Do lockdowns actually promote spread?

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Dec 20

Has it occurred to anyone in authority that lockdowns may promote the spread of COVID-19?  Let’s look at the evidence.

Lockdown measures are designed to suppress the spread of the virus.  That means that the social isolation measures of a lockdown status are more than necessary to hold the spread rate constant.  Yet, the harder the province locks down, the higher the daily case rate becomes.  The experts were supposed to be ahead of the curve, not behind it.

Lockdowns force people who live in apartment buildings and multi-generational dwellings to spend more time in them, and intra-family transmissions is thought to be the biggest pathway of spread.  Now that it’s getting colder, the air within dwellings is getting worse.  The virus can collect.  Forcing so many people to breathe the same air seems like a scenario for transmission.

A strategy to reduce close person-to-person interactions looks doomed to failure.  People may be divided into tiny groups and groups put into cubicles, but they still breathe the same air.  The lockdown strategy may reduce the incidents of “super-spreading”, but it won’t stop the spread.  The lockdown strategy prolongs the crisis, at best, but there is no evidence that it reduces the total number of people eventually infected.

Assuming lockdown measures have any effect at all, and there is zero experimental evidence that they do, only statistical hopes, lockdowns may promote the spread by forcing large numbers of people who live in certain kinds of dwellings to all breathe the same air for prolonged periods of time.

Prolonging the crisis doesn’t seem smart in view of the social, educational, and economic side-effects.  The trends of data seem to show that lockdowns perversely may enhance transmission, and that enhancement may occur among certain classes of people.

-30-