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...
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.