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I feel like there's direct application to the lockdowns. A lot of them are arbitrary nonsense and not based on any actual academic study at all. You can simply

I feel like there's direct application to the lockdowns. A lot of them are arbitrary nonsense and not based on any actual academic study at all. You can simply look at different nations and different efforts, and except for very few outliers (NZ, South Korea) they've never had a consistent effect. California had/has some of the strictest closures, while Florida has tried to avoid them entirely, and look at the result. In NYC and Michigan, many of the dead elderly came directly due to orders by the governess to house sick elderly in care homes with healthy people. This is a situation where if they had done literally nothing at all, thousands of people would still be alive.

atoav 6y ago
> A lot of them are arbitrary nonsense and not based on any actual academic study at all. Yet most of the measures are intuitively a step in the right direction when thinking about an airborne pandemic. What I think is even more unacademic, irrational and wishful thinking than the measures against the pandemic are the exceptions made in those measures. E.g. how schools are handled in most western nations ("There are no infections in schools, the scientific papers which say otherwise have to vanish in some drawer"). A lot of pandemic response is about reducing contact. What surprised me about the people in my vicinity at the start of the pandemic was how many (otherwise intelligent) people where like: "If a measure isn't 100% scientifically sound or 100% effective than it ahouldn't be rolled out". When I asked these people what they would do instead they didn't have an answer. They all didn't understand that the measures where about reducing contacts (as opposed to 100% preventing) and tried to do so while leaving some individual freedoms. That the resulting rulesets will have a ton of counterintuitive edge cases is pretty unsurprising: teatchers that are expected to work with each other in school aren't allowed to meet outside of school etc. I think rules are one thing, but the local mentality has a much stronger influence. If you e.g. observe how each of the nations in Europe is doing even when the rules are comparable, any person who knows the local mentalities isn't surprised by which nations fare well and which don't. Just like that it didn't surprise me that asian nations like Taiwan or South Korea dealt well with the virus while a Trump lead US didn't (and let's face it, even a US lead by pandemic experts wouldn't have fared well, due to local mentality). Egoistic individualism is deadly in a pandemic. Doing as if everybody exists in isolation of each other (and therefore has to deal with problems themselves) is deadly in a pandemic. Not realizing we are part of society is deadly in a pandemic.

atoav 6y ago

> A lot of them are arbitrary nonsense and not based on any actual academic study at all. Yet most of the measures are intuitively a step in the right direction when thinking about an airborne pandemic. What I think is even more unacademic, irrational and wishful thinking than the measures against the pandemic are the exceptions made in those measures. E.g. how schools are handled in most western nations ("There are no infections in schools, the scientific papers which say otherwise have to vanish in some drawer"). A lot of pandemic response is about reducing contact. What surprised me about the people in my vicinity at the start of the pandemic was how many (otherwise intelligent) people where like: "If a measure isn't 100% scientifically sound or 100% effective than it ahouldn't be rolled out". When I asked these people what they would do instead they didn't have an answer. They all didn't understand that the measures where about reducing contacts (as opposed to 100% preventing) and tried to do so while leaving some individual freedoms. That the resulting rulesets will have a ton of counterintuitive edge cases is pretty unsurprising: teatchers that are expected to work with each other in school aren't allowed to meet outside of school etc. I think rules are one thing, but the local mentality has a much stronger influence. If you e.g. observe how each of the nations in Europe is doing even when the rules are comparable, any person who knows the local mentalities isn't surprised by which nations fare well and which don't. Just like that it didn't surprise me that asian nations like Taiwan or South Korea dealt well with the virus while a Trump lead US didn't (and let's face it, even a US lead by pandemic experts wouldn't have fared well, due to local mentality). Egoistic individualism is deadly in a pandemic. Doing as if everybody exists in isolation of each other (and therefore has to deal with problems themselves) is deadly in a pandemic. Not realizing we are part of society is deadly in a pandemic.