6 ms·

Are you forgetting that the lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth doubling, tripling, and quadr

Are you forgetting that the lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on "ignore it and it will go away" instead of jumping on measures to reduce Rt? They only blinked when faced with the imminent prospect of having hospitals spill out into parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of a respirator. The pandemic was incompetently managed, but "ignore COVID harder" is the exact brand of incompetence that made the pandemic worse than it had to be.

secondcoming 3y ago
If it was Trump's fault, why was most of the developed world in lockdown too?
- barbazoo 3y ago
  The degree of how locked down one was and for how long varied greatly depending on where you were.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    The lockdown was significantly worse in most European countries than in the US for a long time.
sergiotapia 3y ago
"Worse for who?" is the question a lot of people should have asked. I'm not responding to this thread anymore. People are still cultish about this discussion.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Worse for everyone. It's absolutely wild that you think elementary public health is a conspiracy.
  - runsWphotons 3y ago
    Many Countries which did little had better results. Arguable that all efforts outside protecting nursing homes were futile or harmful.
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      By "many countries" do you mean "Sweden, if you cut off the data right before their big wave"?
      - runsWphotons 3y ago
        It isn't just Sweden and even where you may have some questions about the data, it is no small thing for countries which put fewer restrictions to have rates which are of the same magnitude as those with heavier restrictions, given the huge costs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...
- ethanbond 3y ago
  "I would go on living my life with literal airborne HIV... [other] people are still cultish about this discussion"
specialp 3y ago
The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase. I think the lessons learned here were: 1. Once something like this escapes its confines and starts spreading as COVID did, it is here to stay and any lockdowns that are not to avoid hospital capacity problems just prolong the inevitable 2. Compromised people due to health conditions and age should definitely lay low when there is an outbreak. But locking down a populace at great financial and other costs does not help them. In fact it probably causes more harm as the cycle is prolonged. The more healthy people that recover the better. Trump did his things based on stubbornness and stupidity. Persisting lockdowns and draconian restrictions past the hospital situation being resolved was also not wise either. I live in NY and in April 2020 locking down was essential. It was very bad with the hospitals and nursing homes being ravaged.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  > The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase. Did they? Is the table on wikipedia wrong? Outside of California (which I feel no desire to defend), it looks like the actual lockdowns were 0-3 months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns 0-3 months doesn't sound nutty to me. Perhaps 3 months was a bit on the high side, sure, but it's also on the high side of actual policy. What does strike me as nutty was the extreme rhetoric around extremely basic Rt reduction measures. Washing hands, social distancing, wearing masks, taking temperatures, installing spit shields etc just don't deserve nearly the same level of vitriol as the lockdowns themselves, but people seem awfully keen to fudge the distinction. Next time we should start those measures out of the gate but I am worried that people will jump right back into the game of pretending that basic public health measures = extreme oppression, sending us down the exact same path as 2020.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    Sorry but I consider social distancing measures and forced mask wearing to be "lockdowns", colloquially, as do many other people. The life-altering consequences of COVID policy lasted much, much longer than three months.
lvass 3y ago
Don't we have enough evidence from China it was the other way around? They seemingly imposed the most restrictive lockdowns in the world, and it took them the longest to get rid of the largest scale crisis.
tristor 3y ago
> lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth This does not match my recollection. Not to get all political, but I was headed to a conference in Belgium just weeks prior to the lockdowns starting wearing a full-face respirator and got made fun of by the TSA agents in the Atlanta airport because the CDC was telling people that masks were unnecessary/didn't work. I was wearing said respirator, because I had been deeply attuned to the news of what was going on around the world well ahead of any real concern or alarm bells in the US. I remember very clearly that the first major action to be taken by the US government was a travel restriction/travel ban on flights entering the US from China, and this was done via an executive order by Trump which was lambasted broadly in the news media and by politicians across the aisle as being racist and bigoted. I remember just months later that those same talking heads were happy to say that not enough had been done soon enough and that we should have instituted a similar travel ban earlier and more broadly. Trump's administration definitely screwed up the pandemic response, not the least of which by basically throwing out the playbook on exactly how to respond to a pandemic that had been built painstakingly after the previous challenges we had with SARS, MERS, and H1N1. I am in no way defending Trump here, but I think making this political and trying point fingers isn't an accurate recollection. The entire US government failed to appropriately respond, this includes elected officials from both political parties, as well as the appointees and bureaucrats. Yes, this /very much/ includes the CDC that bald-faced lied about the effective usage of masks for months in the beginning of the pandemic. Luckily many people, like myself, are capable of understanding the basic physics of air movement and understand that masks can very much be effective if worn properly and so we went out and did just that. I managed to avoid being infected until early 2022 (Omicron) despite being required to travel multiple times, including internationally, because I effectively used PPE. The most infuriating thing about all of this, as the OP of this thread points out, is that very likely the entire pandemic was caused by a lab leak after the virus was created during gain of function research, and yet, we will never actually know. The evidence of what occurred has been destroyed or muddled for political reasons by everyone involved, including both parties in the US, not just the Chinese. It's a huge mess, and a huge failure of governments around the world, and everyone involved is hoping that normal folks will forget about it and move on with their lives like nothing happened, or better yet, argue about it politically for the dumbest reasons. Your comment equates to "Trump bad, CDC good", but actually the truth is "Trump bad, CDC bad, everyone involved pretty much bad".
internat333 3y ago
It would have grown around the world anyway...
dfadsadsf 3y ago
If anything lack of respirators saved lives. With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID. All this hospital heroic in New York and around the country was huge mistake and most people who were in hospital at the time should have stayed home. On lockdowns - you have to do them 100% (China, Australia, New Zealand) or just give up. Half measures just do not make sense - you get a lot of pain with very little to show for it. For US specifically 100% lockdown was never an option - building wall with machine gun encampment to stop movement on both Canadian and Mexican border was not feasible, definitely not on timeline of days or at most weeks. In the end Fauci, NIH, and medical establishment etc just made zero difference to COVID or COVID deaths. Missed school and ballooned debt are the only legacy of their efforts.
- foobarian 3y ago
  > With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID. Do you have links on this? I'd love to know more.
  - op00to 3y ago
    Of course they don't. This is nonsense. There are studies that said "if you were on mechanical ventilation early on in the pandemic, you were highly likely to die". Oh my! Ventilators sound bad, right? Doctors were reserving ventilators for the most critically ill people that needed them. The same patients who were most likely to die (ill, old, etc) from COVID were put on ventilators. It wasn't the ventilators, it was the god damned virus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7682899/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7682899/
  - dfadsadsf 3y ago
    Hospitals put people on respirator who should have never been on it and then in New York in 2020 it was compounded by sever lack of nurses which led to shoddy care - essentially intubated and sedated patients were on their own with no help or monitoring. Relatives were not allowed in. When you are on respirator you have few days to recover and then you are starting to die due to lung damage - and 3-7 days were not enough to fight COVID so people just died. The same people would have been fine and recovered from COVID on their own. To be fair, doctors noticed it fairly quickly (but too late for New York) and now usage of respirators for COVID is much much rarer. My guess nobody talks or highlights blunders of New York because it goes against doctors/nurses are heroes of COVID mantra and not very relevant to current debates on COVID. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventilators-specia/special-report-as-virus-advances-doctors-rethink-rush-to-ventilate-idUSKCN2251PE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
[flagged]
School-Cotton 3y ago
What's your explanation for all the other countries that also had lockdowns despite Trump not being president there? This thing was impossible to contain, regardless of which talking head was in charge.

secondcoming 3y ago

If it was Trump's fault, why was most of the developed world in lockdown too?

barbazoo 3y ago
The degree of how locked down one was and for how long varied greatly depending on where you were.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  The lockdown was significantly worse in most European countries than in the US for a long time.

sergiotapia 3y ago

"Worse for who?" is the question a lot of people should have asked. I'm not responding to this thread anymore. People are still cultish about this discussion.

jjoonathan 3y ago
Worse for everyone. It's absolutely wild that you think elementary public health is a conspiracy.
- runsWphotons 3y ago
  Many Countries which did little had better results. Arguable that all efforts outside protecting nursing homes were futile or harmful.
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    By "many countries" do you mean "Sweden, if you cut off the data right before their big wave"?
    - runsWphotons 3y ago
      It isn't just Sweden and even where you may have some questions about the data, it is no small thing for countries which put fewer restrictions to have rates which are of the same magnitude as those with heavier restrictions, given the huge costs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...
ethanbond 3y ago
"I would go on living my life with literal airborne HIV... [other] people are still cultish about this discussion"

specialp 3y ago

The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase. I think the lessons learned here were: 1. Once something like this escapes its confines and starts spreading as COVID did, it is here to stay and any lockdowns that are not to avoid hospital capacity problems just prolong the inevitable 2. Compromised people due to health conditions and age should definitely lay low when there is an outbreak. But locking down a populace at great financial and other costs does not help them. In fact it probably causes more harm as the cycle is prolonged. The more healthy people that recover the better. Trump did his things based on stubbornness and stupidity. Persisting lockdowns and draconian restrictions past the hospital situation being resolved was also not wise either. I live in NY and in April 2020 locking down was essential. It was very bad with the hospitals and nursing homes being ravaged.

jjoonathan 3y ago
> The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase. Did they? Is the table on wikipedia wrong? Outside of California (which I feel no desire to defend), it looks like the actual lockdowns were 0-3 months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns 0-3 months doesn't sound nutty to me. Perhaps 3 months was a bit on the high side, sure, but it's also on the high side of actual policy. What does strike me as nutty was the extreme rhetoric around extremely basic Rt reduction measures. Washing hands, social distancing, wearing masks, taking temperatures, installing spit shields etc just don't deserve nearly the same level of vitriol as the lockdowns themselves, but people seem awfully keen to fudge the distinction. Next time we should start those measures out of the gate but I am worried that people will jump right back into the game of pretending that basic public health measures = extreme oppression, sending us down the exact same path as 2020.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Sorry but I consider social distancing measures and forced mask wearing to be "lockdowns", colloquially, as do many other people. The life-altering consequences of COVID policy lasted much, much longer than three months.

lvass 3y ago

Don't we have enough evidence from China it was the other way around? They seemingly imposed the most restrictive lockdowns in the world, and it took them the longest to get rid of the largest scale crisis.

tristor 3y ago

> lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth This does not match my recollection. Not to get all political, but I was headed to a conference in Belgium just weeks prior to the lockdowns starting wearing a full-face respirator and got made fun of by the TSA agents in the Atlanta airport because the CDC was telling people that masks were unnecessary/didn't work. I was wearing said respirator, because I had been deeply attuned to the news of what was going on around the world well ahead of any real concern or alarm bells in the US. I remember very clearly that the first major action to be taken by the US government was a travel restriction/travel ban on flights entering the US from China, and this was done via an executive order by Trump which was lambasted broadly in the news media and by politicians across the aisle as being racist and bigoted. I remember just months later that those same talking heads were happy to say that not enough had been done soon enough and that we should have instituted a similar travel ban earlier and more broadly. Trump's administration definitely screwed up the pandemic response, not the least of which by basically throwing out the playbook on exactly how to respond to a pandemic that had been built painstakingly after the previous challenges we had with SARS, MERS, and H1N1. I am in no way defending Trump here, but I think making this political and trying point fingers isn't an accurate recollection. The entire US government failed to appropriately respond, this includes elected officials from both political parties, as well as the appointees and bureaucrats. Yes, this /very much/ includes the CDC that bald-faced lied about the effective usage of masks for months in the beginning of the pandemic. Luckily many people, like myself, are capable of understanding the basic physics of air movement and understand that masks can very much be effective if worn properly and so we went out and did just that. I managed to avoid being infected until early 2022 (Omicron) despite being required to travel multiple times, including internationally, because I effectively used PPE. The most infuriating thing about all of this, as the OP of this thread points out, is that very likely the entire pandemic was caused by a lab leak after the virus was created during gain of function research, and yet, we will never actually know. The evidence of what occurred has been destroyed or muddled for political reasons by everyone involved, including both parties in the US, not just the Chinese. It's a huge mess, and a huge failure of governments around the world, and everyone involved is hoping that normal folks will forget about it and move on with their lives like nothing happened, or better yet, argue about it politically for the dumbest reasons. Your comment equates to "Trump bad, CDC good", but actually the truth is "Trump bad, CDC bad, everyone involved pretty much bad".

internat333 3y ago

It would have grown around the world anyway...

dfadsadsf 3y ago

If anything lack of respirators saved lives. With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID. All this hospital heroic in New York and around the country was huge mistake and most people who were in hospital at the time should have stayed home. On lockdowns - you have to do them 100% (China, Australia, New Zealand) or just give up. Half measures just do not make sense - you get a lot of pain with very little to show for it. For US specifically 100% lockdown was never an option - building wall with machine gun encampment to stop movement on both Canadian and Mexican border was not feasible, definitely not on timeline of days or at most weeks. In the end Fauci, NIH, and medical establishment etc just made zero difference to COVID or COVID deaths. Missed school and ballooned debt are the only legacy of their efforts.

foobarian 3y ago
> With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID. Do you have links on this? I'd love to know more.
- op00to 3y ago
  Of course they don't. This is nonsense. There are studies that said "if you were on mechanical ventilation early on in the pandemic, you were highly likely to die". Oh my! Ventilators sound bad, right? Doctors were reserving ventilators for the most critically ill people that needed them. The same patients who were most likely to die (ill, old, etc) from COVID were put on ventilators. It wasn't the ventilators, it was the god damned virus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7682899/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7682899/
- dfadsadsf 3y ago
  Hospitals put people on respirator who should have never been on it and then in New York in 2020 it was compounded by sever lack of nurses which led to shoddy care - essentially intubated and sedated patients were on their own with no help or monitoring. Relatives were not allowed in. When you are on respirator you have few days to recover and then you are starting to die due to lung damage - and 3-7 days were not enough to fight COVID so people just died. The same people would have been fine and recovered from COVID on their own. To be fair, doctors noticed it fairly quickly (but too late for New York) and now usage of respirators for COVID is much much rarer. My guess nobody talks or highlights blunders of New York because it goes against doctors/nurses are heroes of COVID mantra and not very relevant to current debates on COVID. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventilators-specia/special-report-as-virus-advances-doctors-rethink-rush-to-ventilate-idUSKCN2251PE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

[flagged]

School-Cotton 3y ago

What's your explanation for all the other countries that also had lockdowns despite Trump not being president there? This thing was impossible to contain, regardless of which talking head was in charge.