"We did what we had to when we needed to" is not true yet. We need to finish the job, instead of half-assing it. The WSJ Opinion page is not a place where reasoned thinking happens.
Fair enough. But to their credit, at least the WSJ has the decency to clearly distinguish their Opinion page from their actual news. The NYT seems to have given up maintaining any such separation.
I've noticed this as well among many in my social circles. Every time I discovered some new scientific study which helped to dispell some degree of the FUD surrounding covid, the people who had adopted that heuristic always responded with more negativity and FUD, and never relief.
A great example of this was how early on, when looking at data from Italy, there was FUD suggesting that the death rate could be 10-15%. When more data was collected which dispelled that great fear, Fauci said "It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death".
Don't say this. Among the scientific advisors to governments, there have been a few (thankfully a fringe who don’t have any real influence) who in media interviews have advocated mask wearing and even social distancing in perpetuity, even after COVID is long gone. This is because they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all.
for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.
Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.
alrighty then. glad that's cleared up.
seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help."
how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?
Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.
I definitely don't want mask wearing and social distancing to continue in perpetuity but I do hope that wearing a mask when you are feeling sick but still out in public becomes normalized.
I wonder if masks are a cop out for real, effective disease mitigation. (BTW I’ve been called an anti masker for asking this.)
For thousands of years, Native Americans maintained comparatively low densities and longer distances between people. Large cities existed in the Mississippi basin, but that was the exception. From a "public health" perspective, this was great.
Then they encountered a population that had been living in denser conditions, both with other humans and with animals. These people had been a breeding ground for pathogens, a big gain-of-function experiment, for thousands of years. They even smelled bad.
The population with the good public health was ravaged by the worst plague the world has ever known, a plague that makes the Black Death look like the common cold, a plague that killed 90% of people in many places, that destroyed cities, that nearly emptied continents ("providentially", from the invaders' point of view).
To this day, it is a tragedy whenever an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon is met by an outsider, because within a month 90% of the tribe is dead of disease.
It is very good for a society to embrace vaccines. It is very bad for a society to sit out the next rounds of evolution, or of immune learning. You'll end up with Galapagos syndrome.
Consider the Indian symbol of the lotus. (It is the sign of the BJP.) It symbolizes "beauty growing from the muck". The "muck" is important. Drink the water.
A society that really wants to win, should have viral research facilities, well protected in their deepest deserts, where gain of function experiments speed evolution and produce ever more dangerous threats. At the same time, they should develop vaccines for these viruses, and include them in peoples' regular shots. If it wants to go on the offense, all this society has to do is release its pathogens. It will be protected; its enemies will not.
Lockdowns can be accepted as one-off responses that preserve population while a vaccine is developed. Since you end up with the same (or even better) immunity but less death, it's a win. So just be patient; we're almost there.
But as a long term solution, a society that embraces lockdowns over immune learning is going down the wrong path.
COVID is very likely to become an endemic disease, so it probably won't be going away.
Of course the best way to deal with that is vaccination, but there are anti-vaxxers so masks will probably become more of a fixture. Not because of an overzealous adviser, but because of people's stupidity.
To me this seems to be another over reach emboldened into existence by COVID measures. Im not making the argument these measure were unnecessary at the time. I am making the argument that we do in fact live in an imperfect world filled with both natural and man made threats. Bad things are going to happen and thats a fact of life.
> "they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all."
Until domestic and international travel is banned this is a pipe dream. In a matter of months anyone who wants a vaccination will have had one. Time to get on with the business of living in an unpredictable world filled with new threats.
U.S. District Judge William Stickman said it best when declaring PA's lockdown orders unconstitutional:
The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair-weather freedoms -- in place when times are good but able to be cast aside in times of trouble. There is no question that this country has faced, and will face, emergencies of every sort, but the solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The constitution cannot accept the concept of a 'new normal' where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures
I couldn't disagree more with this. Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population. Sadly, the predictable occurred and no politician was going to do very much about it.
Looking back on it, the only effective preventative measure that had any chance at all of working in the US would have been to totally seal the national borders about mid January 2020.
At the time the politicians were too busy trying to impeach the executive office holder who may have debatably held the authority to accomplish such an action. When there finally were inbound travel restrictions implemented the leadership was yet again accused of Xenophobia and Racism per usual opposition schtick (farcical as US residents returning from abroad were just as much of a risk).
In my opinion, with the benefit of hindsight, this could have all been avoided in the US had such an action been taken. It wasn't and here we are. The world is poorly made I regret to report.
Of which many would have been preventable. Do you think the mass protests, calling it a hoax (yeah I know the usual rhetoric, he didn’t explicitly say it to COVID, but come on, he did try to half-ass two things with that), the useless too little too late closing of borders, some states going on as if nothing happened, sunbathing on the beach and I could go on. All that with a pandemic that is known to have an exponential growth rate - that is even doing very little in the beginning will save many many people.
Nice priorities there. A prerequisite to taking any kind of coordinated or effective action is actually treating the threat as a priority. Clearly the chief executive, while being completely aware of the threat and its severity, had other things on his mind that took precedence over the risk of half a million dead Americans.
That's the false premise that we accepted as true when the majority of the electorate agreed to allow this shut downs to happen.
No one justified lockdowns with "we need to eliminate covid" or "we need to vaccinate 50% people". That simply did not happen.
The literal premise used by all govt officials was that all forceful covid mandates were only temporary and only to avoid healthcare collapse and to have time understand the virus.
We are well past that point. The restrictions are still in place.
The only thing being half assed is the job, as ny state aptly showed, and most of the federal vaccine distribution rollout continues to demonstrate.
The truth is reasoned thinking was never part of the equation.
If i am wrong, then please define "the job", and then find quotations from April or May 2020 stating that the "job" did not mean understand the virus and avoid hospital collapse.
And if politicians had acted effectively, would zero people have died? We're talking about a mostly invisible natural killer. It's going to kill people, regardless of who does what. Influenza has killed thousands every year since the dawn of time, but we don't blame anyone for it.
Basically there are two groups of people: one group (let's call them 'young people') are not very unlikely to die or suffer from this disease but are very inconvenienced by the various restrictions. Your "We did what we had to when we needed to and the need for such measures is demonstrably coming to an end." really illustrates that. You're unilaterally declaring it over because you're tired of your freedoms being impinged and you're ready to move on. Meanwhile the science doesn't support your view.
And that brings me to the other group (let's call them 'old people'): these people are much more likely do die and don't have that much scope for protecting themselves reliably. Or maybe they can but they have been led to believe in the attitude of the 'young people'. They pay the price for people not wearing masks, not taking the disease seriously and acting recklessly.
And that's the insidiousness of it. One group plays, the other group pays. It reveals something discomforting about our society which we think is highly civilized but really is so casually indifferent to other people's death and suffering.
I am nearly middled-aged myself and living in the countryside and remote-working for years already, so I am not very inconvenienced. But I want restrictions lifted so that people in their teens and twenties can have their big festivities, courtship rituals, etc.
The COVID lockdowns have been the biggest betrayal of youth since May '68, and their loss of freedoms offends me more than the deaths of the old.
I'd be more worried for those who work festivals, events , bars , restaurants, etc. Millions of life have been destroyed.
I like to put it this way , the worst thing that's happened to me since Corona started, is I no longer have places to meet people. But the folks who staff those places , bars , concerts, etc ,are out of work.
Not very fun to be jobless when rent is still due and your kids still need to eat.
You may not have many empathy towards the older population who is endangered directly, but perhaps the many who will not have place in hospitals due to the flood of COVID patients, causing many many indirect deaths.
Maybe that's you, and that's your choice. But what about all the young people who do not want to stay home and make sacrifices for the sake of older people? My sympathies are with them.
> perhaps the many who will not have place in hospitals due to the flood of COVID patients
One solution to this is to triage COVID patients away from intensive care, so that those beds remain available to the bulk of the population. This is the approach that Sweden chose, for example. So, no, I don’t see this as a reason to place limits on the lives of young people.
I wore a mask, I social distanced, I refrained from gatherings of more than 2 people. I followed protocol during the time of crisis and I did so willing and zealously. Your ad hominem attack does little to disparage my argument or my thinking on the subject.
This pandemic has been deadly because it was a virus humans didn't have immunity for. I wonder why people find such a thing to be so hard to accept?
Necessary measures were taken AFTER the fact.
You cant unring the bell around the neck of a horse that already got out of the barn and boarded a ship thats already sailed. I realize people died and loved ones were lost and this is an unmitigated human tragedy but the urge to find someone to blame isn't helpful.
Continuing the current practices in dogmatic fashion for some unspecified period of time isn't the answer. Vaccination is the answer. Immunity is the answer and at current that seems like a realistic possibility. Things can always go to hell again at any moment from some new threat and thats a fact of life.
France’s government was annoyed for months by the Yellow Vests protests but unable to make them go away. When it saw that instituting COVID restrictions got rid of those protests at the stroke of a pen, could this not motivate the state to maintain restrictions on gatherings for as long as possible? Elsewhere, curfews and laws against protests have benefited the governments in power, sending them to reelection, simply because opposition parties were not allowed to organize publicly and show their strength.
"Fight to return to normal"
How many realize COVID-19 is endemic, will continue to mutate and will be with us for the foreseeable future?
Those among us, who remain vulnerable either matter, or they do not, which is it?
"We" is who exactly?
Does the "we" body of people include people living (very carefully) with immunodeficiency, those without access to doctors, no insurance, elderly, survivors of the dead?
How many are aware pandemics and the medicine, science, various other impacts play out on multi year timelines?
When is the last time nature abided by human preferences?
Please, no response is needed to the above, just rhetorical questions as food for thought.
Frankly, politicizing COVID-19, as well as denying the reality of it did us and the world a lot of harm.
I do not disagree with you on the basic idea of politicians leveraging any shiny thing to avoid hard legislation long overdue. I do not find conflating that with COVID-19 realities all that useful.
COVID-19 is still novel. There is a ton we do not know and we have yet to get the data we need to proceed in a more definitive way, and for sure lack what is needed to basically ignore it per normal.
We are going to get some of that data the hard way as some parts of the world, and the US are choosing to behave as if it has "gone away."
Finally, "we" absolutely did not do what was needed and a lot of people died, who did not have to die.
The numbers, variant strains and their potential impacts remain with us and are at levels well above those that triggered (our poor) actions in the first place. The only real difference I can see is more nebulous publishing of that information coupled with more aggressive signaling it is all OK now.
We lack the data needed to make that assessment.
We also lack the data to fully understand what "normal" will end up looking like too. It won't look like it did before. It could look similar, depending on how nature plays out and how good both our understanding and response to said understanding actually is.
The US track record is poor so far.
So to have someone who is vehemently against stimulus in regular situations not putting up a resistance (and I know others like me) is probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who support even mildly socialist concepts to push new spending and social welfare through.
In that case, if you are someone wielding that power during a serious crisis, it’s going to be hard to let that go.
As for the masks, despite being mandatory at my gym - if there are 100 people there, only 10-20 of us are wearing a mask. Disappointing but even if there are laws to mandate it, are police really going to run around and enforce it?