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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 on

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...
  - PlunderBunny 3y ago
    Omicron is certainly less deadly that the earlier variants, and the time gained with lockdowns allowed the population to get vaccinated, and gave hospitals time to build more ICUs. I think it's fair to say that these things are facts, not opinions!
  - terminatornet 3y ago
    i would argue they did help. i have not gotten covid yet as far as I know. If and when I do, I guarantee I will be much happier to have gotten it when vaccines, treatments and therapeutics are improved compared to 3 years ago.
- revelio 3y ago
  Curfews and other such measures had no effect and this is clear in the data. It's been looked at extensively and there's no correlation between severity of lockdown measures and outcomes. It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time. And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is: 1. Wrong 2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.
PlunderBunny 3y ago
I don’t wish in any way to minimise or attempt to refute how you feel about the events your family missed, and I know a great many other people had similar experiences. Lockdowns, when done properly, do work. Here in New Zealand, we enjoyed more than a year of _normal_ life between our first Nation-wide lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, and the eventual emergence of omicron in the community. That period not only provided time for the population to be vaccinated (we got to 92% fully vaccinated) but also saved many many lives, and allowed people to do things like attend funerals and births which they wouldn’t have been able to do (safely) if there was no lockdown. History will record that it was the right approach.
- 015UUZn8aEvW 3y ago
  The US has 70 times the population of New Zealand, an underclass that's larger in percentage terms and less functional than New Zealand's, a porous border through which literally millions of people pass illegally-outside of the government's control, and tens of millions of illegal residents who have illegal or no ID and studiously avoid being tracked by the government. New Zealand is an island country with only a handful of international airports. There was no possible way that the US could ever have implemented New Zealand's policy successfully, even if Americans wanted to do so.
  - PlunderBunny 3y ago
    Sure - I think I agree that the same approach wouldn't have worked in the USA. But it's also not a binary choice between 'lockdown until elimination' and no lockdowns, but having said that, I don't know what the US or similarly large countries should have done.
- User23 3y ago
  And Sweden did nothing and got an equally good outcome and doesn't even have the benefit of being an island country.
  - PlunderBunny 3y ago
    It doesn't take much time to find articles from reputable sources that show that Sweden most definitely did not have 'an equally good outcome' (if I understand you correctly and you're comparing to New Zealand). For example: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-stacks-up https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-s...
zeagle 3y ago
I work in healthcare and attended on COVID wards when that was a thing. One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families. There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID. They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy. To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.
- peteradio 3y ago
  Would you rather one person lose a hand or many people lose a finger, that's effectively what you advocate for here.. distribute the impact that would natural affect few onto the many and with no actual analysis to see if we minimized harm overall. I think the lack of empathy can cut both ways.
  - zeagle 3y ago
    I think your argument is disingenuously reductive but I'll bite: yeah. Life over limb is not a hard argument. Thankfully nobody is going around chopping off fingers. Would you donate blood to save lives? Or reduce a company's profit a bit to have less environmental impact through regulations? I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing. You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.
    - peteradio 3y ago

_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...
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  Omicron is certainly less deadly that the earlier variants, and the time gained with lockdowns allowed the population to get vaccinated, and gave hospitals time to build more ICUs. I think it's fair to say that these things are facts, not opinions!
- terminatornet 3y ago
  i would argue they did help. i have not gotten covid yet as far as I know. If and when I do, I guarantee I will be much happier to have gotten it when vaccines, treatments and therapeutics are improved compared to 3 years ago.
revelio 3y ago
Curfews and other such measures had no effect and this is clear in the data. It's been looked at extensively and there's no correlation between severity of lockdown measures and outcomes. It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time. And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is: 1. Wrong 2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.

PlunderBunny 3y ago

I don’t wish in any way to minimise or attempt to refute how you feel about the events your family missed, and I know a great many other people had similar experiences. Lockdowns, when done properly, do work. Here in New Zealand, we enjoyed more than a year of _normal_ life between our first Nation-wide lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, and the eventual emergence of omicron in the community. That period not only provided time for the population to be vaccinated (we got to 92% fully vaccinated) but also saved many many lives, and allowed people to do things like attend funerals and births which they wouldn’t have been able to do (safely) if there was no lockdown. History will record that it was the right approach.

015UUZn8aEvW 3y ago
The US has 70 times the population of New Zealand, an underclass that's larger in percentage terms and less functional than New Zealand's, a porous border through which literally millions of people pass illegally-outside of the government's control, and tens of millions of illegal residents who have illegal or no ID and studiously avoid being tracked by the government. New Zealand is an island country with only a handful of international airports. There was no possible way that the US could ever have implemented New Zealand's policy successfully, even if Americans wanted to do so.
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  Sure - I think I agree that the same approach wouldn't have worked in the USA. But it's also not a binary choice between 'lockdown until elimination' and no lockdowns, but having said that, I don't know what the US or similarly large countries should have done.
User23 3y ago
And Sweden did nothing and got an equally good outcome and doesn't even have the benefit of being an island country.
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  It doesn't take much time to find articles from reputable sources that show that Sweden most definitely did not have 'an equally good outcome' (if I understand you correctly and you're comparing to New Zealand). For example: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-stacks-up https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-s...

zeagle 3y ago

I work in healthcare and attended on COVID wards when that was a thing. One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families. There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID. They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy. To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.

peteradio 3y ago
Would you rather one person lose a hand or many people lose a finger, that's effectively what you advocate for here.. distribute the impact that would natural affect few onto the many and with no actual analysis to see if we minimized harm overall. I think the lack of empathy can cut both ways.
- zeagle 3y ago
  I think your argument is disingenuously reductive but I'll bite: yeah. Life over limb is not a hard argument. Thankfully nobody is going around chopping off fingers. Would you donate blood to save lives? Or reduce a company's profit a bit to have less environmental impact through regulations? I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing. You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.
  - peteradio 3y ago