Day 730 – Two years

It’s 26th March 2022, which means that it’s exactly two years since South Africa locked down as the Covid pandemic hit our shores.

Kwik maffs: 365 x 2 = 730, see?

Did it work? In limiting the spread of the virus, almost certainly, yes. And in terms of the economy and social effects? Well, there’s clear evidence that lockdowns all over the world had a terrible effect in those regards. And it would be easy to simply say that it wasn’t worth locking down just because of that.

But if you want to do science and maths stuff (more complicated than the effort above), you need to measure like against like, and you need to have controls and all that. We can’t compare the effects of economic hardships with the number of infections prevented or the number of lives saved. And even if we could, who would decide the balancing point where one won out over the other? You could make those data say exactly what you wanted them to.

Not that you would have any data anyway. Because beyond the issue above, there’s the one of controls. How many infections has our lockdown prevented? We’ll never really know, because there wasn’t another cohort that didn’t lock down. And sure, the economy has tanked, but let’s be honest: those same individuals who hate the government because they instituted a lockdown, also hated them before that lockdown because they were tanking the economy.

So good research is hard to do, but that’s not to say we shouldn’t try. When the next pandemic hits, it would be good to have a working policy on the best way to navigate things ready to go. I’m not sure if we can formulate anything like that from where we stand now, though.

So maybe it’s enough to say that pandemics are just crap for the economy and absolutely awful in terms of their human cost; that prevention is better than cure. Agreeing on those might not help us out much of there is a next time, but it’s probably the only consensus we’re going to get.