That would surprise me if lockdowns didn't appear in any pandemic playbook since they've been practiced since antiquity and until the 20th century where the only way to prevent spread of contagious disease.

The only way lock downs were even remotely possible was zoom. Without zoom, none of this would have been possible. One has to be incredibly privileged to think lockdowns can work in any place but very advanced "first world" societies. Getting villagers living in the 12th century to lockdown would mean they'd all starve to death. Same with getting some favella in Brazil to lock down. It just doesn't work.

It requires an immense, huge amount of privilege to support virtually any of our response to covid. Anybody but a select group of wealth upper class people get absolutely fucked over by lockdowns. Fucked over far worse than covid ever would have.

12th century farmers were practicing subsistence agriculture. Locking the entire village off from the outer world was absolutely possible.

The cities are the big problem. During the Black Death, people coming to cities were quarantined before they were allowed to enter. Even then, many cities saw half their population die. A very significant number of settlements was wiped out altogether.

Ironically, it was actually quite beneficial to the regular villager - provided you survived. The Black Death has been directly linked to the collapse of feudalism in Europe, among with many other sociological developments.

I don't think the people stocking shelves in grocery stores, making deliveries, picking up garbage, driving busses, and tending the sick were able to work over zoom even today.

See the "died with" thing is where you lost me. It was obvious that there was an illness killing lots of people. But then you had people who didn't want to admit it, blamed co-morbidities, said doctors were deliberately inflating the numbers to make money, etc. Those people poisoned the well of discourse.

"Died with" was not a meaningful distinction at the time and falls under the "bad faith" category for me.

It’s a huge distinction. There is a massive difference between dying because of Covid vs. dying from something else and happening to test positive. By combining them together, Covid looks worse than it is. Then politicians use that faulty data to make bad decisions and the media publishes that bad data and freaks the shit out of people.

One cannot claim to be on team “science and data” when their data is a garbage heap. Being able to tell between “hospitalized because of Covid” and “died because of Covid” vs “hospitalized and tested positive” and “died and tested positive” is an incredibly important thing.

I have no idea why people continue to dismiss this other than fears of people “not taking Covid serious” because… well it might not be as serious as the trash data suggests. It’s completely manipulative, a common theme from “the experts”

You cannot in good faith claim to be “following the data” and accept commingling “from” and “with”.

The reported death numbers absolutely were inflated in many areas, at least early in the pandemic. This is a proven fact not open to dispute. For example, Santa Clara County had to revise their death toll down by 22% because they were using invalid criteria.

https://sanjosespotlight.com/santa-clara-county-revises-tota...

Whether such classification errors were deliberate is a separate issue. In most cases I suspect it was more due to lack of resources and/or incompetence rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Medicare did pay hospitals more to care for COVID-19 patients. That is also a fact not open to dispute. Whether doctors or hospitals deliberately inflated numbers to make money is unknown.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...

About half of the COVID-19 positive hospital patients were admitted for unrelated reasons, and only tested positive as part of admission screening.

https://gothamist.com/news/new-preliminary-state-data-shows-...

>poisoned the well of discourse

Please find me a single topic which impacts more than a roomful of people where someone isn't engaging in this type of discourse.

This sounds like you justifying your former false beliefs (or at least lack of willingness to investigate alternative beliefs) by blaming it on other people who were also wrong.

It's not true because it dissents from government approved science. That's the only definition of "not true" which matters for culture warriors.