Those sorts of explanations are all totally ad-hoc and have no real scientific validity. The English are famously stand-offish yet have worse results than Sweden. Texas and Florida are culturally very similar to other parts of the USA, yet unlocked without experiencing any change in their situation whatsoever and have seen similar results to other US states.
You can find counter-examples like that for more or less any posited influential factor on COVID outcomes, except for obesity. Government interventions in particular don't correlate well with anything. The models are all built on the assumptions that they should have a huge impact, but real data tells us differently - the assumptions the models are built on are unsound.
IMHO it's really a pity the game authors used this to influence the Czech parliament. These models were never validated against reality before being thrown at policymakers, instead the (sad to call them this) "scientists" simply assumed that because the underlying theories are simple they must therefore also be correct. I've had actual scientists tell me "of course lockdown works, it's basic germ theory" which demonstrates a pretty chaotic confusion between theory and reality, but that sort of attitude can be found everywhere in the academic modelling world.
> IMHO it's really a pity the game authors used this to influence the Czech parliament.
Remember that politicians are in the tradeoff and bullshit business. They assume every they are told is bullshit, they repackage it and than sell it to us. My guess is if they don't like what the scientist and economist say, they just get another group they like more. It's probably a mix of the advice they get, with the tradeoff they want to make.
> "of course lockdown works"
Of course they work! The question is how much it affect the transmission ratio and the economic cost, and if people will follow the restrictions.
I like that this was call the "Corona Game" and not the "Corona Simulator". Some people noticed that in this game "doing nothing" does not drop the popularity to 0, and I think that it's very unrealistic. Other people noticed that closing the schools has a big effect in the game, but the different parts of the government here in Argentina disagree https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783454
Why do you say this when there are many analyses saying they don't have any impact. At any rate that doesn't really need studies, because places that either didn't lock down, or did and then entirely removed restrictions (like Florida, Texas), did not see any large clearly artificial jump in case numbers. And yet suppressing such spikes was the sole justification for lockdowns.
That's why, when investigated, all claims I've seen that lockdowns work are either mis-analysis of the data (Flaxman et al and friends), or, justified on theoretical grounds like "of course they work, theory says they work".
Perhaps lockdowns are overrated, I think nobody knows for sure the correct weight of it, but I'd be really surprised that it has absolute zero effect.
It also depend on other factors. I guess most people in Florida and Texas move in their own car. Here in Argentina most people use public transport.
For example in normal times I have once a week to commute from one building of the university to another building that is like 7 miles away. I can take a bus, the trip is 90 minutes, and at rush hours it has like 100-150 persons.
I can also make the middle part of the trip using the underground/metro, so I pass under the mess of transit in downtown and the trip is only 45 minutes long. Now I have like 150+150+150=450 new friends to share the air. (And the underground/metro cars are bigger and more crowed, so perhaps it reach 200 and the total is 500.)
Many persons here in normal times must do similar or longer trips everyday, twice per day at rush hour. (Perhaps bus+train+bus, or bus+train+undergroung and the can't skip the train because they live too far away.)
(And the same morons that open in summer the window because the air conditioner is not cold enough, will close the window in winter because the wind is too cold.)
So in different places, a lockdown may have very different effects.
I agree it's really surprising that they have no effect. Yet that is what the data seems to be telling us, and it's not specific to certain regions. The number of places is limited because the number of places that got rid of or didn't implement lockdowns is limited, but the story is consistent between them, including in Sweden where they also use public transport.
I believe the fact that this invalidates what was seen as robust theory is one reason (but not the biggest reason) why people are resistant to that conclusion. Yet, that is what the data demands of us.
In reality there are lots of ways to patch up germ theory to handle the ineffectiveness of lockdowns. For instance, contact tracing studies claim that almost all infections are spread in homes, care homes and hospitals, i.e. places where sick people have to be. That makes logical sense: you would expect viruses to spread in places where sick people are, and you would expect sick people to be in a bed somewhere because they feel sick. The idea that lockdowns work is strongly predicated on the belief that asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people are highly infectious. However there's actually very little evidence of this, and quite a lot of evidence that they're not.
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for continuing this thread, I agree with pretty much everything you said.
Lockdowns simply don't work, because a functioning society where people don't starve to death requires massive amounts of "essential" workers who have to be exempt from the lockdown rules. But a lot of people seem to think Uber Eats is run by an army of small elves or something...
You can find counter-examples like that for more or less any posited influential factor on COVID outcomes, except for obesity. Government interventions in particular don't correlate well with anything. The models are all built on the assumptions that they should have a huge impact, but real data tells us differently - the assumptions the models are built on are unsound.
IMHO it's really a pity the game authors used this to influence the Czech parliament. These models were never validated against reality before being thrown at policymakers, instead the (sad to call them this) "scientists" simply assumed that because the underlying theories are simple they must therefore also be correct. I've had actual scientists tell me "of course lockdown works, it's basic germ theory" which demonstrates a pretty chaotic confusion between theory and reality, but that sort of attitude can be found everywhere in the academic modelling world.