Anyone who went to an open bar or a packed church service in the USA in December 2020 can tell that governors and the courts were both very sensitive to business and religious concerns about impact on worship, business, and employment.

Unclear who you mean “exaggerated the risks” but the actual risk of fatality was more like 0.6% of all infected in the USA pre-vaccine.[0] 0.3% is the case only after torturing statistics or using international statistics from countries that skew younger and have fewer risk factors.

[0] see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...

Ironic, since a 0.3% (or 0.6%) fatality rate is vastly exaggerated for people in low risk groups. The only reason the number is even that high is due to the high death tolls of people in high risk groups.

Many people shared Facebook memes of a “99.9%” survival rate not understanding that they personally were at greater risk than that. This page was available on the CDC website for quite a long time explaining the different risks in a pretty straightforward table https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

The only reason the fatality rate is that high is because people died? What are you trying to say here? What else would it measure?

Better?

To say they were respectful - absolutely they were not.

Edit: They were literally advising people to snitch on each other, even neighbor on neighbor, and make sure to keep that Christmas gathering at 10 people! Last I knew that was a communist tactic. Respected us?

Edit 2: The above would be for Christmas. Earlier in the year it was much worse, don’t attend church unless you are in your car with windows shut for months.

Your comment would have been stronger if you didn't wave out the 1950s red scare tactics. Overall, it sounds like you were personally frustrated by the limitations - is that about what you wanted to say?

gjsman is using the word neighbour correctly to mean someone who physically lives next to you, which is dystopian because it effectively extends the power of law enforcement inside the walls of everyone's homes to criminalize normal pro-social behaviour, and does so by manipulating and exploiting the bonds that form robust communities. It's very different to seeing someone break into a shop on the street and reporting it.

I suppose the actual issue here is the “pro social” behavior piece. I haven’t actually heard of any U.S. state where significant fines or enforcement of private home gathering sizes was done after a few months in March, most states relied on the honor system even if governors ordered allegedly strict restrictions (e.g. one “blue” state I traveled to required me to submit a form for travel, however, each time I went there I was never approached by police or anyone else to check my form and I easily could have never done it).

People voluntarily gathering in defiance of COVID restrictions is a classic "victimless crime". Comparing it to covering up a murder is an example of the type of hyperbolic language that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion about policy.

Also, "communist tactic"? The red scare is still with us but to see that shit on HN is always alarming. If holding people accountable so that they don't sacrifice grandma and the immunocompromised for "the economy" (whose economy? certainly hasn't benefitted me) is necessary then I'll do so gladly. If you don't care for public health or the people around you why should I?

The federal government and most governors didn't do shit. It sounds like you live in one of the few places that tried, and got fucked by the sobering reality that a constant 33-40% of this country can not handle epidemiological outbreaks while we sport a pretty weak central government.

US might have a low death rate because of fancy hospitals and some of the best specialists on the planet — it never needed to infect this many people or kill a million Americans. If COVID is no big deal I don't want to have to "never forget 9/11" or whatever bullshit people refusing to vaccinate or quarantine say.

And for the dig at communism, China's zero-covid policy worked. Westerners can say the numbers are cooked, with a population of 1.4 billion you're not going to hide 1 in 3 getting infected. That's the number in the US as of the end of 2020, 1 in 3. Vietnam's zero COVID policy was also working, until they ended it for the economy. Maybe profit motives are unethical where human lives are concerned? By what calculus do you get to determine which outbreaks are worth the bare minimum of germ theory and which ones we get to sacrifice our families and neighbors to for the economy?

I'll end with the note that there are outcomes beyond death. My boyfriend and I contracted COVID before vaccines were available (he works in healthcare) and he couldn't smell or taste for a year. Made eating very difficult. My grandfather can't walk a block anymore, and hasn't been able to in months, but survived. My coworker started to lose her hair in clumps and was embarrassed to wear a wig, but survived. Personally, as a 23 year old with no comorbidities, who was fit and had no physical issues—I'm still recovering a year later. My run times aren't the same, I have a lot less lung capacity, I developed clinical depression. I lived in Argentina for a time and caught swine flu as a child. I'd easily put this as worse. During the infection even putting on a shirt hurt. I'm happy most people are vaccinated now and unlikely to have severe outcomes, but the risk of exposure was totally unnecessary.

By December maybe, but earlier in 2020 this varied greatly by state, and there are plenty of educational, business, and religious institutions that still haven't recovered. I think people are underestimating just how much damage was done.

Or countries that don't keep accurate records pertaining to hospitalizations and cause of death.

Early on, nobody knew what covid was gonna look like. It had the potential for millions dead with a very high rate of spread.

So we panicked. It seems forgotten that nobody remembers how awful, unknown, and strange the early pandemic was back in March 2020.

What’s pathetic is how almost two years later, when we know oodles more about this disease, our solutions are identical. Where is the focus on improving hospital capacity? Improving air filter quality (it’s an airborne disease)? Therapeutics? Mass testing capabilities?

The vaccine has proven to be not as effective as we had initially hoped for because the new variants are too different. But that possibility was always known. Why do nothing else?

I will say, though, that the shutdown went on too long. It was originally sold as a stopgap to allow us to set up testing, track and trace infrastructure etc etc and the government by and large just… didn’t. So there was no clear path out of it.

I was skeptical and accepted the lockdown for two weeks. We only just started getting out more than three months later.

Either my family was really unusually right… or there was a percentage of people saying it was a bad idea that was blissfully ignored and given no voice.

And now that they were shown to be completely right, we pretend they don’t exist or lump them into the anti-vax crowd even though these groups are distinctly different with some overlap.

Let’s say we flip a coin. I call heads. You tails. It’s heads. So I was correct. But at the moment I made my prediction I wasn't correct, I was just speculating. There was no way to know for sure.

What would you do in such a case:

a) agree that you are over the line with your complaints and keep listening to the same mechanic

b) go to someone else with your mechanical issues and sue the mechanic for the engine rebuild

c) something else?

The reality is, a bunch of stuff was thrown at the wall, and the only thing that really worked was lockdowns, which won't work long term. But why didn't we do anything to figure out if any of the things were working We should have immediately spent resources into determining how effective some of the strategies were, and called of the ones that didn't work. Instead many of those strategies are still in place. Like six feet, sanitizing everything, cloth masks. Instead of putting money into research (other than the vaccine) a bunch of money was spent on things that didn't have much to do with covid.

And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ahead, here’s some protections. Don’t want to lock down? Your body your choice.

That kind of is why they said: that lockdowns were about the only reliable tool until we understood more, built out testing infrastructure, track and trace etc… it’s just that the government then didn’t do any of that.

> And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ahead, here’s some protections. Don’t want to lock down? Your body your choice.

Even a cursory look towards labor rights in the US would make it very clear it wouldn’t be “your body your choice”, it would be “want to keep your job? Turn up to work or you’re fired”.

There were people and even doctors back then saying they didn’t know it was a good idea.

There were people back then worried about how it would affect education, suicide attempts (this article!), and businesses, and whether the cure was worse than the problem.

These people were not allowed to speak, in policies or on television. If they spoke on social media, say they want people to die and they are heartless. Once the vaccine comes out, lump them in with the anti-vaxxers.

The cure was worse than the problem. Except we got screwed and the problem remains.

That’s just flat out untrue, though. These views were widely aired at the time. It’s revisionist history to say they were censored. The government made a choice they didn’t agree with but that doesn’t mean they were silenced.

If you disagreed with the government you are called anti science (despite the policies having nothing to do with science) it belittled for wanting to kill grandma. Shoot people are still saying that.

Science is a process about learning from the world. These people (who are scientists themselves!) have disagreements about how scientists are doing science, and they are called "anti-scientific" as a result of disagreeing with their interpretation of science.

That's a direct "censor this guy" threat.

The compromise would have been to actually enforce the lockdown so it can end in 3 weeks. Having a couple of weeks where people still went to bars and ordered takeout was not a lockdown. At least not in the sense that a virus would care about. Plenty of countries did a hard lockdown and enjoyed normal activities afterwards but no, because the "land of the free" can't do a public health (or allow poor people in other countries to get vaccines) we globally got to have multiple waves. You're saying it's not about compliance, but in the countries where people complied they are enjoying a freedom we still are not.

It's better in science to have a false positive than a false negative. Had we not even done that half-assed few months of quasi-confinement (no indoor dining, curbside pickup, no movies, work remotely, otherwise go wild!) the deaths would have been much higher. Remember, we only went into that soft lockdown once cases had started to spike. The federal government knew about it earlier. You don't have to know jack shit about a virus to know that it's probably a good idea to minimize person-person contact until you know jack shit about it? I don't know, I guess that's "radical" in the US, the idea that you might have to make some sacrifices for your neighbors or community or city or state or country.

We did actually. Many things were known and anti-lockdown activists were pointing these things out from the start. In hindsight they were all right and the "experts" were wrong.

Things these people were pointing out right back in March/April 2020:

1. SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory coronavirus. We have lots of experience with those: they're normally mild, seasonal and spread quickly. All these things have turned out to be true (yes COVID is a mild disease compared with most others).

2. The Diamond Princess cruise ship had an outbreak at the start of February 2020. This immediately made it clear that (a) IFR was low even amongst very elderly people and (b) many people didn't catch it at all, even when quarantined on a plague ship.

3. Modelling was ignoring all the above by assuming a way higher IFR than the Diamond Princess data supported, that the virus was entirely non-seasonal, and that the entire population would get infected in a single massive wave. None of these assumptions were supported by evidence and virtually no epidemiologists cared when this was pointed out. In fact the opposite, they went on the attack.

4. The WHO actually had a plan for pandemic respiratory viruses. It said very clearly not to do lockdowns, close borders or do contact tracing. This plan was ignored.

> And now that they were shown to be completely right

Only if we define literally any mitigation (like indoor masks, and often not even that, depending on the state) as not letting us out.

They had to attend church for months watching only from their parked vehicles and with their windows shut. And somebody had their windows open once so the church got a threatening letter from the city from an informant neighbor across the street.

As for not opening a car window, I'm obviously not informed about every city's policies, but if true, sounds dumb but irrelevant to your point. I assume used to paint restrictions in a ridiculous light?

There is and was no evidence then or now that you can catch COVID from the car next door with the windows open.

The church offered workarounds, like two pews spacing between families (over 6’ easily) and spaced-out folding-chair overflow in the basement. City didn’t care.

We didn't have any vaccines or effective treatments during the 3 month soft lockdown, you think it would be better to have congregations every Sunday to increase that spread? Or is God going to send us to hell for not attending mass during a plague?

It's so frustrating because the "lockdown" was doomed from the moment it wasn't enforced. Like you don't get a "threatening letter" if you posess a gram of cannabis. Our criminal justice system comes down hard except when it's people who don't care about public health. So yeah, we wasted like 3 months because most Americans prefer eating indoors at Applebee's to keeping disabled or elderly people around (and everyone else healthy). COVID has really shown me how much eugenics is still alive in the US that people can do a mental calculus about who is "expendable"

The lockdowns we're effective. But lockdowns aren't really possible. The virus is/was going to spread almost no matter what we did. If you are worried about the disabled and elderly, the solution isn't to lockdown the entire society. And if you compare USA to other countries, including Sweden, other numbers are fairly similar.

Should they have done more? Absolutely… and the fumble by Biden when his PressSec joked about sending testing kits to everyone for free was a very let them eat cake moment.

Because Covid's broad parameters were known to the experts and attentive laypeople in February 2020: spread through the air and quite infectious, but not particularly serious to a healthy individual. The importance of risk factors was strongly expected but not known for a fact. Analogies to the Spanish Flu were drawn, and dismissed by the experts.

And the expert response was basically "this one thing is more important than anything else, and minimizing it takes priority over all other concerns". Anyone asking questions of their recommendations, never mind criticizing them, was labelled as anti-science. The "expert" response to serious and informed questions, some of them from excellent medical people, was dismissive and condescending.

But it was obvious that its spread could only be slowed, not stopped. It was clear at the start of "Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread" that the facts on the ground would be pretty much the same after as before. So the logic leading to the first fifteen days would lead to the next fifteen days, and so on. But because the first lockdowns were supposedly just two weeks, their cost was minimized. No one spoke up to the obvious logic of their perpetuation.

Our public health experts failed to push against the fears, and failed to address the obvious consequences of their recommendations. They failed to honestly consider and respond to questions from other scientists, who, if not "public health experts", certainly had the training and intelligence to pose serious questions. And we, as citizens and in our government, failed to question those experts, and to conduct a proper layperson's analysis of their technical statements. All in all, a very poor performance by all of us.

we should have focused our mitigation efforts only on the immune deficient (elderly, obese, other diseases, etc.), not everyone, as the optimal approach.

1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation.

2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place.

3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up.

When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down.

No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?

The stay-at-home "orders" were more like suggestions: completely unenforced. How many people got any kind of penalty for traveling during stay-at-home? A dozen in the entire country at most? Police have no trouble pulling over speeders and drunk drivers, but suddenly it's impossible enforce stay-at-home? Governors were all talk and no action.

The only thing that actually consistently happened were public school closures, because the government itself runs public schools. Everything else was half-assed, where the government was just begging/hoping that companies would voluntarily close their doors and that people would voluntarily stop spreading the virus around. That never happened, and the federal and state governments seemed to be totally powerless to make it happen.

But while the government can't order you to stay home, they can order a business to close. And by that metric we were under a lockdown because going about your life like before was impossible. Can't go to the gym, can't go out to eat, can't go hiking or to the beach if you live in LA. It wasn't a lockdown on individuals so much as it was a lockdown on just about everything else.

LA and NYC are some of the densest cities in the States. 12.5% of the US lives in California. Tons more people in close proximity for a virus to tear through than in a hollowed-out former manufacturing city in the Midwest.

That was where the "experts" should have been saying "look, there really isn't a lot we can do, outside of drastic measures that could do as much harm as help." But everyone wanted to Do Something, and the experts didn't want to seem impotent, and we proceeded thoughtlessly into a mistake.

I'm not sure what you mean by "0.3 risk". 0.3% case fatality rate? But where are you getting that number from? COVID19 had roughly a 2% CFR early on when testing was limited and treatments hadn't been developed. It was around 1% for most of the pandemic. It is *now* as low as 0.3% in highly vaccinated countries, but still about 0.5% in the US.

It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history. A million Americans are dead. I'm not sure how people can think the risks were over exaggerated.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

By percentage of global population, I beg to differ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

It also overwhelmingly killed the very elderly, an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list.

They exist now though? And they died, so we must count them among the dead. Nothing else makes sense here.

The CFR statistics in that graph are misleading anyways, confirmed cases early on would have skewed drastically towards more severe due to lack of widespread testing. Similar arguments can be made for large spikes later on as the ability to get a confirmed case can dry up due to demand for lab tests.

The fundamental flaw in your logic is there was no "US policy response", each state had their own regulations, and they varied widely from shutting down churches, to next to nothing. So you're going to have to be a lot more specific about which policies you're referring to.

And, if you have actual analysis of the benefits and costs associated with any piece of any response, you should totally publish your results. But just saying it is completely worthless.

We all know actual experts will be analyzing this for decades, probably centuries. There is no doubt some of the policies helped, and some of them made things worse. Any blanket statements about all policies being too much, is going to require some pretty solid evidence.

The issue I think is that there was very little government support for individuals affected economically.

On the other hand, that this has become such a trope indicates that the stay at home suggestions ended up working. People who weren't paying close attention to details thought the suggestions did have the force of law, without there actually being such laws.

(As an aside, I sympathize with small business owners and think "lockdown" is appropriate (albeit hyperbolic) to describe business closures. It's the society-wide usage of the term I'm talking about, where it's implied that people were not allowed to leave their homes. A few counties in California were the only instances that I'm aware of)

I went out a few times to drive on the empty roads but the only reason I went out was to explicitly drive, I wasn't actually going anywhere because there was nowhere to go.

You could still visit friends and family, public parks, or even have private parties. And since you weren't being physically pulled into work, you could visit distant friends/family or even go on vacation and stay in a hotel. I'm not saying you wanted to do any of these things given the pandemic, but it's fallacious to imply that you were only stuck at home due to government fiat.

As far as why they worked, I ran into enough people who thought such a recommendation had the force of law (and I wasn't going to correct them). At the time I had a bifurcated living situation and was concerned about doing the commute, but looking into it I could continue going about my routine as usual.

US pandemic policy response has assumed the cost of shutdown to be infitinte, and has not appropriately reckoned with the coats of letting the virus proliferate, save for the risk of mass death by overwhelming hospital capacity.

The shutdowns (shelter-in-place orders) were short and have been over for more than a year now. Governors have been eager to consistently reduce mitigation measures as fast as possible.

We're seeing the strain on our health care system. Medical staff are overworked and heavily traumatized, leading to a bidding war for their labor. Less staff leads to harder work, and can go into a death spiral. We might reach a tipping point where our health care system collapses.

As with many things, the US response combined all the worst parts of the left's reaction to the pandemic with all the worst aspects of the right's. We had ham-fisted lockdowns (of dubious effectiveness) that destroyed small business and harmed mental health while simultaneously we had a right-wing crackpot antivaccination movement that prevented vaccine herd immunity from being achieved fast enough to really impact the virus.

Our present day two party system is like a two fisted beat down in boxing. First you get a left, then you get a right, then a left, then a right, until you're curled up on the floor and you can't take any more.

Maybe a constitutional amendment to ban political parties would help, or at least ranked choice voting so we no longer "have" to vote for incompetent fools or "our vote doesn't count" against the other incompetent fool.

I love everyone trying to play epidemiologist or public policy coordinator like they know what they’re talking about; what hubris.

They passionately hate these leaders.

There’s plenty to hate and more.

When did all of those benefits and stimulus for the common person end? It was September wasn't it with some states stopping them months before that yet the states that stopped them before are still having trouble filling jobs.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Others did not though. Many people have private agreements with their landlords for payment, and some cities have their own policies. Some are still collecting unemployment. Many just have never reentered the workforce. For example, many “Baby Boomers” decide this was retirement time and retired en-masse instead of being spread out.

And then there is the whole “Great Resignation” going on for the rest.

You don't get to call us "essential workers" and treat us like shit. This is the first time in my living memory McDonald's and co raised their starting wages. Line cooks were the most impacted and it was the most dangerous job last year. You want that to be worse, for small businesses to survive?

I can reincorporate "Drekk Design Studio", the line cook can't re-enter his mortal coil. We should have paid everyone every month of the pandemic and enforced these public health measures like Germany (1 in 10 infected vs the US 1 in 3).

We would? How do you know?

This is a bit of a dead end argument. By the same token, nobody guarantees that there is food in the supermarket for people to purchase. Yet, if there wasn't, and 90% of us starved, it'd be a fairly major problem. Small businesses and their employees make of roughly half of "society at large".

Also, what the heck? The Supreme Court has ruled businesses have some constitutional protections repeatedly.

For the first two weeks, the lockdown was indeed completely justified. But it's completely unjustified that it lasted so much longer than that, now that we know what's going on (in particular, there's some places with lockdown rules still in effect today, 2 years later).

And it is important to distinguish those who are against mandates from those who are against the vaccine.

It's very notable that the states where the racial gap is highest are

a) not doing very well on mass vaccination b) Republican

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

So I think it's fair to ask if these people have been denied the vaccine more than they've rejected it.

Meanwhile, the stats fairly clearly show political affiliation to be a bigger factor:

> According to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) released on Sept. 28, gaps in vaccination rates across racial and ethnic groups have virtually disappeared—while gaps reflecting political affiliation have widened substantially.

Nevertheless, in New York blacks are under-vaccinated.

I don't think it affects the general trend though.

> NAM found that “racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care than white people—even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable.” By “lower-quality health care,” NAM meant the concrete, inferior care that physicians give their black patients. NAM reported that minority persons are less likely than white persons to be given appropriate cardiac care, to receive kidney dialysis or transplants, and to receive the best treatments for stroke, cancer, or AIDS. It concluded by describing an “uncomfortable reality”: “some people in the United States were more likely to die from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes simply because of their race or ethnicity, not just because they lack access to health care.”

But I wouldn't want to doubt your anectodal evidence that black people are "smart" enough to not face institutional racism.

It's even better they all have a smart device or personal computer and internet connection to make the appointment or even know it's available for free. What really makes us a first world country is the knowledge that all our citizens, including ethnic minorities, speak our unofficially official English language with fluency to navigate our fragmented-but-free medical system.

And lastly it's better still that they live in a country with a rich and storied history of medical experimentation on black people that drives down trust in the first free medical intervention in modern memory.

In seriousness, close friends of mine are an hour from the nearest pharmacy. Millions of Americans live in remote areas, and we have zero infrastructure in these areas. Food deserts aren't just lacking food.

Edit: Ages 18-44

It’s very clear that the OP is talking about systemic racism. Your anecdotes are meaningless. We need to look at statistical data. If African Americans are vaccinated less, it doesn’t matter if CVS isn’t explicitly denying them the shots. It’s possible that they may not have as many pharmacies in their neighborhoods. That they can’t get a day off to get the shots (because it’s not a mandate) in many Red States. Maybe there haven’t been enough outreach programs like Blue states trying to convince the community of the importance of getting vaccinated…

Anyway, if it’s justifiable to believe that the medical community is behaving untrustworthily towards black people, wouldn’t that be evidence that they’re unethical in general, and reason enough for anyone, black or not, not to get the vaccine?

As opposed to white people? Why does it matter whether you mistrust the US government because of Tuskegee Syphilis Study, or because of MKULTRA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

So does the current drive for vaccination.

It’s weird that you don’t see the connection.

I’d resist extrapolating too much from that. “hasn’t got a vaccine” doesn’t equal “is anti-vax”. There are still issues with accessibility of the vaccine (varying wildly according to location) and those with lower incomes working hourly-paid jobs are concerned about having to take time off to both get the vaccine (two doses) and deal with the side effects.

That’s not to say no black people are anti-vax, there’s a strong distrust of the medical establishment by many (given the history it’s understandable!) but just pointing out that it’s not a 1:1 relationship.

It is easy to blame antivaxxers. Could you however name a few countries where vaccine herd immunity was achieved?

Two parties might be the worse possible number of parties in terms of creating polarization and extremism.

I'm generally not a fan of voter initiative processes, but imagine states passing a voter initiative to make ALL public offices non-partisan?

Yes mortality is low and kids are quite safe from hard impacts but they don't live in a bubble. They meet people.

Also: even if you don't die of it, it could have severe impacts on your life. Long Covid is a thing.

It's not that simple...

That doesn't really follow logically. The reason why that's the advice on airplanes is that you can be unconscious for a while (a minute or two?) and not suffer brain damage. Therefore the cost of helping yourself is fairly low. It's not clear that the same dynamic applies to lockdowns.

Instead some Governments went out and sacrificed everybody.

Harsh point to make but at this point I hold what I consider to be a very justifiable grudge.

I didn't have Covid yet. At least as far as I know. I work in health IT and have been vaccinating and protecting myself according to the book. It works.

There’s far more to life and jobs than that.

As for how it’s inevitable - maybe it wasn’t, but look around you. An awful lot of destruction we did for questionable benefits.

And I know that with the next pandemic, far less people are going to listen. To them, the credibility of experts has been permanently damaged.

Also, we did try, it was called Payroll Protection and it was an epic fail.

Nobody is pretending that lockdown hurt people. This is a strawman.

It's pretty obvious that 'politicians' took into account potential costs of shutdowns. Shutdowns aren't very popular with anyone, and politicians tend to want to get re-elected.

The question really is, how, as a society, do we distribute the costs of the pandemic, and different societies have tried different trade-offs.