What do you think the average response was in the West to covid protests last year?
Here in Australia the public and media overwhelmingly despised anyone protesting despite having some of the harshest covid restrictions on Earth.
Here in Australia the public and media overwhelmingly despised anyone protesting despite having some of the harshest covid restrictions on Earth.
But even crazier is the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response, not a single major country i know of has performed any serious commission work to established what things went wrong and why. It’s like nothing has happened.
Your hindsight is missing a lot of nuance.
In the first few months, there was a fog of war. How transmissable is it? How deadly? What is the most effective course of treatment? How does the disease affect our internal systems?
In hindsight, we now know the facts.
We also developed a vaccine which reduces the severity of symptoms if not outright prevents infection in some individuals.
The initial reaction to lock down saved lives. Your own might never have been at risk, but there are many higher risk folks who benefited from the time we bought with lockdowns early on.
Lockdowns now do not make sense. We understand the disease. We have courses of treatment. We have functional vaccines. We have some level of population immunity.
I am sure some lock down rules and some implementations of them were not good. But "live with it" was not the same back then as now.
But since that happened and life does go on, states started doing things that clearly stepped over the line for some people without appropriate authority unleashing legal challenges in the process[1].
[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/10/legal-challenges-cd...
EDIT : as for lockdowns, they were understandable in 202O when the virus was new. But locking down 20 yo students in 2021 made absolutely no sense, and all the evidence pointed to that. Note that in france at least, the most serious measures against non vaccinated people were taken in early 2022 (aka: not even allowed to take the train), despite omicron being the only variant remaining, and casualties becoming super super low.
However, I want to point out that you've moved the goalposts in your arguments. You started with
> everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response
But you're now saying that because of the mutation to Omicron and the prior exposure of "almost 100% of the population", just living with it is the appropriate policy move. Neither of these were true throughout 2020 or most of 2021, so cannot be useful in determining what the correct course was in the early pandemic.
Furthermore, I think you are vastly discounting the value of a single vaccination. Just because few people have taken the bivalent shot does not negate the value that their original shots in 2021 still provide against serious/spreading cases today.
For the record, my own low-confidence prediction is that future historians will bear out the early (first two months, say) phase of lockdown, and will agree with the utility of many of the later policies but take issue with the hubris of states thinking they could impose them on an unwilling population with no blowback. There will also be an endless list of easy-to-condemn overreactions to the virus or silly policies continuing way too late (e.g. a large park near where I used to live was shut down until late 2021, well after vaccination and after we were very confident that it basically didn't spread outdoors)
Over time the virus tame and solution appeared hence measure should be relaxed.
If you just let it goes as Boris would want it would have killed a lot more.
All the projections i’ve seen during the pandemic were off by at least 50% (in their most generous intepretation), and countries like sweden that locked people down the least didn’t see any difference in the number of casualties.