I hope that the legacy of covid lockdowns is a renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action, to be weighed against the direct and intended effects.
The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines.
Then you have the total failure to mobilize an institutional response for contact tracing. There’s not apparently any infrastructure for it, despite how monumentally useful such a thing could have been, would be now. I don’t want another endemic smallpox-related virus, and this virus having lots of hosts to evolve in has some clear second order risks.
Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.
The initial lockdowns, I think, hold up pretty well in retrospect. Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors; keeping the schools open was a lot less clearcut for the teachers. You don’t become a schoolteacher because of your high appetite for risk.
Asking gay men to stop having orgies isomorphic to asking people to put on masks.
I'd take any authoritarian state over ebola, thank you very much.
https://www.paho.org/en/topics/ebola-virus-disease
Even at that rate, I would rather take my chances with ebola than live under a communist regime.
Yes, there are situations in which "higher order thinking" doesn't matter.
That's the sort of higher-order question you'll be able to find out right after the magical Ebola wave, if you embrace authoritarianism.
Of course, nobody on your team said that, nor did they say "being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people" Why did you choose to lie about this?
This was when democrats were making apology tours telling everyone not to be afraid to go to Chinatown.
There were several months at the start of 2020 where the “progressive” authority would systematically attack you as racist for being worried about COVID.
You can _also_ find people saying the lack of response is because of homophobia, and this is the thing that makes me want to flip a table: the WHO describing reality is morally culpable and causes homophobia per that tweet, the lack of effective response is homophobic, emphasizing the actual events that have had a causal role in the outbreak is homophobic. Homophobia/whatever flavor of the day is the a-priori conclusion, work backwards from there.
When you bring up the excesses of this cultural movement, you're told
1. it's not really happening
2. you're just nut picking, or
3. it's actually good.
and it's so often tied up with accusations of lying or dishonesty. Like, everyone is so mind poisoned at this point we can't just _disagree_, it's got to be an issue of mendacity or moral corruption.
The statement “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic” is obviously not the same as the statement "emphasising the focus on men who have sex with men…will lead to a dark place with rampant homophobia", particularly when backed up with lots of examples of exactly that thing happening!
It's not that "everyone is so mind poisoned at this point we can't just _disagree_". Indeed, I don't even disagree! I generally think that health authorities do need to understand and talk about community-specific risk, while ensuring that they balance that messaging with the impact that this can have. On the other hand, my own fucking grandmother is now under the impression that I am now at risk from a magical gay disease that's sweeping through the country because of how ham-fisted the communication has been.
The problem is that instead of talking about what your concerns were (while taking on board other points of view on the issue and how complex it is) you jumped directly to making up a quote that justified what you already thought. If you want to find a thing that is going to make "everyone is so mind poisoned" then that is what's going to do it.
After bemoaning failure to consider second-order effects this seems like making the same mistake - It was a good news that kids were less susceptible to severe infection but protecting children was not the sole purpose of closing schools. Kids were still susceptible to infection and could still spread the disease to adults. Schools were a mixing pot for kids to get infected and then go home to infect adults who might then suffer more severe effects.
I think even in retrospect it holds up very well as an effective means (amongst many others) of slowing spread.
"Open schools and kindergartens" is not gradual.
Then instead of just staying at the camp where it would be contained and burn itself out, the camps themselves shut down and sent everyone home on regular commercial flights. Completely inexplicable and inexcusable.
1. humans are fuckin' terrible at thinking through second order effects, and 2. often they are simply unknowable a-priori
so to the extent that I am doing the thing I'm unhappy with, it's less hypocrisy and more accidentally proving my broad point.
At any rate, about kids: the same reason kids aren't especially susceptible to COVID seem to also substantially reduce their transmission of it. It might be the case that it's still worthwhile for the broader community, idk - I'm certainly default a little skeptical of anyone saying "think of the children!"
In hindsight, maybe, but there were a lot of unknowns in March of 2020 and that was one of them.
Funny, that's how I would describe the widespread insistence that we can indefinitely conceal half of everyone's faces in public (when the only effective masks are ones which create a large amount of plastics pollution), or assiduously suppress the spread of pathogens, without having some as-yet unknown knock-on effects. It's bizarre that so many treat these things as unalloyed goods with zero downside whatsoever.
I do think the arguments against wearing masks when interacting with children/making children mask have been quite strong, post ace-2.
This particular second-order effect affected 1000 people in 35 countries.
I’m not saying this or that about the causes that led to this illness, but 30 cases per country is a bit hard to justify as an input to decision making, especially at a community or country level. It’s valuable information, but if we hid under the sheets for everything that affected a small portion of the population, we’d all have bed sores.
The solution to this issue is both unlocking lockdowns more carefully to detect such problems, and deploying vaccines if such a problem is identified.
Kind of the same problem with COVID, it can also contribute to a terrible secondary infection. In this case, quite some time after even recuperating from it.
You cannot look at the actual stats without taking those mitigating factors into account.
Sure if they create the next one too I suppose they'll "see" that one too.
They've also been among the most vocal proponents of censoring and silencing any opposition or questioning of their claims.
We've seen a massive amount of anti-scientific behaviour from the "science" community.