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.