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This framing is patently ridiculous. Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively. Nobody wants anyone to wear 2 masks forever. "Science and stuff" and "for our own good" are not actually bad things.

"We did what we had to when we needed to" is not true yet. We need to finish the job, instead of half-assing it. The WSJ Opinion page is not a place where reasoned thinking happens.

> The WSJ Opinion page is not a place where reasoned thinking happens.

Fair enough. But to their credit, at least the WSJ has the decency to clearly distinguish their Opinion page from their actual news. The NYT seems to have given up maintaining any such separation.

Aside from the large “Opinion” text above the title and the clear delineation of sections?

I think the point was that there is quite a bit of opinion to be found outside the designated opinion section, not that the area for officially acknowledged opinion pieces isn't clearly marked.

But this kind of rhetoric is exactly what I find concerning. The arguments I've seen on this issue seem to be driven by soaring rhetoric about finishing the job and trust for the science and respect for the dead, rather than a practical analysis of the risks and tradeoffs we face today. It seems to me that a lot of Americans have adopted the heuristic that all good Covid news is a trick to get people to "half-ass it", and see relentless negativity as the only responsible posture. (This is an observable trend in international comparison of news coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting...)

>It seems to me that a lot of Americans have adopted the heuristic that all good Covid news is a trick to get people to "half-ass it", and see relentless negativity as the only responsible posture

I've noticed this as well among many in my social circles. Every time I discovered some new scientific study which helped to dispell some degree of the FUD surrounding covid, the people who had adopted that heuristic always responded with more negativity and FUD, and never relief.

A great example of this was how early on, when looking at data from Italy, there was FUD suggesting that the death rate could be 10-15%. When more data was collected which dispelled that great fear, Fauci said "It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death".

"Nobody wants anyone to wear 2 masks forever."

Don't say this. Among the scientific advisors to governments, there have been a few (thankfully a fringe who don’t have any real influence) who in media interviews have advocated mask wearing and even social distancing in perpetuity, even after COVID is long gone. This is because they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all.

there are also eg privacy advocates who may now be able to wear masks without too much hassle for the foreseeable future to defeat mass surveillance.

for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.

Masks don’t help for privacy, and already privacy advocates are becoming aware of this. The extensive networks of surveillance cameras in e.g. Russia and China are now able to identify people wearing masks – this was recently used in Moscow to go to the homes of masked demonstrators a couple of days after the protests and arrest them there, for example.

Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.

> Masks don’t help for privacy

alrighty then. glad that's cleared up.

seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help."

how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?

The problem is that modern surveillance tech has imposed so many layers that observing them all isn’t realistic for even the most privacy-conscious people: you not only have to wear a mask, you have to change your gait, you can’t carry around a mobile phone, you have to somehow elude cameras being able to track you from wherever you started off that morning (i.e. likely your home) etc. So what is the point of being happy that you can now wear a mask in public?

Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.

Do you have any links? Sounds interesting.

I definitely don't want mask wearing and social distancing to continue in perpetuity but I do hope that wearing a mask when you are feeling sick but still out in public becomes normalized.

I do agree but even better would be universal paid sick days so they don’t have to even go out.

I wonder if masks are a cop out for real, effective disease mitigation. (BTW I’ve been called an anti masker for asking this.)

That would be very fragile.

For thousands of years, Native Americans maintained comparatively low densities and longer distances between people. Large cities existed in the Mississippi basin, but that was the exception. From a "public health" perspective, this was great.

Then they encountered a population that had been living in denser conditions, both with other humans and with animals. These people had been a breeding ground for pathogens, a big gain-of-function experiment, for thousands of years. They even smelled bad.

The population with the good public health was ravaged by the worst plague the world has ever known, a plague that makes the Black Death look like the common cold, a plague that killed 90% of people in many places, that destroyed cities, that nearly emptied continents ("providentially", from the invaders' point of view).

To this day, it is a tragedy whenever an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon is met by an outsider, because within a month 90% of the tribe is dead of disease.

It is very good for a society to embrace vaccines. It is very bad for a society to sit out the next rounds of evolution, or of immune learning. You'll end up with Galapagos syndrome.

Consider the Indian symbol of the lotus. (It is the sign of the BJP.) It symbolizes "beauty growing from the muck". The "muck" is important. Drink the water.

A society that really wants to win, should have viral research facilities, well protected in their deepest deserts, where gain of function experiments speed evolution and produce ever more dangerous threats. At the same time, they should develop vaccines for these viruses, and include them in peoples' regular shots. If it wants to go on the offense, all this society has to do is release its pathogens. It will be protected; its enemies will not.

Lockdowns can be accepted as one-off responses that preserve population while a vaccine is developed. Since you end up with the same (or even better) immunity but less death, it's a win. So just be patient; we're almost there.

But as a long term solution, a society that embraces lockdowns over immune learning is going down the wrong path.

> even after COVID is long gone

COVID is very likely to become an endemic disease, so it probably won't be going away.

Of course the best way to deal with that is vaccination, but there are anti-vaxxers so masks will probably become more of a fixture. Not because of an overzealous adviser, but because of people's stupidity.

What is the case for it not being endemic now?

The fact that variants are already rife, all coronaviruses are globally endemic so far and the impossibility of the required global coordination of all countries to eradicate it.

I'm curious and Im not putting you on the spot here but I wonder from what law does the government derive the authority to force people to wear masks in order to prevent a common virus which all of us have some immunity to?

To me this seems to be another over reach emboldened into existence by COVID measures. Im not making the argument these measure were unnecessary at the time. I am making the argument that we do in fact live in an imperfect world filled with both natural and man made threats. Bad things are going to happen and thats a fact of life.

> "they want to get rid of influenza, too, or they want public-health practices in place that could stop the next pandemic from ever starting at all."

Until domestic and international travel is banned this is a pipe dream. In a matter of months anyone who wants a vaccination will have had one. Time to get on with the business of living in an unpredictable world filled with new threats.

I think you’re spot on.

U.S. District Judge William Stickman said it best when declaring PA's lockdown orders unconstitutional:

The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair-weather freedoms -- in place when times are good but able to be cast aside in times of trouble. There is no question that this country has faced, and will face, emergencies of every sort, but the solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The constitution cannot accept the concept of a 'new normal' where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures

The power to enforce quarantines goes all the way back to the founders.

Perpetual mask laws aren’t quarantines, though. Quarantines are limited-time emergency things. Consider how Poland's Supreme Court, for example, recently found that the government had no right to close businesses or require masks without declaring a state of emergency (which is necessarily a short-term thing). In the USA, with its even more litigious culture and judges favouring limited state intervention, I would expect long-term public-health laws to face even more legal opposition.

Quarantines as considered by the founders were far harsher than the mask mandates we have now. This all seems like just-so logic to me.

Again, it doesn’t matter how harsh the quarantine, what matters is that a quarantine is a limited-time restriction. (Etymologically, the word "quarantine" originally referred to a period of 40 days.) Meanwhile, this thread of the discussion is about the idea of states imposing mask laws forever, even after the COVID emergency has passed.

"Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively"

I couldn't disagree more with this. Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population. Sadly, the predictable occurred and no politician was going to do very much about it.

Looking back on it, the only effective preventative measure that had any chance at all of working in the US would have been to totally seal the national borders about mid January 2020.

At the time the politicians were too busy trying to impeach the executive office holder who may have debatably held the authority to accomplish such an action. When there finally were inbound travel restrictions implemented the leadership was yet again accused of Xenophobia and Racism per usual opposition schtick (farcical as US residents returning from abroad were just as much of a risk).

In my opinion, with the benefit of hindsight, this could have all been avoided in the US had such an action been taken. It wasn't and here we are. The world is poorly made I regret to report.

> Several hundred thousand people are dead because mother nature saw fit to allow a virus no living person had immunity from to jump into the human population.

Of which many would have been preventable. Do you think the mass protests, calling it a hoax (yeah I know the usual rhetoric, he didn’t explicitly say it to COVID, but come on, he did try to half-ass two things with that), the useless too little too late closing of borders, some states going on as if nothing happened, sunbathing on the beach and I could go on. All that with a pandemic that is known to have an exponential growth rate - that is even doing very little in the beginning will save many many people.

The impeachment was over by mid-January so that timeline doesn't line up. As for the executive office holder, he spent the next several months on the one hand telling a journalist the virus was a dire national security threat, much worse than flu and really nasty, while at the same time telling the public is was just a flu and a hoax, and blocking emergency preparations because he didn't want to spook the markets.

Nice priorities there. A prerequisite to taking any kind of coordinated or effective action is actually treating the threat as a priority. Clearly the chief executive, while being completely aware of the threat and its severity, had other things on his mind that took precedence over the risk of half a million dead Americans.

Even January may have been way too late.

The problem in your scenario is that "finishing the job" was always about not letting hospitals be swamped

That's the false premise that we accepted as true when the majority of the electorate agreed to allow this shut downs to happen.

No one justified lockdowns with "we need to eliminate covid" or "we need to vaccinate 50% people". That simply did not happen.

The literal premise used by all govt officials was that all forceful covid mandates were only temporary and only to avoid healthcare collapse and to have time understand the virus.

We are well past that point. The restrictions are still in place.

The only thing being half assed is the job, as ny state aptly showed, and most of the federal vaccine distribution rollout continues to demonstrate.

The truth is reasoned thinking was never part of the equation.

If i am wrong, then please define "the job", and then find quotations from April or May 2020 stating that the "job" did not mean understand the virus and avoid hospital collapse.

> Several hundred thousand people are dead because politicians failed to act effectively.

And if politicians had acted effectively, would zero people have died? We're talking about a mostly invisible natural killer. It's going to kill people, regardless of who does what. Influenza has killed thousands every year since the dawn of time, but we don't blame anyone for it.

Death toll is a number, and the smaller the better I would say..

What did you want politicians to do?

You are typical of why this pandemic has been so bad and deadly, besides some fecklessness early in the pandemic by the authorities.

Basically there are two groups of people: one group (let's call them 'young people') are not very unlikely to die or suffer from this disease but are very inconvenienced by the various restrictions. Your "We did what we had to when we needed to and the need for such measures is demonstrably coming to an end." really illustrates that. You're unilaterally declaring it over because you're tired of your freedoms being impinged and you're ready to move on. Meanwhile the science doesn't support your view.

And that brings me to the other group (let's call them 'old people'): these people are much more likely do die and don't have that much scope for protecting themselves reliably. Or maybe they can but they have been led to believe in the attitude of the 'young people'. They pay the price for people not wearing masks, not taking the disease seriously and acting recklessly.

And that's the insidiousness of it. One group plays, the other group pays. It reveals something discomforting about our society which we think is highly civilized but really is so casually indifferent to other people's death and suffering.

There is at least a third group: people neither at risk nor majorly inconvenienced who sympathize with the "young people".

I am nearly middled-aged myself and living in the countryside and remote-working for years already, so I am not very inconvenienced. But I want restrictions lifted so that people in their teens and twenties can have their big festivities, courtship rituals, etc.

The COVID lockdowns have been the biggest betrayal of youth since May '68, and their loss of freedoms offends me more than the deaths of the old.

Thanks for the insight.

I'd be more worried for those who work festivals, events , bars , restaurants, etc. Millions of life have been destroyed.

I like to put it this way , the worst thing that's happened to me since Corona started, is I no longer have places to meet people. But the folks who staff those places , bars , concerts, etc ,are out of work.

Not very fun to be jobless when rent is still due and your kids still need to eat.

Unfortunately it is not a zero sum game - and exponential growth is no joke. We have to make some sacrifices, and I would say many of the young understands it and is not joyfully, but willfully do their part and stay home.

You may not have many empathy towards the older population who is endangered directly, but perhaps the many who will not have place in hospitals due to the flood of COVID patients, causing many many indirect deaths.

> We have to make some sacrifices, and I would say many of the young understands it and is not joyfully, but willfully do their part and stay home.

Maybe that's you, and that's your choice. But what about all the young people who do not want to stay home and make sacrifices for the sake of older people? My sympathies are with them.

> perhaps the many who will not have place in hospitals due to the flood of COVID patients

One solution to this is to triage COVID patients away from intensive care, so that those beds remain available to the bulk of the population. This is the approach that Sweden chose, for example. So, no, I don’t see this as a reason to place limits on the lives of young people.

I doubt any country has enough hospital beds/personal to “battle” a pandemic. I’m not sure what you mean by triaging COVID patients, I doubt any hospital accepts mild cases - and basically everything has to have a covid and non-covid part.

Triaging means that COVID patients are directed towards palliative care (which is quick, and for which even non-specialist personnel can be trained) regardless of the severity of their symptoms, so that they do not take up beds. Again, Sweden has managed well with this approach and never had to institute a severe lockdown.

"You are typical of why this pandemic has been so bad and deadly"

I wore a mask, I social distanced, I refrained from gatherings of more than 2 people. I followed protocol during the time of crisis and I did so willing and zealously. Your ad hominem attack does little to disparage my argument or my thinking on the subject.

This pandemic has been deadly because it was a virus humans didn't have immunity for. I wonder why people find such a thing to be so hard to accept?

Necessary measures were taken AFTER the fact.

You cant unring the bell around the neck of a horse that already got out of the barn and boarded a ship thats already sailed. I realize people died and loved ones were lost and this is an unmitigated human tragedy but the urge to find someone to blame isn't helpful.

Continuing the current practices in dogmatic fashion for some unspecified period of time isn't the answer. Vaccination is the answer. Immunity is the answer and at current that seems like a realistic possibility. Things can always go to hell again at any moment from some new threat and thats a fact of life.

In recent months, mainstream media has reported a great deal of concern that countries are using COVID as an excuse to crack down on the political opposition. Usually the examples given are countries in the developing world already regarded as non-free. But is there really no risk that stable Western nations, too, will be tempted to misuse laws? I don’t mean yours, where laws and enforcement of them have been relatively lax, but there are certainly reasons to be worried in Europe.

France’s government was annoyed for months by the Yellow Vests protests but unable to make them go away. When it saw that instituting COVID restrictions got rid of those protests at the stroke of a pen, could this not motivate the state to maintain restrictions on gatherings for as long as possible? Elsewhere, curfews and laws against protests have benefited the governments in power, sending them to reelection, simply because opposition parties were not allowed to organize publicly and show their strength.

"Go away"

"Fight to return to normal"

How many realize COVID-19 is endemic, will continue to mutate and will be with us for the foreseeable future?

Those among us, who remain vulnerable either matter, or they do not, which is it?

"We" is who exactly?

Does the "we" body of people include people living (very carefully) with immunodeficiency, those without access to doctors, no insurance, elderly, survivors of the dead?

How many are aware pandemics and the medicine, science, various other impacts play out on multi year timelines?

When is the last time nature abided by human preferences?

Please, no response is needed to the above, just rhetorical questions as food for thought.

Frankly, politicizing COVID-19, as well as denying the reality of it did us and the world a lot of harm.

I do not disagree with you on the basic idea of politicians leveraging any shiny thing to avoid hard legislation long overdue. I do not find conflating that with COVID-19 realities all that useful.

COVID-19 is still novel. There is a ton we do not know and we have yet to get the data we need to proceed in a more definitive way, and for sure lack what is needed to basically ignore it per normal.

We are going to get some of that data the hard way as some parts of the world, and the US are choosing to behave as if it has "gone away."

Finally, "we" absolutely did not do what was needed and a lot of people died, who did not have to die.

The numbers, variant strains and their potential impacts remain with us and are at levels well above those that triggered (our poor) actions in the first place. The only real difference I can see is more nebulous publishing of that information coupled with more aggressive signaling it is all OK now.

We lack the data needed to make that assessment.

We also lack the data to fully understand what "normal" will end up looking like too. It won't look like it did before. It could look similar, depending on how nature plays out and how good both our understanding and response to said understanding actually is.

The US track record is poor so far.

Don't worry, there's always another spectre lurking in the dark. Firearms and vague "white supremacy" are up next. We also have Syria, Iran, and North Korea as solid go-to options as we await the placid shepherding that is the NFL season.

Where I live the local government is watching the data and removing restrictions as cases go down. Their justification from the beginning has been to not overwhelm hospitals, and their actions seem to be in line with that. If you live some place where your government is just itching to gain more power over people, I’d say you need to elect better government.

There has been an emergency for a long time before covid. Covid has given the government the motivation to address it, at least in small part. Before covid, many people where overworked, underpaid, or unemployed completely, sick and dying needlessly.

Replace COVID with climate change, your comment would still be just as true.

I have to say even me (who frankly leans right and is usually against most types of government aid that is dollars only) has tacitly supported stimulus since the problem is a government created problems. To be clear - Not that Covid is created by the government but instead that government is demanding that we do something to curb it and therefore is creating a hinderance to work. That hinderance is made up unfortunately of stimulus checks.

So to have someone who is vehemently against stimulus in regular situations not putting up a resistance (and I know others like me) is probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who support even mildly socialist concepts to push new spending and social welfare through.

In that case, if you are someone wielding that power during a serious crisis, it’s going to be hard to let that go.

As for the masks, despite being mandatory at my gym - if there are 100 people there, only 10-20 of us are wearing a mask. Disappointing but even if there are laws to mandate it, are police really going to run around and enforce it?

Some countries kept revolution going for 50 years. Maybe you will not wear a mask, and smirk how you won, but system always gets its fair cut.