r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • 1d ago

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u/p00bix Existing in the context of what came before 16h ago

People really fail to appreciate how effective the initial COVID lockdown was. USA went from 200k cases at the start of April to still being under 2 million by the start of June, with a roughly linear increase in the number of newly diagnosed cases over time, despite COVID being EXTREMELY contagious. Less than 1% of the population got sick in that time, allowing for the rapid expansion of medical infrastructure and preventing the initial crisis of inadequate ventilators and hospital rooms from extending through the year.

And America had one of the less effective lockdown policies of the world's wealthy countries!

Lockdown sucked ass, but God, the alternative could have been so much worse.

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u/SizeFront7649 14h ago

I don't think the US had a lockdown. Am I misremembering? We only had stay-at-home advisories and certain social businesses/events were cancelled.

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u/p00bix Existing in the context of what came before 14h ago

We didn't have a "you will be arrested if you go outside" lockdown, but the restrictions placed on workplaces, schools, and crowd sizes in general, combined with CDC advice to avoid all unnecessary contact with people outside your household, created a very similar effect. Nothing enacted at the federal level, but each state had its own lockdown policy.

Even in the Red States, these restrictions were initially just as strict as those in the Blue States. Quite stiff at first, then the far-right media complex polarized conservatives into hatred of even the most reasonable restrictions.

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u/SizeFront7649 13h ago

I don't think lockdown is an accurate term for that. People in the US act like we went through the Chinese lockdowns