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>Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors

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.

Real lesson to be learned is to open lockdowns and remove restrictions gradually.

"Open schools and kindergartens" is not gradual.

That first summer lots of kids went to sleepaway camp and caught the virus there.

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.

I mean, I think my real complaint is that

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!"

> the same reason kids aren't especially susceptible to COVID seem to also substantially reduce their transmission of it

In hindsight, maybe, but there were a lot of unknowns in March of 2020 and that was one of them.

oh, totally - my post also said I thought the initial lockdowns were fully justified and correct, and that only after the discovery of the ACE-2 mechanism did the calculus for children having schools open change (for me)

Bars were open. Whatever impact school would have on transmission was dwarfed by bars.

Some countries did seriously try contact tracing for COVID-19 and it was generally a waste of resources. Most contact tracing programs have now been discontinued or scaled back. China is still doing it, but their approach requires an authoritarian surveillance state which is far worse than any virus.

>an authoritarian surveillance state which is far worse than any virus

I'd take any authoritarian state over ebola, thank you very much.

The irony of seeing this reply in a thread started with hope for "renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action" is darkly comic.

The first-order effect of ebola is (almost) certain death. No need to consider anything of higher order.

The fatality rate for ebola is around 50%.

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.

https://victimsofcommunism.org/

It's not, it's about a coinflip (as the sibling reply noted). But you're making a very salient point about the ease at which higher order thinking can be shut down en masse in a population through fear.

Is there an authoritarian government in the history of humanity that managed to kill 50% of its population? What's the average?

Yes, there are situations in which "higher order thinking" doesn't matter.

>Is there an authoritarian government in the history of humanity that managed to kill 50% of its population?

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.

Got it, "higher-order thinking" is the new reincarnation of "doing your own research". Not that surprising, actually.

In that both are exemplary qualities, only talked down by people who — by laziness or ulterior motive — would rather see them outsourced?

No, in that both are usually repeated by clueless charlatans.

Can confirm. Whatever the success of other public health measures in NZ, contact tracing was insanely high cost if done manually (and spinning up new contact tracers was much harder than it sounds). The Bluetooth and "scan here" tech solutions never seemed to get widespread adoption by users, and for a reason I've never heard explained, seemed rarely used by the health administration.

Not sure if the risk/benefits analysis is that simple, because the risk/benefits evolve over time. At the beginning of a pandemic it is definitely beneficial, but it changes when either spread is too high, or other measures (vaccines, therapeutics) become available. This is evidenced by the fact that contract tracing continues e.g. for monkey pox.

There's also the difference in transmissibility between the original virus and the later variants. Contact tracing something with an R0 of 5 is a different matter than tracing one of 15.

“asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”

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?

Okay, I'll say "I think unvaccinated people should not be having orgies", I'll wait to see if anyone says that's homophobic. Yes I actually think the statement is true, I'm not just making a point. Edit: I guess I should be more constructive, an action gay men could take is demanding their states order enough doses of ACAM-2000 from the Strategic National Stockpile to cover everyone who can take it in their community (so no HIV, skin disorders, heart disease, etc). Leave MVA-BN for people who can't take ACAM2000.

I had an account on Reddit /r/news get banned because I said we should suspend all international travel to China at the start of COVID.

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.

I'm definitely not lying about this. See: https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1550856205706338305 Also see sibling comment.

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.

I'm definitely not lying about this.

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.

We need a billionaire to start funding boarding schools, where the kids and teachers can be isolated from the rest of the public.

> Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.

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 don't view them as unalloyed goods, for sure - it's just that most of the hostility came pre-anyone having great arguments against them and struck me as fundamentally tribal - went into an ice cream shop with my girlfriend in Ocala, Florida, got glared down as the only people wearing masks. This wasn't well considered social pressure, it was most assuredly "we don't cotton to them types around here."

I do think the arguments against wearing masks when interacting with children/making children mask have been quite strong, post ace-2.

> 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.

Asking gay men to stop having orgies isomorphic to asking people to put on masks.

Randy Shilts' book And the Band Played On spends a lot of time on exactly this problem during the early days of AIDS. Closing the bathhouses was controversial and resisted for too long.