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The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be. The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There h

• Krasnol 5y ago
  Everybody I know who got Covid, got it from their kids which go to school. Yes mortality is low and kids are quite safe from hard impacts but they don't live in a bubble. They meet people. Also: even if you don't die of it, it could have severe impacts on your life. Long Covid is a thing. It's not that simple...
  • gjsman-1000 5y ago
    If everyone got it, destroying businesses and families for over a year in some states to postpone the inevitable was stupid.
    • Krasnol 5y ago
      How do/did you know it's "inevitable"? I didn't have Covid yet. At least as far as I know. I work in health IT and have been vaccinating and protecting myself according to the book. It works.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • onepointsixC 5y ago
        Respectfully, how do you know you didn't have it? If you are young and vaccinated, the chances of your covid being asymptomatic would be quite high.
        • Krasnol 5y ago
          As I said: "as far as I know". We have to follow a tight testing routine. The remaining chances are quite low.
      • gjsman-1000 5y ago
        Good for you, you are in a situation where you are not reliant on a small business and it’s easy to follow advisories. There’s far more to life and jobs than that. As for how it’s inevitable - maybe it wasn’t, but look around you. An awful lot of destruction we did for questionable benefits. And I know that with the next pandemic, far less people are going to listen. To them, the credibility of experts has been permanently damaged.
        • drekk 5y ago
          Maybe the government should have paid people so they could stay home? But that's communism and then no one will work and who will bring us our McDonald's order during the outbreak
          • gjsman-1000 5y ago
            You seem to not comprehend how completely unworkable such a solution is for a country as broad as the US. Also, we did try, it was called Payroll Protection and it was an epic fail.
          • rnotaro 5y ago
            We paid 2k$ a month for people to stay at home in Canada and it was quite an issue with low income jobs.
          • chrismcb 5y ago
            They did.
        • Krasnol 5y ago
          How do you measure "questionable benefits"? As a Government you have to protect every single citizen. Lifes have been saved because of lockdowns, vaccination, masks, etc. Not doing that and letting everybody get Covid to see who survives is barbaric. I know that it's no seen that way in the US since this has been your culture but you should accept that it's not seen that way in civilized countries.
          • 5y ago
      • chrismcb 5y ago
        What "works?" Statistics? You can do everything wrong and still not get covid. About 10% of the population has gotten covid reach year (at least in USA) sure that probably goes up if you don't follow all those protocols. But even if you don't, there is still a good chance you didn't get it. Here, have my tiger repellant rock.
    • drekk 5y ago
      It wasn't inevitable, Americans chose per usual to do something half-ass, which generally is worse than doing nothing at all or full-assing it
      • gjsman-1000 5y ago
        In my state, it was as full-assed as it could be without societal collapse, and didn’t work.
  • hackflip 5y ago
    Should children have to sacrifice their development to protect adults? I always thought adults should be the ones making sacrifices for children, not the other way around.
    • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      On airplanes the parents are told to fit their oxygen mask first in an emergency, as its hard to help your child when you are unconscious. I feel the same applies here.
      • gruez 5y ago
        >I feel the same applies here. That doesn't really follow logically. The reason why that's the advice on airplanes is that you can be unconscious for a while (a minute or two?) and not suffer brain damage. Therefore the cost of helping yourself is fairly low. It's not clear that the same dynamic applies to lockdowns.
    • Levitz 5y ago
      Definitely not the norm with the boomer generation. It's not people under 50 that are really victims of covid. Harsh point to make but at this point I hold what I consider to be a very justifiable grudge.
    • Krasnol 5y ago
      No they shouldn't but your government should provide for those children and their development. There are countries on this planet which have shown how it's supposed to be done. Instead some Governments went out and sacrificed everybody.
• api 5y ago
  > The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be. As with many things, the US response combined all the worst parts of the left's reaction to the pandemic with all the worst aspects of the right's. We had ham-fisted lockdowns (of dubious effectiveness) that destroyed small business and harmed mental health while simultaneously we had a right-wing crackpot antivaccination movement that prevented vaccine herd immunity from being achieved fast enough to really impact the virus. Our present day two party system is like a two fisted beat down in boxing. First you get a left, then you get a right, then a left, then a right, until you're curled up on the floor and you can't take any more. Maybe a constitutional amendment to ban political parties would help, or at least ranked choice voting so we no longer "have" to vote for incompetent fools or "our vote doesn't count" against the other incompetent fool.
  • shmel 5y ago
    > prevented vaccine herd immunity from being achieved It is easy to blame antivaxxers. Could you however name a few countries where vaccine herd immunity was achieved?
  • chernevik 5y ago
    The anti-vax movement isn't just right-wing. Blacks are the most under-vaccinated demographic. And it is important to distinguish those who are against mandates from those who are against the vaccine.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      I think this is misleading. It's very notable that the states where the racial gap is highest are a) not doing very well on mass vaccination b) Republican https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/us-vaccine-demographics.html https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo... So I think it's fair to ask if these people have been denied the vaccine more than they've rejected it. Meanwhile, the stats fairly clearly show political affiliation to be a bigger factor: > According to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) released on Sept. 28, gaps in vaccination rates across racial and ethnic groups have virtually disappeared—while gaps reflecting political affiliation have widened substantially.
• javagram 5y ago
  > The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There has been little or no consideration of their impact on physical health, mental health, education, business, employment, worship. Anyone who went to an open bar or a packed church service in the USA in December 2020 can tell that governors and the courts were both very sensitive to business and religious concerns about impact on worship, business, and employment. Unclear who you mean “exaggerated the risks” but the actual risk of fatality was more like 0.6% of all infected in the USA pre-vaccine.[0] 0.3% is the case only after torturing statistics or using international statistics from countries that skew younger and have fewer risk factors. [0] see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220321809 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
  • yucky 5y ago
    >0.3% is the case only after torturing statistics Ironic, since a 0.3% (or 0.6%) fatality rate is vastly exaggerated for people in low risk groups. The only reason the number is even that high is due to the high death tolls of people in high risk groups.
    • javagram 5y ago
      That is how averages work. One could equally point out that 0.6% IFR actually underestimated the risk for some adults. Many people shared Facebook memes of a “99.9%” survival rate not understanding that they personally were at greater risk than that. This page was available on the CDC website for quite a long time explaining the different risks in a pretty straightforward table https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
    • giraffe_lady 5y ago
      > The only reason the number is even that high is due to the high death tolls of people in high risk groups. The only reason the fatality rate is that high is because people died? What are you trying to say here? What else would it measure?
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  • Pyramus 5y ago
    Not sure why you are being down voted, your observation is spot on. It's pretty obvious that 'politicians' took into account potential costs of shutdowns. Shutdowns aren't very popular with anyone, and politicians tend to want to get re-elected. The question really is, how, as a society, do we distribute the costs of the pandemic, and different societies have tried different trade-offs.
  • tonguez 5y ago
• aqme28 5y ago
  It's interesting to read this as an expat in Europe, where it seems like the US hasn't really done any lockdown at all compared to most other countries. The issue I think is that there was very little government support for individuals affected economically.
  • _fat_santa 5y ago
    I think it highlights, for better or for worse, the cultural difference between the US and the EU. Take for example the UK that went into lockdown after lockdown, the reason it hasn't been done in the US is that it would be politically untenable. If a politician in the US tried anything remotely like that, they would be burned alive by the opposition and the media.
    • aqme28 5y ago
      Exactly. So it's insane to me to see OP posting about how heavy-handed the lockdown was and how it ignored business interests.
      • mindslight 5y ago
        I agree. But as political Kool Aid goes, talking about a nonexistent US "lockdown" is pretty mild. On the other hand, that this has become such a trope indicates that the stay at home suggestions ended up working. People who weren't paying close attention to details thought the suggestions did have the force of law, without there actually being such laws. (As an aside, I sympathize with small business owners and think "lockdown" is appropriate (albeit hyperbolic) to describe business closures. It's the society-wide usage of the term I'm talking about, where it's implied that people were not allowed to leave their homes. A few counties in California were the only instances that I'm aware of)
        • _fat_santa 5y ago
          The stay at home orders worked because while the government couldn't "lockdown" individual citizens, they could lockdown just about everything else. During that initial period I stayed at home for most of the 2 weeks. Sure I could leave at any time but where would I go? The stores are closed, the gyms are closed, all public places are closed. I went out a few times to drive on the empty roads but the only reason I went out was to explicitly drive, I wasn't actually going anywhere because there was nowhere to go.
• bingohbangoh 5y ago
  I’m gonna defend a bit here. Early on, nobody knew what covid was gonna look like. It had the potential for millions dead with a very high rate of spread. So we panicked. It seems forgotten that nobody remembers how awful, unknown, and strange the early pandemic was back in March 2020. What’s pathetic is how almost two years later, when we know oodles more about this disease, our solutions are identical. Where is the focus on improving hospital capacity? Improving air filter quality (it’s an airborne disease)? Therapeutics? Mass testing capabilities? The vaccine has proven to be not as effective as we had initially hoped for because the new variants are too different. But that possibility was always known. Why do nothing else?
  • afavour 5y ago
    Have to agree on the shutdown. It’s very easy to look back with 20:20 hindsight and say “duh, that was overkill”. But at the time we were sanitising every surface because we didn’t even know how COVID spread, much less exactly how dangerous it was. The shutdown was a panic move but the panic wasn’t unjustified at the time. I will say, though, that the shutdown went on too long. It was originally sold as a stopgap to allow us to set up testing, track and trace infrastructure etc etc and the government by and large just… didn’t. So there was no clear path out of it.
    • gjsman-1000 5y ago
      I had family members telling me that the news was spreading fear and panic back then, and that we should not lock down even for two weeks because, in their own words, “they won’t let us out.” I was skeptical and accepted the lockdown for two weeks. We only just started getting out more than three months later. Either my family was really unusually right… or there was a percentage of people saying it was a bad idea that was blissfully ignored and given no voice. And now that they were shown to be completely right, we pretend they don’t exist or lump them into the anti-vax crowd even though these groups are distinctly different with some overlap.
      • magicalist 5y ago
        > that we should not lock down even for two weeks because, in their own words, “they won’t let us out.” > And now that they were shown to be completely right Only if we define literally any mitigation (like indoor masks, and often not even that, depending on the state) as not letting us out.
• gmiller123456 5y ago
  >The US policy response The fundamental flaw in your logic is there was no "US policy response", each state had their own regulations, and they varied widely from shutting down churches, to next to nothing. So you're going to have to be a lot more specific about which policies you're referring to. And, if you have actual analysis of the benefits and costs associated with any piece of any response, you should totally publish your results. But just saying it is completely worthless. We all know actual experts will be analyzing this for decades, probably centuries. There is no doubt some of the policies helped, and some of them made things worse. Any blanket statements about all policies being too much, is going to require some pretty solid evidence.
• faangiq 5y ago
  The people pulling the strings handled this exactly the way they wanted. And roughly 75% of the population enjoyed it. The are going to escalate ad infinitum. There’s no turning back now.
• dekerta 5y ago
  > The disease has a 0.3 risk of fatality, still less for Omicron I'm not sure what you mean by "0.3 risk". 0.3% case fatality rate? But where are you getting that number from? COVID19 had roughly a 2% CFR early on when testing was limited and treatments hadn't been developed. It was around 1% for most of the pandemic. It is *now* as low as 0.3% in highly vaccinated countries, but still about 0.5% in the US. It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history. A million Americans are dead. I'm not sure how people can think the risks were over exaggerated. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Case+fatality+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
  • ya_throw 5y ago
    >It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history. By percentage of global population, I beg to differ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics It also overwhelmingly killed the very elderly, an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list.
    • computerphage 5y ago
      There have always been 80 and 90 year olds in society.
      • sieabahlpark 5y ago
      • ya_throw 5y ago
        False.
      • josephcsible 5y ago
        Sure, "didn't even exist" was an exaggeration, but you can't deny that it was a much, much smaller age category before.
• fineIllregister 5y ago
  My observations are the opposite. US pandemic policy response has assumed the cost of shutdown to be infitinte, and has not appropriately reckoned with the coats of letting the virus proliferate, save for the risk of mass death by overwhelming hospital capacity. The shutdowns (shelter-in-place orders) were short and have been over for more than a year now. Governors have been eager to consistently reduce mitigation measures as fast as possible. We're seeing the strain on our health care system. Medical staff are overworked and heavily traumatized, leading to a bidding war for their labor. Less staff leads to harder work, and can go into a death spiral. We might reach a tipping point where our health care system collapses.