I'm not a complete doofus about reading the research literature, which is why at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281057 I pointed you to the peer-reviewed review article at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7881715/ titled "Non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: A review"

Quoting from it:

> In doing so, I analyze 348 articles written by more than 2518 authors in the first 12 months of the emergency.

If you honestly believe "higher" is a meaningful point, then "peer-reviewed review in the scientific literature" is "higher" than someone's review in a personal newsletter.

You cannot possibly believe that newsletter summary you pointed to contains "practically all meaningful available evidence". Quoting the same review paper I linked to:

> searchers in PudMed for restrictions AND COVID, lockdown AND COVID, (control measures) AND COVID and (social distancing) AND COVID return more than 2000, 2900, 3000 and 8000 results respectively. Furthermore, any systematic review should play with synonymous and similar words. This monumental work, which would end up with well more than fifteen thousand papers is left for the future and it would benefit from a large collaboration.

If your statement is true then either Astral Codex Ten managed to read and review 10K+ papers on the topic, or you somehow know that most of those papers are not meaningful.

As for "no clear data" about Italy's red zones, what is unclear about these quotes from that Italy paper?:

> the red zone policy was by far the most successful in reducing the rate of growth of new cases, hospitalizations in regular wards and ICUs.

> the red zone is an instrument that makes it possible to rapidly bring down cases and the speed of transmission of the virus and consequently both hospitalizations and deaths (being very correlated). However, it implies severe social and economic consequences due to forced economic activity suspensions and restrictions on the freedom of movement. Therefore, this choice can be considered as a tool of last resort in cases of dramatic spread of the epidemic or when the local health system is close to the collapse.

> The package of measures contained in the red policy well responds to the need of quickly reducing the speed of transmission of COVID-19 and consequent hospitalizations.

That sounds pretty clear to me, and you haven't highlighted the faults, nor identified where I've mis-understood things, beyond making seemingly unsupported statements of fact.

I'll be clear as well. Stay-at-home orders for, say, New York might have been useless while the red zone orders for Italy were useful.

But your argument appears to be that no lockdowns for COVID were useful, while I can point to at least one case where it was successful.

Regarding "metastudy", the term "meta-analysis" is far more frequently used. A quick HN search shows I'm aware of that concept, yes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I ignored that question as it appeared a meaningless ad hominem, especially as you weren't actually pointing to any meta-analysis to back your claims, nor demonstrating that you are qualified to read the primary literature and able to understand what they really say.