I’m not sure if you actually read carefully what you are commenting on. I emphasized early response, or initial governmental-level response in both comments in this thread.
Sure, multiple countries on the list made mistakes later, some countries sort of become insane, and so on. Later, almost everyone made mistakes with vaccines, rapid tests, investments in contact tracing, etc.
Arguing that the early lockdown was more costly than “an uncontrolled pandemic” would be pretty insane position (cf GDP costs, Italy had the closest thing to an uncontrolled pandemic). (Btw the whole notion of “an uncontrolled pandemic” is deeply confused—unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, you cannot just order people “live as normally” during a pandemic when enough other people are dying; you get spontaneous “anarchic lockdowns” anyway, just later and in a more costly way)
If Australia was pursuing a strategy of “lock down irrespective of cost”, then I don’t think it makes sense to describe the initial response as competent. It just happened to be right in this case, but in order for the overall response to helpful, it has to be adaptive to the actual costs. I agree that the early response on its own would have indicated a potentially competent decision-making algorithm, but the later followup showed that the algorithm seems to have mostly been correct on accident, and not on-purpose.
I do appreciate the link to the GDP cost article. I would have to look into the methodology more to comment on that, but it certainly seems like an interest analysis and suggestive result.
I’m not sure if you actually read carefully what you are commenting on. I emphasized early response, or initial governmental-level response in both comments in this thread.
Sure, multiple countries on the list made mistakes later, some countries sort of become insane, and so on. Later, almost everyone made mistakes with vaccines, rapid tests, investments in contact tracing, etc.
Arguing that the early lockdown was more costly than “an uncontrolled pandemic” would be pretty insane position (cf GDP costs, Italy had the closest thing to an uncontrolled pandemic). (Btw the whole notion of “an uncontrolled pandemic” is deeply confused—unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, you cannot just order people “live as normally” during a pandemic when enough other people are dying; you get spontaneous “anarchic lockdowns” anyway, just later and in a more costly way)
If Australia was pursuing a strategy of “lock down irrespective of cost”, then I don’t think it makes sense to describe the initial response as competent. It just happened to be right in this case, but in order for the overall response to helpful, it has to be adaptive to the actual costs. I agree that the early response on its own would have indicated a potentially competent decision-making algorithm, but the later followup showed that the algorithm seems to have mostly been correct on accident, and not on-purpose.
I do appreciate the link to the GDP cost article. I would have to look into the methodology more to comment on that, but it certainly seems like an interest analysis and suggestive result.