Personally i’m not 100% calling for lockdown. I just take issue with spreading bollocks about them not working.
My personal take on taiwan’s situation is the leniency with bosses and inconsistencies about who should stay home and who shouldn’t, those companies that can do WFH should not have a choice about it.
And those people who are living in multi generation families with their grandparents should have to take some special consideration into account. That idea hasn’t really caught on here as much as wearing a mask has…
If it were obvious that they worked, people wouldn’t be publishing learned papers about their ineffectiveness. Their usefulness would be so in-your-face obvious that there’d be no debate. There’d be a whole bunch of COVID-free countries that did draconian lockdowns, and the ones that didn’t would be smoking ruins.
Whether they “work” or not depends a lot on your personal definition of “works”. It also depends whether you’re prepared to completely overlook the harm that they do.
There are other options that might work better, eg., focusing on the people who are actually likely to be a problem with COVID and setting up efficient systems for helping them get through this.
So what do you want to do about that? They’re not breaking the law. They’re staying in business because the alternative is to close their doors forever, for thousands or millions of people to lose their jobs, and for Taiwan’s economy to go down the tubes.
I think it’s stupid people are going into offices but how is the government supposed to decide which companies can do WFH and which can’t?
Are they going to send an auditor to do an analysis and make a decision?
If TW wants to encourage WFH, given the culture of mistrust of employees, they’d be better off giving companies some sort of financial incentive to do it.
So you’re saying any academic paper that disagrees with you is written by a conspiracy theorist?
Why? Can you point to some hard data that would illustrate why working from home would reduce the spread of COVID? “It’s obvious” is a poor argument.
I’d also add that the Act underpinning all this (forget what’s it’s called) doesn’t give the government blanket leeway to do whatever they like. Their interventions have to have some scientific basis and overall benefit to society. Masks have some trivial positive benefit and few harms, so it’s clear that mask mandates are within the law. “Lockdowns” of whatever stripe would directly cause a certain number of deaths and some very clear harms, and there is very little scientific evidence for benefit. Which is why, I think, the gov’t is currently avoiding that option.
But that makes no sense either because the % who work in the office will still be getting and spreading the virus.
The rapid tests have a high false negative rate when used in asymptomatic people or people who are early on in their infection. The Trump WH outbreak was caused by an overconfidence in rapid tests.
The rapid tests have a high false negative rate when used in asymptomatic people or people who are early on in their infection. The Trump WH outbreak was caused by an overconfidence in rapid tests.
Rapid tests are better than no tests.
That a measure is not 100% perfect does not mean it should not be implemented. The right comparison is not perfection, but doing nothing or other alternatives
Rapid tests can be dangerously counterproductive when they are not used properly. They give people a false sense of security that can encourage behaviors that spread the virus.
I think what it boils down to is you and many others want to feel that something is being done. And while I’m not saying “do nothing” I think people should be realistic about how much effect these things will really have, and what the costs will be.
No matter what TW does, the coming months are going to be painful until more people get vaxxed.
It’s not the same thing. And look at how good TW did with masks. Turns out that they don’t work so well when you take them off to enjoy hot pot, sing at a KTV, get touchy feely with someone’s grandma, etc.
But yeah, ironically to your point, the CECC always played up the risk of false negatives when defending its decision not to do more testing in TW.
If TW had used rapid tests more liberally in the beginning as indicated (rapid tests for people with COVID symptoms) maybe we would have caught this thing faster. Instead you’ve had reports of people going to clinics up to 10 times before they got tested.
I have to wonder though why the outdoor mask mandate when they said before that masks outdoor wouldn’t have made a difference? Was it for the sake of consistency? Because I can certainly understand if they say “must be masked in all indoor spaces except your home” but I guess people will find ways around it.
It’s pretty obvious you are ignoring all the hard data that’s given to you…
You need to look no further than this thread to see that more can and should be done to limit people working outside, if you also want to ignore that then fine but there’s not much more i can add.
I haven’t seen you present any data at all, hard or otherwise. I’ve had a look at several papers on lockdowns. The general conclusion is that they do alter the way the disease spreads, but the papers that assert that they “work” can only do so on the basis of ignoring all the other harms.
I have a good-enough level of expertise to assess the information being put out there on this sort of thing. I’m becoming increasingly bemused by the obsession with ‘R’ and ‘R0’, since neither value can be measured with any accuracy, and even if you could measure them, they’re useless for modelling because anything with an exponential term in it becomes rapidly divergent. And in fact they don’t even matter if you’re looking at the relative effectiveness of different interventions.
Since I have little to do at the moment I’m buggering about with a model using Markov chains to characterize infection dynamics, and a set of object classes representing people and places. I want to see if I can reproduce the actual patterns of infection that occurred in various countries during 2020.
Sure you could. There are all sorts of things you can do to people if you’re prepared to flout enough laws and take leave of your senses. I’m simply asking you to justify your belief that draconian interventions in people’s lives will deliver benefits outweighing the harms.
what scientists are actually saying is that some techniques work and some techniques don’t and we have the data to actually dig in and determine which are which.
in case you didn’t actually read all those papers you said you read, here’s a nice chart summarizing the most effective techniques. you’ll see national lockdown near the top.
Among the six full-consensus NPI categories in the CCCSL, the largest impacts on Rt are shown by small gathering cancellations (83%, Δ Rt between −0.22 and –0.35), the closure of educational institutions (73%, and estimates for Δ Rt ranging from −0.15 to −0.21) and border restrictions (56%, Δ Rt between −0.057 and –0.23). The consensus measures also include NPIs aiming to increase healthcare and public health capacities (increased availability of personal protective equipment (PPE): 51%, Δ Rt −0.062 to −0.13), individual movement restrictions (42%, Δ Rt −0.08 to −0.13) and national lockdown (including stay-at-home order in US states) (25%, Δ Rt −0.008 to −0.14).
you are disingenuously cherry picking quotes when the study authors quite clearly say individual movement restrictions are some of most effective measures.
