5 ms·

The "two weeks to flatten the curve" feels like gaslghting in retrospect.

by mStreamTeam 6y ago

majewsky 6y ago
We did flatten the curve. You just don't get to see the alternate reality where we didn't.
- mStreamTeam 6y ago
  I'm not questioning the flattening the curve part. I'm saying the 2 weeks part was gaslighting. What they should have said is "one year or greater to flatten the curve." That would have been honest
  - blamestross 6y ago
    What the parent comment is trying to say is that we did accomplish the goal of those two weeks. The curve was flattened. Your perspective is a result of not living in the universe were it was a lot worse. This isn't the best time line, but it is one of the better ones.
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. First masks were unnecessary and hand washing was crucial. Now it’s essentially the reverse. It helps to wash hands of course but we realize it’s less of a vector. Then various governments said it’ll be over by summer. Then various governments said it’ll be a year. No one was attempting to gaslight; this was the culmination of millions of professionals doing their best to make sense of the situation, and occasionally, uncertain terms being communicated incorrectly. This is normal. The decision to perceive non-optimal performance in an incredibly complex situation as an attack on a population is yours, and you’re welcome to it. I simply don’t see the point.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      > I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Dont want to start was flamewar here but just pointing out a flaw in your response. That was factually a 'emotional or manipulative motivation', right or wrong. > This is normal. Obviously not.
      - camgunz 6y ago
        > I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Can you provide some examples? I googled around and found this [1] which seems like a reasonable summary of the Covid-related consequences of the George Floyd protests. The "reasons it seems like it was OK" doesn't seem too divergent from what many medical professionals are saying (don't gather indoors, wear masks, wash hands). I'd also like to point out that institutional racism and police brutality are public health crises with uncountable effects on the health of Black Americans. Further, when you consider that Covid-19 has had far worse effects on communities of color, and that many essential workers are people of color, the protests don't seem that unrelated. Edit, found some: - https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/political-and-health-leaders-embrace-of-floyd-protests-fuels-debate-over-coronavirus-restrictions/2020/06/11/9c60bca6-a761-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/political-and-health-l... - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-protest-george-floyds-death-safely/story?id=71070269 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-protest-george-floyds-d... - https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette... Here are some quotes: > “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential,” Dhillon said. “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.” > "Staying indoors all the time in a pandemic is equivalent to an abstinence-only policy," > For her part, Patel says the core tenants of harm reduction fit into public health doctors’ broader obligation to protect human rights while also helping people stay safe. "You’re describing a broader human rights-based approach to policy and medicine," Patel said. "These are the tenants of human rights." > "There’s broad recognition that racism is one of the top public health issues of our time," Beletsky said. > "Racism is a public health problem," the health department tweeted Monday. "In New York City, Black and Brown communities face the disproportionate impact, grief and loss from the COVID-19 pandemic on top of the trauma of state-sanctioned violence." > “If people were to understand that racism, and all of the social and political and economic inequalities that racism creates, ultimately harms people’s health,” Boyd says, they would see that “protest is a profound public health intervention, because it allows us to finally address and end forms of inequality.” > "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington's Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises." [1]: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21300636/coronavirus-pandemic-black-lives-matter-protests https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21300636/coronavirus-pandemic-...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - notatoad 6y ago
    Maybe health officials were more misleading where you are, but from everything i saw the "2 weeks" messaging wasn't intended to say that everything would be solved in two weeks of lockdown, it was that after two weeks we would begin to see if a lockdown was effective or not. and it never was effective because our lockdowns are more of a polite suggestion to please not lick strangers than an actual lockdown.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    It’s not lying if we didn’t understand reality at the time. Hindsight is powerful, but I don't think in March anyone seriously thought this’d go through the year.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Even if it would be lying, not every lying is gaslighting. Gaslighting is very specific abuse tactic.
rz2k 6y ago
Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store, and probably don't even know what that is. Flattening the curve was really about overloading hospitals. The end game is to make covid-19 extinct in the wild, or domesticated in the sense that only relatively harmless variants remain. Without serious testing and contact tracing that may take a very long time. We completely fumbled the early 2020 chance to contain the virus. The vaccines should decrease the numbers enough that there will be a second chance to contain it, this time with real efforts at contact tracing if we actually want to make the virus extinct.
- Nursie 6y ago
  > Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store We did that for bars and restaurants in the UK, but it doesn't seem to have done as much good as it was probably just lost or ignored by our abysmal track and trace services... We also had a QR code system to tag yourself in places, but it fell down because it was firstly optional, and secondly there was no way to tag out so the records weren't that accurate.
- kelnos 6y ago
  We did (still do?) that in San Francisco, but it's incredibly inconsistent. Some restaurants would make a reservation in their reservation system on the spot for you to keep a record of you being there. Others didn't keep track at all. Meanwhile, we spent last month in Honolulu, and every single restaurant took down our contact info. Nothing for regular stores in either place, though.
- cylinder 6y ago
  We check in with a govt app and QR codes in NSW and all of Australia does this and venues confirm before letting you in. It's integrated into the Service NSW app so I don't need a separate one. Same app where my digital drivers licence is. No paper. In fact I don't carry a wallet here anymore because public transport is with NFC - Apple pay.
OminousWeapons 6y ago
The problem is people saw China bring the situation under control in under six weeks and thought that containment rather than management was also an achievable goal here. They therefore interpreted the term "flatten the curve" in that context and assumed it would lead to containment. What they didn't see (and what was never really talked about) is just how extreme China's eventual response to COVID was relative to the constraints placed on Americans. The Chinese were placing everyone under house arrest, mandating mask use, monitoring everyone's movements at checkpoints, temperature checking anyone who left their house when possible, banning people from going outside more than X times per week, forcibly quarantining, arresting non-compliant people, shuttering every non-essential business under the strictest interpretation of "essential", blocking internal travel, physically isolating cities, requiring quarantine when returning from traveling abroad, etc. The US government didn't really do any of that. To anyone aware of the contrast in national responses, it was very obvious that we would not be able to replicate China's success and that COVID would be around until we got a vaccine.
- cullinap 6y ago
  Any sources showing that china brought it under control?
  - OminousWeapons 6y ago
    https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-mission-briefing-on-covid-19---26-february-2020 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-dir... https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/asia/china-covid-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/asia/china-covid-ec... I am also getting anecdata from people living in Shanghai and Beijing. Life has largely returned to normal outside of people wearing masks.
    - cullinap 6y ago
      Was there a reliable test in Feb 2020 at the time of the WHO article?. Who is to say that they are reporting the numbers correctly? For most of Jan 2020, china claimed covid was mild and wasn't spread human to human (and the WHO backed them up for some time as well).
Axien 6y ago
The curve was flattened, but the goalpost changed. We went from flattening the curve to eliminating the virus. With flattening the curve, the question should be "how full are the hospitals"?. Instead, the metric was infection rates.

The "two weeks to flatten the curve" feels like gaslghting in retrospect.

majewsky 6y ago

We did flatten the curve. You just don't get to see the alternate reality where we didn't.

mStreamTeam 6y ago
I'm not questioning the flattening the curve part. I'm saying the 2 weeks part was gaslighting. What they should have said is "one year or greater to flatten the curve." That would have been honest
- blamestross 6y ago
  What the parent comment is trying to say is that we did accomplish the goal of those two weeks. The curve was flattened. Your perspective is a result of not living in the universe were it was a lot worse. This isn't the best time line, but it is one of the better ones.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. First masks were unnecessary and hand washing was crucial. Now it’s essentially the reverse. It helps to wash hands of course but we realize it’s less of a vector. Then various governments said it’ll be over by summer. Then various governments said it’ll be a year. No one was attempting to gaslight; this was the culmination of millions of professionals doing their best to make sense of the situation, and occasionally, uncertain terms being communicated incorrectly. This is normal. The decision to perceive non-optimal performance in an incredibly complex situation as an attack on a population is yours, and you’re welcome to it. I simply don’t see the point.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations. I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Dont want to start was flamewar here but just pointing out a flaw in your response. That was factually a 'emotional or manipulative motivation', right or wrong. > This is normal. Obviously not.
    - camgunz 6y ago
      > I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Can you provide some examples? I googled around and found this [1] which seems like a reasonable summary of the Covid-related consequences of the George Floyd protests. The "reasons it seems like it was OK" doesn't seem too divergent from what many medical professionals are saying (don't gather indoors, wear masks, wash hands). I'd also like to point out that institutional racism and police brutality are public health crises with uncountable effects on the health of Black Americans. Further, when you consider that Covid-19 has had far worse effects on communities of color, and that many essential workers are people of color, the protests don't seem that unrelated. Edit, found some: - https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/political-and-health-leaders-embrace-of-floyd-protests-fuels-debate-over-coronavirus-restrictions/2020/06/11/9c60bca6-a761-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/political-and-health-l... - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-protest-george-floyds-death-safely/story?id=71070269 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-protest-george-floyds-d... - https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette... Here are some quotes: > “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential,” Dhillon said. “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.” > "Staying indoors all the time in a pandemic is equivalent to an abstinence-only policy," > For her part, Patel says the core tenants of harm reduction fit into public health doctors’ broader obligation to protect human rights while also helping people stay safe. "You’re describing a broader human rights-based approach to policy and medicine," Patel said. "These are the tenants of human rights." > "There’s broad recognition that racism is one of the top public health issues of our time," Beletsky said. > "Racism is a public health problem," the health department tweeted Monday. "In New York City, Black and Brown communities face the disproportionate impact, grief and loss from the COVID-19 pandemic on top of the trauma of state-sanctioned violence." > “If people were to understand that racism, and all of the social and political and economic inequalities that racism creates, ultimately harms people’s health,” Boyd says, they would see that “protest is a profound public health intervention, because it allows us to finally address and end forms of inequality.” > "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington's Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises." [1]: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21300636/coronavirus-pandemic-black-lives-matter-protests https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21300636/coronavirus-pandemic-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notatoad 6y ago
  Maybe health officials were more misleading where you are, but from everything i saw the "2 weeks" messaging wasn't intended to say that everything would be solved in two weeks of lockdown, it was that after two weeks we would begin to see if a lockdown was effective or not. and it never was effective because our lockdowns are more of a polite suggestion to please not lick strangers than an actual lockdown.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  It’s not lying if we didn’t understand reality at the time. Hindsight is powerful, but I don't think in March anyone seriously thought this’d go through the year.
- watwut 6y ago
  Even if it would be lying, not every lying is gaslighting. Gaslighting is very specific abuse tactic.

rz2k 6y ago

Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store, and probably don't even know what that is. Flattening the curve was really about overloading hospitals. The end game is to make covid-19 extinct in the wild, or domesticated in the sense that only relatively harmless variants remain. Without serious testing and contact tracing that may take a very long time. We completely fumbled the early 2020 chance to contain the virus. The vaccines should decrease the numbers enough that there will be a second chance to contain it, this time with real efforts at contact tracing if we actually want to make the virus extinct.

Nursie 6y ago
> Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store We did that for bars and restaurants in the UK, but it doesn't seem to have done as much good as it was probably just lost or ignored by our abysmal track and trace services... We also had a QR code system to tag yourself in places, but it fell down because it was firstly optional, and secondly there was no way to tag out so the records weren't that accurate.
kelnos 6y ago
We did (still do?) that in San Francisco, but it's incredibly inconsistent. Some restaurants would make a reservation in their reservation system on the spot for you to keep a record of you being there. Others didn't keep track at all. Meanwhile, we spent last month in Honolulu, and every single restaurant took down our contact info. Nothing for regular stores in either place, though.
cylinder 6y ago
We check in with a govt app and QR codes in NSW and all of Australia does this and venues confirm before letting you in. It's integrated into the Service NSW app so I don't need a separate one. Same app where my digital drivers licence is. No paper. In fact I don't carry a wallet here anymore because public transport is with NFC - Apple pay.

OminousWeapons 6y ago

The problem is people saw China bring the situation under control in under six weeks and thought that containment rather than management was also an achievable goal here. They therefore interpreted the term "flatten the curve" in that context and assumed it would lead to containment. What they didn't see (and what was never really talked about) is just how extreme China's eventual response to COVID was relative to the constraints placed on Americans. The Chinese were placing everyone under house arrest, mandating mask use, monitoring everyone's movements at checkpoints, temperature checking anyone who left their house when possible, banning people from going outside more than X times per week, forcibly quarantining, arresting non-compliant people, shuttering every non-essential business under the strictest interpretation of "essential", blocking internal travel, physically isolating cities, requiring quarantine when returning from traveling abroad, etc. The US government didn't really do any of that. To anyone aware of the contrast in national responses, it was very obvious that we would not be able to replicate China's success and that COVID would be around until we got a vaccine.

cullinap 6y ago
Any sources showing that china brought it under control?
- OminousWeapons 6y ago
  https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-mission-briefing-on-covid-19---26-february-2020 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-dir... https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/asia/china-covid-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/asia/china-covid-ec... I am also getting anecdata from people living in Shanghai and Beijing. Life has largely returned to normal outside of people wearing masks.
  - cullinap 6y ago
    Was there a reliable test in Feb 2020 at the time of the WHO article?. Who is to say that they are reporting the numbers correctly? For most of Jan 2020, china claimed covid was mild and wasn't spread human to human (and the WHO backed them up for some time as well).

Axien 6y ago

The curve was flattened, but the goalpost changed. We went from flattening the curve to eliminating the virus. With flattening the curve, the question should be "how full are the hospitals"?. Instead, the metric was infection rates.