One policy failing in this instance, was our reduction of stockpiled PPE several years earlier.
Since COVID, there has been no discusion or suggestion of how to prepare better for next time
>This seems very inconsistent with what I remember.
Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine <https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>
>There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election.
Ah, this is you doing some searching, realizing that TechBro8615 is right, and trying to justify what you had already written.
Personally, I read the study data for it (and for some of the other 150+ vaccines that had been attempted), and figured I'd go for it when it was available. Which took forever.
"Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word."
"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."
The main claims seems to be accidental release of a virus. If it was deliberate, you probably wouldn't release it right at the lab that developed it...
There’s a reason the US banned that variety of gain of function — and a reason why people are outraged Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance sponsored it in China to circumvent that.
I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time.
And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is:
1. Wrong
2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.
Neither approach worked. The NZ approach merely delayed the inevitable and was horrific for citizens who wanted to return home and were unable to do so. One NZ citizen had to rely on the kindness of the Taliban because nowhere else would take her. Incidents like that are nothing to be proud of.
Meanwhile, good luck implementing such controls in places where it's easier to get to!
History will record that the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe, revealing the truth that expert advice was damaging and futile. Something that was already clear in 2020 to anyone who cared to look.
Anyway, death rates are garbage data during COVID. They were classifying murders by shooting as COVID deaths. They were classifying people who died at 95 as COVID deaths. Where lockdowns were implemented they wanted the measured death rates to be as high as possible to justify what was being done, so classification criteria were as loose as possible. In NZ the political narrative relied on border closures being effective so they needed deaths to be as low as possible. Public health is so corrupt and malign that you can never really know what's going on if you listen to them.
> All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice
Then they are idiots because COVID wasn't eliminated, was it? As you said yourself, their strategy was at best one of delaying the inevitable.
It works when (or rather almost entirely because) you’re in a geographically isolated island.
Maybe the Netherlands could have pulled this of if they really wanted to, like them time they flooded half of the country to keep out the French but it’s not applicable to any other country in Europe
One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families.
There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID.
They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy.
To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.
I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing.
You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.
As an aside certainly some have died from aggressive dog breeds. I personally agree with the bans that exist in some municipalities on them to prevent a toddler from getting mauled. But I can see how some don't and that is a valid perspective.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like "flattening the curve."
Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that damage. It was the policies.
Which logically I agree with, although I still think that post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor transmission, any government that didn't allow people to socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.
I think we could have done a lot better, even with the available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.
The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and so forth.
"Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the science.
And even without the policies, things were going to happen.
The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH) started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on the matter for instance, because they didn’t have any better alternatives, and it would have been worse otherwise.
Oh how we forget!
I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year.
And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words).
Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
The problem is that most COVID cases in hospitals were of people who were infected in hospital itself. They weren't admitted for it. Just looking at "covid cases in hospitals" would therefore be misleading. That was never highlighted by the media or government officials because it was embarrassing but sometimes dashboards would reveal it.
As an example look at Switzerland's data. It's useful because it was still being updated as recently as May.
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZ...
As you can see, it made no difference whatsoever and actually at the start of the dataset the hospitals are way under utilized.
Some countries have worse hospital systems than Switzerland, and regularly experience shortages of care even in normal times. But this example shows that for a good healthcare system COVID could be handled easily without even coming close to running out of capacity.
Ireland (where I live) have one of the worst, and I followed the numbers religiously for most of Covid. Without the lockdown/other measures to reduce spread, the health care system would have collapsed multiple times (hence why we had some of the longest lockdowns in the world).
Like, my mother had cancer and suffered massively due to the lockdowns (I firmly believe it was a large contributor to her death last year) but that doesn't mean that they weren't necessary, at least in Ireland.
> the health care system would have collapsed
You were told that but the Swiss were told that too. In fact they were told the hospitals were collapsing, even as their own dashboard said the exact opposite.
Governments lied about COVID, all the time. Lockdowns had no impact on spread, and there's a ton of studies showing that by now, just go searching for them on Google Scholar. But you don't even need studies. Just eyeball the graphs of various countries and try to spot the impact on case numbers of these supposedly mandatory interventions. There isn't any. SARS-CoV-2 like all coronaviruses spreads like a gas and these viral clouds can hang around and travel long distances in the air. Lockdowns are meaningless given such a modality of spread.
This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe
My personal pandemic experience was luckier than many . 3 wilderness years of lost time only; of no growth. no loss of business, work , home etc. more importantly I’m alive and so is everyone I love
Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there were zero "good" options. In a global pandemic, every choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least bad.
Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect. That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
No teachers died, and there was very little in school transmission. Our provincial health officer in charge made the choice based on the data available. BC has a very low overall COVID death rate compared to other jurisdictions. You can go look up the data on deaths and satisfy yourself that closing schools as long as many jurisdictions did was a stupid idea. The idea that we didn't know that at the time is also suspect, since data driven decision makers like the one in BC opened schools back up once the risk of transmission between children was determined.
Yet we saved by some estimates lower tens of millions of lives, and we tested en masse extremely promising new way of administering cures/vaccinations. Attacking that takes more than just some emotional outbursts, better come with some cold hard facts. Ie I don't know a single person who doesn't have in circle of family or close friends somebody who passed away directly due to covid.
Not one intervention has been shown to reduce mortality by 50% across the general population — you’re making facts up to deny the harms caused.
[1] https://www.dagensmedicin.se/specialistomraden/infektion/sve...
[2] https://www.europaportalen.se/2023/03/sverige-hade-lagsta-ov...
Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some educational company.
The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
Attending schools is about 50% education, 50% social development.
Many students don't have strong family structures at home and fall behind academically and socially if not attending in person.
Kids can catch up. I think people perceive the less than 2 years of remote school that these kids are irreversibly behind in some huge proportion.
The good benefit of not dying easily outweighs the bad effect of a slightly less optimal education for a brief period of time.
It's only close to true for those kids that would have done reasonably anyway.
For those kids that don't have the kind of family environment that will allow them to catch up, it's gonna be a long haul. And they may never get there. That weighs on them for the rest of their time — on the education system, while they're still in it. And it weighs on us, in terms of the resources they take away from other children in education, and then on wider society later in life.
Since the lockdowns, there seems to have been a change in the mindset of some groups — skipping school has been made acceptable. There's a whole bunch of kids that might never return to education as a normal routine. It's likely the hangover will be long and painful for some groups.
Schools aren't the solution to the problem you're describing (children with bad homes) and was a problem before COVID.
Bigger picture is that it is better to keep a larger portion of the population from dying or developing long term complications than slightly (very) protect a few children that are already being abused.
If you're really going to stand by your position then I suggest a reasonable compromise and that is expanding access to licensed professional social workers and community health programs that are there to help parents and children succeed in life.
Plenty of students do. The percentage of parents that does is indeed small, but not trivial either.
Re: governmental open source - the government is typically bad at such things. It’ll be private sector, educator, and contributor sourced as with all great things in the space of tech, for better or worse.
One of my friend's daughter was 6 years old in the middle of the mess. He simply could NOT get her to "mode switch"--if she was home and daddy was home it's "vacation time" and anything else was a miserable fight.
He and couple of other families finally got together to pay a teacher and have a "pod" of 4 other children in their local housing development. That way the daughter went to "school" for some number of hours a day and her father didn't have to fight the "mode switch" any more.
All four of those students are now WAY ahead of all their classmates.
But the story (s)he tells is extremely interesting and is useful to others.
Neither individual home tutors nor parental tutoring nor online schooling seemed to be able to solve the problem. The solution required an in-person mode switch of the teacher and environment.
Now, this could obviously be different for, say, college age or adult learners. Young children don't have the same general understanding of conditions that adults do. On the other hand, "mode switch" is a thing even for adults as we talk about "flow" all the time.
The ones I know about were mostly elementary school math teachers, so it was like you had online lessons covering grade 5-9 math, almost overnight. Of course it made me think: "How much work would it take to systematically cover everything?" At least, everything on the elementary and high school level -- perhaps universities are a special case, but for every elementary or high school lessons, you have hundreds of teachers that teach it every year, so a few of them should be capable and willing to do a solid work in front of the camera.
And it would be so incredibly easy! Not in the sense that I would underestimate the work of a good teacher required to make a good lesson... but in the sense that the teachers are already preparing those lessons anyway -- it is their everyday work. The only thing that is needed is for them to repeat the lesson once again, in an empty room in front of the camera.
The greatest actual obstacle is probably that many don't think about it, or don't want the extra work of learning to use the camera, buying the right camera, cutting the video, making and maintaining an online account, etc. Which is why this would benefit from some division of labor. How about letting the teacher prepare and do the lessons, and have someone else operate the camera and cut the videos? The advantage is that the camera person can be the same for many different subjects. More teachers would probably be willing to join the project this way.
Now imagine the easiest possible implementation: very simply edit the videos (just remove the mistakes, or maybe the parts where the teacher took a break, speed up 3x the erasing of the blackboard, etc.), upload those videos to YouTube (to the teachers' accounts if they have some, or to a project's common account if they don't), and then create a simple web catalogue of all the videos. So that the person would visit the homepage, choose the subject, choose the grade, choose the topic, and then see a list of videos from different teachers teaching that topic.
I think the "minimum viable product" should cover at least one subject in one grade completely, so that it is a reliable resource that the user can keep visiting during the entire year, knowing that they will always find what they are looking for. Otherwise, there is really not much advantage over using Google. Expand from there to cover more grades and more subjects. Basically, always provide an equivalent of a textbook for the entire grade, not just a video here and a video there and a disappointment everywhere else. -- But of course, once you have the entire grade of a subject covered, you can keep adding more videos from other teachers even if they do not cover the entire grade. If you have 1 video for one topic, and 3 different videos for another topic, that is perfectly okay. The important thing is that all topics (in given subject and grade) are covered at least by 1 video. Alternative videos are good, because if you don't get it after watching a video, it might help to hear another person explain it differently.
I think you could do all this relatively quickly and cheaply. I mean, if you find teachers willing to do this for free (and I believe you could, considering the fact that a few of them already did it alone), and if the schools provide the empty classrooms in the evening, you basically just need to pay someone with the camera to record the videos, someone to cut the videos, and someone to make the web front end. That would be like, three people's salary, and in return you get hundreds of videos each year.
Providing all those videos for free could dramatically change the experience of education. Anytime a child didn't understand the lesson at school, or was sick, they could watch the lessons at home. This would be an awesome resource for homeschoolers, or for talented kids who want to learn the knowledge of higher grades. Adults could refresh their knowledge, whether out of sheer curiosity, or because they want to help their kids.
And because the contents of school education do not change so fast (except maybe for computer science lessons), the content once produced could be used for decades. And once it is there, it can still be further improved -- like, if you think that some teacher did not explain a certain topic properly, make a better video yourself. If certain knowledge becomes obsolete, or something is added to the curriculum, just record that one lesson.
You could also dub those lessons to the languages of minorities (by different people, again the division of labor), etc.
*
In before "but isn't Khan Academy doing exactly this?" -- yes and no. Yes, Khan Academy provides awesome online education, a strong alternative to schools. And it does much more than I propose here; such as automatically evaluated exercises, tracking of student progress, etc. But the cost is that preparing all this takes a lot of time. Also, the barriers to contributing are high; a random teacher cannot just record their lessons and add them.
I would like to see a system where contributing is simple for teachers, and therefore we could reasonably expect to have the elementary and high school education covered systematically; to have alternative explanations for the same topic, to keep getting new and improved videos for the existing topics, etc. (And there is nothing wrong with having Khan Academy as an alternative to this; the more options, the better.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/13pgt...
Here is a chart listing their cumulative mortality, from the OECD dataset. Measured as fractions of their current populations. This chart assumes all COVID deaths are excess (which undercounts real excess).
USA pop: 334,814,000
AUS pop: 26,479,000
https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-...
Total excess is pink; COVID deaths (total) are orange; non-COVID attributable excess is blue.
A few points:
- COVID deaths are about 4x lower, but excess deaths around 3x
- there’s more non-COVID attributable excess than COVID deaths in AUS
- the USA has higher per capita expected mortality than AUS, as well; by about 1.5x
See here:
https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/all-mortality-co...
I’m not sure I’d count this to interventions, which when directly measured seem to provide lower benefits, versus the fact US healthcare is questionable and the US unhealthy in ways dangerous during COVID — as measured by expected mortality being higher.
https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...
I cited the OECD data; I downloaded it, added up COVID deaths, excess deaths, and subtracted COVID from excess to get “non-COVID attributed excess”.
But they deliberately chose the least _good_ policies, when it was very obvious that the choices they were making were by far the worst.
What lesson did I learn from this?
I learned that toddlers will throw an epic hissy fit if they don't get what they want, even if what they want is impossible, impractical, or goes against either their own personal interest or the interests of their family. They'll insist on doing things that have a very decent chance of killing them on the spot.
"I want it!" followed by 120 decibel screeching is the behaviour of a toddler.
We're teaching him better, of course. We're teaching about sharing. About saying sorry. Telling him when to say "thank you" and "please". I'm also teaching him not to poke metal utensils into power sockets or to sneeze in my face.
Apparently not all parents bothered with this. Their children grew up to be big children, unable the grasp these simple concepts despite having adult bodies.
Yes, the speed limit on the highway is inconvenient for you if you're late for a meeting. No, nobody cares about you and your stupid appointment, we care about the family of four you might kill for your own convenience if we let you drive as fast as you possibly can.
This is the crux of it. Some people think being allowed to drive as fast as they can is freedom, and any curtailment of that freedom is oppression.
What's truly sad about all of this is not the political polarisation over the type of health policy that goes back centuries[1]. No, it's that Katalin Karikó, the woman who spent here entire life toiling away in obscurity, never got a proper "Thank you!" from the world that she saved.
She should be more famous than Beyoncé and richer than Bill Gates, and instead she's a little-known scientist with a few pats on the back from jealous colleagues mumbling "I could have invented that" under their breath.
[1] Go look up how old the word "quarantine" is and where it originated from.
It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group.
Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions.
I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.
The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0 for people to understand this.
So it wasn’t. We knew it was mild, certainly worse than flu, but still mostly killing the elderly above life expectancy.
- We knew newspapers were grossly exaggerating information to the point of saying obvious bait (“the vaccine enlarges the penis” — yup they said it),
- We knew newspapers were under gag order to publish misinformation.
- We knew that most governments declared the law of exception and state of emergency, so from that point, no information could be trusted.
We knew it was mild because everyone was in a state of hysteria, from “SO YOU WANT TO KILL ALL GRANDMOTHERS” to “IN NYC THEY USE GIANT DUMPSTER TRUCKS TO CARRY THE DEADS TO THE MORGUE, SO WHY ARE YOU AGAINST LOCKDOWNS”. We knew it was all a gross exaggeration.
What if Covid had a 50% mortality rate? Would that not have justified a lockdown?
No, not even a 100% mortality rate justifies a lockdown
Movement of individuals (as long as he/she is not moving into your home/territory etc.) is IMO a sacred 'right' that one must offer one's fellow humans. It's a slippery slope if a dire situation however real is used as a justification for a lockdown.
I disagree with the concept that individual freedoms trumps the safety of other's, as does society at large, which deems some level of negligence to be criminal.
I hope the next pandemic has a short incubation period and ultra-high mortality.
1. https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/05/fugitive-with-untreat...
See, you’re using the fallacy, right here. We can still do both.
I was hoping you'd explain in more detail, so I wont have to assume what your reasoning. By "do both", were you perhaps referring to measures like masks mandates while allowing people move freely? Unsurprisingly, some people felt mandates violated the sanctity of their individual rights too.
sangnoir, Think really hard and you will be able to come up with something (where 'both' can be done).
If you cannot come up with anything then I'd say that even having a discourse with someone who can potentially come up with something is pointless because of the wide chasm.
At least as far as COVID is concerned, and that's because COVID isn't a realistic concern for most children.
There are people (children, but also others) for whom it is a marked concern, and appropriate risk mitigation strategies should be taking. Working with the gung-ho assumption that all spaces are essentially risk free would represent a fail in your duty of care.
Some of us are more afraid of an all powerful state using any excuse to further their own interests.
No, certainly not. I want people to make their own informed choices. It can be heart-wrenching for oneself to observe people make (what you think) an obvious wrong choice, but if you had any any life experiences of substance, you will realize that all you can do is give people the most accurate information that you have, but you should never, ever impose your decision (even if it's for the person's good) if the person does not consent to it. One could probably make an exception for very young kids.
Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Side note: who exactly decides what is good for the individual?
These are two contradictory sentences. Wanting people to make their own informed choices unimpinged by government action while a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate exists is definitionally being okay with the death of 99% of the human population. Like, that is the outcome so by definition if you're in favour of only dealing with pandemics through personal responsibility and you're saying that would be the case even with a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate, then you are saying that the death of 99% of people in existence is an acceptable outcome. What I am asking is why you believe that.
>I am asking why you are okay with the outcome where 99% of people are dead.
Do you have any real life experiences? this happens all the time, why the fuck do you keep repeating that I actually _want_ people to die? Really evil things happen, when you try and help people even if it is for their own good without their consent. Often _more_ than 99% people will die if you do that. Let me repeat: you do not have enough life experiences. Let me also say another thing you do not read enough history especially of the 'extermination' kind. There is also a good possibility, that you are a nerd/sociopath if you do not understand the concept of live an let live.
*I've looked for this over and over since then and haven't been able to find it, I get the feeling it might have been taken offline.
Perfect eradication has to be the objective, not simply stopping it in its tracks. Otherwise, whenever you open up, you start spreading again.
It's also a rather offensive appeal to human superiority in as much as it totally ignores the various animal reservoirs.
I'd never mock the perspective, the situation is too serious.
When there was an active fire threatening my town a couple years, emergency issued an evacuation order and arrested people who came into the area. When I worked as a teacher in the 1990s, I had to get various vaccines as a condition for having a job. When I traveled in 2012, I also had to get some vaccines to visit various countries. Health departments have required restaurants to control the behavior of their customers including preventing them from coughing on the salad bar.
Covid involved the state using it's existing powers on a larger scale, no doubt. And how well it did that can certainly be debated. But all the powers the state used existed already.
So the arguments that try to put paint this situation as fundamentally new and wrong are incorrect. That they were accompanied by efforts to also falsify the nature of the illness itself reinforces the perspective that they were disingenuous. But I recognize people can convince themselves of a lot when it suits them.
if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off
As far as I can tell, the anger about state actions against and claims that it was some new are part of the generally polarized state of American politics. So, I think I understand. People are map 'cause they're convinced themselves of self-serving baloney. That's not an unusual source of anger for humans. But this doesn't make me "understanding" as you can imagine. Indeed, those people sure aren't the only angry ones and shouldn't be treat as special for their anger.
If you want something more related in 1948 or some such there was a small outbreak of smallpox in New York. And they vaccinated 80% of the city in a couple of months.
Speaks to me that while the state has and always had had these powers it's become loath to use them.
I think you’ll just have a natural disaster and a man-made disaster as people start shooting over toilet paper.
Look how they acted over haircuts. Look how 3 years later people are shooting folks who use their driveway to turn around.
Americans have a huge credibility issue, and act like god damn chimps flinging shit in the best of times.
You and too many others are afflicted with the idea you live in a vacuum. Your mind palace doesn’t exist to me.
Like outbreaks of:
- Smallpox
- Ebola
- Weaponized Anthrax
- Some other novel bug with high fatality rates.
You don't have to go very far back to figure out WHY the laws being used were put in place. Even in the 60's-70's, if someone had Measles they'd be in enforced quarantine in their house along with the rest of their family until it cleared. Because not doing that kills people. Innocent people. Often a lot more innocent people than the original infected, all because someone got selfish and couldn't control what they were doing.
Look at the number of people killed by Typhoid Mary [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/]
That people are angry is very true. But frankly they'd be angry regardless. It doesn't stop the very real reason why society needs to protect itself.
Then the discussion comes down to 'when is the societally acceptable threshold for measures to be taken'.
I think it's hard to define the "greater good" and even harder to tell who represents it. If you want to have the kind of cooperation you're talking about, it first requires trust. The data confirms trust makes a difference when you compare vaccine uptake in countries like Japan vs. Russia.
There's certainly much to be fed up about, but we can at least derive some practical questions from this experience.
* What was the source of distrust during the pandemic? Was it legitimate or illegitimate?
* Have our institutions earned trust since then so we can do better next time around?
It would be a horrific dystopia as everyone who tried to implement that has found. Competitive and free socialists always outcompete "radically cooperative" societies because the latter is always implemented through violence and coercion. There's no such thing as "radically cooperative" and also kind, the two are incompatible.
No offense, but from the first part of your comment, it is clear you were part of the problem, not the solution, on this front.
We did all the things you suggest after the last pandemic. The findings strongly cautioned against attempting another lockdown. For covid, that advice was ignored, and now we are seeing excess deaths comparable to the “isolate just the most vulnerable, and get it over with in a month or two” approach, along with huge economic and societal costs from the lockdowns.
It was perhaps the single greatest tragedy in America since WWII and we basically said “think of the economy!” and happily sent everyone back after a very limited period of time.
We learned nothing.
Oh hell no. I did not live through an "inconvenience". I and my kids now inhabit a world that will deal with the societal and economic damage for many years.
And no, I'm not just going to let slide a historically unprecedented, in scope and scale, change in citizen/government dynamics, and for a disease where you couldn't even begin to question the official narrative without being branded an evil anti-vaxxer.
We absolutely need to analyse what was done, and sort the panicked, fear-driven polices from what was useful.
>what are you still complaining about? you won, no one likes a sore winner.
"Won" means that we are all allowed out of our houses?
I'm complaining about the damage that has been done.
weird, this headline doesn't say lockdowns costing workers up to £1.5bn in lost income. But i'm sure you're very concerned about that damage too.
https://www.platinumaccounting.com.au/blog/melbourne-lockdow...
It fit the logistics curve to <0.1%, except for super spreader events, which afterwards, it still was very close.
All the policies, were designed around herd immunity which maximizes deaths, except for the WHO which fallowed Fauchi.
An acquaintance of mine, M, lost 19 family members to the pandemic. My family, mostly very well educated, went super paranoid, and we only had two late Omichron infections.
I am sorry it was hard for everyone, I wish we followed proticalls.
You are a commenter, for whom I read ever post.