Yes, violence was largely avoided. But it was still an extremely harmful period of time.
It should be a constant reminder to each of us that we are not special and we are not different - we could and very well may be whipped into a similar frenzy someday.
The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience, or to simply virtue-signal their contrariness to their clan.
And the US treated these attackers with kid gloves. There were pretty much no enforcement of any of the things the complainers were complaining about: No consequences for ignoring stay-at-home mandates. Few localities actually enforced business closures. Masking was up to individual businesses to enforce, resulting in little compliance. Throughout the pandemic, I could drive 50 miles in any direction from my city and find people out and about, maskless, businesses open, no measures being taken at all. The only thing that was actually enforced were school closures, and that's only because schools are run by the government.
Those two years ushered in this new era of consequence-free mass civil disobedience. And it wasn't even in service of anything--just performative contrariness.
I guess intelligence agencies also learned the sad answer to the question "If there were a grave threat to society, is it possible to use PsyOps to get society to ignore or even prolong it?" But then again, I suppose our reaction to Climate Change has already answered that question.
Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.
The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.
I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.
I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.
On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.
You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").
Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.
You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.
Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration, victim complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was pulled out, every tactic was tried.
Like when Ron DeSantis was called a murderer for opening Florida's beaches (when it was well established that outside activities were extremely safe), or when parents advocating for schools to open were called white supremacists (when the predictable result of closing schools was that poor and minority students suffered most)?
The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience
Meanwhile, I learned how many people are willing to have governments literally lock everyone in their homes because of their inability to do any sort of rational risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis.
Lockdowns, and the labeling of society into "essential" and "non-essential", occurred nearly everywhere with no debate at all.
The most basic freedoms guaranteed to us - the freedom of movement, association, free speech - were taken away from hundreds of millions of people who had literally no say in the matter.
What world were you living in where these restrictions were only nominal? They literally roped off certain sections of businesses preventing people from buying non-essential products. It was everywhere.
"Politicized" is a funny word. When people talk about "democratizing" something, it is all "everyone's voices must be heard!" and "we all come together!" and sunshine and rainbows.
But when ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives try to use the political process to effect policy—supposedly the essence of "democracy," as I was taught in grade school… "How dare you politicize this issue! Stupid peasants, don't you know you are supposed to blindly follow every diktat of our unelected expert class! The nerve, to think government is supposed to be responsive to your desires"
If ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives are all clambering to remove those limits during times of turmoil, we absolutely have a right to decry politics crossing a line it was never meant to cross.
My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."
The "public health experts" are not angels of God, infallible messengers of Reality itself come down from Heaven to deliver the Gospel Of The Science to an unworthy populace. They are fallible human beings, they made many mistakes and their priorities don't always align with everyone else's. The inalienable rights of man, as re-affirmed in the First Amendment, give everyone the right to worship whomever they wish however they wish; I am therefore free to deny Saint Anthony of Bethesda's divinity as loudly and publicly as I desire.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed this review of it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
Cloth masks and social distancing did not seem to slow the spread. Some people who got fully vaxed and boosted got sick and are still getting sick. None of that stuff effectively protected people, and it caused harms. Those with at-risk medical conditions (maybe you) should take care of themselves by isolating to avoid those busses.
Since day 1 this thing was 99% killing older people or people with 3 or 4 comorbidities. Dont try to turn it into the black plague now.
Behind every comment is an actual person with a valid opinion. I may not agree with it, but perspective is key.
Some have said you learn the most listening to a critic/skeptic
And then there was this plan from 2019: "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...
1) "We need a no fly zone over Ukraine
and somehow not connecting the dots to that meaning
2) NATO jets shooting down Russian jets
which in turn leads to
3) A hot war with between nuclear powers
something that hasn't happened outside of a few border skirmishes between India and Pakistan
The question is: what public health policies will minimize harm according to some set of metrics, and what will those metrics be?
The harms you describe are real. But you offer no way to quantify these harms against the harms that may have occured without the policies you are objecting to.