I know in florida there could be literally airborn aids and people will still go out and live life, myself included. COVID lockdowns were a test of how much the government could push without backlash.
I feel so badly for the kids that lost their last two years of high school for what?
The pandemic was incompetently managed, but "ignore COVID harder" is the exact brand of incompetence that made the pandemic worse than it had to be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...
1. Once something like this escapes its confines and starts spreading as COVID did, it is here to stay and any lockdowns that are not to avoid hospital capacity problems just prolong the inevitable
2. Compromised people due to health conditions and age should definitely lay low when there is an outbreak. But locking down a populace at great financial and other costs does not help them. In fact it probably causes more harm as the cycle is prolonged. The more healthy people that recover the better.
Trump did his things based on stubbornness and stupidity. Persisting lockdowns and draconian restrictions past the hospital situation being resolved was also not wise either. I live in NY and in April 2020 locking down was essential. It was very bad with the hospitals and nursing homes being ravaged.
Did they? Is the table on wikipedia wrong? Outside of California (which I feel no desire to defend), it looks like the actual lockdowns were 0-3 months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns
0-3 months doesn't sound nutty to me. Perhaps 3 months was a bit on the high side, sure, but it's also on the high side of actual policy. What does strike me as nutty was the extreme rhetoric around extremely basic Rt reduction measures. Washing hands, social distancing, wearing masks, taking temperatures, installing spit shields etc just don't deserve nearly the same level of vitriol as the lockdowns themselves, but people seem awfully keen to fudge the distinction. Next time we should start those measures out of the gate but I am worried that people will jump right back into the game of pretending that basic public health measures = extreme oppression, sending us down the exact same path as 2020.
The life-altering consequences of COVID policy lasted much, much longer than three months.
This does not match my recollection. Not to get all political, but I was headed to a conference in Belgium just weeks prior to the lockdowns starting wearing a full-face respirator and got made fun of by the TSA agents in the Atlanta airport because the CDC was telling people that masks were unnecessary/didn't work. I was wearing said respirator, because I had been deeply attuned to the news of what was going on around the world well ahead of any real concern or alarm bells in the US. I remember very clearly that the first major action to be taken by the US government was a travel restriction/travel ban on flights entering the US from China, and this was done via an executive order by Trump which was lambasted broadly in the news media and by politicians across the aisle as being racist and bigoted. I remember just months later that those same talking heads were happy to say that not enough had been done soon enough and that we should have instituted a similar travel ban earlier and more broadly.
Trump's administration definitely screwed up the pandemic response, not the least of which by basically throwing out the playbook on exactly how to respond to a pandemic that had been built painstakingly after the previous challenges we had with SARS, MERS, and H1N1. I am in no way defending Trump here, but I think making this political and trying point fingers isn't an accurate recollection. The entire US government failed to appropriately respond, this includes elected officials from both political parties, as well as the appointees and bureaucrats. Yes, this /very much/ includes the CDC that bald-faced lied about the effective usage of masks for months in the beginning of the pandemic. Luckily many people, like myself, are capable of understanding the basic physics of air movement and understand that masks can very much be effective if worn properly and so we went out and did just that. I managed to avoid being infected until early 2022 (Omicron) despite being required to travel multiple times, including internationally, because I effectively used PPE.
The most infuriating thing about all of this, as the OP of this thread points out, is that very likely the entire pandemic was caused by a lab leak after the virus was created during gain of function research, and yet, we will never actually know. The evidence of what occurred has been destroyed or muddled for political reasons by everyone involved, including both parties in the US, not just the Chinese. It's a huge mess, and a huge failure of governments around the world, and everyone involved is hoping that normal folks will forget about it and move on with their lives like nothing happened, or better yet, argue about it politically for the dumbest reasons. Your comment equates to "Trump bad, CDC good", but actually the truth is "Trump bad, CDC bad, everyone involved pretty much bad".
Had they done little, people would be in hysterics that nothing was being done because $FOREIGN_COUNTRY had stricter rules in place.
Had they done a lot, people would be in hysterics that freedoms were being curtailed unnecessarily because $FOREGN_COUNTRY had weaker rules in place.
Instead, 3 years later, half the country believes that masks are tyrannical government oppression and IR thermometers are gulag training.
The CDC didn't think it had the political capital to press the mask issue. Until it did, and then the policy changed. It was a delay of weeks on one Rt reduction measure of many.
Trump, OTOH, placed all of his chips on "ignore it and it will go away in April," delayed all the other Rt reduction mechanisms for longer, lost the bet, and activated his entire voter base to cover. He could have pivoted and managed them (Wear a MAGA mask! Stop the China Virus!) but he chose not to. The FUD he stirred on basic public health measures swirled for years and we still haven't seen the end of it. Just look at this thread.
In terms of the public health implications, one of these is a 1x problem, the other is a 100x problem.
By this, I take it you're implying I'm a Trump supporter and that is why I responded the way I did. You are mistaken, and I suggest you re-read what I actually wrote.
Nothing you have said in reply to me refutes the substance of my statements, you are just trying to deepen the politicization of something that was nearly a universal government fuckup, and I mean universal both across political alignments, but also geographically around the world.
Comparing two mistakes separated by orders of magnitude in consequence is a conservative talking point for a reason. I genuinely believe you when you claim to not like him, but you are supporting him by pushing this comparison, even if you don't like him.
That's not how that works.
I believe you are commenting in an entirely politically-motivated way and are not responding in good faith to my reply to your original comment. At this point I don't think we can have a productive conversation, so I wish you the best and I'm going to move on to a better use of my time.
On lockdowns - you have to do them 100% (China, Australia, New Zealand) or just give up. Half measures just do not make sense - you get a lot of pain with very little to show for it. For US specifically 100% lockdown was never an option - building wall with machine gun encampment to stop movement on both Canadian and Mexican border was not feasible, definitely not on timeline of days or at most weeks.
In the end Fauci, NIH, and medical establishment etc just made zero difference to COVID or COVID deaths. Missed school and ballooned debt are the only legacy of their efforts.
Do you have links on this? I'd love to know more.
There are studies that said "if you were on mechanical ventilation early on in the pandemic, you were highly likely to die". Oh my! Ventilators sound bad, right? Doctors were reserving ventilators for the most critically ill people that needed them. The same patients who were most likely to die (ill, old, etc) from COVID were put on ventilators. It wasn't the ventilators, it was the god damned virus.
To be fair, doctors noticed it fairly quickly (but too late for New York) and now usage of respirators for COVID is much much rarer.
My guess nobody talks or highlights blunders of New York because it goes against doctors/nurses are heroes of COVID mantra and not very relevant to current debates on COVID.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
This thing was impossible to contain, regardless of which talking head was in charge.
They flattened the curve and then managed limited social resources.
Many other states just went into irrational and indefinite Long term lockdowns. Illinois for instance was locked down for months and months despite having enourmous hospital capacity - the lack of which was the whole reason for entering the lockdown in the first place. It just didn't make sense after a while except as a political tool.
Early on there was a lot of metrics-driven decision making, and metrics changed as new information came to light. That was good. Florida would still lockdown if done in that light - not without bellyaching but yes it would. When the metrics go out the window so too would Florida's compliance.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...
If you contrasted nursing home covid deaths to high school covid deaths you'd see high schools "did better", but that probably has nothing to do with policy.
The type of trolling you're doing isn't cute.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
I don't know that any state made it a policy to optimize for a reduced death rate directly. They chose hospitalizations in the early days and then I think metrics disappeared, or only the R value was loosely paid attention to. That's my point.
If death rate wasn't a chosen metric then it's irrelevant.
If that fear returns then the population will go along with whatever terrible intervention is proposed, at least until that fear dissipates.
Some wont, but some people actually miss it and it was the best thing that ever happened to them.
I dunno, to prevent overflowing hospitals from having to turn people away because everyone who ‘did their research’ conveniently start trusting doctors again when they get a bad case.