While I agree with you that a lot of the damage we did wasn't the virus, I feel like OP was quite clear in saying if there's only bad and worse, pick bad.

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.

> was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.

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.

Uh, they were sold as better than the alternatives.

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.

Of course they did. The alternative was to just keep calm and carry on, like for every other virus outbreak. The idea that COVID required unique measures is not true and had been proven untrue many times in many ways. The correct response was the traditional one: let doctors get on with it and otherwise continue with normal life.

The hospitalisation rate made this implausible. Sure, we could have kept calm and carried on, but the health care system would have collapsed. It almost did in a bunch of European countries, including mine. And that's with the lockdowns.

Yeah. There were areas in the US (parts of Texas, Los Angeles County, New York) where the system did start to collapse, even with lockdowns and warnings. It likely would have been much worse without them. It likely would have been much better if folks had taken the warnings more seriously. Most didn't.

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.

It wouldn't. Governments said the hospitals were collapsing because they needed to justify their actions, whilst simultaneously publishing dashboards that showed plenty of free capacity.

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.

Switzerland have like one of the best numbers of beds per person in the OECD.

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.

You had lockdowns because politicians were following the instructions of corrupt academics. Lockdowns made no impact on hospital load (can you determine the dates and times of interventions by looking at the graphs I just linked?). Nor did they have any impact on death rates or anything else.

> 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.

The living complain about the adverse impacts they experienced, while the dead remain dead.

I see this argument a lot but I don't understand it. Are you suggesting the dead people would have been grateful for the policies that didn't stop them from dying? Or are you suggesting the policies didn't go far enough, and if the dead people could complain, then we'd be convinced to implement even stricter policies next time?

It's not about what the dead would say - it's about the difference in degree between inconvenience and death.

The implication of this argument is that if people are dying, the government can implement any policy they want with the nominal intention of "saving lives," and nobody has any right to complain about "inconveniences" because they're not dead, unlike the people who died despite the policies meant to prevent their deaths.

While I agree with your statement, I think you might be projecting a little - this is a simple comment, kind of like saying "nothing new under the sun". Not all statements are necessarily prescriptive.

This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe

It’s an argument about survivorship bias in any critique of Covid policies that imply Covid response was unnecessarily harmful

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

The GP means the policies were sold as the "least worst" option.

Less bad need not be good. One only need look at electoral politics in the US for this to be obvious.

> Why'd we implement them then?

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.

This is complete historical revisionism. For basically the entire time that schools were remote and weeks after, any time a school tried to open so many teachers became sick that operating the school became infeasible. It was a choice between sick and dead teachers (and some children) with unknown future consequences and schools shut down without staff, or schools shut down to do remote schooling with significantly lower mortality rates. We saw what your proposed solution did when the policies were abandoned; millions of people died and are still dying, and life expectancy in the US is still 2-6 years below what it was four years ago. That has wiped out 20-40 years of improvements to life expectancy in the US, depending on the population under discussion.

Huh, my kids went back to school in September of 2020 here in Vancouver British Columbia. There was a short shutdown later in the fall, then schools were open for the duration.

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.

To be fair, the person was talking about the US and more likely they were talking about the region they are from.