A retrospective summary of the Covid-19 pandemic
ramrajv.com
ramrajv.com
Similarly, large scale loss of people and restrictions of freedom have been disturbingly frequent. They were called plagues or wars, and seem to be an aspect of the human condition. Remember aids? Polio? The only real difference with covid was that it occurred in the age of social media. Dying on tv seems to affect people more than dying in some distant land almost out of memory.
Smoked inside recently?
Believe it or not, even back in April of 2020 there was millions of other problems besides covid.
Examining only covid outcomes is not a retrospective at all. Examining the sum of all outcomes for all things holistically is a retrospective. And doing that you only arrive at one conclusion: literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off.
There is more to living than the avoidance of exactly one specific disease. Anything that attempts to focus on only covid outcomes is not a retrospective. It’s a circle jerk.
> "literally every single thing society chose to do for covid was wrong. We could have done nothing at all and been better off."
Perhaps this is only indicative of my own failings, but the absolute certainty you express here led me to greatly devalue your opinion and conclude that engaging with you wouldn't likely lead to an interesting discussion on the main topic. (E.g., Do you really believe that nothing that any aspect of society did related to covid positively affected the outcome?)
(Somehow, apparently, I still felt compelled to comment on this tangential/meta topic. Maybe I'm imagining that you might find my reaction useful or interesting or maybe I'm driven by internal factors, such as guilt at dismissing your perspective because of a couple of your specific word choices.))
1) Massive and public damage done to the cause of liberty. Picking a minor, I wouldn't want to imagine the looks that someone protesting the Roe v. Wade overturning got if they tried to chant "my body, my choice!". There is firm precedent now for a generation that your body, government's choice. We're more likely to regret that than a few people hurting/killing themselves out of stupidity refusing to take a vaccine as the authoritarians start making more invasive demands.
2) Forcing someone to do something against their volition, followed up by the rather obvious point that the coercers were acting without full information or particularly good intent (see: "Why did COVID become so polarizing?"), will have consequences just from the bad blood it created. There are some angry, angry people out there now. People who have a very compelling argument that it is acceptable to coerce your political opponents and punish them in disproportionate ways.
3) It still isn't obvious that the all in cost/benefits of the policies were worth it factoring in 2nd order effects and opportunity costs. We're staring at nuclear war between the two countries with the largest arsenals right now. It might have been worth just ignoring COVID, letting people make their own choices for better or worse and focusing on not finding a diplomatic peace in the northern hemisphere. The nuclear war risk is probably higher than the COVID risk, although a lot more all-or-nothing. It was almost completely ignored because of the resources spent trying to keep unwilling people inside their own homes. Also the global economy overall is in a terrible place, the damage is incalculable but large and probably comparable to losing 1% of the population. There is a famine problem out there [0].
A well-meaning analysis and noting that 1% of the population could die doesn't really capture the trade offs here. 1% of the world is going to die every year anyway; doubling that is bad. Normalising, justifying and defending mass suspensions of human rights is, amazingly, probably going to be worse.
[0] https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...
Natural immunity wasn't allowed.
I’ll actually agree that by the time vaccine mandates were made the strains didn’t diverge that much and it should have been perfectly acceptable to show iron clad proof of prior infection as an alternative for vaccine proof (if I’m not wrong that was actually the case in some scenarios).
Right now the evidence that boosters are more than a little bit helpful is rather lacking.
I say this as someone that got the original strain and then delta - and both were quite serious. I remember at the time I got delta there was supposed to be about a 1% chance of me getting reinfected, though that study might have been pre-delta as I got it quite early.
Looking at your answers looks like you really don't have a clue, but the worst thing is you don't realize that you don't a have clue. Just like ChatGPT. You think it is intelligent, but it is not.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/State_government_policies_about_vacc...
Just to be clear I’m pro-choice, though I think abortion should be done as early as possible. I just really dislike dishonest rhetoric.
Surely, forcing people to get a vaccine at gunpoint is as serious as it gets.
The middle-ground is trickier: how to think about professionals who have been effectively forced to get a vaccine at the cost of losing their jobs and livelihood.
In practice though I've heard way more complaining about absolute freedom from people in the former camp.
As for the adequate birth control angle: sure, some people are careless, some people are just young, birth control methods do fail, etc. there are so many ways you can end up with a unwanted pregnancy, including some that are easier to sympathize with even for the most strict defender of the morals (I hope), like rape.
If I were king for a day I'd make every abortion more expensive than the last, and I would also make it more expensive the further along you are - barring fetal abnormalities and other gotchas. Those fees would go towards birth control and education about it.
I have business-owning anti-vax neighbours, I saw what they had to put up with. While I do agree that abortion is probably a bit more consequential the government was putting in an honest-to-goodness effort to destroy their lives and socially ostracise them through COVID. And, in hindsight, largely for insufficient reasons with questionable benefits. They eventually got COVID despite all that they were hit with too so all the abuse was for nothing.
It just is a laughable position that we can force people to stay at home, force them out of work, isolate them from their peers, demand that they get vaccinated when they aren't comfortable with the idea and then expect them to pretend that making some pregnant woman carry a child is somehow more problematic. It isn't. It is less problematic. The former was much worse. If the former is an option on the table then the latter is an option on the table. A lot of nasty stuff is, apparently the standard is just 'if the government thinks it is a good idea'. That is a lousy standard, but that is what was just set for a lot of people.
For example what is "the cause of liberty?" As phrased nearly anyone would support that abstract concept, but when they find out what concrete policies other people mean by that it's a source of vicious conflict. So what do you mean by it?
Another is the repeated assumption that covid mitigation steps like isolation and vaccination have no impact beyond the individual. This is a normative american mindset, maybe, but completely insufficient for addressing a public health issue like a pandemic. As witnessed by the US having something like 1/5 of the global covid deaths. Rhetorically irresponsible not to address this point, given the subject and context.
And then finally you're assuming a lot of things happened because of covid, when it's possible-to-likely covid provided only the proximate trigger or justification. To address your examples: russia and ukraine were already at war & this escalation had been predicted for years; famine is well understood to be a political phenomenon and covid provided a justification to accelerate policies of austerity and inequality, but none of them were invented recently.
iirc I followed this https://bartoszgorka.com/github-discussion-comments-for-jeky...