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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.

No, they aren't.

Settled != correct. But what most crackpots fail to take into account is that if you want to challenge the scientific status quo you need an actual argument, i.e. you need propose a better alternative to the current-best explanation, one that either accounts for data that the current-best explanation does not, or one that has fewer free parameters. You can't just say, "Science has gotten it wrong in the past so it probably has got it wrong now, and therefore you should pay attention to my crackpot theory." The status quo is the result of a lot of hard work. It may not be right, but you have to at the very least understand how it became the status quo before you can seriously challenge it.

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I mostly agree, but I think you are confounding two things here. The actual argument doesn't have to contain a better alternative than the current best explanation. It's enough to show the errors of the current explanation - as long as you are doing it using the scientific method.

I.e. it's enough to point out flaws in a scientific theory even if you don't have a better one yet. E.g. if talking about covid, it's indeed valuable to prove that the virus does not use the receptor, suggested by the status quo, to get into the cells. One could do this without identifying the actual receptor it does use (by showing that it can infect cells that lack the said receptors). Another example would be showing that a specific medication that is thought to work, actually does not. (Say hydroxychloroquine...)

> You can't just say, "Science has gotten it wrong in the past so it probably has got it wrong now, and therefore you should pay attention to my crackpot theory."

Now I fully agree with this. But where these guys go completely off the rail is that they try to discredit the scientific method by saying that it's wrong, because it provided erronous results in the past. And try to use this as an argument for why their suggested alternative solution doesn't need to pass the test of science.

And here is where they can be challenged with having to come up with a proven better alternative to the scientific method. (Which is kind of nonsense, because science is a self-improving/self-correcting system anyway.)

> It's enough to show the errors of the current explanation

Not if you want to argue in favor of a specific alternative.

I can point out the discrepancies between theory and observation, for example, with regards to the orbital velocities of the outer arms of galaxies. But that does not give me license to hypothesize that this is caused by leprechauns and expect to be taken seriously.

> it's indeed valuable to prove that the virus does not use the receptor, suggested by the status quo, to get into the cells

That's true. But again, you have to show some actual evidence that the current-best-explanation is wrong. You can't just proclaim it.

>> It's enough to show the errors of the current explanation

> Not if you want to argue in favor of a specific alternative.

Sure, but this is not what you actually said in your original comment. You said "if you want to challenge the scientific status quo you need an actual argument, i.e. you need propose a better alternative to the current-best explanation" and that's different. You can challenge the status quo by proving it wrong and that doesn't mean that you have to propose a better alternative.

Now what was happening with covid and the crakcpots you mentioned is where you would be right to say that they need to prove they have a better alternative. Because they did claim that but all they had was criticism for the existing solutions. E.g. "vaccines cause side effects, so let's use ivermectin". (Without proving that ivermectin works better than vaccines for preventing e.g. deaths.)

But in theory someone could come around and prove that vaccines "don't work" (i.e. not worth using) without suggesting a better alternative. They would just need to show the data/supporting evidence. And actually that's exactly what real scientists did with Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine: they have proven that neither of them work for any sensible endpoint.

> But again, you have to show some actual evidence that the current-best-explanation is wrong. You can't just proclaim it.

Sure. That's what I said too. (I even included it in the example how you would do it ;) )

Fair enough.

the famous example is, if they find any problems do not be resolved, it mean their gods is true!

The point about providing a better alternative and not just poking holes is very good and I actually agree with you but still, the people saying "the science is settled" are almost always trying to manipulate the public. In fact, I cannot recall hearing someone saying that when they weren't trying to manipulate the public.

And how do you know that these people were "trying to manipulate the public"? Do you draw a distinction between "trying to manipulate the public" and "trying to persuade the public of the truth"? What is it? And if you don't, what exactly is the problem?

The fact of the matter is that people who use the phrase "settled science" are almost always trying to persuade someone not to pursue a course of action that is almost certainly doomed to fail, either individually, or as a matter of public policy. You can call that "trying to manipulate the public" if you like, but this is disingenuous because it implies there is something sinister going on. There is nothing wrong with "trying to manipulate the public" to steer them away from charlatans and crackpots.

These people? as in those in authority. Those who have both the platform and power to manipulate the public.

Why are you so willing to vigorously defend them and deride opposing views as charlatans and crackpots? What have these politicians and media personalities done to deserve your undying loyalty and trust?

> These people? as in those in authority.

No, as in: the people saying "the science is settled".

> Why are you so willing to vigorously defend them and deride opposing views as charlatans and crackpots?

Because the vast majority of people who challenge established science are charlatans and crackpots.

There are legitimate challenges to established science. All scientific progress starts that way. But mounting a legitimate challenge to established science is hard. It takes a lot of work. And most people I see doing it are just lazy bums who are not willing to put in the hours. They aren't even willing to put in the effort to learn what a legitimate challenge to established science even looks like, let alone actually mount one themselves. They just latch on to some fad and then bitch and moan about how "those in authority" are repressing them or some such bullshit.

In the meantime, there are a lot of hard-working actual scientists toiling away in labs around the world to do the research that actually advances human knowledge.

That's why.

This isn't what I saw happening during the pandemic.

The (to use your word) 'crackpots' were proposing alternative solutions like Ivermectin and Chloroquine. The people who were shouting 'believe science' were trying to silence the debate.

I offer no opinion on either of those two alternatives, I merely point out that 'believe' isn't the verb that goes with 'science'.

The crackpot spectrum was unusually broad during the pandemic, far from the realm of vaccine deniers and flat earthers.

One professor of virology from a world renowned institution was soft banned on twitter behind some sort of click-though warning for pointing to public data about what we knew at the time that closing schools would lead to. Apparently because it fed into some bizarre American debate which was going on at the time.

Another is a professor of immunology that was heavily criticized for explaining why and how thoroughly a vaccine must be tested before mass vaccinations can occur, even if every day it can be deployed will save lives and labelled a "vaccine skeptic". Which is more than one kind of weird. Of course, the vaccine was tested exactly as described, and came out even better than most had expected.

But that makes it more than clear that many people who demands us to "follow science" more often than not could not be bothered to actually find out what science has to say. It is the new "think of the children". Science exists on its own merits, and we should be careful when the mob demands otherwise.

It's very sad that some people were keen to lump the denialists, antimaskers, or the Chloroquine people, with valid concerns about lockdowns or school closures.

> One professor of virology from a world renowned institution was soft banned on twitter

Reference?

> a professor of immunology that was heavily criticized for explaining why and how thoroughly a vaccine must be tested before mass vaccinations can occur

Reference?

> that makes it more than clear

The only thing this makes clear is that you have no compunctions about advancing an unsubstantiated argument as a response to someone who just explained to you that you can't do that if you want to be taken seriously. You may well be right, but that is beside the point. There is no way for someone reading your claims to verify them. You expect people to just take you at your word and accept your unsubstantiated claims and innuendo as fact simply because you have made the claims. And that is exactly the problem with all of the people who grouse about "settled science".

I do agree with you that it would be nice to have references here.

> There is no way for someone reading your claims to verify them. You expect people to just take you at your word and accept your unsubstantiated claims and innuendo as fact simply because you have made the claims.

Don't we all? The amount of people, myself included, that have 0% knowledge of the intimate details of Covid and virology, and how it spreads, and anything remotely close to scientific knowledge of this, have to be less than 1% of the world. This statistic is completely pulled out of my rectum, but intuition tells me that in a world of 70 billion people, you would be very hard pressed to find 70 million people who have studied this virus in depth and actually understand the details.

Sometimes, you have to accept that people will hold beliefs about stuff without knowing the implementation details, and that's OK. How many of us can hold a modern CPU's architecture in our mind at once? I would wager, nobody in the world has that capability. But we can build abstractions that help us reason at a higher level. How much scientific rigor is necessary for general conversation? How much is necessary for a debate? How much is necessary for a belief? These are tough questions and it doesn't do anybody any good to say:

> And that is exactly the problem with all of the people who grouse about "settled science".

The problem is we have to build abstractions about our infinitely complex universe at some point. How much abstraction is deemed too much abstraction to make an informed opinion?

> Sometimes, you have to accept that people will hold beliefs about stuff without knowing the implementation details, and that's OK.

That depends on what those beliefs are. Not all unfounded beliefs are false, and not all false beliefs are harmful. But some are. False beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (to cite but a few noteworthy examples) are particularly harmful. IMHO it is unwise to respond by throwing up your hands and saying, "What are you gonna do? Sometimes you just have to accept things like this."

> False beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (to cite but a few noteworthy examples)

Any statistics to back this claim? These are all heavily politicized topics. The truth is not being sought on either side of the spectrum. Both sides are seeking the narrative that will promote their political agenda.

> IMHO it is unwise to respond by throwing up your hands and saying, "What are you gonna do? Sometimes you just have to accept things like this."

I'm not. I'm saying it's stupid to go berate somebody on HN for not knowing exactly how the science behind Covid works, while at the same time, you possessing equally limited knowledge about the science.

You can find "experts" on both sides of the spectrums saying different things. IMHO it's unwise to accuse anybody who disagrees with you of being ignorant. When, the reality of the situation is, both sides are arguing based off of equally limited knowledge of the actual scientific details on hand. Both sides find the experts that agree with their presuppositions. I find it difficult to trust any political actor, because they are not seeking truth, they are looking to advance their own career.

I'm not berating anyone for not knowing exactly how science works. What I berate people for is casting doubt on the science while at the same time being profoundly ignorant of how science works, and in many cases acting as if this ignorance were actually a virtue, as if being ignorant made one somehow more authoritative than someone who actually makes their living doing scientific research.

> Any statistics to back this claim?

What claim? What I said was:

> False beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (to cite but a few noteworthy examples) are particularly harmful.

That's not a factual claim, that is a statement about what I personally consider harmful.

> You can find "experts" on both sides of the spectrums saying different things.

Yes, if you put "experts" in scare quotes. But if you are talking about experts rather than "experts" then there is an overwhelming consensus with regards to vaccines, climate change, and the election.

The society does not operate in the same way in the time of an acute crisis as during peacetime.

During a war, telling the truth to the wrong audience or in the wrong way may end up aiding the enemy, even if the speaker did not intend it. People generally agree that such people can be silenced, even if that violates their freedom of speech.

In a pandemic, the adversary is the nature, but the situation is similar. Speaking the truth the wrong way may kill people, because the audience may make incorrect conclusions from it. The society may decide that preserving those lives is more important than preserving someone's freedom of speech. After all, the situation may be dire enough that you must sacrifice one fundamental freedom anyway to preserve another.

Yeah, so lie to people. And then be surprised after they decide to trust people that do nothing but lie to them.

Your rhetoric, and the practices you're advocating for, rightfully hurt the public's trust in scientific and public health institutions. As a layperson, I don't trust someone who lies to me, no matter that they say it's "for your own good!!". Their interests aren't aligned with mine.

"It's an emergency, so surrender your rights and give us more power over you!" Huh. Looks like Covid was a great opportunity for hedge funds and the expansion of government control. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

It wasn't rhetoric, and I wasn't advocating for anything. I was just explaining what actually happened in many places in early to mid-2020. There was a genuine emergency, societies switched to "war mode", and governments used similar (and sometimes even the same) emergency powers as during an actual war. And people generally supported it.

I remember being mildly amused how the early lockdowns in the US were often instituted by mid-level administrators such as county health officials. Similar measures would have required a constitutional amendment in Finland. It was like the aftermath of 9/11: when a crisis hits home, Americans don't care so much about freedom anymore.

Same in Norway, no lockdown because the constitution forbids it. There was a half hearted attempt to drum up support for an amendment but it didn't get any real support.

Why would a person untrained in science declare that Chloroquine is a cure to covid? That is a definition of crackpot: you are not offering an explanation or a minimally reasonable argument, you're just contradicting current scientific knowledge for the sake of it.

Maybe one of his favorite authorities said so. That's generally how people arrive at their "facts" these days

> The (to use your word) 'crackpots' were proposing alternative solutions like Ivermectin and Chloroquine.

People can "propose" all they want. They were also proposing bleach, vitamin D, UV sunlight, and probably much more. It takes more than a bare proposal--you need to be able to show (with data) that your proposal is better than the current best theory.

In hindsight, the so-called crackpots were not all that invested in any particular alternative. They were invested in a general, vague contrariness: If the mainstream agreed with it, they were against it, for all definitions of "it". If, for instance, Chloroquine actually was found to be effective and Dr. Fauci got on stage and recommended it, the crackpots would have instantly abandoned it and pivoted over to a different proposal. They were more interested in simply being contrary to "the other side".

> proposing alternative solutions

Proposing an alternative is not enough. Re-read what I wrote:

"... if you want to challenge the scientific status quo you need an actual argument, i.e. you need propose a better alternative to the current-best explanation, one that either accounts for data that the current-best explanation does not, or one that has fewer free parameters ..."

Ivermectin met none of those criteria and was therefore never worthy of serious consideration. It got some serious consideration nonetheless in the form of actual controlled studies, which it failed spectacularly and predictably.

Well, they weren't really proposing solutions, Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were really just suggestions, candidates. I.e. ideas for what might work. Now in both both cases there were no reasons why anyone would think they could work, but as far as I know, in both cases there were multiple trials. And those trials didn't show effectiveness (hence these were not solutions) and despite this, the crackpots did continue to push both for a while and then they silently dropped Hydroxychloroquine but the ivermectin delusion is still strong. (At least where I live, before most discussion was washed away by the war in Ukraine a few months ago, it was still being brought up.)

Now the thing about believing and science is that it's being told to people who don't do science (so most of us!) but have strong opinion and minimal knowledge about a specific topic. If you ask them, most of them will say they don't believe science or scientists. But what it means is not what you suggest, i.e. a lack of blind faith, but an active rejection of what science has to say about this topic without having the alternative explanations/solutions you're talking about. And I mean scientifically proven ones, of course.

So suggesting that laymen should believe (i.e. trust) science is actually a pretty adequate and reasonable advice. Since you basically have to sane options:

- believe/trust science (the knowledge gathered by those who work on a specific topic)

- work on that specific topic yourself (scientifically)

Thank god the (to use your word) ‘crackpots’ didn’t get away with such behaviours, back when polio was being eradicated. We once had a society that pulled together in tough times. Victory gardens, inoculations, charity. Kicking ass by uniting in our efforts.

We couldn’t beat polio today.

> ...is that if you want to challenge the scientific status quo...

That is a bit of a straw man though, people who care to challenge the scientific consensus are extremely rare. The people claiming "the science is settled" are also adding in an unspoken and-therefore-we-can-overrule-your-choices rider on the end.

In Australia I have been appalled by the treatment of my anti-vax neighbours. As far as I can tell they had their human rights suspended for an extended period for reasons that were totally wrong - them getting the vaccine doesn't protect others, everyone I know who had COVID was vaccinated. I still expect to get COVID eventually, nothing that has been done in the last 2 years has changed the basic calculus. It turns out that all we could do in hindsight was vaccinate the people who want to be vaccinated then let the virus go wild.

I don't particularly care what the science is, as far as I can tell there were no scientists involved in the decisions made that I disagreed with. The people claiming "the science is settled" and then pushing their agenda were just trying to short circuit the political process, overturn long established traditions of liberty and get the result they wanted. They weren't being intellectually honest. They may have been trying to help, but the damage they've done has been pretty extreme - a lot of Pandora's boxes have been opened politically, the economic damage is breathtaking and the world seems to be facing "unexpected" inflation, famine and war that is probably linked to the (global) knee jerk.

We'd have been better off ignoring them and sticking to old-established political norms that are well tested.

> them getting the vaccine doesn't protect others

Of course it does. The more people are vaccinated the fewer hosts are available for the virus to spread through.

> I don't particularly care what the science is

Why does that not surprise me.

> Of course it does.

What statistics are you basing this on? NSW in Australia has a vaccination rate of somewhere in the mid 90%s [0] before opening up from lockdown. It did absolutely nothing to slow the spread of COVID [1], anyone who has an active social life got vaccinated, had a short break, then got COVID.

The evidence is pretty overwhelming at this point - vaccinations provided personal protection but failed to control the risk of infection. Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual. The R value for the January outbreaks got to about 5. The vaccinations did nothing to even slow that down. The case numbers were high enough that it was physically impossible for the unvaccinated to be the main issue in the story, it was clear vaccinated->vaccinated transmission.

In 2020 pre-vaccine it was obvious that everyone was going to get COVID sooner or later. Now, in 2022 post-vaccine, it remains clear that everyone is going to get COVID sooner rather than later and the vaccine didn't change that. The unclear part is whether suspending all those basic political freedoms on the way through made sense.

[0] https://www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/stay-safe/data-and-statistic...

[1] https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html - State population of around 8 million, the case number records broke down sometime in January and has probably gotten progressively less reliable as time goes on as people get sick of reporting it.

> > > them getting the vaccine doesn't protect others

> > Of course it does.

> What statistics are you basing this on?

I'm not basing it on statistics, I'm basing it on basic knowledge of the mechanics of infectious diseases. The more people in a population have immunity to a disease, the slower it will spread.

> Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual.

The people you talk to may think this is true, but there is no way anyone can possibly know this.

> The vaccinations did nothing to even slow that down.

Again, there is no way you can possibly know this. Without vaccines, the situation may have been much worse.

> The unclear part is whether suspending all those basic political freedoms on the way through made sense.

Yes, I agree that is unclear. But that is a completely different question than what is under discussion here.

> I'm not basing it on statistics, I'm basing it on basic knowledge of the mechanics of infectious diseases. The more people in a population have immunity to a disease, the slower it will spread.

Your understanding must be faulty, because that isn't how it has played out in practice. I've got an 8 million person state's worth of cases for evidence here. Very well vaccinated, fast and pervasive spread. Based on the official case numbers I can estimate about half the state has had COVID. Possibly more.

Follow the science, not your uninformed opinions, and all that jazz.

> The people you talk to may think this is true, but there is no way anyone can possibly know this.

It doesn't matter what they think, it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening We had one case in the newspaper of a vaccinated individual who managed to infect ~20 people at a party for example. Or maybe it was 100, I forget. that was early in the 2021-2022 outbreak when a superspreading event was still rare enough to make the news.

> Again, there is no way you can possibly know this. Without vaccines, the situation may have been much worse.

There most certainly is, the failure was so complete it can be observed from the high level statistics.

It can't, the number of cases is basically worse case - we're talking 2.5 million cases with a state population of 8 million. Those are official cases, the actual number of cases is higher. And the case count continues to slow burn/rise.

Now, noting that the vaccine claims a >70% reduction in cases on the Pfizer wiki page ... that suggests everyone in the state has been exposed to COVID. At face value there is literally no impact on slowing the spread from the mass vaccination program.

The picture here is painted and dried. Vaccines provide good personal protection but have had no impact on the spread of COVID cases. Unvaccinated individuals only posed a threat to themselves. Well meaning people - much like you - were saying things that have turned out not to be true.

> I've got an 8 million person state's worth of cases for evidence here.

But the only way you can draw any conclusions is with a control experiment, another country where the vaccination rates were lower but which otherwise imposed the same restrictions, and lifted them under the same initial infection conditions.

> it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated

I presume you meant "unvaccinated" here.

Look, no one disputes that vaccinated people can get infected and so can spread the disease. That does not change the fact that vaccinated people are infected less frequently and recover more quickly than non-vaccinated people, and so they don't spread the disease as efficiently as unvaccinated people.

> the number of cases is basically worse case - we're talking 2.5 million cases with a state population of 8 million

That's about 6.5 million cases shy of the worst case.

> Vaccines provide good personal protection but have had no impact on the spread of COVID cases.

Just because everyone who wasn't vaccinated eventually got or will get infected does not mean that the vaccinations had no impact. The rate of spread matters a lot. 2.5 million cases over two years is a lot different than 2.5 million case over two weeks.

> That does not change the fact that vaccinated people are infected less frequently and recover more quickly than non-vaccinated people, and so they don't spread the disease as efficiently as unvaccinated people.

Disease spread is an exponential process. That will delay the date that everyone has gotten COVID by for a week or two. Who cares?

> That's about 6.5 million cases shy of the worst case.

2.4 recorded cases is evidence that literally everyone was exposed to COVID. Worst case for what I could have predicted in advance (8 million residents, 70% reduction from vaccine-induced symptomlessness so people don't get teted, predicts around ~2.4 million cases expected if everyone is exposed to COVID. Which is about what happened.

High vaccination rates did nothing to delay the spread. The idea that it could has been debunked. It didn't.

> The rate of spread matters a lot.

That is a different argument, but the evidence I've seen is that that isn't true either - and I already have reason to believe you aren't cross-checking your assumptions against ground truths. The high vaccination rates basically meant that speed of spread was a non-issue.

The targeted attacks against unvaccinated people were unwarranted and have look even worse than expected in hindisight. I too was expecting the vaccine to do something about the spread. It just turns out it doesn't.

> for a week or two

And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...

> Disease spread is an exponential process

Indeed. And because it is an exponential process, decreasing the rate of spread will not result in a fixed delay for all infections, it will result in a decrease in the exponent. Some people will get it a week later than they otherwise would have, some two weeks later, some three weeks... and if you reduce the exponent enough, the result will be exponential decay rather than growth, and some people will never get it at all. And even if you don't get to that point, reducing the exponent can make the difference between hospitals having enough capacity, and being overloaded and having people dying in the streets and having to rent refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.

Furthermore, vaccines are dramatically effective at reducing the rate of severe illness and death, so even if everyone gets infected and even if they get infected as quickly as they otherwise would have, you still have fewer people dying from covid, and you also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.

> > The rate of spread matters a lot.

> That is a different argument

Different from what? Your original claim was there is no societal benefit to vaccination, only an individual benefit, and that is just plainly false. One of the reasons it is false (but far from the only reason) is that lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself, even if everyone eventually gets infected anyway, and even if there were no other benefits, like reducing the risk of serious disease and death.

BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:

> Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual.

Well, of course they did. That's because:

> it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening

If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.

Honestly, the quality of your reasoning is comparable to a flat-earther.

> And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...

Trough to peak of the initial outbreak was 4 weeks, and the 2nd wave peaked after another 12 weeks. How quickly do you think the virus can spread? :p

Voila, the stats [0]. You need to ground-check your assumptions.

> You also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.

We're two years in to this, we could have beefed up the hospital staff. I suppose strategies that are human-rights friendly are off the cards in Australia because they aren't exciting enough.

Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach. Ordinary flu season overwhelmed the hospital system. An ordinary day overwhelmed the hospital system. We do not go to extreme lengths to stop the hospital system getting overwhelmed. We certainly don't lock people in their houses, ban free association, ban people from working, or start forcing people to undergo what is effectively a medical procedure. Furthermore we had a lot of time to beef up the hospital system to cope as this pandemic has been a thing for more than a year by now. The argument is underdeveloped.

> lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself

What are they and how are you measuring them? Because intuition hasn't been a good guide so far.

> BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:

Point them out, I reckon I can patch them up with evidence.

> If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.

Well, they confer enormous benefits to people who get vaccinated. But Australia has been in human-rights-abuse mode for a while now and it makes me very uncomfortable. I'd rather people had been honest up front that the vaccine wasn't going to have any impact on the spread of COVID. A lot of people were saying they would and they've turned out to have ... charitably I might say an immeasurable ... impact on the spread.

[0] https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html

> Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach.

It is hard for me to imagine that anyone with internet access could be so profoundly ignorant, but there were actually bodies being stored in refrigerator trucks [1] and critically ill patients housed in tents [2] in many parts of the world before vaccines became widely available. It's not a reach, it was the actual situation on the ground for months.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/new-york-coronavirus-victi...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9082631/California-...

Australia was a special case. It became a victim of its own success, because it managed to avoid COVID so thoroughly and so long that there was no chance to determine which measures were cost-effective and which weren't. China is still in a similar situation.

In more interconnected parts of the world, the first waves were often really bad. Nobody really knew how to mitigate the spread, except by crude lockdowns. Hospitals became overcrowded and many people died, because doctors didn't know what was the exact problem and how to treat it. People also died from other preventable causes, because there was no one left to treat them.

The economy tanked, and not simply due to the lockdowns but also because of the disease itself and the voluntary actions people took. Facilities were shut down, because too many people were sick at the same time. The demand for some products and services crashed, because (for example) people started working from home. At the same time, there were shortages because the demand for other things increased but there was no way to scale up the production quickly enough.

Things started getting better by mid-2020. There was a better understanding of what worked and what didn't, what was cost-effective and what wasn't, and what was possible within the existing legal framework and what wasn't. People also started adjusting to the new normal instead of being afraid of the unknown. Different jurisdictions around the world made different choices based on their specific circumstances and the values of those in charge.

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