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Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu.

We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds?

Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing.

It wasn’t about being accurate. It was intentionally about over-reacting because we just didn’t know enough.

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We knew in March 26, 2020 it was not the Spanish flu because the data from the cruise ship diamond princess came back and the cfr was 1.1%. This was a shipped filled with the most vulnerable, obese people over 65. We should have never closed schools or lockdown in the USA.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w

I think you're missing the aspect of Spanish flu that presents the threat. CFR doesn't define the threat.

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. No clarity of hindsight is required to realize that the conversations regarding COVID were not good faith explorations of the facts or the risks. Decisions were made very crudely in order to determine the proper course of action, and virtually all necessary mechanisms for continuously evaluating what we knew or were doing were forcefully marginalized. If you were somebody genuinely interested in understanding the pandemic, you immediately found that virtually all the sane conversations you were looking for were taking place in the same fringes as the places where lunatic conspiracy theorists were, because they were the only places that tolerated any discussion whatsoever.

That may have been the case in the very beginning, but it certainly evolved into let's scare the crap out of people to achieve whatever outcome we want.

What outcome is that, exactly?

I don't think the key is to blame CDC or Fauci or the government. The key is that people should be able to examine their numbers, critique their analysis, and challenge their policies, just like people should do to any doctrine. Yet Twitter staff, at least some of them, turned such normal debates into political issues, and tried every way to ban the people or villainize them.

Doesn’t sound to you like hindsight is 20/20. Sounds like you’d want to take the exact same approach next time something like this happens

Not just hindsight. Many people came to the same conclusion in the moment.

That's an interesting idea, but it completely falls apart if one remembers the "don't buy masks" phase of the CDC's efforts.

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