4 ms·

I can't remember where, but I read an article talking about how there were examples of lockdowns and no lockdowns both controlling COVID well, and that perhaps

I can't remember where, but I read an article talking about how there were examples of lockdowns and no lockdowns both controlling COVID well, and that perhaps not every pandemic and every event in time will have a lesson for us to learn. Sometimes there isn't a "right" answer when we have a problem we face. Life isn't like that, we look at life with a lens like that. Maybe our strategies were wrong. Maybe they were right but the virus was stronger than our strategies. Maybe all the feasible strategies wouldn't have made much of a difference. We won't ever know. There are many things we can never know. We've become addicted to knowing, with the Internet and all, and similarly we've forgotten that some things (yes, still some few things) are not in our hands.

mikepurvis 6y ago
> We won't ever know. I sure hope we will understand these things better, in the fullness of time. Even if the answer turns out to be some boring mix of cultural practices, genetics, and luck, it's still worthwhile having that understanding for the next time.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yeah, although "luck" is mostly just another way of saying ultimately unknowable factors caused the outcomes in some places to be better than others. I do hope and expect that we'll eventually come away with at least a partial explanatory model that doesn't lean too heavily on being an isolatable island. But an awful lot of what we've heard so far seems to be case-by-case after the fact rationalizations leavened by how the country's politicians are viewed.
breatheoften 6y ago
I think there might be some truth to this ... observability of the pandemic is very highly non-uniform -- even assuming the input measurements can be somehow normalized in a semi-trustable way (probably not true in general), non-uniform population distribution + exponential makes for much much more noisy measurement than I think is regularly acknowledged. I feel like there's a kind of built in bias against fully appreciating the effects of the unknowns given the nature of the crisis -- because being the guy who says 'well actually we might not _know_ that' in every policy discussion about the pandemic doesn't actually contribute much benefit ...
duderific 6y ago
I tend to disagree with this take. I think we've known for quite some time (at least since the Influenza epidemic of 1918) that masks can help prevent the spread of viruses of this sort. At first in the US, the recommendation was to not wear a mask. The reasoning was that we weren't sure about whether airborne or surface-borne spread was more of a factor (remember the huge shortages of hand sanitizer), and we wanted to prevent a run on masks, so that we would have enough masks for health care workers. This then gets into the reasons why we didn't have enough PPE on hand in our strategic reserve which is more of a political question. So in the case of the US at least, I think we are aware of the proper strategies, but many people, from the top down, refuse to adopt and/or promote those strategies.

mikepurvis 6y ago

> We won't ever know. I sure hope we will understand these things better, in the fullness of time. Even if the answer turns out to be some boring mix of cultural practices, genetics, and luck, it's still worthwhile having that understanding for the next time.

ghaff 6y ago
Yeah, although "luck" is mostly just another way of saying ultimately unknowable factors caused the outcomes in some places to be better than others. I do hope and expect that we'll eventually come away with at least a partial explanatory model that doesn't lean too heavily on being an isolatable island. But an awful lot of what we've heard so far seems to be case-by-case after the fact rationalizations leavened by how the country's politicians are viewed.

breatheoften 6y ago

I think there might be some truth to this ... observability of the pandemic is very highly non-uniform -- even assuming the input measurements can be somehow normalized in a semi-trustable way (probably not true in general), non-uniform population distribution + exponential makes for much much more noisy measurement than I think is regularly acknowledged. I feel like there's a kind of built in bias against fully appreciating the effects of the unknowns given the nature of the crisis -- because being the guy who says 'well actually we might not _know_ that' in every policy discussion about the pandemic doesn't actually contribute much benefit ...

duderific 6y ago

I tend to disagree with this take. I think we've known for quite some time (at least since the Influenza epidemic of 1918) that masks can help prevent the spread of viruses of this sort. At first in the US, the recommendation was to not wear a mask. The reasoning was that we weren't sure about whether airborne or surface-borne spread was more of a factor (remember the huge shortages of hand sanitizer), and we wanted to prevent a run on masks, so that we would have enough masks for health care workers. This then gets into the reasons why we didn't have enough PPE on hand in our strategic reserve which is more of a political question. So in the case of the US at least, I think we are aware of the proper strategies, but many people, from the top down, refuse to adopt and/or promote those strategies.