csdf

That is exactly my point. Even with lockdowns, their hospitals filled to capacity. So imagine a situation where there was no lockdown.

csdf

I think most people are in agreement that a lockdown is terribly bad for the economy. The debate is about whether no lockdown would be much better. I think the rapidity with which China (a country not known for populist pandering) locked down rather than let the disease run riot, might be informative as to how they, at least, perceived the relative payoffs between lockdown and not.

martinbkk

The current China interest should be less about how it went into almost national lock down but rather how, once they had the numbers and data, the lock down was essentially switched off. With the exception of a few key areas being carefully monitored China now has its foot planted firmly on the gas.

weasel decentral

The premise of my original question was to assume these statements are both wrong, what I was asking for was an analysis of the outcome if there was no lockdown. The given knowledge seems to be that no lockdown would mean the economy would continue as before with no or very small negative effects.

Millhouse

So you want to compare the outputs of two impossibly complicated models supplied with bullshit data and assumptions.

scrubbedexpat141

3 weeks and counting.

I'm sure a list of why lockdowns are important is longer than these two.

There must be a tip in the scale though.
Lockdown for 1 yr say, economies destroyed, government borrowing to bailout, lots of people stay alive from the disease. Long term recovery from government spending and rebuilding.
Lockdown never happens, economies suffer because people are scared and death and disease. Societal breakdown?
Lockdown for X months, economies suffer from dip, government borrowing bailouts, some die, period of recovery from spending etc.

To me, the extremes are the worst scenarios. The mid ground is where you probably see the best results by mitigating both risks

weasel decentral

Finally! Well done

Miss Ann Thrope

There is a live example: Sweden versus its immediate neighbours. Of course it's foolish to extrapolate from a single data point but this one available example very much contradicts the economic argument not to lock down. Sweden, with no lockdown, has fared worse economically than its immediate neighbours (albeit not by a huge amount), that have locked down. Sweden has simultaneously suffered a hugely higher death rate.

Even with this one example, it is early days. But this clearly disproves the notion that not locking down and letting the disease run automatically means an economic advantage. Early action, whatever the action is, seems to be the key to minimising impact rather than the dithering and denial that beset most of Europe and particularly the UK and US, who are now experiencing the worst of all worlds. Taiwan and New Zealand are the two interesting cases where different approaches both seem to have left them in the best position to fully reopen their economies soonest. Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea are not far behind. Of course all of those are mainly export driven economies so it remains to be seen whether they will be able to sell much for a while.

DXBtoDOH

Sweden is a trade based economy so they were always going to be heavily dependent on trade with surrounding nations and the rest of the world. More than half of the GDP is based on external trade.

"Scandinavia’s biggest economy will shrink 7 per cent this year, Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Tuesday." Let's compare this to the projected 14% decline for the UK economy.

I had also read (admittedly can't find via googling today) that per capita spending in the other Scandinavian economies had fallen twice as much as Sweden (60-70% in Norway and Denmark compared to 30% in Sweden) but this was in an article about Anders Tegnell a few weeks back and things may be different now. Nonetheless, a trade based economy heavily dependent on global trade was never going to be immune.

What I find interesting is how emotionally involved people have become in trying to prove Sweden is right versus wrong. One can see this from the language being used when people write about Sweden. "Hugely worse" for example. As we speak, Sweden has less than 4,000 deaths from COVID-19 (376.2 per million) compared to 35,000 for the UK (537 per million), 32,000 for Italy (535 per million), 9,000 in Belgium (840 per million), just to use as comparisons. If you compare Sweden with its 10 million people to individual US states, what about New Jersey (9 million people, 10,000 deaths), Pennsylvania (13 million people, 4,300 deaths), Michigan (10 million people, 5,000 deaths). This may be the first time in global history when so few deaths would be considered pandemic level.

As in most places, the majority of Sweden's 3800 deaths are also from care homes. To me, what Sweden's approach confirms is that shutdowns have minimal impact if you can't control the spread of COVID-19 into care homes. Which turned out to be the case in many countries with heavy shutdowns (France, Spain, UK, Italy, USA all point to that).

We are all moving to the Swedish model with the reopenings across Europe and in the US. So it's a pointless argument in many ways.

DXBtoDOH

I like to follow the US response to COVID-19 because it's the one place in the world where people quarrel about it so openly, so you get different viewpoints ranging from the Karens who think we should permanently shutdown for years to gun toting wackos storming government building in the name of freedom and liberty and everything in between. Nonetheless, most of the American media establishment has been very much in favour of extensive shutdowns and it is decidedly apparent the biases in how they report on certain states versus other states.

The Florida versus New York is a perfect example. The Republican Florida governor was roasted over coals for being late to shutdowns and early to reopen and there were plenty of dire predictions of COVID-19 running rampant through the gazillion care homes and retirement communities in Florida, which has the largest concentration of elderly people in America. The governor was accused for having blood on his hands by established media figures. But the surges never materialised.

The Florida governor explained that he and his public health team immediately saw what was happening in Italy and how the virus was affecting elderly people, so instead of rushing into a one size fits all shutdown, their policy from the first day was to get COVID-19 patients out of care homes and any patient who tested positive was immediately removed, and if at a hospital, ordered not to return to their care home. By contrast New York's Democratic governor ordered care homes to take positive COVID-19 patients back and freaked out about needing 30,000 ventilators, and we know what happened (and that the ventilators likely killed more than helped).

Florida's approach focusing resources on care homes and the high risk population shows it was a more efficient response than mass shutdowns that treated everyone as the enemy through massive suspensions of civil rights and crippling the economy.

Maxima

Haven't you heard about that one person in Florida who was asked to hide Covid deaths? The Karens now say that Florida has a huge toll but are hiding it...

Georgia is another state I have been following for weeks, they were supposed to be dying in the tens of thousands by now for opening in late April. Hospitalizations have actually gone down....

The thing about the US is that peoples responses are now 99% predictable based on their political positions...

The left see Fauci and Cuomo as the second coming of Jesus. All Cuomo does is talk, talk, and talk, thinking he is Al Pacino, and say he is following "science", and has led to his state being the worst affected in America, but the left worships him

The Michigan Governor is another work of art, she probably has her eyes on the VP to Biden and has been acting tough.

Among Democrat states, Washington and California have actually done decent jobs

Maxima

These are the arguments used by some pro-lockdown people

You want a haircut?! So you are ready to kill grandma for your haircut?

Miss Ann Thrope

Sorry, just for the record, the most egregious error versus the ONS numbers was in the proportion of deaths that you attributed to care homes.

Miss Ann Thrope

Sweden's death rate is at least 6 times higher than any of its immediate neighbours. Worse in some cases. That's not emotional, that's data. Denmark, Finland and Norway are all also export-led economies with Norway particularly affected by oil prices.

But really, if your main takeaway from this event is Chinese ineptitude, then we are hardly having a serious discussion anyway.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Millhouse

please provide the correct data point.