A fair number of countries did have lockdowns that successfully eliminated (as in: completely eliminated the virus within their borders) the virus within weeks. China is the elephant in the room (local elimination by about April 2020), but there are several other countries that did the same thing (such as New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan).
On the assumption that you're an American, your country was not organized enough to couple a lockdown with effective contact tracing and mass testing, which is what other countries did to eliminate the virus.
Yep. Australian here. We successfully brought our case numbers down a number of times through expensive, city wide lockdowns. Each time we succeeded and then opened back up, the virus unfortunately found a new route in the country and case numbers went up again.
If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely.
Lots of lives were still saved by our strategy because almost everyone had a chance to get vaccinated before getting covid.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, its still controversial whether the lockdowns were worth it overall. But they were definitely effective at containing covid.
It's also with noting that there were other zero-CoVID countries that were able to maintain control of the virus with less significant lockdowns. The key was early detection of new outbreaks and effective, rapid contact tracing.
Between the initial outbreak and Omicron (roughly, April 2020 - March 2022), most people in China never experienced a lockdown, because each new outbreak was controlled locally before it could spread to the rest of the country.
> city wide lockdowns ... If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely.
Did you know that covid can infect many other mammals? Here's a summary of the science on this: [0]
> appears that many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible
> the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human
> found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species
> found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested
> Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs
Does your belief that city wide lockdowns could be used to eliminate covid take the above into account? Wouldn't covid continue to spread in other mammals and reinfect humans again?
I don't know that any experts ever said that lockdowns could eliminate covid. From where did you get such an idea?
The post I replied to said that if the world had adopted city wide lockdowns covid "would have been eliminated from the planet entirely". I objected that this doesn't account for covid in animal populations. Your reply mentioning China in 2020 doesn't address that objection.
Are you saying that you agree with the original poster, that city wide lockdowns could have eliminated covid from entire planet?
Even if every person in the world were isolated for weeks, so that covid no longer existed in the human population, many animal species would still carry covid, like rats [0] and pets like cats and dogs [1], and humans would become reinfected again.
Unless perhaps we destroy all those animals? And deer, and minks, and bats, and perhaps a few dozen other species [2]. Bats carry hundreds of different coronavirises and spillovers happen all the time [3]. There's evidence that Omicron evolved in mice then jumped back into humans [4]. It doesn't seem possible to eliminate covid from all those animals, does it?
That's why city wide lockdowns could never -eliminate- covid from the planet, as the original poster stated. They could only temporarily suppress covid in human populations. Like what happened in countries that did impose lockdowns. Temporary.
Here's what the scientists say:
> The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said. [5]
I assume that some people don't want to face the fact that diseases spread between animals and people and there's nothing we can do about it, and that scares them. Some people get so afraid they would do anything, even the impractical, to believe they retain some measure of control. They might not want to face facts that conflict with their fears. Not everyone thinks this way.
I understand why you believe that. Plenty of other Australians think likewise (including most of my Australian friends who live overseas).
And yet, in my home state of Victoria, the state premier behind the lockdowns was reelected after covid with a huge majority. It seems like the way the story unfolded for people inside of Victoria was very different to how the story was told everywhere else.
I am trapped inside of Victoria, unfortunately. I wholeheartedly agree with GP poster. We saw visitor bans, curfews, work permits, arrests, rubber bullets and riot gear police deployed as "epidemiological" measures. My respect for police and public service in general went right out the door. Now there is only fear. Biggest regret of my life to settle down here. The huge majority electing the same person only solidifies my view that they may just be the different biological species. The "premier" spared no expense in making the event all about him and only him - just check the Wikipedia page [0].
That's a feat no other leader in any world's jurisdiction even attempted to. I don't know if it is another "red shirts" undertaking or a sycophantic "grass roots" movement - wouldn't be surprised with both, but just don't care at the moment. Seeking an exit of Victoria, but the most likely one for me will be out of existence.
If you think public support validates the "measures", check another example of similar landslide victory - election in Belarus of 1994. That win was as democratic as they get, I am telling you as a first-hand witness. The support was very genuine, for at least a decade to come. As for myself and my family - we feel that we escaped that hellhole only to land in a worse one... where there is no escape from.
Lockdown may have made sense as a strategy to vaccines and treatments in place. To abolish the virus? It could never have worked. I mean, tell me how likely do you think it would have been that every country could have done something like that, in synchrony?
Australia is a big place with the major population centres isolated from each other by hundreds of KMs, you can't just look at overall numbers. Here in Melbourne we successfully eliminated 2 covid outbreaks, and then we were able to control the spread until most had been vaccinated.
As a proportion of the population only a very small amount of us have been exposed to covid with a naive immune system; not being vaccinated.
We can look at such numbers when it is relevant, and if the claim is that the virus was eliminated then it's relevant.
It was not eliminated in any country, at any time during the pandemic, the claim is entirely false. Whether some places did better than others is undoubtedly the case, but not only is that a different argument, and not only I don't think the numbers would support the goalposts-moved argument, it certainly shouldn't start with trivially falsifiable statements.
Feel free to make a new argument in support of lockdowns but try to start by clearing up the obvious counter argument instead of assuming the point to be good and true - Sweden and Japan could not institute lockdowns because of legal restrictions, how did they do in this league?
Those countries also did not eliminate the virus at any point, which only underlines how vapid the other assumptions made were - that elimination was possible or necessary - if indeed it still needs to be underlined.
You don't necessarily need to make that argument with me either, a top level comment might be more appropriate.
> It was not eliminated in any country, at any time during the pandemic, the claim is entirely false.
You're just wrong in this claim. For example, New Zealand completely eliminated the virus in early 2020 and went for over 100 days with zero local cases, from 10 May until 11 August 2020. That's when a new cluster was discovered - genetic sequencing of the viral genome showed that it was imported from abroad.[0]
I suspect that the mistake you're making is that you're looking at aggregated case numbers, which include cases caught inside border quarantine (you can see an example in this report: [1]), and confusing them with local cases (compare with this report: [2]).
COVID was fully eliminated in Western Australia for > 138 days (looks like ~400 days all up) until vaccinations became widespread and borders were reopened.
Most days recorded zero cases, every now and then there was a cluster of quarantine cases from people travelling in|out the state - which didn't impact the state population.
> The virus was not eliminated in any country, at any point in the pandemic.
Simply untrue. The virus was fully eliminated from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand (and other countries) for long periods of time.
Internally, these countries dropped controls on daily life for long periods of time. If the virus had been present, even at a very low level, it would have rapidly ballooned into a massive outbreak on a very short timescale (weeks). It didn't.
In fact, using genetic sequencing of the virus and contact tracing, countries like New Zealand and China were able to determine the origins of later outbreaks. They were imported from abroad. They did not come from low-level domestic transmission. Here's a stark demonstration of that: after a year with no cases, Guangzhou suddenly had an outbreak in May-June 2021. What variant was it? Delta. A variant that emerged outside of China, and which was then brought back in through air travel. They didn't get some locally developed variant that had been circulating at a low level and suddenly surged. They got the variant that had been spreading around the world, and which managed to penetrate their border quarantine measures.
> Moreover, why do you believe anything that comes out of China at this point?
For a long time during the pandemic, China actually published extremely detailed reports on virtually every case. For every infected person, you could literally look up an itinerary of where they had visited. For the Guangzhou outbreak, there's a very detailed tree of who infected whom, going all the way back to the original introduction from abroad. It's actually a thing of beauty: [0]. This sort of study could only be carried out in a zero-CoVID country, because anywhere else, the contact tracing would be impossible. There would simply be too many random infected people walking around.
About your assertions about various countries, you keep making statements about low transmission that suddenly "surged exponentially." There are only two steady states for CoVID: zero prevalence or everyone gets it. If you drop virtually all controls in a society with no pre-existing immunity, it's going to immediately surge exponentially if it's present at all. This is in addition to the fact I mentioned above, that genetic sequencing of the virus proves that these various outbreaks were imported, not local surges.
One final word of caution: In general, when looking at the data from these countries, you have to be careful about aggregators like ourworldindata.org or worldometers.info. These aggregators are not particularly careful about how they categorize the cases. Unless you go back to the original national data sources, you won't know whether the "cases" in question were recent arrivals sitting in quarantine hotels, or whether they were people who were actually infected in country. If you count people who had just flown in and were sitting their required 14-21 days in quarantine hotels, China had plenty of cases every day. But those cases were not terribly relevant for the rest of China, because they never got the chance to spread into the normal society.
On the assumption that you're an American, your country was not organized enough to couple a lockdown with effective contact tracing and mass testing, which is what other countries did to eliminate the virus.