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Comment by blacktriangle | Hacker News Reader

Want to know why people are anti-mask? Because they saw this coming the second we crossed the "15 days to stop the spread" line.

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Refusing to wear a mask because you hate lockdowns has the same energy as refusing to provide birth control or sex ed because you hate abortions.

It depends on the country. In some countries, governments have chosen to relax restrictions or avoid tightening them further, precisely because the general public was so blatantly flaunting them – refusing to wear masks, not social distancing, etc. If this involves enough of the general public, than a pro-restriction government risks losing the next election. Obviously COVID doesn’t go away then, but it could be that both government and society simply accept higher mortality.

This sentiment is a curiosity to me. I don't remember any public advisories claiming that a 15 day lockdown would be sufficient to stop the spread.

When I think about it, such a claim doesn't even make sense, because for it to be true, all transmission would have to be stopped, instantaneously and completely. But that would be impossible, as there would still be transmission within bubbles, and transmission through all the essential work that continued where social distancing was not an option. That would reset the clock, and since the infectious period was thought to be about 15 days, such a statement could not possibly have been true.

Does anyone have any examples of public health advisories claiming that the lockdown would only last 15 days?

Every single announcement by my county at the first lockdown was about a short sacrifice to ‘flatten the curve’. Once we were past that, it became clear that the government officials would say whatever they thought would be most palatable to the public to get their policies enacted.

Dr Fauci even admitted to selectively lying about a number of things (masks, herd immunity) because he felt the public couldn’t handle the truth.

He’s not wrong about the average public, who even when faced with the truth will act irrationally and emotionally.

Irrationally doesn’t mean “in a way I don’t like” and it’s kinda rude to paint huge swaths of people with that brush.

Irrational is “I’m not wearing a mask” or “I’m not getting vaccinated”, and I don’t believe there is a need to enumerate the evidence of this at nation state scale in this thread, which can be observed with five minutes of search engine usage. Facts are non-negotiable.

You're still acting like you think your personal concept of rationality is some objective truth.

You're gaslighting into "The sky is blue is just your personal opinion" terrority.

That seems to be the favorite word of people who believe their subjective reality should be objective reality, yeah.

I always understood 'flatten the curve' to mean 'don't overwhelm hospitals'. I don't remember any public advisories suggesting it would be short, and definitely nothing that anticipated how politicized the pandemic became.

Do you have any examples of public health advisories claiming 'flattening the curve' would be short, and not based on the hospitalization numbers?

I never read 1984, but generally would not have been able to guess that 1984ing was going to be a grass roots phenomenon.

I've been enjoying for some time now how people who have never read 1984, or have no actual idea what Orwell was alluding to in it other than "bad government", keep invoking that book. It's funny.

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