Comment by beisner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beisner | Hacker News Reader

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It's not an education problem. It's an ideology problem. A huge fraction of the country has basically lost all faith in public and academic institutions. In these polarized times, when many leaders that institution-skeptics listen to decided to make COVID a political issue in the ongoing culture war, listening to public health recommendations (including masking, vaccination) is akin to "letting the other side win".

Earlier in the vaccine rollout, some minority populations were skeptical of the vaccine for more historically-grounded reasons (i.e. historical discrimination/abuses in the healthcare system), but that skepticism has faded dramatically [1] as more and more people get the vaccine. Only one group [2] has been pretty consistently unwilling to get the vaccine, and it's tightly coupled to the same ideological alignments that are dividing society in all political and social arenas.

More education won't change deeply-held ideological beliefs.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-and-more-americans...

[2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/24/trump-covid-vaccine-re...

I don't think it was "institution skeptics" who made COVID a political issue. How many months did it take before academics were claiming that anti-lockdown protests were dangerous and must not happen but BLM protests were to be encouraged, because "systemic racism" is a public health issue? Not many. How many other academics condemned this blatant politicization of science? Not enough.

Lockdowns don't work: US states that locked down hard have not seen different results from those that had far fewer restrictions. Sweden has been less impacted than the UK and many other European countries that locked down hard. Have academic institutions ever acknowledged that, or accepted that their predictions were wrong? They do not. The ones I've seen just claim anyone who disagrees with them is an ideologically motivated anti-science conspiracy theorist.

These things are not the right way to re-assure people institutions are on top of things. They clearly are not.

Lockdown worked fine in New Zealand it not? The thing is, it’s something you have to commit to. You can’t just half ass it.

You realize they achieved this by effectively locking down their borders right? Now, imagine the response if Trump had suggested this. Actually, you don't even need to imagine it:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-borders_n_5...

That article is from 2020-03-12. By that day, we had a total of 40 deaths and 1.5k confirmed cases. It was pretty obviously spreading within the US at that point, and just closing the borders wasn't going to stop it. Headlines for context:

> Trump Appears More Concerned With Closing Borders Than Testing For Coronavirus

> The president has characterized the pandemic as a “foreign virus” and suggested that banning people from other countries is key to fixing the outbreak at home.

Where did I say anything about "just closing the borders"? Yes multiple approaches are necessary. My point was that if Trump had tried the same tactics NZ did he would have been met with vitriol about how racist and xenophobic he was. People still won't admit that his administration was responsible for getting the vaccine out in a timely manner.

NZ had the obvious benefit of being an island with a low population that was able to easily lock their borders down and keep people socially distanced. They didn't pull off some miracle that no one else can figure out.

> if Trump had tried the same tactics NZ did he would have been met with vitriol about how racist and xenophobic he was.

This point doesn't follow from the article you linked. The HuffPo article has two major complaints:

1) Trump's major focus on dealing with covid at the moment was the existing travel restrictions for China and the new restrictions for Europe. He should have pivoted to addressing the internal spread within the US.

2) Trump was trying to direct blame to specific nationalities/ethnic groups instead of saying that anyone and any travel could be spreading the virus. They were deflect blame by calling it the "Wuhan virus" and "China coronavirus".

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the manner he closed the borders was xenophobic. Furthermore, he wasn't doing the things necessary to stop the internal spread, and those were more important once the virus arrived. NZ's new cases only started falling in mid-April, a month after Trump's expanded travel restrictions. Additional travel restrictions were necessary, but not sufficient to reduce covid's impact.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri...

There are some mitigating factors. The primary purpose of a border closure is to prevent, or at least control, the introduction of the virus into the country, especially to let the health services prepare better. Viewed from this context, Trump's border closures look especially asinine:

* The closure (at least with respect to Europe) occurred by which time it was widely known that the US had uncontrolled community spread.

* The closure applied only to non-Americans, which made it a really, really porous closure. New Zealand's closure applied both to Kiwis and non-Kiwis.

* The administration of the closure was also chaotic and inept. There was no real effort to screen for COVID-19 among the many people who were let in during the closure, and the fact that the arrival halls were jam-packed with people only exacerbated any potential spread that might have happened.

* Similarly, there was no real effort to use the time afforded by the closure (even had it been more effective) to improve testing and tracing infrastructure.

* The actual announcement of the rollout was extremely botched--the White House had to issue three separate statements afterwards correcting Trump's announcement.

* Finally, it's been pretty clear in the months since then that Trump believes that being proactive in the (ineffective) closure efforts is all that he should have done in response to the coronavirus, especially given his pretty active resistance to any further measures.

This, so much this. Sure businesses were shut down or significantly restricted in the US, but people commingled anyway. You shut down one vector, but everyone flocked to other, unsanctioned ones. We failed at our own attempts because we didn't commit.

Conversely, places like Sweden didn't require significant legal restrictions because they have a sense of societal responsibility. When leaders told them to restrict their movement, they listened. They didn't do it as perfectly as if it were enforced or ordered, but they listened (and probably better than Americans listened).

Was it lockdowns or was it border closures or was it the geographical location of New Zealand or was it chance?

This is the whole problem with the pro-lockdown position. It's turned into an exercise in cherry picking. We don't need to do this, we have global datasets and those can be analysed to try and detect correlations between policies and outcomes. When this analysis has been done, there are no correlations.

Here's a summary of an unusually thorough analysis of global geography vs excess mortality:

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/05/03/geography-not-lockdo...

Here's an analysis of mortality vs control stringency across all US states:

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/04/24/more-people-died-in-...

Here's a published, peer reviewed paper which says the same thing:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

The thing is, it’s something you have to commit to. You can’t just half ass it.

Some countries have now accrued more public debt than after World War 2. At some point, even the most ardent true believers in this policy have to accept that if entire continents can take measures as extreme as they have done and get no results whatsoever then it is a failed policy.

thu2111 says >"Some countries have now accrued more public debt than after World War 2. At some point, even the most ardent true believers in this policy have to accept that if entire continents can take measures as extreme as they have done and get no results whatsoever then it is a failed policy."<

Wow! This is the best takeaway of this discussion and possibly one of the most quotable statements (and posts) ever made concerning the Covid-19 lockdowns. My hat is off to you, sir.

Lockdown worked amazingly in Singapore as well.

No US state even came close to “locking down.” You had these ineffective stay-at-home orders, ignored mask mandates, unenforced travel restrictions, and unevenly enforced business closures. It was almost entirely voluntary, and therefore widely ignored.

Throughout the entire year, if I wanted to, I could easily drive out of my county, sit down at an indoor restaurant, and party indoors without a mask, and there would be absolutely zero police action to stop me. What kind of lockdown is that?

except, these ideological beliefs are only intrinsictly deep, sparked by the republican desire to have as many polticially potent tools for their trade.

this belief is only a year ood. its not same centuries old belief,

> lost all faith in public and academic institutions

The people wearing masks outside, what are they afraid of and where are they placing their faith?

> It's not an education problem. It's an ideology problem.

Ideology is formed via education

I think the OP was asking if it's an education problem as in, do people just not understand what a vaccine is or how it works? But that's not the issue really. The information is out there; people are just choosing to ignore it or cling to "alternative facts" for some as yet poorly understood reason.

Because critical thinking skills are severely lacking due to - you guessed it, poor education.

I think it's more complicated than that.

I’d argue that ideology is what fills in the voids that education hasn’t already reached. It’s like some kind of spray-foam that takes up whatever space that hasn’t yet been filled with educated thought.

The line between ("good") education and ("bad") ideology is not nearly this clear. Religions run schools for a reason. Canada started Residential Schools, and China started vocational training in Xinjiang, all for the same reason. You can call it continuing the culture, or passing on the traditions, or inculcating values, or working for progress, or social change, or cultural genocide, depending on your bent. It's the war for minds. And young minds are impressionable.

Another way of putting this is that schools are organs of ideological reproduction.

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