Thread by @phl43

It took some of them long enough, but it's nice to see that almost everyone now accepts the obvious, which wasn't the case when I wrote this. Sadly, the cost of those unnecessary lockdowns has been absolutely enormous, the worst policy failure in decades. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…

https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1479487688973688836

And before someone replies that if lockdowns had small effects on transmission because people voluntarily change their behavior then they also had smalls effects on cost, which I *know* is going to happen, let me remind you that it's an obvious fallacy.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1385007267645374464

Will the people who pushed for those policies at the time and treated the position I defended in that piece, which again was already obvious back then, as borderline conspiracy theory ever acknowledge they were completely wrong? Lol, no, of course they won't 🤷‍♂️

By the way, as I explained more recently in a post where I explored how population structure could affect transmission (cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…), I don't think voluntary behavioral changes are sufficient to explain the data, but it still happens and no doubt makes a difference.

On the fact that incidence would have fallen even in the absence of a lockdown in the UK, keep in mind that even during the second wave, the COVID-19 Infection Survey data showed very clearly that epidemic growth had started to collapse before the second lockdown started.

So while a lot of people claimed that we don't know incidence would have peaked even in the absence of a lockdown, we actually *do* know that, because that's what happened every time this pattern has been observed (lockdown or no lockdown) and magic doesn't exist.

Amazingly, the people behind "Anti-Virus: the Covid-19 FAQ" (a website created to defend lockdowns), actually cited data from the REACT study that showed exactly the same thing and managed to draw exactly the opposite of this conclusion from them 🙃 covidfaq.co/Claim-Cases-we…

Of course, this is not a serious website and neither are its authors interested in the truth, otherwise they would have modified it when I pointed out the studies they cited to support their claim that voluntary behavioral changes wouldn't have brought R below 1.

But instead they just made a cosmetic change to make it *seem* like they were responsive to criticism, which they clearly were not, replacing the study I had pointed out was complete garbage by other studies that had the *same* methodological problems.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1358148446381891585

All those people, who pride themselves on being oh so very smart, would like us to forget what they were saying back then now that it's obvious they were wrong. But I for one will not forget the combination of condescension and stupidity they exhibited during this episode.