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Comment by loveistheanswer | Hacker News Reader

>But this article is about the US, where there have been no lockdowns. Only (mostly) unenforced stay-at-home orders, (mostly) unenforced business closures, and (mostly) unenforced mask mandates. I don't see the link.

Your privileged, pedantic ignorance of the major socioeconomic problems caused by the covid 19 response perfectly illustrates OP's point.

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No it doesn't. We have been doing the whole spiel for over a year now, running different experiments in different countries.

Lockdowns are not silver bullets - what drives viral spread is behaviour, not legal measures. In fact, if everybody would stay at home for 14 days, the virus dies (decays exponentially).

What actually happened is that folks made the wearing of a piece of cloth, meant to protect others, a political statement and a 'restriction of personal freedom'.

You're disingenuously ignoring that those pushing for mask wearing destroyed their credibility by earlier claiming masks didn't work. It doesn't matter what the goals of their lies were, they were lies and the costs of loss of credibility is at the heart of all of this. Spin it all you want and try to win political points on your ideological enemies all you want, nothing can change the fact that lies were knowingly told and that's the seed that started the skepticism about masks. No amount of gaslighting and screaming that it didn't happen or that it was for everyone's own good will undo that damage. Denying this only harms the credibility of the cause even more.

What does that have to do with the major socioecomic hardships that were created and exacerbated for millions of poor people around the world which are largely ignored by politicians and many other people as evidenced in this thread?

Members of the WHO covid team have estimated that lockdowns may well end up doubling world poverty.

Until you acknowledge these negative side effects, rather than narrow mindedly defaulting to american partisan politics, your response again further helps illustrate OPs point.

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