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