’m simply questioning whether lockdowns work.

These methods give extraordinary power to deeply unreliable and often not-very-competent enforcement agencies to carry out a strategy for which there has been virtually no empirical research to even establish a benchmark of what winning would look like.

To the extent that we have research, it suggests that R0 can be pushed well below 1 without lockdowns, and that lockdowns without public social distancing measures and centralized quarantining CANNOT do so.

There is no “hammer” we can drop so hard now that we get to all relax and go back to normal soon. In all likelihood, we will be dealing with waves of this thing for many months. We should adopt strategies that reflect that reality.

We do NOT have to wait for testing to reach a greater scale to do this. You can quarantine presumptive cases or traced contacts even without testing, and the most important measures like masking are test-neutral.

Furthermore, as Singapore has now shown, the biggest test and trace program in the world is still no match for poor social distancing practices. You simple cannot test and trace your way out of a high R0 disease which has already gone global at a huge scale.

Population-level mitigation strategies focused on reducing high-infection risk behaviors in ways that can be sustained for months or years should be the focus.

Some people seem to think I’m citing Sweden positively: I’m not. My point was that they are having bad economic outcomes even without a lockdown. They are also having bad COVID outcomes. Though not as bad as much of the rest of Europe.

Note as well that people mean many different things by “lockdown.” I mean basically requiring people to have a “good reason” to go somewhere or do something. Once you have decided that people have to offer a justification for their mobility, it’s a lockdown.

Most of the US is not at that point. But some places more-or-less are. And much of Europe and the developing world is there. And there are gray areas, of course. Extremely low assembly bans can become de facto lockdowns.