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Those of us who had post-infectious disability were screaming about this since early 2020, unfortunately we were ignored in favor of "experts" who suggested we

Those of us who had post-infectious disability were screaming about this since early 2020, unfortunately we were ignored in favor of "experts" who suggested we should let a virus with unknown long-term side effects rip through the country. I've seen estimates as high as 4 million Americans out of work due to being disabled with Long Covid. Add some more people who now can't work because they are taking care of disabled family members. To me, the only news story that really matters is that we're crippling 2 million+ working age Americans a year, many of them concentrated in very high need areas such as nursing. At this rate, hospitals and schools will functionally (if not officially) collapse within the next few years at most. A country where you cannot go to the ER when you're sick because there is nobody there to work the ER, and a country where there are no teachers and they've had to bring out the national guard to merely babysit students, is a failed state.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> unfortunately we were ignored in favor of "experts" who suggested we should let a virus with unknown long-term side effects rip through the country. What expert was suggesting that in 2020? As I recall, we shut down schools and restaurants and basically everything else we could for more than a year, except for very limited re-openings (e.g. outdoor dining, in the dead of winter) months later. We couldn't shut down everything because people need grocery stores to get food!
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  Even then there was never any guarantee that shutting everything down would make an impact greater than the costs. The idea that all these lockdowns did anything meaningful at all is still an open question. The fact it is an open question means 1) it never should have been done and 2) its costs have to completely outweigh any benefit. For the lockdowns and all the other nonsense you should see at least an order of magnitude difference between places that instituted them and those that didn’t. It shouldn’t require fancy statistics or expensive studies to confirm. It should be complete obvious to any reasonable person there was a very large difference.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    There was and still is a large difference between otherwise similar areas/countries that did/didn’t take appropriate measures.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      So there should be no debate right?

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> unfortunately we were ignored in favor of "experts" who suggested we should let a virus with unknown long-term side effects rip through the country. What expert was suggesting that in 2020? As I recall, we shut down schools and restaurants and basically everything else we could for more than a year, except for very limited re-openings (e.g. outdoor dining, in the dead of winter) months later. We couldn't shut down everything because people need grocery stores to get food!

spookthesunset 4y ago
Even then there was never any guarantee that shutting everything down would make an impact greater than the costs. The idea that all these lockdowns did anything meaningful at all is still an open question. The fact it is an open question means 1) it never should have been done and 2) its costs have to completely outweigh any benefit. For the lockdowns and all the other nonsense you should see at least an order of magnitude difference between places that instituted them and those that didn’t. It shouldn’t require fancy statistics or expensive studies to confirm. It should be complete obvious to any reasonable person there was a very large difference.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  There was and still is a large difference between otherwise similar areas/countries that did/didn’t take appropriate measures.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    So there should be no debate right?