4 ms·

This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole

by grebc 9d ago

This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived? The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show. I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.

watwut 8d ago
Kids mostly forgot and adapted back. It is adult, mostly men, who just cant get over fear of vaccines, injury of having to do something a little uncomfortable for someone else.
- fabioborellini 8d ago
  Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point. The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here. Especially for ones that didn’t have a lot of social life or family to begin with.
  - moron4hire 8d ago
    Almost every single meetup group in Northern Virginia was completely destroyed and did not grow back. I watched as dozens of local meetups, several running for many years, disappeared over night. I managed one as well and my crew held on to ours for as long as we could. We managed to keep it running online for several more years. But the social damage was done. After running the thing for 12 years, not being able to find anywhere that was willing to host us in-person again, and all of us original organizers having moved to different cities, there was nobody willing to take over.
  - kbelder 8d ago
    And the massive damage this did to children's education. I think people who didn't have a child in the school system at the time might not understand how poorly the schools functioned during that time. My child had two intelligent and supportive parents, including a stay-at-home mother, and it was still rough. Many of her classmates just flat-out lost a year of education. There's still obvious effects on her cohort years later.
  - preg_match 8d ago
    The lack of human connection has been a trend for many decades now, covid just accelerated it all at once. Not like there was much choice, lots of people died, we did what we had to. The communities that did exist were always running on fumes, basically only existing due to inertia. When the inertia was cut, even if only for a couple weeks in some places, they were done. That’s it. The social damage has been here, and we’ve been zombie-ing our way through it. Covid just let the undead stay dead, and turns out we can’t revive it.
  - watwut 8d ago
    > Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point. We had concerted anti-vaccine campaign. Literally trying to make you feel afraid of vaccines or feel sorry for kids that might get them. And yes, it was fear spread by men who fancy themselves manly men. > The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here. I am particularly salty about this one. Because the exact same ideological and political groups who are throwing complete temper tamptrum over lockdown are the ones who want women to be stay at home moms. I did not, lockdowns were easier, you had a lot more communication and everybody was in the same position so you could realate. Lockdowns were an easy mode compare to the thing they want force women into.
- dofm 8d ago
  I live in a relatively wealthy town and most people here had a pretty safe series of lockdowns (bit hair-raising for me as a freelancer but ehh). We are collectively massively pro-vaccine; I know only two people who loudly resisted (and one of them nearly died in hospital from COVID). But I can tell you that our collective sense of (unusually strong) community has taken six years since the first lockdown (four and a half years since the end of mask restrictions) to truly return to what it was before. So even in this quite cushioned place I think we didn't really return to a sense of proper ordinary community positivity for quite a long time (it helps that we had a pretty great summer). Last summer things still felt very disjointed. Kids, young adults, I can assure you, resent what happened and how poorly we managed it. In other towns where community was weak, a lot of damage has been done, and you can see that in how little collective spirit there is in dealing with new challenges. Even around where I live, things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely. We have done damage to young people by simply deleting community things we benefited from that they no longer will.
  - preg_match 8d ago
    Of course kids and young adults resent it: a part of their childhood and formative years sucked ass. But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, it’s towards the reality. It sucks covid happened and it shouldn’t have. But there’s nothing that could have been done to save their youth; it was already ruined for those years. I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen and instead a few million more people died, would they have preferred that? I doubt it, especially considering such a situation would inevitably result in even stricter restrictions going forward. After all, lockdown was a reaction. If you make the thing it’s reacting to even bigger, even more of a problem, then… well… the reaction will be more extreme.
    - dofm 8d ago
      > But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, Oooooh yes it is. They are so mad at how badly we handled it. And they are right to be. > I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen That isn't their complaint. Their complaint is not the first one (except that in our case in the UK it was idiotically weeks late and major sporting events happened; the older ones understand how stupid that was). It's the fact that we subsequently undermined it, and then did it again. And again. And again.
- account42 8d ago
  Ah yes, lets throw in casual sexism in with your victim blaming.
teamonkey 8d ago
After being burned by the first wave, Australia locked down hard and early for subsequent waves. It was the correct thing to do. As a result, they had relatively short periods of lockdown compared to other countries, such as the UK, which had comprehensive vaccination but dithered about going into lockdown.
- qsi 8d ago
  IIRC Melbourne had the longest lockdown in the world.
  - _carbyau_ 8d ago
    The lockdown was not spread equally. There were enough people just ignoring it. Some having midnight parties because it was extra exciting to subvert the curfew, with incidental spreading of COVID. Some were outright trying to have "herd immunity" parties to deliberately spread it. And hence the official lockdown kept having to be extended. Fuck I hated those people.
  - defrost 8d ago
    For a city, yes - seven or eight on again / off again hard lockdowns with a total of 262 days(?) or so of stay in place isolation. At the state level Western Australia continuously self isolated for something like 18 months with a 14 day quarantine period for anybody wanting to enter for longer than it takes to turn a truck around. Very different types of lockdown for sure.
  - teamonkey 8d ago
    It did. That’s why I said Australia was burned at first and changed their policy. (Actually the longest lockdown in Melbourne was the second one, but it was only a couple of weeks after the first, I misremembered it as being one continuous lockdown.) Subsequent lockdowns were shorter than elsewhere in the world because they reacted faster.
simonbarker87 8d ago
That’s the thing about large scale public health interventions like that, if it works it will look like you overreacted and you still won’t know if it’s because it worked or if it was never as bad as was feared.
doginasuit 8d ago
It's my understanding that there's some room to be skeptical about the value of the lockdowns after a certain point and costs are undeniable. But for a period of time hospitals were basically overrun and medical staff were pushed way past the limit. To do any less would have been utter disregard for human life and the people who were trying to keep us alive. There were huge outbreaks in specific areas because people decided to ignore it and have a wedding or a party. So many videos of rebellious people on social media only to follow up with another video a few weeks later gasping for breath in a hospital room. Most people didn't do that, and the people on the front line held it together despite the insanity. With vaccines brought the opportunity to open up more safely, and it seems like many places found a responsible balance in doing that based on available hospital capacity. And it seems like others took a more cautious approach and it is a fair question whether it went too far.
_carbyau_ 8d ago
At the time: 1. no one knew that much about COVID. Even the authorities and experts! 2. It was a respiratory thing kinda like a cold or flu that killed some people. And then more people. And of course the news hyped that. So many theories and crackpots and experts and armchair-experts spouting all kinds of shit. It was tiring to open a web browser. 3. No vaccine. No vaccine for at least a year. You just have to wait for this tidal wave of sickness to hit you and everyone around you. 4. I recall seeing on the news what was happening in Italy. March 2020, something like 600 people a day dying of covid. Italy's hospitals were being overrun with covid patients. It wasn't obvious who needed treatment and help to survive the night and who could just go home and be (quite) miserable for a bit. There were so many unknowns! Hospital overrun resulted in not just covid patients dying but also anyone else who needed to go to the emergency department was affected to some degree. Partly because the system didn't have the capacity and partly because you'd catch covid on top of the reason you were there. The systems were choking. I was in Melbourne the whole time, through every lockdown. Everyone has an opinion on whether it was the right thing to do, but for me, it was the society agreed upon (via authority and literal epidemiologist expert guidance) way to avoid killing a single digit % of the population. Don't get me wrong, I was so fucking sick of being couped up... but I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I had've put some of my neighbours through that first wave harsh covid. I couldn't say as to whether it would have killed some of them. Yes, many people had it rough in so many different ways. Bureaucratic shit was being made up almost day to day and people were also trying to scam it day to day. So it isn't surprising shit happened. Everyone has a story. However, to say "We should have.." belies the fact that hindsight is easy and recollection is rose tinted.
- jakzurr 8d ago
  Thank you.
- grebc 8d ago
  1. They still don’t, you just lived through an episode though so you feel good because you survived and it feels like you’re prepared. 2. Cool story. 3. Another cool story. 4. Yeah. People lost their minds because people got sick and gate crashed the ED for what’s to mostly normal person a bad flu. You’re proving my point that people lost their minds. Our hospitals are more up the creek presently. I can’t emphasise that enough. All the billions upon billions of dollars spent during & since on R&D, staff, resources, beds. PRESENTLY - no covid outbreak - thank the lord.
queenkjuul 8d ago
Millions and millions of people died, you know.
account42 8d ago
The biggest damage from COVID will be that it serves as a dry-run for future techno-faschist governance. The way in which the masses were not only willing to give up their own liberties but also pressure their peers into following the outright unconstitutional "emergency" laws was truly shocking.

by grebc 9d ago

watwut 8d ago

Kids mostly forgot and adapted back. It is adult, mostly men, who just cant get over fear of vaccines, injury of having to do something a little uncomfortable for someone else.

fabioborellini 8d ago
Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point. The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here. Especially for ones that didn’t have a lot of social life or family to begin with.
- moron4hire 8d ago
  Almost every single meetup group in Northern Virginia was completely destroyed and did not grow back. I watched as dozens of local meetups, several running for many years, disappeared over night. I managed one as well and my crew held on to ours for as long as we could. We managed to keep it running online for several more years. But the social damage was done. After running the thing for 12 years, not being able to find anywhere that was willing to host us in-person again, and all of us original organizers having moved to different cities, there was nobody willing to take over.
- kbelder 8d ago
  And the massive damage this did to children's education. I think people who didn't have a child in the school system at the time might not understand how poorly the schools functioned during that time. My child had two intelligent and supportive parents, including a stay-at-home mother, and it was still rough. Many of her classmates just flat-out lost a year of education. There's still obvious effects on her cohort years later.
- preg_match 8d ago
  The lack of human connection has been a trend for many decades now, covid just accelerated it all at once. Not like there was much choice, lots of people died, we did what we had to. The communities that did exist were always running on fumes, basically only existing due to inertia. When the inertia was cut, even if only for a couple weeks in some places, they were done. That’s it. The social damage has been here, and we’ve been zombie-ing our way through it. Covid just let the undead stay dead, and turns out we can’t revive it.
- watwut 8d ago
  > Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point. We had concerted anti-vaccine campaign. Literally trying to make you feel afraid of vaccines or feel sorry for kids that might get them. And yes, it was fear spread by men who fancy themselves manly men. > The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here. I am particularly salty about this one. Because the exact same ideological and political groups who are throwing complete temper tamptrum over lockdown are the ones who want women to be stay at home moms. I did not, lockdowns were easier, you had a lot more communication and everybody was in the same position so you could realate. Lockdowns were an easy mode compare to the thing they want force women into.
dofm 8d ago
I live in a relatively wealthy town and most people here had a pretty safe series of lockdowns (bit hair-raising for me as a freelancer but ehh). We are collectively massively pro-vaccine; I know only two people who loudly resisted (and one of them nearly died in hospital from COVID). But I can tell you that our collective sense of (unusually strong) community has taken six years since the first lockdown (four and a half years since the end of mask restrictions) to truly return to what it was before. So even in this quite cushioned place I think we didn't really return to a sense of proper ordinary community positivity for quite a long time (it helps that we had a pretty great summer). Last summer things still felt very disjointed. Kids, young adults, I can assure you, resent what happened and how poorly we managed it. In other towns where community was weak, a lot of damage has been done, and you can see that in how little collective spirit there is in dealing with new challenges. Even around where I live, things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely. We have done damage to young people by simply deleting community things we benefited from that they no longer will.
- preg_match 8d ago
  Of course kids and young adults resent it: a part of their childhood and formative years sucked ass. But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, it’s towards the reality. It sucks covid happened and it shouldn’t have. But there’s nothing that could have been done to save their youth; it was already ruined for those years. I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen and instead a few million more people died, would they have preferred that? I doubt it, especially considering such a situation would inevitably result in even stricter restrictions going forward. After all, lockdown was a reaction. If you make the thing it’s reacting to even bigger, even more of a problem, then… well… the reaction will be more extreme.
  - dofm 8d ago
    > But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, Oooooh yes it is. They are so mad at how badly we handled it. And they are right to be. > I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen That isn't their complaint. Their complaint is not the first one (except that in our case in the UK it was idiotically weeks late and major sporting events happened; the older ones understand how stupid that was). It's the fact that we subsequently undermined it, and then did it again. And again. And again.
account42 8d ago
Ah yes, lets throw in casual sexism in with your victim blaming.

teamonkey 8d ago

After being burned by the first wave, Australia locked down hard and early for subsequent waves. It was the correct thing to do. As a result, they had relatively short periods of lockdown compared to other countries, such as the UK, which had comprehensive vaccination but dithered about going into lockdown.

qsi 8d ago
IIRC Melbourne had the longest lockdown in the world.
- _carbyau_ 8d ago
  The lockdown was not spread equally. There were enough people just ignoring it. Some having midnight parties because it was extra exciting to subvert the curfew, with incidental spreading of COVID. Some were outright trying to have "herd immunity" parties to deliberately spread it. And hence the official lockdown kept having to be extended. Fuck I hated those people.
- defrost 8d ago
  For a city, yes - seven or eight on again / off again hard lockdowns with a total of 262 days(?) or so of stay in place isolation. At the state level Western Australia continuously self isolated for something like 18 months with a 14 day quarantine period for anybody wanting to enter for longer than it takes to turn a truck around. Very different types of lockdown for sure.
- teamonkey 8d ago
  It did. That’s why I said Australia was burned at first and changed their policy. (Actually the longest lockdown in Melbourne was the second one, but it was only a couple of weeks after the first, I misremembered it as being one continuous lockdown.) Subsequent lockdowns were shorter than elsewhere in the world because they reacted faster.

simonbarker87 8d ago

That’s the thing about large scale public health interventions like that, if it works it will look like you overreacted and you still won’t know if it’s because it worked or if it was never as bad as was feared.

doginasuit 8d ago

It's my understanding that there's some room to be skeptical about the value of the lockdowns after a certain point and costs are undeniable. But for a period of time hospitals were basically overrun and medical staff were pushed way past the limit. To do any less would have been utter disregard for human life and the people who were trying to keep us alive. There were huge outbreaks in specific areas because people decided to ignore it and have a wedding or a party. So many videos of rebellious people on social media only to follow up with another video a few weeks later gasping for breath in a hospital room. Most people didn't do that, and the people on the front line held it together despite the insanity. With vaccines brought the opportunity to open up more safely, and it seems like many places found a responsible balance in doing that based on available hospital capacity. And it seems like others took a more cautious approach and it is a fair question whether it went too far.

_carbyau_ 8d ago

At the time: 1. no one knew that much about COVID. Even the authorities and experts! 2. It was a respiratory thing kinda like a cold or flu that killed some people. And then more people. And of course the news hyped that. So many theories and crackpots and experts and armchair-experts spouting all kinds of shit. It was tiring to open a web browser. 3. No vaccine. No vaccine for at least a year. You just have to wait for this tidal wave of sickness to hit you and everyone around you. 4. I recall seeing on the news what was happening in Italy. March 2020, something like 600 people a day dying of covid. Italy's hospitals were being overrun with covid patients. It wasn't obvious who needed treatment and help to survive the night and who could just go home and be (quite) miserable for a bit. There were so many unknowns! Hospital overrun resulted in not just covid patients dying but also anyone else who needed to go to the emergency department was affected to some degree. Partly because the system didn't have the capacity and partly because you'd catch covid on top of the reason you were there. The systems were choking. I was in Melbourne the whole time, through every lockdown. Everyone has an opinion on whether it was the right thing to do, but for me, it was the society agreed upon (via authority and literal epidemiologist expert guidance) way to avoid killing a single digit % of the population. Don't get me wrong, I was so fucking sick of being couped up... but I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I had've put some of my neighbours through that first wave harsh covid. I couldn't say as to whether it would have killed some of them. Yes, many people had it rough in so many different ways. Bureaucratic shit was being made up almost day to day and people were also trying to scam it day to day. So it isn't surprising shit happened. Everyone has a story. However, to say "We should have.." belies the fact that hindsight is easy and recollection is rose tinted.

jakzurr 8d ago
Thank you.
grebc 8d ago
1. They still don’t, you just lived through an episode though so you feel good because you survived and it feels like you’re prepared. 2. Cool story. 3. Another cool story. 4. Yeah. People lost their minds because people got sick and gate crashed the ED for what’s to mostly normal person a bad flu. You’re proving my point that people lost their minds. Our hospitals are more up the creek presently. I can’t emphasise that enough. All the billions upon billions of dollars spent during & since on R&D, staff, resources, beds. PRESENTLY - no covid outbreak - thank the lord.

queenkjuul 8d ago

Millions and millions of people died, you know.

account42 8d ago

The biggest damage from COVID will be that it serves as a dry-run for future techno-faschist governance. The way in which the masses were not only willing to give up their own liberties but also pressure their peers into following the outright unconstitutional "emergency" laws was truly shocking.