10 ms·

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

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.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      No - like they literally wouldn’t let us out. They had to attend church for months watching only from their parked vehicles and with their windows shut. And somebody had their windows open once so the church got a threatening letter from the city from an informant neighbor across the street.
      - magicalist 5y ago
        Sure, but that's actually been shown to be one of the better early pandemic choices. Three months of not gathering inside a church when there were no vaccines and treatments were so primitive and often completely ineffective. As for not opening a car window, I'm obviously not informed about every city's policies, but if true, sounds dumb but irrelevant to your point. I assume used to paint restrictions in a ridiculous light?
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        I’m not painting it in a ridiculous light when it was actually ridiculous. There is and was no evidence then or now that you can catch COVID from the car next door with the windows open. The church offered workarounds, like two pews spacing between families (over 6’ easily) and spaced-out folding-chair overflow in the basement. City didn’t care.
      - drekk 5y ago
        That's your anecdata, why should we treat it as representative? I was delivering food throughout the pandemic and not one person I handed the food to wore a mask (even when all deliveries were supposed to be no contact) We didn't have any vaccines or effective treatments during the 3 month soft lockdown, you think it would be better to have congregations every Sunday to increase that spread? Or is God going to send us to hell for not attending mass during a plague? It's so frustrating because the "lockdown" was doomed from the moment it wasn't enforced. Like you don't get a "threatening letter" if you posess a gram of cannabis. Our criminal justice system comes down hard except when it's people who don't care about public health. So yeah, we wasted like 3 months because most Americans prefer eating indoors at Applebee's to keeping disabled or elderly people around (and everyone else healthy). COVID has really shown me how much eugenics is still alive in the US that people can do a mental calculus about who is "expendable"
peatmoss 5y ago
It also felt like once we in the US barely caught our breath, everything took on a political valence. Everyone dug in so hard that, when new information or considerations came to light, nobody could budge.
_fat_santa 5y ago
When I talk about "lockdowns", I want to split it up into a few separate instances. 1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation. 2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place. 3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up. When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down. No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?
- egypturnash 5y ago
  how are we do different than those places? LA and NYC are some of the densest cities in the States. 12.5% of the US lives in California. Tons more people in close proximity for a virus to tear through than in a hollowed-out former manufacturing city in the Midwest.
  - _fat_santa 5y ago
    True. It's also the type of restrictions that were in place. I think the most egregious was LA closing hiking trails. I get if you need restrictions in the densely populated portions, but closing hiking trails? It seems like whoever made the rules was more concerned with exerting control rather than public health.
- chernevik 5y ago
  I'd argue with #1. It was obvious at the start that this thing could at best be slowed, not stopped, and that conditions on the ground after would be the same as before. And thus the logic of lockdown #1 lead inevitably to #2, and so on. That was where the "experts" should have been saying "look, there really isn't a lot we can do, outside of drastic measures that could do as much harm as help." But everyone wanted to Do Something, and the experts didn't want to seem impotent, and we proceeded thoughtlessly into a mistake.
chernevik 5y ago
The whole thing shows how dangerous and stupid panic can be. There was a lot of media freakout, because drama drives audience. That's where the public health people should have been saying "it's serious but not catastrophic, take a deep breath". And that's where our government and citizenry should have taken a long, hard look at what these recommendations involve. Instead we dove into an extended exercise in groupthink. Because Covid's broad parameters were known to the experts and attentive laypeople in February 2020: spread through the air and quite infectious, but not particularly serious to a healthy individual. The importance of risk factors was strongly expected but not known for a fact. Analogies to the Spanish Flu were drawn, and dismissed by the experts. And the expert response was basically "this one thing is more important than anything else, and minimizing it takes priority over all other concerns". Anyone asking questions of their recommendations, never mind criticizing them, was labelled as anti-science. The "expert" response to serious and informed questions, some of them from excellent medical people, was dismissive and condescending. But it was obvious that its spread could only be slowed, not stopped. It was clear at the start of "Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread" that the facts on the ground would be pretty much the same after as before. So the logic leading to the first fifteen days would lead to the next fifteen days, and so on. But because the first lockdowns were supposedly just two weeks, their cost was minimized. No one spoke up to the obvious logic of their perpetuation. Our public health experts failed to push against the fears, and failed to address the obvious consequences of their recommendations. They failed to honestly consider and respond to questions from other scientists, who, if not "public health experts", certainly had the training and intelligence to pose serious questions. And we, as citizens and in our government, failed to question those experts, and to conduct a proper layperson's analysis of their technical statements. All in all, a very poor performance by all of us.
- clairity 5y ago
  the difference now is that we have practically no limit on the amount and speed of information, such that we can generate fear and garner complicity much quicker. had we not had such a consolidated mediopolitical machine, the mean/median response probably would have been to treat covid like a serious flu: trying not to get it, but not generally panicking over it and going about our business more-or-less as usual, as happened in most places for the spanish flu 100 years ago. we should have focused our mitigation efforts only on the immune deficient (elderly, obese, other diseases, etc.), not everyone, as the optimal approach.
chrismcb 5y ago
One thing that has annoyed me is that we have done very little research into things, like how it really spreads, how effective are masks, shutting down schools. Research into therapeutics. It seems, at least in USA, to be all about getting vaccinated. And ignoring anything that isn't about the vaccines.

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.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    No - like they literally wouldn’t let us out. They had to attend church for months watching only from their parked vehicles and with their windows shut. And somebody had their windows open once so the church got a threatening letter from the city from an informant neighbor across the street.
    - magicalist 5y ago
      Sure, but that's actually been shown to be one of the better early pandemic choices. Three months of not gathering inside a church when there were no vaccines and treatments were so primitive and often completely ineffective. As for not opening a car window, I'm obviously not informed about every city's policies, but if true, sounds dumb but irrelevant to your point. I assume used to paint restrictions in a ridiculous light?
      - gjsman-1000 5y ago
        I’m not painting it in a ridiculous light when it was actually ridiculous. There is and was no evidence then or now that you can catch COVID from the car next door with the windows open. The church offered workarounds, like two pews spacing between families (over 6’ easily) and spaced-out folding-chair overflow in the basement. City didn’t care.
    - drekk 5y ago
      That's your anecdata, why should we treat it as representative? I was delivering food throughout the pandemic and not one person I handed the food to wore a mask (even when all deliveries were supposed to be no contact) We didn't have any vaccines or effective treatments during the 3 month soft lockdown, you think it would be better to have congregations every Sunday to increase that spread? Or is God going to send us to hell for not attending mass during a plague? It's so frustrating because the "lockdown" was doomed from the moment it wasn't enforced. Like you don't get a "threatening letter" if you posess a gram of cannabis. Our criminal justice system comes down hard except when it's people who don't care about public health. So yeah, we wasted like 3 months because most Americans prefer eating indoors at Applebee's to keeping disabled or elderly people around (and everyone else healthy). COVID has really shown me how much eugenics is still alive in the US that people can do a mental calculus about who is "expendable"

peatmoss 5y ago

It also felt like once we in the US barely caught our breath, everything took on a political valence. Everyone dug in so hard that, when new information or considerations came to light, nobody could budge.

_fat_santa 5y ago

When I talk about "lockdowns", I want to split it up into a few separate instances. 1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation. 2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place. 3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up. When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down. No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?

egypturnash 5y ago
how are we do different than those places? LA and NYC are some of the densest cities in the States. 12.5% of the US lives in California. Tons more people in close proximity for a virus to tear through than in a hollowed-out former manufacturing city in the Midwest.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  True. It's also the type of restrictions that were in place. I think the most egregious was LA closing hiking trails. I get if you need restrictions in the densely populated portions, but closing hiking trails? It seems like whoever made the rules was more concerned with exerting control rather than public health.
chernevik 5y ago
I'd argue with #1. It was obvious at the start that this thing could at best be slowed, not stopped, and that conditions on the ground after would be the same as before. And thus the logic of lockdown #1 lead inevitably to #2, and so on. That was where the "experts" should have been saying "look, there really isn't a lot we can do, outside of drastic measures that could do as much harm as help." But everyone wanted to Do Something, and the experts didn't want to seem impotent, and we proceeded thoughtlessly into a mistake.

chernevik 5y ago

The whole thing shows how dangerous and stupid panic can be. There was a lot of media freakout, because drama drives audience. That's where the public health people should have been saying "it's serious but not catastrophic, take a deep breath". And that's where our government and citizenry should have taken a long, hard look at what these recommendations involve. Instead we dove into an extended exercise in groupthink. Because Covid's broad parameters were known to the experts and attentive laypeople in February 2020: spread through the air and quite infectious, but not particularly serious to a healthy individual. The importance of risk factors was strongly expected but not known for a fact. Analogies to the Spanish Flu were drawn, and dismissed by the experts. And the expert response was basically "this one thing is more important than anything else, and minimizing it takes priority over all other concerns". Anyone asking questions of their recommendations, never mind criticizing them, was labelled as anti-science. The "expert" response to serious and informed questions, some of them from excellent medical people, was dismissive and condescending. But it was obvious that its spread could only be slowed, not stopped. It was clear at the start of "Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread" that the facts on the ground would be pretty much the same after as before. So the logic leading to the first fifteen days would lead to the next fifteen days, and so on. But because the first lockdowns were supposedly just two weeks, their cost was minimized. No one spoke up to the obvious logic of their perpetuation. Our public health experts failed to push against the fears, and failed to address the obvious consequences of their recommendations. They failed to honestly consider and respond to questions from other scientists, who, if not "public health experts", certainly had the training and intelligence to pose serious questions. And we, as citizens and in our government, failed to question those experts, and to conduct a proper layperson's analysis of their technical statements. All in all, a very poor performance by all of us.

clairity 5y ago
the difference now is that we have practically no limit on the amount and speed of information, such that we can generate fear and garner complicity much quicker. had we not had such a consolidated mediopolitical machine, the mean/median response probably would have been to treat covid like a serious flu: trying not to get it, but not generally panicking over it and going about our business more-or-less as usual, as happened in most places for the spanish flu 100 years ago. we should have focused our mitigation efforts only on the immune deficient (elderly, obese, other diseases, etc.), not everyone, as the optimal approach.

chrismcb 5y ago

One thing that has annoyed me is that we have done very little research into things, like how it really spreads, how effective are masks, shutting down schools. Research into therapeutics. It seems, at least in USA, to be all about getting vaccinated. And ignoring anything that isn't about the vaccines.