11 ms·

I for one am sick of all the covid related back biting and second guessing. There was no way a major pandemic was going to be anything but an unmitigated natura

I for one am sick of all the covid related back biting and second guessing. There was no way a major pandemic was going to be anything but an unmitigated natural disaster of global proportions. Policies chosen as “least bad” are still bad. Maybe they were worse, maybe they were just less bad. No one sold them as good. Now the job of science is to pick out what was efficacious and what was worse. But the moaning about policies that were unpleasant to my mind ignores the fact that it was a global natural disaster and it was never going to be ok, or pleasant, or not inconvenience you. For some people the policies were worse than the disease. For millions that didn’t die, they were better. As a species I wish we could put down our gripes and figure out how to make the next time less bad, but we need to realize even then it’s going to be a global natural disaster and those might interfere with your preferred daily routine. Edit: to those who brought up ways that the inconvenience was greater than disrupting their preferred daily routines (missed funerals - same happened to me, loneliness, other tragedies). First, I had my share as well and I empathize and mine were fairly horrific with profound impact on me and my family I still struggle with. That comment wasn’t meant for you, but there are many who just simply didn’t like the inconveniences. The rest was for you. It was a global disaster. Disasters are tragedies, heaped upon tragedies. We made good decisions, bad decisions, ineffectual decisions, but ultimately nothing would have made it good, ok, or anything but a disaster of monumental proportion. I’m sorry it was hard for you, it was for me too. It was hard for everyone. I’m down with healing together. I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain.

zmgsabst 3y ago
[flagged]
- AgentOrange1234 3y ago
  What’s your source on this? I haven’t heard anything like this.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    On what? I cited the OECD data; I downloaded it, added up COVID deaths, excess deaths, and subtracted COVID from excess to get “non-COVID attributed excess”.
- someNameIG 3y ago
  Here in Australia our interventions were longer and more sever that that of the US, our excess deaths are about 4 times less than youse over there. https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/13pgttt/australia_had_low_excess_deaths_in_the_past_3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/13pgt...
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Sorry for the slow response, I wanted to investigate the data before responding — Here is a chart listing their cumulative mortality, from the OECD dataset. Measured as fractions of their current populations. This chart assumes all COVID deaths are excess (which undercounts real excess). USA pop: 334,814,000 AUS pop: 26,479,000 https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-comparison.png https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-... Total excess is pink; COVID deaths (total) are orange; non-COVID attributable excess is blue. A few points: - COVID deaths are about 4x lower, but excess deaths around 3x - there’s more non-COVID attributable excess than COVID deaths in AUS - the USA has higher per capita expected mortality than AUS, as well; by about 1.5x See here: https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/all-mortality-comparison.png https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/all-mortality-co... I’m not sure I’d count this to interventions, which when directly measured seem to provide lower benefits, versus the fact US healthcare is questionable and the US unhealthy in ways dangerous during COVID — as measured by expected mortality being higher.
  - enslavedrobot 3y ago
    Take a look at Sweden's cumulative excess deaths. https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...
was_a_dev 3y ago
I agree. I was thinking today how during covid, my country was short of PPE for doctors and nurses. As were many countries One policy failing in this instance, was our reduction of stockpiled PPE several years earlier. Since COVID, there has been no discusion or suggestion of how to prepare better for next time
- lazide 3y ago
  We likely won’t see any real retrospectives for another 5-10 years. It’s still too raw and difficult to process the reality, as you can see in some of the other responses.
  - ls612 3y ago
    We realistically won’t see a good retrospective until the political leaders in 2020 have exited the political scene. Until then reactions to Covid stuff will just be a culture war reflex response of self-preservation.
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      There are many covid counterfactuals we'll never know the answer to, but personally, I wish we could see the timeline where Trump won the election. Would the vaccination positions have been completely flipped? Pre-election you had democrat leaders saying things like "I wouldn't take a Trump vaccine." If we could only see that play out, I think it would expose how arbitrary much of the US political division really is.
      - ls612 3y ago
        Or similarly what if Clinton wins in 2016, and gets stuck with the mess and cratering economy in her re-election campaign.
      - daveguy 3y ago
        This seems very inconsistent with what I remember. "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine" is completely incongruent with the fact that the vast majority of "the gubment can't make me wear a mask or take a vaccine" were in the middle of trump country. Trump got boo'd for promoting the vaccine after he lost. They would have been just as anti-gubment regardless. There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election. It completely disappeared as soon as it was obvious that the FDA wasn't going to let trump circumvent basic safety controls to push a vaccine in 6 months (before the election) instead of 12 months (after the election).
macinjosh 3y ago
Missing my grandmas funeral or my parents missing the birth of their granddaughter are not minor changes to a ‘preferred daily routine.’ Lockdowns were a not only a useless public health measure they caused additional damage on top of the damage the pandemic was doing. Plenty of smart people warned against lockdowns but those in power ignored them. Sorry not gonna let this stuff go.
- _Microft 3y ago
  My condolences for your loss. GP certainly exaggerated by labelling the situation as minor inconvenience. It was a major upheaval to all our lives. There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help - at least where conducted properly and with support of the populace (there's little hope if people are not even trying to cooperate though); the first "lockdown" (it was called like that but actually there were only curfews here) in Germany comes to mind - things went only downhill here after the first partially re-opened summer when different states and politicians discovered the situation as a way to compete with each other. This is hindsight though. In the beginning there was no reliable information on transmission vectors or infectiousness and the lack of tests, drugs, vaccines and treatments (even simple things like positioning patients prone to make breathing easier) or simply protection equipment left imo little choice than to treat the situation as severe as possible (better save than sorry). All in all I think that most of it was unavoidable, although I absolutely agree that this was in every way a situation that was hard to deal with for all of us.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    > There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      The point was the delay of cases. During COVID many people died of preventable diseases or issues because COVID patients were siphoning our hospital and medical systems of resources. This man died of something that could've been prevented because hospitals were full and he couldn't get an ICU bed [1]. There are many more stories of this during the height of COVID of people dying from things that were low risk emergencies that became high risk ones because of hospitals being stressed. In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/13/1036593269/coronavirus-alabama-43-icus-at-capacity-ray-demonia https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
gd1 3y ago
[dead]
momirlan 3y ago
[flagged]
- londons_explore 3y ago
  There aren't many claiming it was deliberate... The main claims seems to be accidental release of a virus. If it was deliberate, you probably wouldn't release it right at the lab that developed it...
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Okay, but if you’re driving recklessly and cause a car crash which kills someone, I don’t say they died “naturally”. There’s a reason the US banned that variety of gain of function — and a reason why people are outraged Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance sponsored it in China to circumvent that.
TechBro8615 3y ago
> No one sold them as good. What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like "flattening the curve." Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that damage. It was the policies.
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  > Why'd we implement them then? Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there were zero "good" options. In a global pandemic, every choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least bad. Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect. That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
- lazide 3y ago
  Uh, they were sold as better than the alternatives. And even without the policies, things were going to happen. The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH) started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on the matter for instance, because they didn’t have any better alternatives, and it would have been worse otherwise.
  - revelio 3y ago
    Of course they did. The alternative was to just keep calm and carry on, like for every other virus outbreak. The idea that COVID required unique measures is not true and had been proven untrue many times in many ways. The correct response was the traditional one: let doctors get on with it and otherwise continue with normal life.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
hanoz 3y ago
[flagged]
- junofan 3y ago
  Yeah, my grandmother was very social. She had dementia and didn’t understand what was happening. She cried about how lonely she was every single day for months until she passed.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    My grandfather had been holding off the worsening of his vascular dementia for a long time because he had a lot of family around him to remind him who he was. Cutting him off from the world resulted in quick decline and death. Lockdown killed dementia patients: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-isolation-causes-shocking-levels-decline-people-dementia-who-are-rapidly https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-isola...
- Fgehono 3y ago
  [flagged]
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  What if both of you are right? Or wrong for that matter? Everybody acknowledges that some people got hurt pretty badly by policies applied, and those people are in millions on global scale. Clearly you are one of them. Yet we saved by some estimates lower tens of millions of lives, and we tested en masse extremely promising new way of administering cures/vaccinations. Attacking that takes more than just some emotional outbursts, better come with some cold hard facts. Ie I don't know a single person who doesn't have in circle of family or close friends somebody who passed away directly due to covid.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Go ahead and post a study that says we saved tens of millions. Not one intervention has been shown to reduce mortality by 50% across the general population — you’re making facts up to deny the harms caused.
pessimizer 3y ago
I still can't get over how we shut down schools in a huge amount of the world for a long period of time, and didn't come out of that with high-quality, open source, government-sponsored software for remote education. Instead, we just waited it out on every level, while the rich got a lot richer.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  That we don't have that anyway is mind-blowing. An open-source corpus of educational material seems like an obvious social good in excess of many things that do get huge quantities of money sprayed at them. Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some educational company. The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
  - abirch 3y ago
    Correct, not a lot has happened in Trigonometry or introductory calculus for centuries but colleges are always requiring newer editions.
    - ForOldHack 3y ago
      Introductory Calculus, my friend, a teacher, during a period, where a new edition proved to be more buggy then the rest, abandoned text books. A recent HS grad, walked into their class, and was dismissed... then dropped my name, and was told to sit down. There are things from recent work that is now being incorporated into the curriculum, cleaner approaches... but the text books have not kept pace, except for one important exception: The amount of free textbooks has ballooned, and a great new proof of integral (1/x)
    - i2cmaster 3y ago
      [dead]
tmaly 3y ago
I think Andrew Huff would contest your qualification of it as "natural"
commandlinefan 3y ago
> Policies chosen as “least bad” are still bad. But they deliberately chose the least _good_ policies, when it was very obvious that the choices they were making were by far the worst.
jiggawatts 3y ago
I raised a child during the pandemic, during the lockdowns. His grandparents missed out on most of the first year of his life because of travel restrictions. They lived just across town. What lesson did I learn from this? I learned that toddlers will throw an epic hissy fit if they don't get what they want, even if what they want is impossible, impractical, or goes against either their own personal interest or the interests of their family. They'll insist on doing things that have a very decent chance of killing them on the spot. "I want it!" followed by 120 decibel screeching is the behaviour of a toddler. We're teaching him better, of course. We're teaching about sharing. About saying sorry. Telling him when to say "thank you" and "please". I'm also teaching him not to poke metal utensils into power sockets or to sneeze in my face. Apparently not all parents bothered with this. Their children grew up to be big children, unable the grasp these simple concepts despite having adult bodies. Yes, the speed limit on the highway is inconvenient for you if you're late for a meeting. No, nobody cares about you and your stupid appointment, we care about the family of four you might kill for your own convenience if we let you drive as fast as you possibly can. This is the crux of it. Some people think being allowed to drive as fast as they can is freedom, and any curtailment of that freedom is oppression. What's truly sad about all of this is not the political polarisation over the type of health policy that goes back centuries[1]. No, it's that Katalin Karikó, the woman who spent here entire life toiling away in obscurity, never got a proper "Thank you!" from the world that she saved. She should be more famous than Beyoncé and richer than Bill Gates, and instead she's a little-known scientist with a few pats on the back from jealous colleagues mumbling "I could have invented that" under their breath. [1] Go look up how old the word "quarantine" is and where it originated from.
jfengel 3y ago
Everything that went wrong is evidence that if everyone had done my thing, it would all have been perfect.
erulabs 3y ago
You’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about if the lockdowns were better or worse, not even a bit. It’s about whether or not governments should have the power and ability to enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were absolutely necessary. Now that the data, retrospectively, seems muddled and unclear, the conversation can recenter on if the government we want should even have the power to do what they did. It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group. Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions. I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.
- discreteevent 3y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "your own decision". For example: If someone wants to smoke in the office that should be their own decision.
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  I mean ultimately the answer is yes. People look at COVID and say it's not a big deal, but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse. We're not at all prepared if we have something like a Black Death 2.0 and ultimately your ability to function as an individual depends on society's ability to actually function. Even the half-assed measures we took against COVID helped prevent our hospital systems from completely collapsing which would've led to far more deaths. The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0 for people to understand this.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    > but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse So it wasn’t. We knew it was mild, certainly worse than flu, but still mostly killing the elderly above life expectancy. - We knew newspapers were grossly exaggerating information to the point of saying obvious bait (“the vaccine enlarges the penis” — yup they said it), - We knew newspapers were under gag order to publish misinformation. - We knew that most governments declared the law of exception and state of emergency, so from that point, no information could be trusted. We knew it was mild because everyone was in a state of hysteria, from “SO YOU WANT TO KILL ALL GRANDMOTHERS” to “IN NYC THEY USE GIANT DUMPSTER TRUCKS TO CARRY THE DEADS TO THE MORGUE, SO WHY ARE YOU AGAINST LOCKDOWNS”. We knew it was all a gross exaggeration.
disambiguation 3y ago
I think the sentiment here applies generally. The world would be a much kinder place if we embraced radical cooperation. Why wait for disaster to strike before we start working together? But humans are egotistical by nature. That goes not only for the individuals that defied mandates, but for the policy makers too. I think it's hard to define the "greater good" and even harder to tell who represents it. If you want to have the kind of cooperation you're talking about, it first requires trust. The data confirms trust makes a difference when you compare vaccine uptake in countries like Japan vs. Russia. There's certainly much to be fed up about, but we can at least derive some practical questions from this experience. * What was the source of distrust during the pandemic? Was it legitimate or illegitimate? * Have our institutions earned trust since then so we can do better next time around?
- revelio 3y ago
  > The world would be a much kinder place if we embraced radical cooperation. It would be a horrific dystopia as everyone who tried to implement that has found. Competitive and free socialists always outcompete "radically cooperative" societies because the latter is always implemented through violence and coercion. There's no such thing as "radically cooperative" and also kind, the two are incompatible.
peteradio 3y ago
Good god, things get better when people advocate for themselves aka griping.
hedora 3y ago
> I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain. No offense, but from the first part of your comment, it is clear you were part of the problem, not the solution, on this front. We did all the things you suggest after the last pandemic. The findings strongly cautioned against attempting another lockdown. For covid, that advice was ignored, and now we are seeing excess deaths comparable to the “isolate just the most vulnerable, and get it over with in a month or two” approach, along with huge economic and societal costs from the lockdowns.
- piloto_ciego 3y ago
  This is revisionist nonsense in America. We didn’t do a damn thing here and 1m people died. We didn’t have real lockdowns here, we had 1 year of remote school but, beyond that not much. It was perhaps the single greatest tragedy in America since WWII and we basically said “think of the economy!” and happily sent everyone back after a very limited period of time. We learned nothing.
faffffaf 3y ago
>the inconvenience Oh hell no. I did not live through an "inconvenience". I and my kids now inhabit a world that will deal with the societal and economic damage for many years. And no, I'm not just going to let slide a historically unprecedented, in scope and scale, change in citizen/government dynamics, and for a disease where you couldn't even begin to question the official narrative without being branded an evil anti-vaxxer. We absolutely need to analyse what was done, and sort the panicked, fear-driven polices from what was useful.
- lazide 3y ago
  So maybe analyze it instead of leading with the conclusion first? Don't forget to come up with a plausible better concrete alternative so we can compare/contrast.
  - faffffaf 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - lazide 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - faffffaf 3y ago
        [flagged]
        lazide 3y ago
        That someone deserves to be punished.
- terminatornet 3y ago
  i swear, with the exception of china, no country has had anything remotely resembling a lockdown since early 2021. what are you still complaining about? you won, no one likes a sore winner.
ForOldHack 3y ago
>Global proportions... So you agree its a pandemic? It fit the logistics curve to <0.1%, except for super spreader events, which afterwards, it still was very close. All the policies, were designed around herd immunity which maximizes deaths, except for the WHO which fallowed Fauchi. An acquaintance of mine, M, lost 19 family members to the pandemic. My family, mostly very well educated, went super paranoid, and we only had two late Omichron infections. I am sorry it was hard for everyone, I wish we followed proticalls. You are a commenter, for whom I read ever post.
- ForOldHack 3y ago
  Just read this: "If covid had a high mortality rate we would almost all be dead. Next time we may not be so lucky" -isetprettygirlsonfire

zmgsabst 3y ago

[flagged]

AgentOrange1234 3y ago
What’s your source on this? I haven’t heard anything like this.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  On what? I cited the OECD data; I downloaded it, added up COVID deaths, excess deaths, and subtracted COVID from excess to get “non-COVID attributed excess”.
someNameIG 3y ago
Here in Australia our interventions were longer and more sever that that of the US, our excess deaths are about 4 times less than youse over there. https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/13pgttt/australia_had_low_excess_deaths_in_the_past_3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/13pgt...
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Sorry for the slow response, I wanted to investigate the data before responding — Here is a chart listing their cumulative mortality, from the OECD dataset. Measured as fractions of their current populations. This chart assumes all COVID deaths are excess (which undercounts real excess). USA pop: 334,814,000 AUS pop: 26,479,000 https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-comparison.png https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/covid-mortality-... Total excess is pink; COVID deaths (total) are orange; non-COVID attributable excess is blue. A few points: - COVID deaths are about 4x lower, but excess deaths around 3x - there’s more non-COVID attributable excess than COVID deaths in AUS - the USA has higher per capita expected mortality than AUS, as well; by about 1.5x See here: https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/all-mortality-comparison.png https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/mortality/all-mortality-co... I’m not sure I’d count this to interventions, which when directly measured seem to provide lower benefits, versus the fact US healthcare is questionable and the US unhealthy in ways dangerous during COVID — as measured by expected mortality being higher.
- enslavedrobot 3y ago
  Take a look at Sweden's cumulative excess deaths. https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...

was_a_dev 3y ago

I agree. I was thinking today how during covid, my country was short of PPE for doctors and nurses. As were many countries One policy failing in this instance, was our reduction of stockpiled PPE several years earlier. Since COVID, there has been no discusion or suggestion of how to prepare better for next time

lazide 3y ago
We likely won’t see any real retrospectives for another 5-10 years. It’s still too raw and difficult to process the reality, as you can see in some of the other responses.
- ls612 3y ago
  We realistically won’t see a good retrospective until the political leaders in 2020 have exited the political scene. Until then reactions to Covid stuff will just be a culture war reflex response of self-preservation.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    There are many covid counterfactuals we'll never know the answer to, but personally, I wish we could see the timeline where Trump won the election. Would the vaccination positions have been completely flipped? Pre-election you had democrat leaders saying things like "I wouldn't take a Trump vaccine." If we could only see that play out, I think it would expose how arbitrary much of the US political division really is.
    - ls612 3y ago
      Or similarly what if Clinton wins in 2016, and gets stuck with the mess and cratering economy in her re-election campaign.
    - daveguy 3y ago
      This seems very inconsistent with what I remember. "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine" is completely incongruent with the fact that the vast majority of "the gubment can't make me wear a mask or take a vaccine" were in the middle of trump country. Trump got boo'd for promoting the vaccine after he lost. They would have been just as anti-gubment regardless. There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election. It completely disappeared as soon as it was obvious that the FDA wasn't going to let trump circumvent basic safety controls to push a vaccine in 6 months (before the election) instead of 12 months (after the election).

macinjosh 3y ago

Missing my grandmas funeral or my parents missing the birth of their granddaughter are not minor changes to a ‘preferred daily routine.’ Lockdowns were a not only a useless public health measure they caused additional damage on top of the damage the pandemic was doing. Plenty of smart people warned against lockdowns but those in power ignored them. Sorry not gonna let this stuff go.

_Microft 3y ago
My condolences for your loss. GP certainly exaggerated by labelling the situation as minor inconvenience. It was a major upheaval to all our lives. There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help - at least where conducted properly and with support of the populace (there's little hope if people are not even trying to cooperate though); the first "lockdown" (it was called like that but actually there were only curfews here) in Germany comes to mind - things went only downhill here after the first partially re-opened summer when different states and politicians discovered the situation as a way to compete with each other. This is hindsight though. In the beginning there was no reliable information on transmission vectors or infectiousness and the lack of tests, drugs, vaccines and treatments (even simple things like positioning patients prone to make breathing easier) or simply protection equipment left imo little choice than to treat the situation as severe as possible (better save than sorry). All in all I think that most of it was unavoidable, although I absolutely agree that this was in every way a situation that was hard to deal with for all of us.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    The point was the delay of cases. During COVID many people died of preventable diseases or issues because COVID patients were siphoning our hospital and medical systems of resources. This man died of something that could've been prevented because hospitals were full and he couldn't get an ICU bed [1]. There are many more stories of this during the height of COVID of people dying from things that were low risk emergencies that became high risk ones because of hospitals being stressed. In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/13/1036593269/coronavirus-alabama-43-icus-at-capacity-ray-demonia https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

gd1 3y ago

[dead]

momirlan 3y ago

[flagged]

londons_explore 3y ago
There aren't many claiming it was deliberate... The main claims seems to be accidental release of a virus. If it was deliberate, you probably wouldn't release it right at the lab that developed it...
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Okay, but if you’re driving recklessly and cause a car crash which kills someone, I don’t say they died “naturally”. There’s a reason the US banned that variety of gain of function — and a reason why people are outraged Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance sponsored it in China to circumvent that.

TechBro8615 3y ago

> No one sold them as good. What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like "flattening the curve." Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that damage. It was the policies.

joshuamorton 3y ago
> Why'd we implement them then? Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there were zero "good" options. In a global pandemic, every choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least bad. Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect. That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
lazide 3y ago
Uh, they were sold as better than the alternatives. And even without the policies, things were going to happen. The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH) started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on the matter for instance, because they didn’t have any better alternatives, and it would have been worse otherwise.
- revelio 3y ago
  Of course they did. The alternative was to just keep calm and carry on, like for every other virus outbreak. The idea that COVID required unique measures is not true and had been proven untrue many times in many ways. The correct response was the traditional one: let doctors get on with it and otherwise continue with normal life.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago

hanoz 3y ago

[flagged]

junofan 3y ago
Yeah, my grandmother was very social. She had dementia and didn’t understand what was happening. She cried about how lonely she was every single day for months until she passed.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  My grandfather had been holding off the worsening of his vascular dementia for a long time because he had a lot of family around him to remind him who he was. Cutting him off from the world resulted in quick decline and death. Lockdown killed dementia patients: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-isolation-causes-shocking-levels-decline-people-dementia-who-are-rapidly https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-isola...
Fgehono 3y ago
[flagged]
saiya-jin 3y ago
What if both of you are right? Or wrong for that matter? Everybody acknowledges that some people got hurt pretty badly by policies applied, and those people are in millions on global scale. Clearly you are one of them. Yet we saved by some estimates lower tens of millions of lives, and we tested en masse extremely promising new way of administering cures/vaccinations. Attacking that takes more than just some emotional outbursts, better come with some cold hard facts. Ie I don't know a single person who doesn't have in circle of family or close friends somebody who passed away directly due to covid.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Go ahead and post a study that says we saved tens of millions. Not one intervention has been shown to reduce mortality by 50% across the general population — you’re making facts up to deny the harms caused.

pessimizer 3y ago

I still can't get over how we shut down schools in a huge amount of the world for a long period of time, and didn't come out of that with high-quality, open source, government-sponsored software for remote education. Instead, we just waited it out on every level, while the rich got a lot richer.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
That we don't have that anyway is mind-blowing. An open-source corpus of educational material seems like an obvious social good in excess of many things that do get huge quantities of money sprayed at them. Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some educational company. The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
- abirch 3y ago
  Correct, not a lot has happened in Trigonometry or introductory calculus for centuries but colleges are always requiring newer editions.
  - ForOldHack 3y ago
    Introductory Calculus, my friend, a teacher, during a period, where a new edition proved to be more buggy then the rest, abandoned text books. A recent HS grad, walked into their class, and was dismissed... then dropped my name, and was told to sit down. There are things from recent work that is now being incorporated into the curriculum, cleaner approaches... but the text books have not kept pace, except for one important exception: The amount of free textbooks has ballooned, and a great new proof of integral (1/x)
  - i2cmaster 3y ago
    [dead]

tmaly 3y ago

I think Andrew Huff would contest your qualification of it as "natural"

commandlinefan 3y ago

> Policies chosen as “least bad” are still bad. But they deliberately chose the least _good_ policies, when it was very obvious that the choices they were making were by far the worst.

jiggawatts 3y ago

I raised a child during the pandemic, during the lockdowns. His grandparents missed out on most of the first year of his life because of travel restrictions. They lived just across town. What lesson did I learn from this? I learned that toddlers will throw an epic hissy fit if they don't get what they want, even if what they want is impossible, impractical, or goes against either their own personal interest or the interests of their family. They'll insist on doing things that have a very decent chance of killing them on the spot. "I want it!" followed by 120 decibel screeching is the behaviour of a toddler. We're teaching him better, of course. We're teaching about sharing. About saying sorry. Telling him when to say "thank you" and "please". I'm also teaching him not to poke metal utensils into power sockets or to sneeze in my face. Apparently not all parents bothered with this. Their children grew up to be big children, unable the grasp these simple concepts despite having adult bodies. Yes, the speed limit on the highway is inconvenient for you if you're late for a meeting. No, nobody cares about you and your stupid appointment, we care about the family of four you might kill for your own convenience if we let you drive as fast as you possibly can. This is the crux of it. Some people think being allowed to drive as fast as they can is freedom, and any curtailment of that freedom is oppression. What's truly sad about all of this is not the political polarisation over the type of health policy that goes back centuries[1]. No, it's that Katalin Karikó, the woman who spent here entire life toiling away in obscurity, never got a proper "Thank you!" from the world that she saved. She should be more famous than Beyoncé and richer than Bill Gates, and instead she's a little-known scientist with a few pats on the back from jealous colleagues mumbling "I could have invented that" under their breath. [1] Go look up how old the word "quarantine" is and where it originated from.

jfengel 3y ago

Everything that went wrong is evidence that if everyone had done my thing, it would all have been perfect.

erulabs 3y ago

You’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about if the lockdowns were better or worse, not even a bit. It’s about whether or not governments should have the power and ability to enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were absolutely necessary. Now that the data, retrospectively, seems muddled and unclear, the conversation can recenter on if the government we want should even have the power to do what they did. It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group. Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions. I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.

discreteevent 3y ago
It depends on what you mean by "your own decision". For example: If someone wants to smoke in the office that should be their own decision.
fzeroracer 3y ago
I mean ultimately the answer is yes. People look at COVID and say it's not a big deal, but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse. We're not at all prepared if we have something like a Black Death 2.0 and ultimately your ability to function as an individual depends on society's ability to actually function. Even the half-assed measures we took against COVID helped prevent our hospital systems from completely collapsing which would've led to far more deaths. The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0 for people to understand this.
- eastbound 3y ago
  > but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse So it wasn’t. We knew it was mild, certainly worse than flu, but still mostly killing the elderly above life expectancy. - We knew newspapers were grossly exaggerating information to the point of saying obvious bait (“the vaccine enlarges the penis” — yup they said it), - We knew newspapers were under gag order to publish misinformation. - We knew that most governments declared the law of exception and state of emergency, so from that point, no information could be trusted. We knew it was mild because everyone was in a state of hysteria, from “SO YOU WANT TO KILL ALL GRANDMOTHERS” to “IN NYC THEY USE GIANT DUMPSTER TRUCKS TO CARRY THE DEADS TO THE MORGUE, SO WHY ARE YOU AGAINST LOCKDOWNS”. We knew it was all a gross exaggeration.

disambiguation 3y ago

I think the sentiment here applies generally. The world would be a much kinder place if we embraced radical cooperation. Why wait for disaster to strike before we start working together? But humans are egotistical by nature. That goes not only for the individuals that defied mandates, but for the policy makers too. I think it's hard to define the "greater good" and even harder to tell who represents it. If you want to have the kind of cooperation you're talking about, it first requires trust. The data confirms trust makes a difference when you compare vaccine uptake in countries like Japan vs. Russia. There's certainly much to be fed up about, but we can at least derive some practical questions from this experience. * What was the source of distrust during the pandemic? Was it legitimate or illegitimate? * Have our institutions earned trust since then so we can do better next time around?

revelio 3y ago
> The world would be a much kinder place if we embraced radical cooperation. It would be a horrific dystopia as everyone who tried to implement that has found. Competitive and free socialists always outcompete "radically cooperative" societies because the latter is always implemented through violence and coercion. There's no such thing as "radically cooperative" and also kind, the two are incompatible.

peteradio 3y ago

Good god, things get better when people advocate for themselves aka griping.

hedora 3y ago

> I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain. No offense, but from the first part of your comment, it is clear you were part of the problem, not the solution, on this front. We did all the things you suggest after the last pandemic. The findings strongly cautioned against attempting another lockdown. For covid, that advice was ignored, and now we are seeing excess deaths comparable to the “isolate just the most vulnerable, and get it over with in a month or two” approach, along with huge economic and societal costs from the lockdowns.

piloto_ciego 3y ago
This is revisionist nonsense in America. We didn’t do a damn thing here and 1m people died. We didn’t have real lockdowns here, we had 1 year of remote school but, beyond that not much. It was perhaps the single greatest tragedy in America since WWII and we basically said “think of the economy!” and happily sent everyone back after a very limited period of time. We learned nothing.

faffffaf 3y ago

>the inconvenience Oh hell no. I did not live through an "inconvenience". I and my kids now inhabit a world that will deal with the societal and economic damage for many years. And no, I'm not just going to let slide a historically unprecedented, in scope and scale, change in citizen/government dynamics, and for a disease where you couldn't even begin to question the official narrative without being branded an evil anti-vaxxer. We absolutely need to analyse what was done, and sort the panicked, fear-driven polices from what was useful.

lazide 3y ago
So maybe analyze it instead of leading with the conclusion first? Don't forget to come up with a plausible better concrete alternative so we can compare/contrast.
- faffffaf 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - lazide 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - faffffaf 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - lazide 3y ago
        That someone deserves to be punished.
terminatornet 3y ago
i swear, with the exception of china, no country has had anything remotely resembling a lockdown since early 2021. what are you still complaining about? you won, no one likes a sore winner.

ForOldHack 3y ago

>Global proportions... So you agree its a pandemic? It fit the logistics curve to <0.1%, except for super spreader events, which afterwards, it still was very close. All the policies, were designed around herd immunity which maximizes deaths, except for the WHO which fallowed Fauchi. An acquaintance of mine, M, lost 19 family members to the pandemic. My family, mostly very well educated, went super paranoid, and we only had two late Omichron infections. I am sorry it was hard for everyone, I wish we followed proticalls. You are a commenter, for whom I read ever post.

ForOldHack 3y ago
Just read this: "If covid had a high mortality rate we would almost all be dead. Next time we may not be so lucky" -isetprettygirlsonfire