Government Covid Response, part 1: Lockdowns

 Of all the responses to the rona, the most dramatic was the "lockdown".  I put lockdown in quotes because while most people stayed home, a large minority of people never locked down.  Retail, trades (such as plumbing, electrician, HVAC) and home improvement never locked down. Health care settings partially locked down as elective surgeries were delayed.

There is no doubt that the lockdowns caused significant personal, social and economic distress.  Whether they did any good for the virus is debatable, which undercuts the rational for doing the lockdowns in the first place.  If the first principle of medicine is to "do no harm", the harm part must be considered before the benefit.  In previous posts I mentioned exercise, diet and vitamin supplements.  In each case, the benefit was modest, but the harm was negligible.  In the case of the lockdowns, the benefits are negligible to modest (maybe) and the harm was enormous.  It is my contention that most of the hell we went through in 2020: the virus itself, the riots over George Floyd, and the loss of trust in institutions, can be largely laid at the feet of the lockdown policy.  It is my further contention that had the lockdowns not been so long and so capricious, there would not be as much opposition to masks and vaccines that we see today (November 2021).

But let's start at the beginning.  Early in the days of the pandemic, the Wuhan region of China was hit very hard (being the origin point of the virus).  In response, China took drastic action, including a total lockdown.  At one point they were believed to be welding doors shut so people couldn't leave their apartments, which is such a bonkers thing to do it must be a deliberate misunderstanding of the events that spread like wildfire in the absence of actual information.

I believe the next major spike was in Italy, specifically the North of Italy.  And they also resorted to a lockdown / curfew type restriction on public gatherings.  And the precedent was set.

When the virus hit the US, it hit first in Seattle, but hit hardest in NY State (but mostly NYC), New Orleans and Chicago.  During February and March of 2020, various states and cities started imposing lockdown measures of various severity.  Many companies started voluntarily telling their employees to work from home, if their jobs could be done from home.  Finally on March 16, 2020, the Trump White House announced their infamous "15 days to Slow the Spread", a supposed  15 day moratorium on public gatherings which would whip the rona.  However, it didn't work, so was eventually was joined by "30 days to Slow the Spread", meaning 45 days total to knock the rona out.  Because of course, the response to any government program that doesn't work is to expand it.  That didn't work either.  But it was too late. The Nation of locked down.

But not consistently.  Of course, not everyone was locked down.  So called front-line workers kept working.  People like doctors and nurses, grocery store employees, plumbers, electricians, big box retailers, home improvement, cable tv sales and repair all kept on going.  And that was the first major point of dissent. Of course, the lockdown caused enormous economic pain.  But early on, it was felt that this would be short-term ("15 days").  However, while Home Depot was allowed to stay open, the corner hardware store might not be.  And while abortion clinics were allowed to stay open, churches were not.  Local gyms were closed down.  Restaurants were only allowed to be open for carry out, but some smaller restaurants and sports-bar type restaurants were unable to pivot to that business model and so closed.  And with restaurants offering only takeout, the wait staff were mostly laid off.  Meanwhile, white collar workers mostly were able to work from home and after the rough adjustment (it took me at least 2 weeks to get into the swing of things), their lives carried on.  Many people decided they liked working from home better.

This led to a balkanization between those that the lockdown favored and those it punished (of course, everyone was punished but some were punished more than others).  Some people's jobs were considered "essential" and thus protected while other people jobs weren't.  Some people's health was so important that they had to stay home and away from anyone infectious and some people's health wasn't.  Ironically, the "essential" workers were considered to more expendable from a health standpoint.  Sucks to be you.

Not only were the divisions between "essential", "non-essential but still employed" and "non-essential and unemployed" people chosen arbitrarily and with apparent indifference, but the specific activities allowed were arbitrary and indifferent to human needs.  In Michigan,  hardware stores were open but not allowed to sell seeds.   In San Diego county, people were supposedly fined for watching the sunset in their cars.

Or course, these stories are full of caveats.  The state of Michigan's rules originally also forbade buying car-seats, but after the outcry they came out and grudgingly allowed car-seats and the formerly verboten seed sales.  Or maybe they never were banned but the bans were poorly written and communicated?  In San Diego county, there were a lot of stories about people being fined in their cars, but a lot of them went back to a single source, who may have had an ax to grind.

But these stories were all-too believable.  Every year there are stories about minor apparatchiks that get ahead of themselves and crackdown on children's lemonade stands and other nonsense.  Consider the life of a nameless, faceless lifetime employee of the State Department of XYZ, laboring in obscurity day after day writing regulations that no one appreciates.  And after all, he's just following the orders of the Legislature and Governor who passed these high-minded laws with little consideration for the details necessary to implement them.  He didn't ask them to write these laws and may not see the need for them anyway.  But he is required to implement them.  

But now... now he's the man.  The world is facing the greatest crisis of his lifetime and it's up to him -- him alone -- to save the world from the icky-sicky.  He has labored his entire life for this, polishing his reg-writing skills and carefully developing the craft of saying in 1000 words what could easily be said in 10,  or better yet, not at all.  With a flourish ... he strikes!

And let us all raise a glass to the Department of Agriculture bureaucrat who single handedly stopped the rona by banning the sale of pumpkin seeds.

Because of course, the government decided that it was essential.  No layoffs occurred in the capital district, I can assure you.

And then the minor tin-pot dictators violated their own orders.  The examples are almost too numerous to name, but a few of the higher profile ones were California Governor Gavin Newsome attending a dinner with lobbyists and other government bigs in violation of state orders.  The mayor of Austin going to vacation in Cabo while telling Austin residents to stay home.  The mayor of Denver tweeted out that people should stay home while he himself was at the airport. The latter has a special irony because he was headed to Mississippi, one of the states with relatively lax Covid restrictions, and which as a result earned the opprobrium of the "latte-class", like the good Mayor of Denver.  But he was caught traveling to Mississippi, not another "follow-the-science" state with harsher restrictions.

It's always easier to get forgiveness than permission.  And it's OK when we do it.  I mean, come on.

Hypocrisy is among the most unforgivable sins in American politics.  Even jaded partisans will turn on a fellow partisan who's found to be a hypocrite.  Given that the government implemented these shutdowns but exempted itself from them, even the appearance of flaunting these orders brought swift condemnation from all sides.

In April some states started lifting the moratoriums.  By July 2020, most if not all state-wide lockdowns were over. Usually, this took the shape of allowing restaurants to open with limited seating, allowing some other businesses (like barbershops) to open with other restrictions in place like limited customers or strict mask requirements and so on. This of course provided much additional useful work for bureaucrats to decide which business can reopen and under what restrictions.  People complained about "lockdowns" for much longer, but they were referring to all of these multitudinous requirements.  The actual stay-at-home orders were gone by then and there's no appetite in the US to bring them back.  (Though as I write this, Europe is toying with the idea again, at least for some).

Since the lockdowns were applied universally (though to different degrees), it probably will never be possible to  know if they were effective.  There was no control group.  Famously, Sweden didn't impose a nationwide stay-at-home order and had relatively lax restrictions.  At times, and depending on how you look at the data, it either did very well, or very poorly or maybe somewhere in the middle.  But of course, Sweden is Sweden.  Its neighboring countries are different.  They have different demographics (specifically related to the age of their populations). Different levels of health, different immigrant communities, different diets and levels of pollution. So comparisons have to take that into account.  And that's an easy comparison since Findland, Sweden and Norway all have similar climate. Comparing those countries to Italy or China or the United States is very difficult to do.  At least, in the short period of time available as I write this.

When the stay-at-home orders were implemented, there was no science that said they would work.  Universal lockdowns are not even recommended by the CDC for nursing homes during influenza outbreaks.  And the CDC has copious data about the spread of that virus.  While the coronavirus is not the same as the influenza virus, it spreads in a similar fashion so best practices from one can reasonably be applied to the other (as is done in the case of PPE and hand washing, for example).  

Most responses to the coronavirus followed the well-known syllogism of bureaucracy:

1. Something must be done,
2. This is something.
3. Therefore this must be done.

And of course the lockdowns fell into that camp.  But there were several obvious problems with that logic that soon became apparent.

First of all, there's no rhyme or reason to it.  If you don't have any data to show under what circumstances a stay-at--home order will restrict the spread of the virus, you don't know when to start it, and you don't know when to stop it.  You are essentially following the  mob.  When the media starts screaming about the virus and showing nonstop pictures of overflowing ERs on TV, you have to move.  Now.  But you can't count the costs because you don't know them yet.  Because you have no past history.  So you end up doing what sounds good to everyone in the room.  So you end up with odd restrictions on selling seeds in TruValue hardware and banning carseats at Walmart.  Not based on any science but just some personal bias of the rulemakers ("I don't need to buy seeds this week, so you can do without them too.  But I do want to pick up a bottle of whiskey on the way home, so I'll keep that legal.")

But it doesn't have to be that way.  Again, the rona is not the same as the influenza virus, but there should be a lot of data on how that virus spreads.  Does the virus, in fact, spread among people gathering in the gardening center of the local Ace Hardware?  I mean, it might as people gather around chatting about whether to plant beefsteak or salad tomatoes.  I've never gotten into the middle of a gardening confab and they might be quite animated, for all I know.  But every single year people get the flu and there should be some information to inform when and where people catch the bug.  But that data was not in evidence when all of these restrictions were put in place.

The next problem is that if you don't know when to put the restrictions in place, you don't know when to lift them.  Even the most hard-hearted tinpot dictator that populates the nations health departments and statehouses didn't enjoy putting these lockdowns in place.  Governments make money from economic activity and by shutting off economic activity, they shut off the lifeblood of their departments.  But they convinced themselves that they were saving lives.  So if they lift the stay-at-home orders, that inevitably means that they will cause deaths.  

But how do you know?  The lockdowns were imposed on a hunch and now you need another hunch to know when it's safe to lift them. And of course, politicians are rarely lacking in confidence that they know what's best, but also are rarely willing to take a risk.  Someone has to be first.

That guy who was first was the Governor of Georgia who was widely pilloried when he started lifting restrictions.   However when disaster failed to materialize, other states soon followed and eventually politicians found their follow-the-mob mentality required that they lift restrictions as well.

Another problem, maybe the problem, is that there's no way if the lockdowns are working.  During the early days of the pandemic we were treated to two daily TV shows: NY Governor Andrew Cuomo would host a press conference on the state of the virus in NY and in the afternoon, President Donald Trump would host a press conference on the national response.  NY was an early hotspot so word of how things were going there was of interest.  During one, Cuomo mentioned that most new hospitalizations were people complying with the stay-at-home order.  Of course, those people could be lying.  Or the virus was spreading through all the "essential" workers delivering packages or doing repairs.  Or the virus was spreading when people went out to buy groceries.  Or maybe buying cabbage and carrot seeds really is a infection vector and NY missed out on banning that activity.

But I think the ultimate problem is that the goalposts shifted dramatically.  Look again at the Initial Whitehouse goal:  "15 Days to Slow the Spread" (emphasis mine).  Note how modest the goal is.  Slow the spread.  We also heard endlessly about "flattening the curve".  During the early days were were treated to graphs like this (this is my own, but accurately represents what I saw)

Depicted here is two scenarios.  With no lockdown, the number of hospitalizations would quickly overwhelm the hospital capacity.  With the lockdowns, there would always be available hospital beds for those that were sick.  An important point to make (and which was made repeatedly) is that the area under the curves is the same.  That is, the same number of people in each case are going to the hospital. It's just that in the "lockdown" scenario, the hospitals are able to care for them.

Note another salient point.  In the assumed "no restriction" scenario, the virus would decrease on its own.  It was assumed that at some point everyone would get it, or at least enough to reach herd immunity at which point no one would be left to infect.  That would assume that recovering from infection confers immunity -- something not obvious in other respiratory viruses we have much more experience with like the cold or the flu.  But in the "restriction" scenario, the virus takes way, way longer to fizzle out.  And that's take a lot of patience (no pun intended) for the hospitalizations to decline.

But patience is not a trait known to the press or politicians.  By the caterwauling it would seem they expected the curve to look something like this.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out that way.

With no data ahead of time and no evidence of efficacy during the lockdown, the people in charge responded by shutting down debate over the wisdom of the lockdowns.  Protests did pop up around the nation, and those protests were mostly dealt with appropriately: no police in riot gear mowing down the protestors.  However, they were widely condemned and the protestors were consigned to various pariah statuses: conspiracy freaks, conservatives, nutters, and so on.  Social Media took steps to clamp down on what was deemed as misinformation.  This continues to this very day.  But to stay on topic of the lockdowns, which only lasted three months, there's a need to highlight one more thing.

During the early summer of 2020, George Floyd -- a black man -- was killed by a white cop in Minneapolis.  The killing shocked just about everyone.  George Floyd immediately became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement that had been building over the previous few years.  Thousands of people poured into the streets to protest the killing.  But the virus was still spreading.  This was clearly a moment that could increase the spread of the virus and public health officials all around the country naturally ... sided with the protestors.  Not only that, they stated that their new-found love of public rallies did not apply to protests against stay-at-home orders.

I'm not here to minimize the George Floyd killing.  I am normally a law-and-order guy but I lost my instinctive support for the cops during that moment myself.  However, I am here to say that it stands to reason that many it not most of the people protesting were out of work due to the pandemic and most were probably already stressed out over their present and future financial, physical and mental health status.  The BLM rallies gave meaning to their otherwise hopeless situation and I suspect that there may not have been the same level of property destruction and death if the virus never hit.  You see your laptop-class neighbor working from home and apparently doing better than he was during the pandemic, your unemployment checks don't arrive because the state is so backed up with applications (which really happened).  Or maybe you watch everyone working from home to avoid the virus which is apparently raging out of control, but you are forced to go out and take your changes.  Maybe you lost YOUR job at mom-and-pop-co, but your friends at BigBoxCo are making overtime.  So you feel screwed, like the whole system is stacked against you.  Then you watch some peckerwood kneeling on George Floyd's back and you think "Burn the fucker down".

Just my theory.

However, by siding with the protesters, by claiming that some protests are valid and some are not, the health authorities squandered whatever credibility they had left. And who were these people?  "Public Health Officials"?  Are they the guys sitting in the corner office or the lowly clerks typing in test results?  Whoever they were, they were unopposed.  The big wigs on TV (Fauci, Birx) didn't condemn their statements, so the damage was one.  And every future restriction that was put in place was immediately viewed with skepticism.

So, the question is... were they right?  Did cases go up after the Month of Madness?  Well, yes they did.  I credit three things for that.

1. By that time most stay-at-home orders were being lifted anyway.
2. The protestors probably did spread the virus.  While I doubt that the protests themselves spread a lot of virus (they were outdoors in the sunshine during the summer which by all accounts should be rather safe), I also assume the protesters met indoors in between times to plan where they'd meet the next day and maybe toss back a few celebratory beers.
3. Watching day after day of protests on TV (with the media cheering them on), probably convinced people that the rona was over and it's time to go back to normal. That was definitely the impression I got, anyway.

But the cases didn't go up all that much.  From a virus standpoint, it turned out that gathering outdoors isn't that much of a risk.  The same thing was seen from Spring Break around the country and other gatherings.

After all of that, I have to say that when the stay-at-home orders were issued, I supported them.  They seemed like a good idea at the time.  I mean, if the virus is spread through human contact and you limit human contact, you'll limit the spread, right?  Right?  In retrospect, the officials clearly went too far, and many of the state orders were found unconstitutional.  During the initial 15 days there should have been discussions about when the restrictions would be lifted.  How many cases / day are acceptable? What rate of increase?  And there should have been some frank discussion about what to do if the lockdowns don't work. A national stay-at-home order is kind of a nuclear option: there's not much more you can do if that doesn't work.  You can work your way UP to a stay-at-home order but by jumping straight to it, you've just thrown away all of your bullets.

The lockdowns were an unmitigated disaster, and there's no other word for them.  Whether they were a good idea at the time or not, when the damage became clear they should have been lifted.  Hey.  It happens.  People do what they think is right and sometimes it doesn't work out. That's OK.  Sticking with a plan in the face of it's disastrous consequences is not alright.

Not at all.