>Certainly the extended lockdowns were harmful, I totally agree. I do think it's important to call out our increasing knowledge over time. Executively imposed l

>Certainly the extended lockdowns were harmful, I totally agree. I do think it's important to call out our increasing knowledge over time. Executively imposed lockdowns we're certainly justified under most states' emergency laws. It's always a 20/20 hindsight thing. I think I would have also locked down for 2 weeks and shutdown the borders. >Firstly, based on what we knew at the time, lockdowns in March and April were absolutely warranted. Beyond that, many states started building frameworks to manage public health, relying on indicators and public data. Mostly those frameworks stopped adapting in summer/fall 2020 despite radically increasing knowledge. That's when it all became politicized. Yep, this. >Metrics should have been updated over time and they largely didn't. We started hearing whispers of hospital utilization and some metrics like bed count started showing up but then it became clear Those were misleading numbers anyway. We never got any sense of the medical staff burnout crisis which should have been critical. 100% of ICU beds are occupied! Oh wait.. that's true literally all the time. >Those emergency laws were badly abused though and many legislatures simply allowed the executive to usurp power instead of jealously guarding it (as they should) and taking up debate on its own. Emergency laws have expiration dates to prevent executive overreach and few states complained when the executive just started declaring the same emergency over and over again, a clear corruption of the purpose of the statute. Now imagine another virus escapes a lab. One that is actually far worse than the spanish flu. Will kill 50% of the world population. Are we ready for it now? Nope. No way.