9 ms·

In all of these posts there is a strong 'what were they thinking' reaction. - remember hindsight. At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into

In all of these posts there is a strong 'what were they thinking' reaction. - remember hindsight. At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? It was a fast, dynamically changing situation, everyone was getting sick, who a the time could say 'yeah, people are dying, but YOLO, no need to sanitize your hands.' Lot of freaking armchair quarterbacks in the 'lets criticize the medical community' co-hort.

jquery 3y ago
It's akin to a master caution alarm on a plane and the engines just cut out. Until there's more data on exactly what the issue is, pilots should generally follow the checklists. Avoidable accidents happen when pilots make assumptions about what is wrong (e.g., "oh my instruments must be incorrect") instead of following their checklists/training. Until we knew that surface transmission wasn't a serious vector, it made total sense to guard against it.
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  But, also, until we knew that it wasn't transmitted through the air, we should have been recommending masking with high quality masks. That right there could have changed the vector of this whole thing. Instead, 6 months in when we knew it was transmitted through air, we continued to make businesses sanitize their checkouts while people walked around in ineffective cloth masks. Really fucked the dog there.
  - whitemary 3y ago
    Quality masks require actual capital investments, so longer term commitments. Toxic hand sanitizer can turn a profit with practically zero capital investment. This is precisely how capitalism works. Socialism or barbarism.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      And proper planning and motivation. My jurisdiction (Ontario and Canada) stockpiled 10s of millions of N95 masks after SARS1. Instead of cycling inventory, they let them expire, disposed them and never replaced them. https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ontario/amp/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ont... https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081 Then, get this, a few years later, they needed them! Best part was I already worked at an organization that required mask fitting for all employees, but when the pandemic hit that this was in preparation for, everybody wanted them and there weren’t any available.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > That right there could have changed the vector of this whole thing. Keep in mind the disease was already all over the world when it was discovered.
    - jethro_tell 3y ago
      It was but it became more mask resistant over time. Putting on masks in Jan 2020 could have made a huge difference instead of waiting until mid year to say mask, and then say mask with an n95. Obviously, there's a preparedness issue which is probably the base root of that issue, but early enthusiastic masking instead of trying to send all the construction workers home probably would have gone a lot farther.
      - peteradio 3y ago
        > It was but it became more mask resistant over time. Wut
- dahfizz 3y ago
  > Until we knew that surface transmission wasn't a serious vector, it made total sense to guard against it. But at what cost? We knew that benzene is toxic. Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction than a rational one, IMO.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol > Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction No, it is a reaction grounded in the last hundreds of year of proper hygiene practice
    - dahfizz 3y ago
      > Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol You can't know that. The regulations and testing requirements were suspended, so companies were free to use benzene and nobody would know. We already know for sure that some companies did use benzene, and its not hard to imagine companies switching to a cheaper, lower grade source for their alcohol. In any case, the government simultaneously saying "Its okay to put benzene in hand sanitizer" and "Everyone should constantly disinfect with hand sanitizer" was not a good move.
      - hn976827 3y ago
        Had this pandemic turned out to kill 10% of the global population then it would definitely have been the right move. Turns out, that didn't happen. Because we were lucky regarding lethality, regarding contageousness, regardin speed of vaccine development. In hindsight, no biggy, how dare they made everybody sanitize their hands all the time. I worry about the real thing hitting someday. When the discussions start again and people refuse to do the most basic things (yes, some of them obviously nonsense and some of them perhaps in hindsight) and the conspiracy theories spreading and everybody being a hobby virologist, and when we realize that a significant fraction of us will die and society will collapse and we could have prevented it but now it's too late. Then it won't help me anymore to say "told you so". But at least society will deserve its collapse.
gowld 3y ago
Not "Everyone" was getting sick. An extremely small portion of the population getting sick can have a large impact, since most people are not sick, most of the time.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  Depends where you were, and when. Probably almost everyone got sick in China after they dropped their zero-covid measures, in the space of a month or so. If you're sick for maybe 1-3 weeks, that's easily 1/3rd of the population sick simultaneously. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/china-covid-death-estimates.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/ch... > Based on that data, they inferred that 90 percent of the population was infected in little more than a month. > While the figure is high, epidemiologists who were not involved with the project said such a rate was plausible. And in January, a leading government epidemiologist said on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that 80 percent of the population had been infected. Some European companies’ operations in China saw infection rates of 90 percent among their employees in December, Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Times in an interview.
  - xyzzy123 3y ago
    Yes, I mean they had the option of pausing air traffic from Wuhan. Why wouldn't you? Well of course it's not from China in any case.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Quarantine only works if it is put in place fast enough. At the time, other countries were showing 10% mortality. If that gets into circulation, there is no stopping it. So quarantine fast, to stop it. Not, wait and see, 'hmmm, some people seem to just get a cough, lets let this baby roll and see what happens'.
pessimizer 3y ago
This "hindsight" distraction can literally be used to excuse any mistake. It always involves completely dismissing a large group of experts who were right at the time, and for all the right reasons. > how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? They certainly pretended that they knew hard enough to react in an extreme way.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  The 'hindsight' does come into play. At the beginning of quarantine, they still didn't know what was happening, some countries were having 10% mortality, people were dying, bodies were stacking up. But, oh, so sorry we jumped the gun, next time we'll let it rampage before doing anything.
  - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
    > some countries were having 10% mortality Huh? Like 1 in 10 people that caught the virus died? Where do you think this happened? This may have been true for very tiny portions of the pouplation, like people over the age of 90 (who had a 20% ifr according to https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) but otherwise the country with the highest ifr seems to be portugal at 2%, and even that would have been heavily concentrated in those who were at risk of death from just about anything due to age and comorbidities.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Italy. Early on when we still didn't know what was happening, Italy was reporting those numbers. It was later, after we had lockdown that it turned out that maybe it was a select groups, and it was older and over-weight Italians. I'd try to take the time to find a reference if I cared anymore about all the counter-counter-counter opinions in this thread.
hedora 3y ago
This has nothing to do with hindsight. We've known for decades that hand sanitizer (and antibiotic soap) kills off the beneficial bacteria on your hands, and also dries out skin, increasing the percentage of pathogens that survive contact with skin, and also increasing the percentage that manage to get past skins' protective barriers. We also knew that coronavirus was airborne well before 2019. The medical and microbiology/virology communities provided advice that was the exact opposite of what the epidemiologists suggested, and were ignored. Epidemiologies are closer to being historians or sociologists than doctors, so letting them run the show made no sense, and, in hindsight, what was obvious at the time turned out to be correct. The lockdowns were absurdly expensive, created massive secondary public health problems, and didn't save as many people as the approach dictated by conventional wisdom would have. Conventional wisdom said we should figure out which people were most vulnerable (the elderly, obese and people with chronic medical conditions), and aggressively quarantine just them. That would allow covid to spread through the rest of the population in a month or two, and wouldn't require the entire economy to shut down. Instead, something like 5% of the workforce would call in sick for a month or two. At this point, the excess mortality from the pandemic is above the expected mortality rate for low risk groups, so, in hindsight, we now know for sure that we should have listened to the medical community, and the findings of the (now retired) epidemiologists that studied the last pandemic. Having more supporting evidence now doesn't change the fact that all of this was obvious at the beginning of the pandemic, but that it was ignored / actively censored by our leaders. Anyway, at the end of the day, covid is a strain of the common cold, not some crazy alien pathogen that we have zero experience with. Also, humans have dealt with dozens of pandemics during recorded history. The whole "this was a brand new thing we had no experience with" argument just doesn't hold water.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  If the people identified to deal with pandemics, are mere 'historians', then maybe the terms are wrong, or where you studied Epidemiology had a different take on it. Right from wiki, this sure sounds like Epidemiologist are the ones to make the call. : Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results (including peer review and occasional systematic review). Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.[1]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
psychlops 3y ago
It was fast and dynamic only because the rulebook was thrown out and created on the fly. There was precedent and strategy. Hindsight is being accurately used to review what happened and correctly criticize. The same would happen in the technical community if there were a breach and procedures were ignored and made up based on hunches. The medical community does not get a pass.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I think a lot of people knew how to respond, its just they were fired. :: Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation. Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did. “One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    I would like them to go on the record on if they weren't fired what they would've done differently. In hindsight, we had vaccines created and in testing 5 days [1] after the WHO called that virus a pandemic [2]. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 [2]: https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020 https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments...
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      I understand nobody rushed the vaccine tests any more because nobody could produce it on the amount necessary. The tests were run faster than normal, and "coincidentally" all finished at about the same time the manufacturers could supply it.
JPKab 3y ago
> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)" There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even for irrational reasons) was useful for getting them to follow their guidelines. Double bonus for highly visible, borderline superstitious rituals like hand sanitizer, which helped identify those who were compliant from the dissidents such as myself. I live outside of Boulder, and long, long after this was known, the businesses were still engaging in surface sanitization theater. My daughter's swim school had employees walking around with large devices, spraying fluid on every chair in between classes. This was going on all the way into 2022. I asked the employees if they knew that covid didn't spread on surfaces and that what they were doing was useless. They knew, but did it anyway because the owner "wanted to show customers they took covid seriously". As a person who was demonized by my colleagues for not wearing a mask OUTSIDE on a windswept hiking trail, I'm frankly triggered by comments like this where people pretend like the information and data showing how irrational and panicked the social reaction was didn't exist. It did, and the people who were the most irrational, panicked, and aggressive towards those attempting to be rational are the ones making excuses like this. There needs to be a reckoning on this insanity and the public health authorities who deliberately chose a "stop covid at any cost" strategy. "At any cost" is correct. They completely refused to do any form of cost/benefit analysis for the absurd panic they produced. I, like many on HN, had relatives who refused to leave their homes, and were wiping down boxes from Amazon for months. These were relatively young people with no health issues. There's a reason why the average American overestimated their likelihood of being hospitalized from covid by 50x, and that's the combination of public health and the overly compliant, ideologically blinded media in the western world.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Yo Triggered. Maybe spring 2021. Guess part of problem with any issue these days, half of what you say is true, the other half starts to sound like 'crazy old guy screaming at the wind'. Yes, there was some group hysteria, no there wasn't a group intent on 'scaring' the population to 'gain control'. Yes, requiring a mask out on a nature trail is little nutz, but also there were some going the other way 'I can cough on your grandpa if I want, this is a free country'.
oredbored 3y ago
Lol... it was known extremely early on that fomite transmission was practically unheard of. People were hand sanitizing for years after this. God knows why. The FDA still hasn't even declared hand sanitizer safe to use by the way.
emodendroket 3y ago
You'd think that the regulations that were suspended were not invented in response to nothing.
- ikiris 3y ago
  This is HN: all regulations are bad, the government is out to get you, and the free market solves all problems. Going by the comments at least.
tomatocracy 3y ago
We knew very early on that plain soap and water were very effective at killing coronavirus (and much, much more so than alcohol gel hand sanitizer). It was even official advice here in the UK to use soap and water instead of alcohol gel for hand washing if at all possible I think. Yet many people still seemed to think the exact opposite. They still have it alongside soap in my office bathrooms for example. It makes a very interesting social study.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  As a point of clarification, were they effective at "killing" the virus or just mechanically removing it from one's hands?
  - Raidion 3y ago
    It does kill it because the soap breaks up fats in the virus.
    - peteradio 3y ago
      A virus doesn't contain fats only 1s and 0s, FYI.
GeekyBear 3y ago
> At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? You pay attention to the news reports showing that despite locking down the passengers of the Pacific Princess cruise ship in their cabins, the disease continued to spread from cabin to cabin? What other theory than airborne spread fits that data?
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
CDC published how lethal it was in March 2020 and that it was basically identical to flu in terms of expected casualties. I knew earlier than that. I considered buying a hazmat suit but realised it was a meme and settled for buying some masks etc in early 2020.
ciconia 3y ago
> It was a fast, dynamically changing situation, everyone was getting sick... I think one could say a lot of the reaction of governments around the world was knee-jerk, "let's copy what that other government is doing" kind of thinking. Not that this is specific to the CoVid situation, there's plenty of it going on at any given moment.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Everyone likes to blame China. There is no opinion on China that can be stated without a huge counter group claiming the opposite. -- But, way at the beginning, they did cancel Chinese New Year and lockdown the country. So where it originated, by whatever way you want to believe, they were seeing deaths, a pandemic was spreading, and they cancelled New Years. They obviously saw the danger of an entire country being sick at once. -- Isn't it more likely that the reason we can argue about this, is because lockdowns worked, since more people lived, we can now argue that we did too much. But the reason more people lived was because we did take action, because people lived doesn't mean we could have done nothing and also had people live.

jquery 3y ago

It's akin to a master caution alarm on a plane and the engines just cut out. Until there's more data on exactly what the issue is, pilots should generally follow the checklists. Avoidable accidents happen when pilots make assumptions about what is wrong (e.g., "oh my instruments must be incorrect") instead of following their checklists/training. Until we knew that surface transmission wasn't a serious vector, it made total sense to guard against it.

jethro_tell 3y ago
But, also, until we knew that it wasn't transmitted through the air, we should have been recommending masking with high quality masks. That right there could have changed the vector of this whole thing. Instead, 6 months in when we knew it was transmitted through air, we continued to make businesses sanitize their checkouts while people walked around in ineffective cloth masks. Really fucked the dog there.
- whitemary 3y ago
  Quality masks require actual capital investments, so longer term commitments. Toxic hand sanitizer can turn a profit with practically zero capital investment. This is precisely how capitalism works. Socialism or barbarism.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    And proper planning and motivation. My jurisdiction (Ontario and Canada) stockpiled 10s of millions of N95 masks after SARS1. Instead of cycling inventory, they let them expire, disposed them and never replaced them. https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ontario/amp/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ont... https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081 Then, get this, a few years later, they needed them! Best part was I already worked at an organization that required mask fitting for all employees, but when the pandemic hit that this was in preparation for, everybody wanted them and there weren’t any available.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > That right there could have changed the vector of this whole thing. Keep in mind the disease was already all over the world when it was discovered.
  - jethro_tell 3y ago
    It was but it became more mask resistant over time. Putting on masks in Jan 2020 could have made a huge difference instead of waiting until mid year to say mask, and then say mask with an n95. Obviously, there's a preparedness issue which is probably the base root of that issue, but early enthusiastic masking instead of trying to send all the construction workers home probably would have gone a lot farther.
    - peteradio 3y ago
      > It was but it became more mask resistant over time. Wut
dahfizz 3y ago
> Until we knew that surface transmission wasn't a serious vector, it made total sense to guard against it. But at what cost? We knew that benzene is toxic. Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction than a rational one, IMO.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol > Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction No, it is a reaction grounded in the last hundreds of year of proper hygiene practice
  - dahfizz 3y ago
    > Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol You can't know that. The regulations and testing requirements were suspended, so companies were free to use benzene and nobody would know. We already know for sure that some companies did use benzene, and its not hard to imagine companies switching to a cheaper, lower grade source for their alcohol. In any case, the government simultaneously saying "Its okay to put benzene in hand sanitizer" and "Everyone should constantly disinfect with hand sanitizer" was not a good move.
    - hn976827 3y ago
      Had this pandemic turned out to kill 10% of the global population then it would definitely have been the right move. Turns out, that didn't happen. Because we were lucky regarding lethality, regarding contageousness, regardin speed of vaccine development. In hindsight, no biggy, how dare they made everybody sanitize their hands all the time. I worry about the real thing hitting someday. When the discussions start again and people refuse to do the most basic things (yes, some of them obviously nonsense and some of them perhaps in hindsight) and the conspiracy theories spreading and everybody being a hobby virologist, and when we realize that a significant fraction of us will die and society will collapse and we could have prevented it but now it's too late. Then it won't help me anymore to say "told you so". But at least society will deserve its collapse.

gowld 3y ago

Not "Everyone" was getting sick. An extremely small portion of the population getting sick can have a large impact, since most people are not sick, most of the time.

roywiggins 3y ago
Depends where you were, and when. Probably almost everyone got sick in China after they dropped their zero-covid measures, in the space of a month or so. If you're sick for maybe 1-3 weeks, that's easily 1/3rd of the population sick simultaneously. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/china-covid-death-estimates.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/ch... > Based on that data, they inferred that 90 percent of the population was infected in little more than a month. > While the figure is high, epidemiologists who were not involved with the project said such a rate was plausible. And in January, a leading government epidemiologist said on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that 80 percent of the population had been infected. Some European companies’ operations in China saw infection rates of 90 percent among their employees in December, Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Times in an interview.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  Yes, I mean they had the option of pausing air traffic from Wuhan. Why wouldn't you? Well of course it's not from China in any case.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Quarantine only works if it is put in place fast enough. At the time, other countries were showing 10% mortality. If that gets into circulation, there is no stopping it. So quarantine fast, to stop it. Not, wait and see, 'hmmm, some people seem to just get a cough, lets let this baby roll and see what happens'.

pessimizer 3y ago

This "hindsight" distraction can literally be used to excuse any mistake. It always involves completely dismissing a large group of experts who were right at the time, and for all the right reasons. > how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? They certainly pretended that they knew hard enough to react in an extreme way.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
The 'hindsight' does come into play. At the beginning of quarantine, they still didn't know what was happening, some countries were having 10% mortality, people were dying, bodies were stacking up. But, oh, so sorry we jumped the gun, next time we'll let it rampage before doing anything.
- ifyoubuildit 3y ago
  > some countries were having 10% mortality Huh? Like 1 in 10 people that caught the virus died? Where do you think this happened? This may have been true for very tiny portions of the pouplation, like people over the age of 90 (who had a 20% ifr according to https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) but otherwise the country with the highest ifr seems to be portugal at 2%, and even that would have been heavily concentrated in those who were at risk of death from just about anything due to age and comorbidities.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Italy. Early on when we still didn't know what was happening, Italy was reporting those numbers. It was later, after we had lockdown that it turned out that maybe it was a select groups, and it was older and over-weight Italians. I'd try to take the time to find a reference if I cared anymore about all the counter-counter-counter opinions in this thread.

hedora 3y ago

This has nothing to do with hindsight. We've known for decades that hand sanitizer (and antibiotic soap) kills off the beneficial bacteria on your hands, and also dries out skin, increasing the percentage of pathogens that survive contact with skin, and also increasing the percentage that manage to get past skins' protective barriers. We also knew that coronavirus was airborne well before 2019. The medical and microbiology/virology communities provided advice that was the exact opposite of what the epidemiologists suggested, and were ignored. Epidemiologies are closer to being historians or sociologists than doctors, so letting them run the show made no sense, and, in hindsight, what was obvious at the time turned out to be correct. The lockdowns were absurdly expensive, created massive secondary public health problems, and didn't save as many people as the approach dictated by conventional wisdom would have. Conventional wisdom said we should figure out which people were most vulnerable (the elderly, obese and people with chronic medical conditions), and aggressively quarantine just them. That would allow covid to spread through the rest of the population in a month or two, and wouldn't require the entire economy to shut down. Instead, something like 5% of the workforce would call in sick for a month or two. At this point, the excess mortality from the pandemic is above the expected mortality rate for low risk groups, so, in hindsight, we now know for sure that we should have listened to the medical community, and the findings of the (now retired) epidemiologists that studied the last pandemic. Having more supporting evidence now doesn't change the fact that all of this was obvious at the beginning of the pandemic, but that it was ignored / actively censored by our leaders. Anyway, at the end of the day, covid is a strain of the common cold, not some crazy alien pathogen that we have zero experience with. Also, humans have dealt with dozens of pandemics during recorded history. The whole "this was a brand new thing we had no experience with" argument just doesn't hold water.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
If the people identified to deal with pandemics, are mere 'historians', then maybe the terms are wrong, or where you studied Epidemiology had a different take on it. Right from wiki, this sure sounds like Epidemiologist are the ones to make the call. : Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results (including peer review and occasional systematic review). Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.[1]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

psychlops 3y ago

It was fast and dynamic only because the rulebook was thrown out and created on the fly. There was precedent and strategy. Hindsight is being accurately used to review what happened and correctly criticize. The same would happen in the technical community if there were a breach and procedures were ignored and made up based on hunches. The medical community does not get a pass.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
I think a lot of people knew how to respond, its just they were fired. :: Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation. Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did. “One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  I would like them to go on the record on if they weren't fired what they would've done differently. In hindsight, we had vaccines created and in testing 5 days [1] after the WHO called that virus a pandemic [2]. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 [2]: https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020 https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments...
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    I understand nobody rushed the vaccine tests any more because nobody could produce it on the amount necessary. The tests were run faster than normal, and "coincidentally" all finished at about the same time the manufacturers could supply it.

JPKab 3y ago

> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)" There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even for irrational reasons) was useful for getting them to follow their guidelines. Double bonus for highly visible, borderline superstitious rituals like hand sanitizer, which helped identify those who were compliant from the dissidents such as myself. I live outside of Boulder, and long, long after this was known, the businesses were still engaging in surface sanitization theater. My daughter's swim school had employees walking around with large devices, spraying fluid on every chair in between classes. This was going on all the way into 2022. I asked the employees if they knew that covid didn't spread on surfaces and that what they were doing was useless. They knew, but did it anyway because the owner "wanted to show customers they took covid seriously". As a person who was demonized by my colleagues for not wearing a mask OUTSIDE on a windswept hiking trail, I'm frankly triggered by comments like this where people pretend like the information and data showing how irrational and panicked the social reaction was didn't exist. It did, and the people who were the most irrational, panicked, and aggressive towards those attempting to be rational are the ones making excuses like this. There needs to be a reckoning on this insanity and the public health authorities who deliberately chose a "stop covid at any cost" strategy. "At any cost" is correct. They completely refused to do any form of cost/benefit analysis for the absurd panic they produced. I, like many on HN, had relatives who refused to leave their homes, and were wiping down boxes from Amazon for months. These were relatively young people with no health issues. There's a reason why the average American overestimated their likelihood of being hospitalized from covid by 50x, and that's the combination of public health and the overly compliant, ideologically blinded media in the western world.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Yo Triggered. Maybe spring 2021. Guess part of problem with any issue these days, half of what you say is true, the other half starts to sound like 'crazy old guy screaming at the wind'. Yes, there was some group hysteria, no there wasn't a group intent on 'scaring' the population to 'gain control'. Yes, requiring a mask out on a nature trail is little nutz, but also there were some going the other way 'I can cough on your grandpa if I want, this is a free country'.

oredbored 3y ago

Lol... it was known extremely early on that fomite transmission was practically unheard of. People were hand sanitizing for years after this. God knows why. The FDA still hasn't even declared hand sanitizer safe to use by the way.

emodendroket 3y ago

You'd think that the regulations that were suspended were not invented in response to nothing.

ikiris 3y ago
This is HN: all regulations are bad, the government is out to get you, and the free market solves all problems. Going by the comments at least.

tomatocracy 3y ago

We knew very early on that plain soap and water were very effective at killing coronavirus (and much, much more so than alcohol gel hand sanitizer). It was even official advice here in the UK to use soap and water instead of alcohol gel for hand washing if at all possible I think. Yet many people still seemed to think the exact opposite. They still have it alongside soap in my office bathrooms for example. It makes a very interesting social study.

emodendroket 3y ago
As a point of clarification, were they effective at "killing" the virus or just mechanically removing it from one's hands?
- Raidion 3y ago
  It does kill it because the soap breaks up fats in the virus.
  - peteradio 3y ago
    A virus doesn't contain fats only 1s and 0s, FYI.

GeekyBear 3y ago

> At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? You pay attention to the news reports showing that despite locking down the passengers of the Pacific Princess cruise ship in their cabins, the disease continued to spread from cabin to cabin? What other theory than airborne spread fits that data?

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

CDC published how lethal it was in March 2020 and that it was basically identical to flu in terms of expected casualties. I knew earlier than that. I considered buying a hazmat suit but realised it was a meme and settled for buying some masks etc in early 2020.

ciconia 3y ago

> It was a fast, dynamically changing situation, everyone was getting sick... I think one could say a lot of the reaction of governments around the world was knee-jerk, "let's copy what that other government is doing" kind of thinking. Not that this is specific to the CoVid situation, there's plenty of it going on at any given moment.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Everyone likes to blame China. There is no opinion on China that can be stated without a huge counter group claiming the opposite. -- But, way at the beginning, they did cancel Chinese New Year and lockdown the country. So where it originated, by whatever way you want to believe, they were seeing deaths, a pandemic was spreading, and they cancelled New Years. They obviously saw the danger of an entire country being sick at once. -- Isn't it more likely that the reason we can argue about this, is because lockdowns worked, since more people lived, we can now argue that we did too much. But the reason more people lived was because we did take action, because people lived doesn't mean we could have done nothing and also had people live.