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> address a virus that in no way constituted an emergency 100s of thousands hospitalised. 60k dead. And that is with lockdowns. Seems like an emergency to me.

santoshalper 2y ago
There is a backlash against COVID actions that is happening now, is because people are terrible at math and worse at assessing risk. The idea that COVID was not a valid emergency is pure historical revisionism with no base in fact or data.
- cempaka 2y ago
  Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
  - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
    Yup. Like orders and orders of magnitude off. People thought they’d have like a 10% of dying if they caught Covid when it was closer to 0.2% (and much less when you stratify by risk conditions). Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
    - cempaka 2y ago
      I ran my personal risk profile through qcovid.org and it spat out a 1 in 80,000 chance of death and 1 in 3,000 chance of hospitalization. Any notion of taking a rush-to-market vaccine went out the window at that point. And before someone says "well what about your obligations to others?", my obligation was to my kids, to stay healthy and able to earn a living.
      - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Fun fact: according to this article posted on HN today 1.1 million people in the US wind up in the emergency room from stair related injuries (https://www.axios.com/2025/01/05/elevators-escalators-regulations-buildings-construction https://www.axios.com/2025/01/05/elevators-escalators-regula...). Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
        cempaka 2y ago
        At times it was as though people believed no one had ever died before COVID, and never would die if only they could indefinitely avoid catching it.
        cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Right? Like these people forgot their own mortality or something. I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense. …and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
        cempaka 2y ago
        > I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
        cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Honestly I think it was a massive, classic engineering disaster. It was multiple failures happening all at once that lead to the disaster that was humans response to Covid. Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
    - threeseed 2y ago
      7 million people have died from COVID so far. And that is with the biggest lockdowns seen in human history. It's ridiculous to me that people seem to downplay the severity.
      - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Your numbers can be true but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers, nor were they ethical or moral. Humans can’t stop a respiratory virus like that—it was wishful thinking at best and peak human arrogance at worst. And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse. Many things can be true at once.
        threeseed 2y ago
        > but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers Wrong. Here is a meta study which found that 79% of studies determined that lockdowns substantially reduced transmission: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10446910 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10446910
        cempaka 2y ago
        What was the upshot/benefit of this "reduced transmission" which was purchased at enormous cost? Everyone eventually got COVID anyway. How many deaths were actually prevented rather than delayed?
        cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        There will be no answer to that. These experts played fast and loose with the data and honestly I don’t trust any of it. And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do. People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really. I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.

santoshalper 2y ago

There is a backlash against COVID actions that is happening now, is because people are terrible at math and worse at assessing risk. The idea that COVID was not a valid emergency is pure historical revisionism with no base in fact or data.

cempaka 2y ago
Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  Yup. Like orders and orders of magnitude off. People thought they’d have like a 10% of dying if they caught Covid when it was closer to 0.2% (and much less when you stratify by risk conditions). Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
  - cempaka 2y ago
    I ran my personal risk profile through qcovid.org and it spat out a 1 in 80,000 chance of death and 1 in 3,000 chance of hospitalization. Any notion of taking a rush-to-market vaccine went out the window at that point. And before someone says "well what about your obligations to others?", my obligation was to my kids, to stay healthy and able to earn a living.
    - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
      Fun fact: according to this article posted on HN today 1.1 million people in the US wind up in the emergency room from stair related injuries (https://www.axios.com/2025/01/05/elevators-escalators-regulations-buildings-construction https://www.axios.com/2025/01/05/elevators-escalators-regula...). Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
      - cempaka 2y ago
        At times it was as though people believed no one had ever died before COVID, and never would die if only they could indefinitely avoid catching it.
        cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Right? Like these people forgot their own mortality or something. I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense. …and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
        cempaka 2y ago
        > I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
        cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Honestly I think it was a massive, classic engineering disaster. It was multiple failures happening all at once that lead to the disaster that was humans response to Covid. Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
  - threeseed 2y ago
    7 million people have died from COVID so far. And that is with the biggest lockdowns seen in human history. It's ridiculous to me that people seem to downplay the severity.
    - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
      Your numbers can be true but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers, nor were they ethical or moral. Humans can’t stop a respiratory virus like that—it was wishful thinking at best and peak human arrogance at worst. And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse. Many things can be true at once.
      - threeseed 2y ago
        > but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers Wrong. Here is a meta study which found that 79% of studies determined that lockdowns substantially reduced transmission: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10446910 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10446910
        cempaka 2y ago
        What was the upshot/benefit of this "reduced transmission" which was purchased at enormous cost? Everyone eventually got COVID anyway. How many deaths were actually prevented rather than delayed?
        cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        There will be no answer to that. These experts played fast and loose with the data and honestly I don’t trust any of it. And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do. People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really. I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.