'Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant | Hacker News Reader

'Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant

telegraph.co.uk

The further we get away from the pandemic, the less anyone will remember that it suddenly became the leading cause of death, or one of the leading causes of death, in many countries. “Scandals” like this one will seem more significant than the fact that policymakers were acting on the imperative to keep even more people from dying.

Confronted with the same circumstances and choices, I don’t think any armchair critic would have done any better. The per capita rate of sickness and death in U.S. states whose leaders boasted the loudest about having few or no restrictions whatsoever suggests that many, many more people would be dead if we had taken their advice.

But the further we get away from the emergency period, the less any of this will matter. We won’t learn anything.

How could we have ever known putting Covid patients in nursing homes with our most vulnerable population was a bad idea?

https://www.wxyz.com/news/region/detroit/20-year-old-beating...

Who could have guessed that stopping all economic activity was not a sustainable solution to the pandemic?

https://twitter.com/who/status/1316020010540625920

https://nypost.com/2020/11/29/nearly-one-third-of-ny-nj-smal...

If you don't take this vaccine you and your family will starve on the cold streets. But the company that created it also has zero liability with it being emergency authorization and all. What, you have a better idea?

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...

Nobody warned us these things could be a bad idea. How could we have known?

https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607378386338340867?s=...

Seriously, were you living under a rock? > "I don't think any armchair critic would have done any better." I think if we allowed a chimp to make decisions at random we could have gotten a better outcome.

No, I lived in San Francisco, a city where we had reasonable restrictions in place in enough time to make a difference, because our policymakers remembered the plague years of AIDS and knew what to do.

A lot of people who pretend to be smart fled the city during the pandemic, claiming, falsely, that it had become a lawless, post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Early on in the pandemic, I participated in the COVID Tracking Project, which was the only reliable source of data on the pandemic in the US for almost a year. I was also a reporter, covering local politics and small business in San Francisco as the pandemic and the regulatory response unfolded.

So, no, I wasn’t living under a rock, and in fact was closer to the action than most people.

Probably going to get downvoted to hell but I'll take it. In my country the deaths were similar to a flu season we had 2-3 years earlier, and nobody batted an eye back then. Look at the numbers in your country yourself and you might see the same.

Of course it's sad for anyone who lost someone but no point in exaggerating. Why has similar years not prompted the same reactions earlier? Does the tone in the messages tell you they acted on a bad pandemic, or that they had to blow it up to scare people? Honest question.

> Confronted with the same circumstances and choices, I don’t think any armchair critic would have done any better

Maybe not, but that doesn't make it out of bounds to be critical.

> The per capita rate of sickness and death in U.S. states whose leaders boasted the loudest about having few or no restrictions

I'm not sure it's so simple. NY stats are very close to FL.

> We won’t learn anything.

Exactly.

Look again at NY and see when the preponderance of deaths happened. Right when the pandemic broke out, U.S. citizens were forced to come home from abroad, and many of them transited through airports in New York. If you recall the images from those airports at the time, people, many of whom were probably infected, were packed shoulder to shoulder. New York’s shelter in place restrictions weren’t in place at that point. New York City was slammed with a wave of sickness and death unparalleled anywhere else shortly afterwards.

New York has been an outlier in the data the entire length of the pandemic for this reason. If you look at the totality of per-capita hospitalizations and deaths over the last several years, its obvious that shelter-in-place restrictions absolutely made a difference.

It’s wild how you can clearly see what I described here on a chart, but people are downvoting this comment.

I didn't downvote, but I think your comment doesn't object to the idea that it's just not simple to determine what policies worked. You could probably find an asterisk to put next to any state (based on age, density, data quality, etc, etc). And that's before you even try to measure the negative effects of lockdown against the positives in your analysis.

I think it's important that every new policy is looked at critically, even if it was created under duress and with good intentions.

While Corona was a major cause of deaths in the population up to Omicron, it wasn’t in general as bad as it was reported on the news and definitely not as bad as modeled/predicted(talking here about the majority of the population). A lot of errors occurred in reporting and collecting data, and this contributed decisively to those errors.

The scandal is not about whether the pandemic response was correct given the information they had, but their efforts to manipulate public perception.

Most of all, it's about the attitude that the tone of the conversation reveals.

Also, the behaviour of this very lot at the time, as was revealed later.

They're mocking people, enjoying the absolute power that they have gained.

So I guess “absolute power” is when your temporary state of emergency, approved through the regular legislative process by duly elected officials, is allowed to expire, and the restrictions imposed by it are rolled back.

Interesting how as more and more information is leaked out about what really happened during the pandemic, the thousands of commenters who were enthusiastically complicit in enabling the gross abuses that happened have become very very quiet. Wonder how many who were pushing for the non-compliant to be imprisoned, or worse, remember the part they gleefully took in all of it. Be prepared for "It's time for us to move on" to become the new blessed narrative all must follow in order to be a good citizen.

There are still a lot of true believers that jump in to these covid discussions (even if it's just to mod down stuff that doesn't support their hysteria). I'm surprised there aren't any smug dismissals posted in this thread yet. Sadly these kind of stories rarely change minds. Once people have dug in, they only get emboldened by any contradictory evidence. Governments spent two+ years radicalizing people, then the messaging just sort of faded away. There should have been loud and unequivocal "ok this is over" but instead nothing because it's politically convenient

Edit: smug dismissal now the top comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026368

And now it's flagged for whatever reason. There's usually lots of great in-depth discussion here on HN and the reason I come here but the pandemic was an exception. Was very disappointing to see at the time.

A few weeks ago I ran into an article making a case for a "covid amnesty".

Essentially, all the doomsayers who pushed for schools to be closed, for people to be vaccinated or lose their job, etc should just be forgiven because "they didn't know, there wasn't enough data"

Kids were badly hurt. People couldn't hold their parents hand as they were dying (not necessarily of covid). Hell, they could barely organize funerals.

Another article (not paywalled?) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/mar/02/isabel-oake...

quote: She added: “Anyone who thinks I did this for money must be utterly insane. This is about the millions of people – every one of us in this country – that were adversely affected by the catastrophic decisions to lock down repeatedly, often on the flimsiest of evidence, for political reasons.” end quote

Strange. Why did it take her so long?

> Oakeshott said she chose the newspaper for ideological reasons, because it “pushed back against lockdown during the pandemic”.

She made the right choice, as much as The Guardian might dislike it. They seem more interested in reporting on the background bickering, rather than on the leaks themselves. A common tactic when one wants to obfuscate a story. And when they do report on the leaks, they use the most discreet of headlines:

Matt Hancock: what do the leaked WhatsApp messages reveal? Texts sent at height of pandemic suggest former health secretary rejected advice on testing in care homes - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/mar/01/matt-hancoc...

I stayed out most discussions about Covid at the time, but I do vividly recall there was a short period where I found it darkly amusing to say stuff like “deploy the Omegacron variant” in response to people expressing optimism about lockdowns ending soon. It was a short-lived period because I got lambasted over it. While I was just using it to make sarcastic jokes, apparently some politicians were really using it to make sincere policy? Hell of a punchline.

Very curious how Matt Hancock’s messages got leaked .. pegasus maybe?

He gave them to a journalist who was writing his book. She later gave them to the press.

Speechless, this guy teaches me the meaning of Hanlon's Razor. Can't help getting pissed off though, kind of like being mad at that annoying bee, only this bee has actual power which makes it scary.

This guy seems to the the Fredo Corleone of tyrants. “I’m smart…not like everyone says…like dumb.”

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