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> 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 v

> 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
    The hospitalisation rate made this implausible. Sure, we could have kept calm and carried on, but the health care system would have collapsed. It almost did in a bunch of European countries, including mine. And that's with the lockdowns.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Yeah. There were areas in the US (parts of Texas, Los Angeles County, New York) where the system did start to collapse, even with lockdowns and warnings. It likely would have been much worse without them. It likely would have been much better if folks had taken the warnings more seriously. Most didn't. Oh how we forget! I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year. And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words). Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
    - revelio 3y ago
      It wouldn't. Governments said the hospitals were collapsing because they needed to justify their actions, whilst simultaneously publishing dashboards that showed plenty of free capacity. The problem is that most COVID cases in hospitals were of people who were infected in hospital itself. They weren't admitted for it. Just looking at "covid cases in hospitals" would therefore be misleading. That was never highlighted by the media or government officials because it was embarrassing but sometimes dashboards would reveal it. As an example look at Switzerland's data. It's useful because it was still being updated as recently as May. https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZoomDev=2020-03-30_2023-05-01 https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZ... As you can see, it made no difference whatsoever and actually at the start of the dataset the hospitals are way under utilized. Some countries have worse hospital systems than Switzerland, and regularly experience shortages of care even in normal times. But this example shows that for a good healthcare system COVID could be handled easily without even coming close to running out of capacity.
carlmr 3y ago
While I agree with you that a lot of the damage we did wasn't the virus, I feel like OP was quite clear in saying if there's only bad and worse, pick bad. Which logically I agree with, although I still think that post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor transmission, any government that didn't allow people to socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and picking worse over bad. I think we could have done a lot better, even with the available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.
- Izkata 3y ago
  > was not listening to science and picking worse over bad. The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and so forth. "Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the science.
zizee 3y ago
The GP means the policies were sold as the "least worst" option.
jen20 3y ago
Less bad need not be good. One only need look at electoral politics in the US for this to be obvious.
geekpowa 3y ago
The living complain about the adverse impacts they experienced, while the dead remain dead.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  I see this argument a lot but I don't understand it. Are you suggesting the dead people would have been grateful for the policies that didn't stop them from dying? Or are you suggesting the policies didn't go far enough, and if the dead people could complain, then we'd be convinced to implement even stricter policies next time? I think the argument would be more convincing if there were a group of people who are still alive that could say they would have been dead without the policies. Obviously this is impossible for anyone to say with certainty, but given that it's the corollary of the "if dead people could talk" argument, perhaps that indicates that both arguments are unfalsifiable and thus ineffective.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    It's not about what the dead would say - it's about the difference in degree between inconvenience and death.
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      The implication of this argument is that if people are dying, the government can implement any policy they want with the nominal intention of "saving lives," and nobody has any right to complain about "inconveniences" because they're not dead, unlike the people who died despite the policies meant to prevent their deaths.
      - dmbche 3y ago
        While I agree with your statement, I think you might be projecting a little - this is a simple comment, kind of like saying "nothing new under the sun". Not all statements are necessarily prescriptive. This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe
lucubratory 3y ago
This is complete historical revisionism. For basically the entire time that schools were remote and weeks after, any time a school tried to open so many teachers became sick that operating the school became infeasible. It was a choice between sick and dead teachers (and some children) with unknown future consequences and schools shut down without staff, or schools shut down to do remote schooling with significantly lower mortality rates. We saw what your proposed solution did when the policies were abandoned; millions of people died and are still dying, and life expectancy in the US is still 2-6 years below what it was four years ago. That has wiped out 20-40 years of improvements to life expectancy in the US, depending on the population under discussion.
- enslavedrobot 3y ago
  Huh, my kids went back to school in September of 2020 here in Vancouver British Columbia. There was a short shutdown later in the fall, then schools were open for the duration. No teachers died, and there was very little in school transmission. Our provincial health officer in charge made the choice based on the data available. BC has a very low overall COVID death rate compared to other jurisdictions. You can go look up the data on deaths and satisfy yourself that closing schools as long as many jurisdictions did was a stupid idea. The idea that we didn't know that at the time is also suspect, since data driven decision makers like the one in BC opened schools back up once the risk of transmission between children was determined.
  - skinnymuch 3y ago
    To be fair, the person was talking about the US and more likely they were talking about the region they are from.

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
  The hospitalisation rate made this implausible. Sure, we could have kept calm and carried on, but the health care system would have collapsed. It almost did in a bunch of European countries, including mine. And that's with the lockdowns.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Yeah. There were areas in the US (parts of Texas, Los Angeles County, New York) where the system did start to collapse, even with lockdowns and warnings. It likely would have been much worse without them. It likely would have been much better if folks had taken the warnings more seriously. Most didn't. Oh how we forget! I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year. And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words). Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
  - revelio 3y ago
    It wouldn't. Governments said the hospitals were collapsing because they needed to justify their actions, whilst simultaneously publishing dashboards that showed plenty of free capacity. The problem is that most COVID cases in hospitals were of people who were infected in hospital itself. They weren't admitted for it. Just looking at "covid cases in hospitals" would therefore be misleading. That was never highlighted by the media or government officials because it was embarrassing but sometimes dashboards would reveal it. As an example look at Switzerland's data. It's useful because it was still being updated as recently as May. https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZoomDev=2020-03-30_2023-05-01 https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZ... As you can see, it made no difference whatsoever and actually at the start of the dataset the hospitals are way under utilized. Some countries have worse hospital systems than Switzerland, and regularly experience shortages of care even in normal times. But this example shows that for a good healthcare system COVID could be handled easily without even coming close to running out of capacity.

carlmr 3y ago

While I agree with you that a lot of the damage we did wasn't the virus, I feel like OP was quite clear in saying if there's only bad and worse, pick bad. Which logically I agree with, although I still think that post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor transmission, any government that didn't allow people to socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and picking worse over bad. I think we could have done a lot better, even with the available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.

Izkata 3y ago
> was not listening to science and picking worse over bad. The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and so forth. "Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the science.

zizee 3y ago

The GP means the policies were sold as the "least worst" option.

jen20 3y ago

Less bad need not be good. One only need look at electoral politics in the US for this to be obvious.

geekpowa 3y ago

The living complain about the adverse impacts they experienced, while the dead remain dead.

TechBro8615 3y ago
I see this argument a lot but I don't understand it. Are you suggesting the dead people would have been grateful for the policies that didn't stop them from dying? Or are you suggesting the policies didn't go far enough, and if the dead people could complain, then we'd be convinced to implement even stricter policies next time? I think the argument would be more convincing if there were a group of people who are still alive that could say they would have been dead without the policies. Obviously this is impossible for anyone to say with certainty, but given that it's the corollary of the "if dead people could talk" argument, perhaps that indicates that both arguments are unfalsifiable and thus ineffective.
- dmbche 3y ago
  It's not about what the dead would say - it's about the difference in degree between inconvenience and death.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    The implication of this argument is that if people are dying, the government can implement any policy they want with the nominal intention of "saving lives," and nobody has any right to complain about "inconveniences" because they're not dead, unlike the people who died despite the policies meant to prevent their deaths.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      While I agree with your statement, I think you might be projecting a little - this is a simple comment, kind of like saying "nothing new under the sun". Not all statements are necessarily prescriptive. This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe

lucubratory 3y ago

This is complete historical revisionism. For basically the entire time that schools were remote and weeks after, any time a school tried to open so many teachers became sick that operating the school became infeasible. It was a choice between sick and dead teachers (and some children) with unknown future consequences and schools shut down without staff, or schools shut down to do remote schooling with significantly lower mortality rates. We saw what your proposed solution did when the policies were abandoned; millions of people died and are still dying, and life expectancy in the US is still 2-6 years below what it was four years ago. That has wiped out 20-40 years of improvements to life expectancy in the US, depending on the population under discussion.

enslavedrobot 3y ago
Huh, my kids went back to school in September of 2020 here in Vancouver British Columbia. There was a short shutdown later in the fall, then schools were open for the duration. No teachers died, and there was very little in school transmission. Our provincial health officer in charge made the choice based on the data available. BC has a very low overall COVID death rate compared to other jurisdictions. You can go look up the data on deaths and satisfy yourself that closing schools as long as many jurisdictions did was a stupid idea. The idea that we didn't know that at the time is also suspect, since data driven decision makers like the one in BC opened schools back up once the risk of transmission between children was determined.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  To be fair, the person was talking about the US and more likely they were talking about the region they are from.