What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like "flattening the curve."
Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that damage. It was the policies.
And even without the policies, things were going to happen.
The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH) started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on the matter for instance, because they didn’t have any better alternatives, and it would have been worse otherwise.
Oh how we forget!
I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year.
And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words).
Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
The problem is that most COVID cases in hospitals were of people who were infected in hospital itself. They weren't admitted for it. Just looking at "covid cases in hospitals" would therefore be misleading. That was never highlighted by the media or government officials because it was embarrassing but sometimes dashboards would reveal it.
As an example look at Switzerland's data. It's useful because it was still being updated as recently as May.
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total?hospCapZ...
As you can see, it made no difference whatsoever and actually at the start of the dataset the hospitals are way under utilized.
Some countries have worse hospital systems than Switzerland, and regularly experience shortages of care even in normal times. But this example shows that for a good healthcare system COVID could be handled easily without even coming close to running out of capacity.
Ireland (where I live) have one of the worst, and I followed the numbers religiously for most of Covid. Without the lockdown/other measures to reduce spread, the health care system would have collapsed multiple times (hence why we had some of the longest lockdowns in the world).
Like, my mother had cancer and suffered massively due to the lockdowns (I firmly believe it was a large contributor to her death last year) but that doesn't mean that they weren't necessary, at least in Ireland.
> the health care system would have collapsed
You were told that but the Swiss were told that too. In fact they were told the hospitals were collapsing, even as their own dashboard said the exact opposite.
Governments lied about COVID, all the time. Lockdowns had no impact on spread, and there's a ton of studies showing that by now, just go searching for them on Google Scholar. But you don't even need studies. Just eyeball the graphs of various countries and try to spot the impact on case numbers of these supposedly mandatory interventions. There isn't any. SARS-CoV-2 like all coronaviruses spreads like a gas and these viral clouds can hang around and travel long distances in the air. Lockdowns are meaningless given such a modality of spread.
Which logically I agree with, although I still think that post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor transmission, any government that didn't allow people to socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.
I think we could have done a lot better, even with the available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.
The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and so forth.
"Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the science.
Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there were zero "good" options. In a global pandemic, every choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least bad.
Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect. That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
I think the argument would be more convincing if there were a group of people who are still alive that could say they would have been dead without the policies. Obviously this is impossible for anyone to say with certainty, but given that it's the corollary of the "if dead people could talk" argument, perhaps that indicates that both arguments are unfalsifiable and thus ineffective.
This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe
My personal pandemic experience was luckier than many . 3 wilderness years of lost time only; of no growth. no loss of business, work , home etc. more importantly I’m alive and so is everyone I love
No teachers died, and there was very little in school transmission. Our provincial health officer in charge made the choice based on the data available. BC has a very low overall COVID death rate compared to other jurisdictions. You can go look up the data on deaths and satisfy yourself that closing schools as long as many jurisdictions did was a stupid idea. The idea that we didn't know that at the time is also suspect, since data driven decision makers like the one in BC opened schools back up once the risk of transmission between children was determined.