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The fact that to this day people still trot out “4% kill rate” and make their kids wear a mask for a disease a kid isn’t even remotely at risk for… my trust in public health is below zero. Not once have these people done anything to calm people or tell them good news. Not a single time. It is disgusting how horribly these public health “experts” treat us.

They keep yelling “follow the science” while completely ignoring or ridiculing science that goes against their pro-mask, pro-lockdown, pro-vaccination narrative.

There is a pretty popular Christmas event where they put lights around the zoo… All visitors must show proof of vaccination and must wear a mask. Outdoors. In an attendance limited event.

And people wonder why nobody takes this stuff seriously. Because not a bit of it makes sense.

There's science proving that covering your mouth to prevent spread of germs and getting vaccinated doesn't work?

That's a bold claim. I'd like to see your science.

Signed, person living in a country with almost no ongoing infections and with a high vaccination and mask-wearing rate.

"They" is mostly people on social media and partisan news orgs. Not health institutions or scientists.

> people still trot out “4% kill rate”

Which health authority or public health expert is claiming that today and hasn't shared updates with better data (=good news)? Yes, some people still bring that, but that's not because evil experts hide the true data from them.

The “experts” don’t say “4%” but they also don’t even bother to give an actual IFR. Why haven’t they? We’ve known it for quite some time.

Media reports about updated risk estimates are easy to find? I guess it's not so much one catchy number anymore and instead goes in more detail regarding age/risk groups, but that's a good thing given how vague an average number is over such a large span? And I'd argue easier to understand what it means than the average number.

I guess you can always argue "but it's not properly explained and people don't understand it!!!", but so much information people keep claiming is hidden is just there and repeated in news reports once you read past the headlines. And at some point people need to deal with the fact that data is messy and not all numbers agree or mean the same thing and that that has reasons. I feel that goes back to the title of the submission here.

> IFR. Why haven’t they? We’ve known it for quite some time.

Well, it's not constant. Vaccination rates have a big impact.

And honestly, what "experts" are you even talking about? Of course the numbers are out there.

I think you discount the idea of "evil experts" too quickly. The day Joe Biden took over the presidency, CNN stopped listing death counts for COVID. The deaths increased in 2021 precipitously, had it been Trump you know they would have probably used bigger fonts, colors etc to drive the narrative.

There are evil people and some of them are in control of various parts of the narrative and they use that control for their own ends.

The problem here is treating partisan news sites as experts.

> lockdowns have significant irreversible costs for low risk individuals and for society

Sure, but let's keep in mind what they can do when they are effective.

China averted the deaths of 2.5-3 million people with an effective lockdown program. That's incredible.

I'm not confident I can really think of any policy proposition that would save more lives off of the top of my head.

The fact that we failed to do the same will go down as a tragedy of massive magnitude.

e: The jingoism here can be a bit too much. Any praise of any Chinese policy gets downvotes, even if one recognizes them as a despotic, racist regime. It's nativistic ignorance, plain and simple.

The goal of a meaningfully-lead life is not to lengthen it as much as possible.

The goal of the government is not to minimize the number of deaths at any cost.

> The goal of the government is not to minimize the number of deaths at any cost.

Maybe not at any cost, but yeah I think there should be a pretty strong presumption towards improving people's welfare and not killing them.

There's a difference between "not killing them" and "protecting them".

Especially during this pandemic when so much low-hanging fruit has been intentionally left on the table--for instance, if "protecting people" was ever a goal, why has there been literally zero focus on vitamin D deficiency in the general population? This is simple, cheap, efficient, and a potent inhibitor of sars-cov-2, and yet the ruling class has seen to it that it has never been publicly pushed at all.

All of the ruling class's ideas happen to align with profit for pharmaceutical companies and greatly increased social control. Is that a coincidence?

I've looked at the evidence regarding vitamin D, it is not nearly as clear cut as you suggest.

To me, it's pretty clear that the driving force for these changes has been 700k people dying, not pharma profit.

I'm not going to continue replying, just an FYI.

At the cost of a lockdown for everyone we could have offered targeted protection to the most vulnerable who wanted to avail themselves of it:

- Work from home options or in the worst case unemployment benefits for duration of the pandemic - Reimbursement for food/goods delivery fees - N95 masks and training on fitting them properly - Hotel/AirBNB rooms as an alternative to congregate living - Small gated communities with entry quarantines / contact tracing

In the meantime those at low risk could have continued to live more normally and building up some herd immunity as a stopgap measure until vaccines were ready.

Certainly Sweden handled things more along these lines and in the long term their society would be better for it. China caused every single COVID death in the world, whether through labs or wet markets, so I wouldn't sing praises of authoritarian governments.

> hina caused every single COVID death in the world, whether through labs or wet markets, so I wouldn't sing praises of authoritarian governments.

> in the long term their society would be better for it

No, I think successful suppression was both shown to be very possible and the better option. Political failure means that millions have already died, and more will follow. Of course, suppression is a no-go now, I'm not denying that.

> China caused every single COVID death in the world, whether through labs or wet markets, so I wouldn't sing praises of authoritarian governments.

It's a nation of 1.2 billion, many new viruses are bound to originate there. I think it is disingenuous to blame the governance of China for the outbreak.

We all know how our own government works. Are we honestly supposed to believe if this outbreak had originated domestically that we would have reacted fast enough to contain it? We couldn't even avert it when we had multiple months advance warning, China controlled an active infection within their own borders and has successfully suppressed a potential pandemic in the past (SARS). I don't think we've demonstrated any capacity to do the same.

This is an argument based on emotional appeal than rational objectivity. See: “Think about the children”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

I find the smug self-confidence in their own rationality that some on this site show to be extremely off-putting. Most people are not nearly as objective as they think they are.

Saying that it is better for 3 million people to be alive rather than dead is not an emotional appeal, it's actually quite rational if our goal is to not kill people.

Not really and you’re just proving the point. Killing people is an acceptable trade off - you do it every day. Otherwise we’d stop driving, flying or take any risks. You’re appealing to the emotion and doubling down on it.

> Killing people is an acceptable trade off - you do it every day. Otherwise we’d stop driving, flying or take any risks. You’re appealing to the emotion and doubling down on it.

Sure, if you only consider first-order effects from car accidents.

A world without easy transportation is a less well off one and one that likely has more people dying/living shorter lives than our present one.

Saying that someone dying is bad is not an appeal to emotion. I'm a consequentialist - I believe we should implement welfare improving policies.

A policy that saved 3 million people, in my view, is a net good one.

Sure, if you only consider first-order effects then 3 million people saved out of 1.4 billion in China is logical. But, shutting down economy, impacting birthrates, inflation, rioting, suicides, taking away precious years of learning from kids, disruption of careers, dating life, college education, loss of sole sources of income, desperation and depression, etc that has been led by authoritarian governments is not worthy of the trade off if we consider 2nd order effects as you suggest. Not to mention, the biggest one is loss of civil liberties that is the engine of growth.

Perhaps you should practice what you preach.

All of those are because we failed to control the virus in the first place. It's a bit less true now with delta, but those things stopped happening in China precisely because their decisive action was so successful.

I really liked the Chinese policy of welding people in their homes (where some starved to death) and lying to the populace about the real numbers and severity of the coronavirus.

Yeah, when there's a deadly pandemic, some people will need to be quarantined.

I liked the bit where 3 million people didn't die, whereas 700k people died here.

There are some things the government just shouldn't be able to do, regardless of the justification. One of those things is locking people in their homes for an indeterminate amount of time.

Only in cages away from their homes?

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

My goodness, what a selfish take. God forbid 20 somethings miss out on some party time. Meanwhile, people who need medical care (many of them not elderly) can't get it because the hospitals are choked with covid patients.

Gen X and older don't have the moral high ground when it comes to selfishness. You know what's selfish? Selling the nation's economy to boost the stock market and pad your nest egg while collecting social security, then writing article after article ad nauseam about how spoiled Millennials are because they dared to eat an avocado with their breakfast.

The lockdowns and mandates are just one more example of generational warfare where the powers that be force the younger generations to sacrifice for the older generations that have already sucked dry every resource they possibly can.

I am so sick of Boomers and their ilk destroying the environment, destroying the economy, undermining democracy, defunding education, sending us into a two-decade war without a strategy or exit plan while collecting dividends from war profiteers, enslaving us in Ponzi schemes masquerading as social safety nets, forcing us into unemployment while racking up national debt we will have to pay back, and unconstitutionally placing the entire country under house arrest without charges, counsel, trial, or jury, all while brazenly lying to our faces about masks ("the typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus"), lockdowns ("two weeks to flatten the curve"), the origin of COVID ("Clearly Not a Lab Leak"), conflicts of interest ("NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan") and so many others it's impossible to keep track.

Western liberal democracy was founded on the simple premise that freedom is inherent, not merely a privilege doled out by the government — that we shall die on our feet before living on our knees. The nations of the world seem to have forgotten this these past two years, and forced — sometimes with violence — their own citizens to sacrifice their freedom with no end in sight.

Wanting to feel loved is not selfish. Wanting to work is not selfish. Wanting to see your friends, your family, is not selfish. Stealing the right to pursue life — real life, not just the continuation of breathing — that is what's selfish.

> Gen X and older don't have the moral high ground when it comes to selfishness.

I wasn't talking about an entire generation, just what you wrote. I know plenty of younger folks who don't feel like they need to wish death upon boomers (and now Gen X) because they perceive that those earlier generations have somehow deliberately screwed them.

And if you aren't watching carefully, please note that millenials are quickly moving into the same every day choices that people before them made. This isn't a generational thing, there is no conspiracy.

Honestly, that "party time" should not be trivialized. A year of lost mating opportunities is a really big deal to a mammal.

> Young children are not getting critical development years back.

This sentence alone is true, but it misses the fact that a) young children suffer from this disease too, b) these young children live with older people that are at more at risk, hence they can bring something back from their schools that may cost the lives of their parents (I don't think losing your parents when you're a kid is great for your development), and c) there's always the risk of more deadly variants emerging due to more transmission.

> [...] individuals should have a role in deciding what's right for them.

For matters that only concern them, yes. For matters of public health, where you can transmit something to others without their consent and potentially cause their death or long-term disability, no, you don't have that luxury. None of us do. Same reason why a single nation can't/shouldn't just pollute all the seas and cause tons of greenhouse gas emissions and kill the world for everyone. We may not like it but we [have to] live together and being in a society means looking out for each other.

You are free to not wear a mask or party by yourself, in your house, away from society.

>You are free to not wear a mask or party by yourself, in your house, away from society.

Or you could frame it the other way. Instead of suppressing everyone's freedom, people who are too scared to resume a normal life could watch us live a free life through their window, from the security of their home.

I'm not aware of any country that had a democratic consultation to ask the people which way they wanted it.