5 ms·

> "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 gro

by 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'.
- ballenf 3y ago
  Maybe a problem less controversial was the absence of trusted public health figures making concerted efforts to calm fears. And those that did try were belittled, minimized and castigated. They were the ones labeled as dangerous. Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    I remember it differently. The medical community was crying out that we needed to take action, and the administration downplayed it and delayed. It was opposite, those that spoke up to do something were squashed in favor of those saying 'its just a cold, suck it up'. The government didn't do anything until private companies started realizing something had to be done, namely the NBA. Nothing was moving until the NBA cancelled the season, then suddenly it was taken more seriously.
    - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
      Exactly. The reason the medical professionals weren't calming people down was because the general consensus was that we should have been panicking more. I was raised by a doctor and all I can remember is them being so tired. No one was following the recommendations, people were dying, and they were at an increased risk. No doctor was going to come on, lie, and tell people to do less. We barely did enough as was
- JPKab 3y ago
  I didn't say "gain control". You said that and put it in quotes. Public health leaders, such as Debbie Birx, believed that the ends justified the means, and knowingly obfuscated the risk stratification by age in a cynical effort to get younger people to comply with lockdowns out of self preservation. She wrote about this in her book, and also wrote that she and her colleagues KNEW that "2 weeks to flatten the curve" was a white lie, because otherwise the public would never have agreed to lockdowns in the first place.
Zancarius 3y ago
I know of people who still won't go to church because of all of the above and are, for all intents and purposes, still deathly afraid to leave their homes. Regardless of what some might say in argument against your point(s), I absolutely do think that part of the public health emergency was the abject panic that ensued following COVID. I stopped exercising caution earlier on in the pandemic, because in my estimation my relatively good health, age, and literature that was available (D3 being an important predictor of outcomes) meant that I was unlikely to have a poor outcome. I did eventually get COVID in Dec 2021, but aside from a total loss of smell for 12 days and a dry cough it was little more than an annoyance. I isolated, as appropriate, for a week or so (never had a fever) and went about my business. Yet, nearly two months later, I remembered telling someone that I had had COVID, they recoiled and backed away as if I were still infectious. Fear is a strong emotion. Part of it is that the general public doesn't understand viruses. We can't see them. That's a problem, because it's an unseen enemy with (at the time) unknown outcomes—especially with rapidly changing information. I don't think the media helped either, because they relish in bad news. My mother was very nearly hospitalized last year, though. Not from COVID but from RSV. I suspect over-sanitization reduced our baseline immunity to your typical run-of-the-mill pathogens, but I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist so that's little more than a guess. I have some friends who are nurses who suggested the theory, and they may be right.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  To be fair, not going to church was about the most impactful thing somebody could to if going to church was a normal activity. And this is probably still saving those people some cases of flu and influenza. This has to be weighted against the benefit, but in a time of free-spread and lots of people dying, closing churches was a very good policy.
  - hn976827 3y ago
    In hindsight, much more important than closing schools.
- JPKab 3y ago
  Both you and I had similar experiences. My wife was hospitalized for unknown bacterial infection what the doctors assumed was caused by masks. I contracted covid in February 2021, before my age group was eligible for vaccine. Like you I had recognized relatively early on that my level of physical fitness and nutrition likely made it low risk for me. Like you I had minimal symptoms except for a total loss of sense of smell. And also like you I encountered a completely irrational response when I would tell people months later I caught it. This included people who should have been educated enough to know better. The really fun part was then having people pretend like the fact I had caught covid and recovered from it didn't translate into immunity. This despite the fact that only months earlier they had been asking people who had recover from covid to come in and donate plasma to help treat vulnerable patients. And also despite the fact that there had already been studies including millions of data points from Israel and Qatar that showed natural immunity to be robust. Like most things with covid, the null hypothesis was inverted. Instead of assuming that like the vast majority of viruses, natural immunity was a thing, they inverted it to assuming that natural immunity was not a thing until proven otherwise. Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus. No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent. I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate, and therefore are incapable of understanding science despite claiming that they "follow the science". In case anyone thinks I'm only picking on one side, I also have a half-brother who is obese and in his fifties who refused to get the vaccine when he obviously should have. He ended up catching the virus and being bedridden for over a week at his house, and then hid this from the family until his wife told us.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> 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. Is this a true statement? If so, do you have any sources to back up your "spring 2020" claim? Heck, I didn't even think this was a true statement now, that is my understanding was that airborne transmission was the primary route, but transmission by fomites was still possible, e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
VancouverMan 3y ago
The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto." https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/1275888390060285967 https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596... By mid-2021, we started seeing news reports like the following: "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-military-report-documents-deplorable-conditions-at-two/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili... Stuff like that was just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, the widespread foolishness continued throughout Canada for most of 2022. Even now, there are still remnants of it remaining in some cases, along with the irreparable long-term harm caused by the numerous unjustifiable policies put in place then.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  > The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling! A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Yeah, all the people saying this was a 'cold', what about all the dead? What do you mean we overreacted, or it was fake, or a conspiracy? Look at all the dead, how do you ignore that.
  - gordian-mind 3y ago
    This is bogus data, they took the officially reported numbers -- which were insane because they reported 'covid deaths' without taking into account comorbidities --, and quadrupled them for 'reasons'. > So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling! You should be ashamed of yourself for this hyperbole, you people have ruined many young people's lives for nothing, the least you could do is apologize. And this habit of constantly looking for numbers that are always wrong and feeding into your taste for impending doom is the greatest setback to science and the rational spirit I have ever witnessed in my entire life.
blub 3y ago
> we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020 No we didn’t and it obviously can. What we found out is that it spreads very efficiently through aerosols, thereby making contact-based infection nearly irrelevant for public health.

by JPKab 3y ago

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'.

ballenf 3y ago
Maybe a problem less controversial was the absence of trusted public health figures making concerted efforts to calm fears. And those that did try were belittled, minimized and castigated. They were the ones labeled as dangerous. Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I remember it differently. The medical community was crying out that we needed to take action, and the administration downplayed it and delayed. It was opposite, those that spoke up to do something were squashed in favor of those saying 'its just a cold, suck it up'. The government didn't do anything until private companies started realizing something had to be done, namely the NBA. Nothing was moving until the NBA cancelled the season, then suddenly it was taken more seriously.
  - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
    Exactly. The reason the medical professionals weren't calming people down was because the general consensus was that we should have been panicking more. I was raised by a doctor and all I can remember is them being so tired. No one was following the recommendations, people were dying, and they were at an increased risk. No doctor was going to come on, lie, and tell people to do less. We barely did enough as was
JPKab 3y ago
I didn't say "gain control". You said that and put it in quotes. Public health leaders, such as Debbie Birx, believed that the ends justified the means, and knowingly obfuscated the risk stratification by age in a cynical effort to get younger people to comply with lockdowns out of self preservation. She wrote about this in her book, and also wrote that she and her colleagues KNEW that "2 weeks to flatten the curve" was a white lie, because otherwise the public would never have agreed to lockdowns in the first place.

Zancarius 3y ago

I know of people who still won't go to church because of all of the above and are, for all intents and purposes, still deathly afraid to leave their homes. Regardless of what some might say in argument against your point(s), I absolutely do think that part of the public health emergency was the abject panic that ensued following COVID. I stopped exercising caution earlier on in the pandemic, because in my estimation my relatively good health, age, and literature that was available (D3 being an important predictor of outcomes) meant that I was unlikely to have a poor outcome. I did eventually get COVID in Dec 2021, but aside from a total loss of smell for 12 days and a dry cough it was little more than an annoyance. I isolated, as appropriate, for a week or so (never had a fever) and went about my business. Yet, nearly two months later, I remembered telling someone that I had had COVID, they recoiled and backed away as if I were still infectious. Fear is a strong emotion. Part of it is that the general public doesn't understand viruses. We can't see them. That's a problem, because it's an unseen enemy with (at the time) unknown outcomes—especially with rapidly changing information. I don't think the media helped either, because they relish in bad news. My mother was very nearly hospitalized last year, though. Not from COVID but from RSV. I suspect over-sanitization reduced our baseline immunity to your typical run-of-the-mill pathogens, but I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist so that's little more than a guess. I have some friends who are nurses who suggested the theory, and they may be right.

marcosdumay 3y ago
To be fair, not going to church was about the most impactful thing somebody could to if going to church was a normal activity. And this is probably still saving those people some cases of flu and influenza. This has to be weighted against the benefit, but in a time of free-spread and lots of people dying, closing churches was a very good policy.
- hn976827 3y ago
  In hindsight, much more important than closing schools.
JPKab 3y ago
Both you and I had similar experiences. My wife was hospitalized for unknown bacterial infection what the doctors assumed was caused by masks. I contracted covid in February 2021, before my age group was eligible for vaccine. Like you I had recognized relatively early on that my level of physical fitness and nutrition likely made it low risk for me. Like you I had minimal symptoms except for a total loss of sense of smell. And also like you I encountered a completely irrational response when I would tell people months later I caught it. This included people who should have been educated enough to know better. The really fun part was then having people pretend like the fact I had caught covid and recovered from it didn't translate into immunity. This despite the fact that only months earlier they had been asking people who had recover from covid to come in and donate plasma to help treat vulnerable patients. And also despite the fact that there had already been studies including millions of data points from Israel and Qatar that showed natural immunity to be robust. Like most things with covid, the null hypothesis was inverted. Instead of assuming that like the vast majority of viruses, natural immunity was a thing, they inverted it to assuming that natural immunity was not a thing until proven otherwise. Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus. No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent. I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate, and therefore are incapable of understanding science despite claiming that they "follow the science". In case anyone thinks I'm only picking on one side, I also have a half-brother who is obese and in his fifties who refused to get the vaccine when he obviously should have. He ended up catching the virus and being bedridden for over a week at his house, and then hid this from the family until his wife told us.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

> 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. Is this a true statement? If so, do you have any sources to back up your "spring 2020" claim? Heck, I didn't even think this was a true statement now, that is my understanding was that airborne transmission was the primary route, but transmission by fomites was still possible, e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...

VancouverMan 3y ago

The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious: "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto." https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/1275888390060285967 https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596... By mid-2021, we started seeing news reports like the following: "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-military-report-documents-deplorable-conditions-at-two/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili... Stuff like that was just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, the widespread foolishness continued throughout Canada for most of 2022. Even now, there are still remnants of it remaining in some cases, along with the irreparable long-term harm caused by the numerous unjustifiable policies put in place then.

zvmaz 3y ago
> The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too. So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling! A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Yeah, all the people saying this was a 'cold', what about all the dead? What do you mean we overreacted, or it was fake, or a conspiracy? Look at all the dead, how do you ignore that.
- gordian-mind 3y ago
  This is bogus data, they took the officially reported numbers -- which were insane because they reported 'covid deaths' without taking into account comorbidities --, and quadrupled them for 'reasons'. > So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling! You should be ashamed of yourself for this hyperbole, you people have ruined many young people's lives for nothing, the least you could do is apologize. And this habit of constantly looking for numbers that are always wrong and feeding into your taste for impending doom is the greatest setback to science and the rational spirit I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

blub 3y ago

> we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020 No we didn’t and it obviously can. What we found out is that it spreads very efficiently through aerosols, thereby making contact-based infection nearly irrelevant for public health.