>But, interventions during the worst parts of the pendemic really did work. I'm not sure the jury is entirely in on that yet; but I'll be the first to admit it

>But, interventions during the worst parts of the pendemic really did work. I'm not sure the jury is entirely in on that yet; but I'll be the first to admit it's painstakingly difficult to with any degree of confidence tease apart disparate threads of systemic dysfunction to isolate the COVID contribution. Like the supply chain: did we get into dire straits because of the bullwhip effect + lack of people actually able to make things? Almost certainly. But could that also have been a symptom of over-reliance on centralized industry, which makes a fundamental tradeoff for efficiency of consolidating people + equipment in a single place at the same-time at the expense of fault-tolerance? I won't opine on the strictly medical interventions since that isn't so much my bag, but logistics-wise, COVID demonstrated our industrial architecture has become a house of cards waiting to go up in flames to a pathogenic match. Socially speaking, I'm tempted to say we were as close as I've seen in living memory to completely unprepared for people to get forcibly physically denetworked to a high degree. I'll also be one of the first to admit that besides 9/11, I've never seen American civic life get quite as ugly, quite so fast, and to such a high degree as it did during the pandemic; and I can't isolate the Administration at the time as a contributing factor; but I also can't deny that in spite of the ineptitude at that level, things developed disturbingly fast and not in an ultimately comforting direction either; but rather reinforcing the same disturbances we haven't even reeled back from from the War on Terror era. There has to be a correction. There has to be a hard line we aren't willing to let fear shephard us to cross. If there isn't, I fear for us all.