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exactly. the measures were always about keeping us simultaneously busy and anxious and not about their actual effectiveness. it’s been so frustrating to see dis

exactly. the measures were always about keeping us simultaneously busy and anxious and not about their actual effectiveness. it’s been so frustrating to see discussion after discussion about the minutiae of masking when they’re so minor to the overall picture. what mattered above all was indoor, familiar social proximity (where we’d be most likely to be exchanging spit for prolonged periods), exactly where our strong social norms dictate the least amount of vigilance.

danenania 5y ago
I think the intentions were good, but it's also probably true that public health officials have been reluctant to admit when there just wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted. Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement. Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.
- clairity 5y ago
  outside of the totalitarian choices, which were entirely untenable in the US, we really had no good options to slow, much less stop, the pandemic. nearly all of it was theater. the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats. this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  > wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted. Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases. There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better. One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.
  - danenania 5y ago
    I agree about Trump and federal messaging being terrible, but CA’s messaging was strong from the beginning. Empirically, it doesn’t appear to have made a significant difference compared to other states.
  - nervlord 5y ago
    Real hard to take it seriously when the democrats are acting like a BLM protest is perfectly fine, or indeed any of their other pet causes, but you can't keep your gym open. Please don't pretend trump was the only one off message here. Democrats have PLENTY of blame
  - thu2111 5y ago
    Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US .... There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better. The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now. If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities. Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality. Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.

danenania 5y ago

I think the intentions were good, but it's also probably true that public health officials have been reluctant to admit when there just wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted. Masks in public are not all that burdensome, so imo the mandates were reasonable regardless of the actual impact, but I wish they would have re-evaluated closing businesses a lot sooner, since that did a ton of economic damage, and the benefit there seems very questionable. I doubt the CA statistics would have been any different if they had never banned outdoor dining, for instance, or even just kept most businesses running normally but with an indoor mask requirement. Comparing CA to TX and FL, it's also pretty hard now to argue that closing playgrounds and schools made much difference either, and that has had a severely negative impact on kids. I understand doing it in the first place when everything was unknown, but they should have been quicker to revise in response to new information.

clairity 5y ago
outside of the totalitarian choices, which were entirely untenable in the US, we really had no good options to slow, much less stop, the pandemic. nearly all of it was theater. the best mitigation would have been to get people to generally distance around familiars indoors and don a mask if you’re going to spend time in close proximity or face-to-face for a while. that would have required families to treat each other as threats rather than safeties, which is why that was not tenable. it’s so much easier to treat strangers as threats. this best mitigation would have led us to violate a visceral belief about the world, creating significant cognitive dissonance, and that’s why we instead focused so much on ineffective measures to protect ourselves from strangers with masks and lockdowns that didn’t tackle the core infection vector through familiars. it’s really not that difficult to unravel what was happening, even at the beginning. watching us dance around this elephant in the room as if it didn’t exist has been no less than maddening.
pasabagi 5y ago
> wasn't much they could do about the situation that would make a major difference, save for employing totalitarian enforcement measures that no one wanted. Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US. There are countries (SK, Japan) with tiny numbers of cases. There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better. One key area I think the US did really badly on was messaging - basically, having Trump drawing the whole thing into his orbit made everybody feel like it's just business as usual. It's hard to take something really seriously when the nation's highest elected official talking nonsense about it on Twitter, so obviously people don't follow rules. Public health messaging is really easy to get right, and the nations that have done really badly (Britain, the USA, Brazil) all had heads of state who did the worst possible kind of messaging.
- danenania 5y ago
  I agree about Trump and federal messaging being terrible, but CA’s messaging was strong from the beginning. Empirically, it doesn’t appear to have made a significant difference compared to other states.
- nervlord 5y ago
  Real hard to take it seriously when the democrats are acting like a BLM protest is perfectly fine, or indeed any of their other pet causes, but you can't keep your gym open. Please don't pretend trump was the only one off message here. Democrats have PLENTY of blame
- thu2111 5y ago
  Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US .... There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better. The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population, and so on. The assumption that governments can control respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 is at the heart of all of this but needs very strong evidential support, given how strong the evidence against this belief is by now. If you look at the data then there are no obvious explanations for why some countries did better than others. It's far from insane to observe this. There are a lot of plausible sounding explanations but they all fall apart due to exceptions, e.g. Japan did very little for a long time and yet has hardly been affected. In fact Asia in general has not been strongly affected (Taiwan is another example) despite a wide variety of response severities, which raises the question of whether Australia/New Zealand's relatively good performance is due to location rather than behaviour. Meanwhile Latin America was very hard hit despite some truly totalitarian responses by the authorities. Your own explanation is especially weak because it appears to be based on a cartoon New York Times interpretation of what happened outside the USA. The British government's messaging was the polar opposite of Trump's. The PM appeared next to two chief scientists every single day, and the government was basically replaced by SAGE, the scientific advisory board. The SAGE scientists took total control of the messaging including designing large scale ad campaigns specifically designed by behavioral psychologists to provoke as much fear as possible in the population. The UK also has by far the highest vaccine uptake in the world. The whole thing had a singular focus, the messaging was very well organized to an extent that evokes people's worst fears of competent totalitarianism and so the idea that the UK was somehow doing the same things as Trump just has no basis in reality. Yet, in the end, it didn't seem to matter. Sweden has had lower excess deaths despite consistent year-long messaging of chill, relax, it's no big deal. Hence, politics can be pretty conclusively eliminated as the source of any differences.