It was "slow the spread" or "flatten the curve", not "stop the spread". The goal was to prevent the hospitals from being overrun while we built extra capacity, after which that extra capacity would allow us to go back to normal.

Instead, the extra capacity barely got used and was dismantled a month or two later.

Not to mention China seemed to have mostly eradicated it by mid-March by simply shutting down for a few weeks. They still seem to have very few cases, many ppl don’t believe their reporting anymore, but at the time it really did look like a quick shutdown would end it.

Its equally easy to see how this was to keep compliance with the orders for as long as possible, then, and in hindsight. Even the most heavily locked places with an overly compliant population couldnt have gotten that result by saying it was going to last for 9 months+

Senators on the intelligence committee dumping shares and buying remote work stocks for … a two week disruption?

I said the same things in March 2020 I just still don't understand how other people process things.

As far as I can tell, most public health decisions made up until this summer have been about preventing collapse of hospital systems. Individual health is of secondary importance to the system being able to handle ordinary levels of non-covid events.

Something changed a few months ago and now some states in the US are making decisions seemingly designed to collapse their health systems. It's tragically short sighted.

> I didn’t think the new goal would become “no one can ever die of this”. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have said this would be over soon.

Which place, specifically, do you think has gone with this kind of thinking? Because in all countries I know of outside of East Asia, this virus has been allowed to kill many more people than virtually any other infectious disease in the last 10 years.

This is insightful, but how was that convincing either? To me, it was more obvious that hard viral mitigations would last for 18 months (until 2022) before there were options available for people (such as an option for vaccines), and I was surprised by the speed of viral sequencing and then emergency authorizations. That was new technology and was impressive, for the people interested in vaccines the option was available.

I don't see how flatten the curve was convincing, in March 2020 or in hindsight.

That's separate from the comical moving goalposts of various Governors and counties.