I feel that this discussion is not framed correctly. Yes, successful eradication is superior to containment in health and economic outcomes. This is a pretty weak claim that lots of people can agree with who otherwise differ considerably in their policy proposals. But the original claim was that EAs and rationalists hadn’t advocated for long lockdowns and border closures, and that this was relevant for retroactively assessing their performance. The plausibility of the latter claim must be evaluated by considering all the countries that implemented long lockdowns and border closures, and not just the tiny minority that were successful in attaining (near-)eradication by adopting those measures.
I took a quick look at the study you shared. Their analysis compared covid deaths, GDP growth and lockdown stringency in two groups of OECD countries during the first twelve months of the pandemic, and offered this as their original contribution to the study’s main thesis that countries which favored elimination had better health and economic outcomes than countries which favored mitigation (the rest of the study is a brief and unsystematic summary of some of the relevant literature). It turns out that the group which supposedly favored elimination consists of just five nations, four of which are islands and the fifth of which (South Korea) shares borders with a single county which has been completely isolated from the rest of the world for decades.
Let’s pause for a moment and consider how quickly this kind of evidence would have been dismissed if it had been presented in support of a politically inconvenient conclusion. Yet here it is offered, in the world’s most prestigious medical journal, to establish that “elimination, not mitigation, creates best outcomes for health, the economy, and civil liberties”.
For what it’s worth, I personally have no strong views on how the pandemic should have been handled. (My only strong meta-view is that decisions should have been based on explicit cost-effectiveness analyses, which were surprisingly absent from most policy discussions.) My impression is that EAs and rationalists—to which I would add the Metaculus community—did somewhat better than most experts, but this assessment is based mostly on comparing their performance on simple factual questions or issues involving basic sanity. Here, instead, we are told to downgrade our estimation of how well EAs and rationalists performed because, apparently, they did not advocate for the entire world a policy that was successful in only a handful of geographically highly isolated countries. I don’t find that plausible.
Thanks for the clarification.
I feel that this discussion is not framed correctly. Yes, successful eradication is superior to containment in health and economic outcomes. This is a pretty weak claim that lots of people can agree with who otherwise differ considerably in their policy proposals. But the original claim was that EAs and rationalists hadn’t advocated for long lockdowns and border closures, and that this was relevant for retroactively assessing their performance. The plausibility of the latter claim must be evaluated by considering all the countries that implemented long lockdowns and border closures, and not just the tiny minority that were successful in attaining (near-)eradication by adopting those measures.
I took a quick look at the study you shared. Their analysis compared covid deaths, GDP growth and lockdown stringency in two groups of OECD countries during the first twelve months of the pandemic, and offered this as their original contribution to the study’s main thesis that countries which favored elimination had better health and economic outcomes than countries which favored mitigation (the rest of the study is a brief and unsystematic summary of some of the relevant literature). It turns out that the group which supposedly favored elimination consists of just five nations, four of which are islands and the fifth of which (South Korea) shares borders with a single county which has been completely isolated from the rest of the world for decades.
Let’s pause for a moment and consider how quickly this kind of evidence would have been dismissed if it had been presented in support of a politically inconvenient conclusion. Yet here it is offered, in the world’s most prestigious medical journal, to establish that “elimination, not mitigation, creates best outcomes for health, the economy, and civil liberties”.
For what it’s worth, I personally have no strong views on how the pandemic should have been handled. (My only strong meta-view is that decisions should have been based on explicit cost-effectiveness analyses, which were surprisingly absent from most policy discussions.) My impression is that EAs and rationalists—to which I would add the Metaculus community—did somewhat better than most experts, but this assessment is based mostly on comparing their performance on simple factual questions or issues involving basic sanity. Here, instead, we are told to downgrade our estimation of how well EAs and rationalists performed because, apparently, they did not advocate for the entire world a policy that was successful in only a handful of geographically highly isolated countries. I don’t find that plausible.