Many, many lives were permanently affected in multiple, very negative ways, with no chance of returning to pre-covid "normal." The resentment and frustration from individual lives being crushed while the entire ordeal seemingly aligned and advanced corporate interests, is only triggered further by the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ attitude.
We should have higher rates of vaccination worldwide, not lower.
I agree that forcing vaccines on people was, at the very least, ethically questionable. OTOH, there was a tremendous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering that would have had an outsized negative effect on the public health response, were vaccines not mandated.
There’s plenty of blame to go around.
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else, it cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people." -- Rachel Maddow
"When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health ... in other words, you become a dead end to the virus." -- Fauci
"If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated" -- Rochelle Walensky
You believe they were not real?
Sometimes I would love to see how corona would have ripped through your country and killed even more faster without any look down...
This is a non-sequitur.
It’s possible to believe Covid really did kill a lot of people and simultaneously believe that the lockdowns did not prevent enough deaths to be worth their negative effects.
I think it's valid and was one of the few indications we had.
Additionally to Italy.
It also correlates with the long and huge problem of ICU beds in germany
As for myself though, you can see from an April 2020 comment that I'm a bit of an anomaly. Even though I felt more aligned with "the other side" I was maybe closer to the middle:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929971
I'm pretty sure I've always, for instance, opposed tech censorship on the subject. Especially during the mid-year riots the way they demonized the anti-lockdown protests by comparison was insane and I recognized it as such then. I could pull up some old tweets if you want.
I was at home and isolating while looking at the hospital stats.
I waited for a vaccine and didn't get alpha.
When I did get COVID I already had a shot.
I was wearing an easy to wear mask and washing my hands (as I did before and still do).
The most frustrating thing to me is and was that we still live in a society were we can afford a lockdown but can't make it work.
It's the capitalism who can't handle a pandemic reasonable.
For example, asserting that the government was enforcing strict lockdown measures in October 2020, if ever. This is despite obvious evidence that people preferred staying home, such as the still historically low rate of people working from offices.
I wasn't wrong once, from the first videos from China in January 2020. it's been amusing to watch people overthink and moralize and become very rabid over side alley of side alleys of 3 simple facts a high schooler knows: "very contagious respiratory disease bad, vaxx's don't prevent infection or transmission, people like working from home"
- masks: clearly they worked for the medical professionals that were treating patients during the first waves, as they were directly exposed and didn't get sick, why didn't they work for the population at large? Did we not wear them correctly, consistently?
- schools: It seems obvious that schools could be a huge vector of transmission, kids largely were asymptomatic and when they got sick, they would still spread it, both inside the school and to their vulnerable relatives. Were the school shutdowns a mistake? Should they have been done differently?
* If you think they're an effective measure for the public in general (which is probably closest to my position), then the variation in studies seems like it should still give you pause because it seems like the way mandates and messaging are implemented could undermine the usefulness. * If you think they're effective in individual cases when people do it diligently, it still seems like you should be worried about the possibility that a lot of people who think they're diligently and correctly masking aren't, including some medical professionals who are regularly exposed to the disease. * Honestly, even if you don't think they work at all, it still seems like learning why masks don't work would expand our knowledge of the disease.
Of course, we do know about plenty of factors that undermine mask effectiveness: people avoiding them altogether, people wearing ones that don't fit, people not covering their nose, etc. And of course researchers can skew the results with their methodological choices. But there seems to be enough variability in these studies that unknown or underappreciated factors could be significant.
If we're talking cloth masks as most people are, the viruses are actually way smaller.
Test 1, spray from 2 feet. Of course the paper was soaked.
Test 2, a cloth mask placed on the paper. It gets damp, especially if left in place.
Test 3, a cloth mask over the spray bottle. The mask blocks almost all of the spray.
We did not bother with test 4 (2 masks) after the 3rd, but I think they understood the point.
We did retry 3 with a medical mask, with 0 spray through.
My attitude pretty much the whole pandemic was 80/20 rule. Everybody seemed to be fighting for the extremes which gave us less optimal results. I didn't see anybody suggesting masking kids indoors especially during deep winter, but then giving them extra time for outdoor play with no restrictions (distancing etc). The transmission outdoors might not be zero but it would be much less, so it would be a much reduced vector. That seems like a good tradeoff for their mental health. Or if not this exactly, something like this. Or what about class outdoors, or open windows and fans instead of masks. I don't recall there even being a discussion like this; granted I'm not a parent.
(caveat: This all assumes masks work and that kids are actually a big vector. I've heard contrary views on both.)
RE: schools, they have been and continue to be a reservoir for COVID and other nasties. Even this September, like clockwork, COVID is ticking back up in the waste treatment tests. I'm still waiting for society to have a conversation about what role schools should fill and how we ensure schools operate the way that people think they should. Additionally, schools should be able to turn away students who are sick--right now it's all honor based and kids with fevers have to be accommodated.
1) The US didn’t have enough N-95 masks. In Asia where masks in public were more common people used masks from their home supply. I think some segments of the population were resentful that the US didn’t have access to the best masks and Asia did. 2) We had only a general idea of who was high risk. 3) We had only a general idea of the long term impacts of the virus. There was some initial concern that the virus could be like the Zitka virus where mortality rates dramatically increase with the second exposure. If that were the case the second waves could have killed off half the population with wide transmission. 4) Households aren’t homogeneous and it is near impossible to prevent transmission from a possibly asymptomatic child to a high risk adult when they share the same home.
Unfortunately given the lack of consistent messaging about masks in the US one segment of the populations believed that the masks were to protect themselves and the other segment believed it was to protect others. Those that were low risk and believed it was to protect themselves resented the masks and those that saw the masks as a way to protect others resented those that resented the masks. I think those polarized views still persist today.
I observed this sentiment in particular about return to school, and not just about masks. A sizable portion of the population would seemingly do anything to avoid accidentally helping someone else.
Likewise, however I should also add that in my case there's no risk component — not only because I get free FFP2 masks at my workplace, but also because it appears that one of the many ways that I'm unusual is that masks (and I mean this literally) cause me less issues than does my underwear.
Even if I wear a mask for a 31 km walk, it's the socks and underpants that pinch or restrict first, not the mask.
In a large meta-analysis[2] the Cochrane Collaboration did not find convincing evidence that masks work. Here is a single sentence taken from the author's conclusions:
"The pooled results of RCTs [Randomly Controlled Trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks."
This gives me pause; I was one of the dedicated mask wearers during the pandemic, but now I realize that we don't know that they did any good. Please note that I am saying we don't know if the masks worked; I'm not saying that the masks didn't work, just that we don't know that they did.
I've included above just a single sentence from the the Cochrane review titled Do physical measures such as hand-washing or wearing masks stop or slow down the spread of respiratory viruses?, the review is available online and is easy to read. I encourage those that think they know that masks either work or don't work to read the entire review for themselves.
[2] https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-s...
Blah blah blah 'I mostly agree with ... an October 2020 anti-lockdown statement signed by a large number of scientists and medical professionals. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”' blah blah.
I don't have any regrets about the position I took, since it seemed to be based on all the verified information we had at the time. YET, I hope our society will embrace the fact that we were largely wrong to prolong the lockdown measures. Humility doesn't hurt the Left either.