I was all for various covid measures, did all the vaccines, didn't travel, practiced social distancing meticulously... to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.
Looking back, many governments around the world applied ridiculously strict restrictions, which just highlighted how badly incompetent in the best headless chicken form they are in SHTF scenarios. You couldn't travel more than 1km from your home (ie France), you couldn't be out after 6/7/8 pm even if you just want to go for a stroll or run in the forest, alone (which I do a lot). Things like these were completely needless and heavily infringed on common folks basic rights, not even going into the topic of fucking up population physical health massively down the road. Not surprisingly population's overall mental health decreased significantly too.
Forcing education of kids from home is seen as failure of even greater proportions. Not only was the system utterly unprepared in first months, but this form just doesn't work as well as direct physical contact. Kids missing tons of societal development that will never work well in digital form. We should have just put extra care into protecting vulnerable and otherwise move on with our lives. If I would be an old fart and somebody would give me choice of fucking up my grandkids lives for some potential extra safety for me, I would choose my grandkids anytime, everytime.
When we could have handled it ie like Sweden (from what I've heard), without any significant basic rights restrictions, and with resulting covid numbers very much the same. Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof (within these diseases number ranges of course). Diabetes, cardiovascular and mental issues are already up.
And one more point I haven't seen much mentioned - society as a whole completely fucked up its approach to healthcare workers. Yes there were evening claps for few months. While a nice gesture, they won't fix the burnout many had. So anywhere I look, health systems have much less medical personnel, mainly nurses simply left their jobs. The situation ie in France is so bad some big cities have to close emergencies through the weekend (!!!). Some emergency doctors left too. There is no quick fix for this. An example - I've recently spent 4 hours to get 1 blood test done (something taking 15 mins before) - and that is already optimized for timing and location since my wife is a doctor.
This period won't be judged nicely by our descendants.
In the end, US casualties only being ~1 million was actually a positive outcome, things could have been a lot worse even if exactly the same people got sick but they did so even slightly faster. Worse suffering 5+ times as many casualties in 2020 would not have prevented the variants which would happily reinfect people.
There wasn’t any great options, but many of them where far worse.
1) Healthcare is too important for light touch regulation =>
2) Big political fight over regulation =>
3) Competition in healthcare largely disappears =>
4) Oh no something went wrong, now we have to adjust what human rights are available based on how prepared the government is for a rather predictable crisis (COVID wasn't/isn't even the bad-case for a highly contagious respiratory disease).
There are people seriously trying to argue that walking more than single-digit kilometres from a body's home depends on what the government's hospital policy was 5 years ago. In complete seriousness, this is crazy. I thought we'd agreed that basic rights were a thing but it turns out large segments of the population and bureaucrats seriously don't believe that.
And exactly what we got to show for this is questionable. Border controls are the only government tool that I have faith in after that pandemic. Even the vaccine we only managed because people agreed that the usual safety procedures would take to long and that we could skip them because the economic damage caused by fearful people was too great. The governments of the world caused a lot of problems these last few years.
Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined, let go resulting in 2 additional deaths, and then permanently quarantined in the US because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in the early 1900’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon The most common versions historically was locking people in their homes or isolating a community from the outside.
As to your complaint, walking outside does carry the risk of infecting others as people demonstrably have gotten COVID from walking past each other. It’s a low risk which why it was generally acceptable, but officials where balancing even this vs more people dying.
If you look at agency budgets you’d think our money would’ve bought a better plan.
The US for example encouraged but didn’t mandate the general public get vaccinated. It’s easy to say that’s the wrong choice, but people would have seriously objected.
I don’t know about the situation in the USA where everything seemed very political and what was done was far less stringent than in my own country but here in France it was pretty obvious that most of the measures were taken haphazardly mostly to placate an ageing population. It was very funny. The media kept blaming the young socialising for cases when it was painfully obvious that most contaminations came from schools.
That parahraph seems to contradict itself. By locking down we slowed down transmission, until treatments and vaccines were available. That is why the effects were so mild for you vs the people who caught it in the earlier waves. How was it to 'no avail', when you state the benefit right afterwards?
The reason we have annual flu shots is because influenza mutates so readily, so it's not like most people have a highly developed immunity to whatever common influenza strain is going around anyway. And fun fact (truly, it's awesome), at least one strain of influenza appears to have gone extinct. It seems possible that your prediction is completely backwards, and that our scattershot headless chicken COVID mitigation policies have managed to permanently improve flu season.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/03/1003020235/certain-strains-of...
It really, really, isn't.
Hospitals the world over were completely and wholly overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19. Lockdowns reduced transmissions, hospitalisations dropped.
That's it. That's all that needs understanding.
Sometimes you have to put on your adult pants, realize you live in a society and not n million individual states of nature, and give up a bit of individual freedom, temporarily, for the safety of the whole.
Because I didn't need to, and no one required me to? Because I didn't believe having to wear a mask, get a vaccine and not being able to eat out at a restaurant was an intolerable violation of my rights, given the alternative?
The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others. Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
Obviously the balance between liberty and safety leads to anarchy on one extreme and authoritarianism on the other, but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And once it sank, we can add few other easily bannable cases (random examples - sugar, no exercise) which will put the number of saved lives in few millions, per every year.
Yet suddenly all those internet warriors who feel righteous and know by heart what needs to be done for society and by society are quiet about these. Nobody is arguing government should force people to exercise, yet school showed us how easily it can be done. It would save more lives than any covid measure ever taken, it will measurably improve people's lives, its quality and happiness, and no adverse effect apart from US HFCS industry.
Where do you draw the line? Certainly elsewhere than I do. But I am not showing that line down your throat and forcing you to live by it, do I. Can you please righteous people like you let people like me take a walk in the forest, alone? Is it really that hard to understand?
This is typical internet discussion for 21st century - few people are very vocal, and they give the impression their voice is consensus. Yet reality is a bit more complex.
This isn't an objective argument.
> Because I didn't need to... Because I didn't believe...
I agree with all the things you mentioned here. However, you failed to mention a myriad of things the government imposed that were, at best, worthless and, at worst, counter-productive. Did you agree with closing beaches/parks? Closing outdoor gatherings is and was known to be anti-science at the time. It had the nice side effect of having people gather indoors because people are social and you won't stop them from gathering.
> The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others
Would you be on board with the sealing in of doors as happened in China or is that too much imposition on your freedom? Would you agree with the travel restrictions placed on people in Australia? Both of those instances achieve your goal of reducing your chance of getting and spreading COVID.
There is an entire population of people who have different, subjective, opinions. You're going to have a bad time if you think yours is the _one true opinion_ and fail to tolerate any descent.
You and I seem to be of similar minds in what restrictions are reasonable (and I tolerate a bit more or less because I know I'm not objectively correct). The difference between us is that when some people think the line should be drawn elsewhere, I don't derisively refer to them like this:
> Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
> but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And (nearly) nobody thinks it is because that's the easy question. The hard question is always how much and you've done a masterful job of acting like people who have a different answer to the hard question instead have a different answer to the easy question thereby making your disdain of them justified.
This example (that I suspect you shoe-horned in to rant) undermines, but also fully demonstrates, your entire point because you've just casually and conveniently ignored the reduced risk _to society as a whole_. I.e., those actually vulnerable from getting sick in the first instance, but further still overwhelming the health and welfare services to the detriment of *everybody*.
But also reeks of FY;GM.