There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even for irrational reasons) was useful for getting them to follow their guidelines. Double bonus for highly visible, borderline superstitious rituals like hand sanitizer, which helped identify those who were compliant from the dissidents such as myself.
I live outside of Boulder, and long, long after this was known, the businesses were still engaging in surface sanitization theater. My daughter's swim school had employees walking around with large devices, spraying fluid on every chair in between classes. This was going on all the way into 2022. I asked the employees if they knew that covid didn't spread on surfaces and that what they were doing was useless. They knew, but did it anyway because the owner "wanted to show customers they took covid seriously".
As a person who was demonized by my colleagues for not wearing a mask OUTSIDE on a windswept hiking trail, I'm frankly triggered by comments like this where people pretend like the information and data showing how irrational and panicked the social reaction was didn't exist. It did, and the people who were the most irrational, panicked, and aggressive towards those attempting to be rational are the ones making excuses like this.
There needs to be a reckoning on this insanity and the public health authorities who deliberately chose a "stop covid at any cost" strategy. "At any cost" is correct. They completely refused to do any form of cost/benefit analysis for the absurd panic they produced. I, like many on HN, had relatives who refused to leave their homes, and were wiping down boxes from Amazon for months. These were relatively young people with no health issues. There's a reason why the average American overestimated their likelihood of being hospitalized from covid by 50x, and that's the combination of public health and the overly compliant, ideologically blinded media in the western world.
Guess part of problem with any issue these days, half of what you say is true, the other half starts to sound like 'crazy old guy screaming at the wind'.
Yes, there was some group hysteria, no there wasn't a group intent on 'scaring' the population to 'gain control'.
Yes, requiring a mask out on a nature trail is little nutz, but also there were some going the other way 'I can cough on your grandpa if I want, this is a free country'.
Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.
No doctor was going to come on, lie, and tell people to do less. We barely did enough as was
Public health leaders, such as Debbie Birx, believed that the ends justified the means, and knowingly obfuscated the risk stratification by age in a cynical effort to get younger people to comply with lockdowns out of self preservation.
She wrote about this in her book, and also wrote that she and her colleagues KNEW that "2 weeks to flatten the curve" was a white lie, because otherwise the public would never have agreed to lockdowns in the first place.
I stopped exercising caution earlier on in the pandemic, because in my estimation my relatively good health, age, and literature that was available (D3 being an important predictor of outcomes) meant that I was unlikely to have a poor outcome. I did eventually get COVID in Dec 2021, but aside from a total loss of smell for 12 days and a dry cough it was little more than an annoyance. I isolated, as appropriate, for a week or so (never had a fever) and went about my business. Yet, nearly two months later, I remembered telling someone that I had had COVID, they recoiled and backed away as if I were still infectious. Fear is a strong emotion.
Part of it is that the general public doesn't understand viruses. We can't see them. That's a problem, because it's an unseen enemy with (at the time) unknown outcomes—especially with rapidly changing information. I don't think the media helped either, because they relish in bad news.
My mother was very nearly hospitalized last year, though. Not from COVID but from RSV. I suspect over-sanitization reduced our baseline immunity to your typical run-of-the-mill pathogens, but I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist so that's little more than a guess. I have some friends who are nurses who suggested the theory, and they may be right.
This has to be weighted against the benefit, but in a time of free-spread and lots of people dying, closing churches was a very good policy.
My wife was hospitalized for unknown bacterial infection what the doctors assumed was caused by masks.
I contracted covid in February 2021, before my age group was eligible for vaccine. Like you I had recognized relatively early on that my level of physical fitness and nutrition likely made it low risk for me. Like you I had minimal symptoms except for a total loss of sense of smell. And also like you I encountered a completely irrational response when I would tell people months later I caught it. This included people who should have been educated enough to know better.
The really fun part was then having people pretend like the fact I had caught covid and recovered from it didn't translate into immunity. This despite the fact that only months earlier they had been asking people who had recover from covid to come in and donate plasma to help treat vulnerable patients. And also despite the fact that there had already been studies including millions of data points from Israel and Qatar that showed natural immunity to be robust.
Like most things with covid, the null hypothesis was inverted. Instead of assuming that like the vast majority of viruses, natural immunity was a thing, they inverted it to assuming that natural immunity was not a thing until proven otherwise.
Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus.
No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent.
I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate, and therefore are incapable of understanding science despite claiming that they "follow the science". In case anyone thinks I'm only picking on one side, I also have a half-brother who is obese and in his fifties who refused to get the vaccine when he obviously should have. He ended up catching the virus and being bedridden for over a week at his house, and then hid this from the family until his wife told us.
This is not "inverting the null hypothesis", it's the precautionary principle. The danger is unknown, there were indications that the virus was spreading rapidly and ICUs in certain pockets of the world filled up quickly early on, so it's better to be too careful than not careful enough.
Let's just look back at 1918. 17-50 million dead who'd have loved to have had the option for a more cautious handling of the situation. I'm glad we didn't have to repeat that, even though some of the measures definitely went to far, especially in hindsight.
> Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus.
What does this have to do with living in Boulder?
Living in a Nordic country, one of my favourite things was noticing how the exact same people that have no problem with GMO food were talking about WHO and Bill Gates running gene experiments on the world populace with mRNA vaccines.
> No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent.
Just because you don't agree with their reasons or don't know them does not make their behavior irrational or inconsistent. One could argue that a single shot (or 2-3) with a well-understood mechanism vaccine against a pandemic virus is worth the risk while daily nutrients coming from GMO plants are not worth that risk for personal health and the environment impacted by it. I don't share most of that view, but I don't consider anybody holding it to be irrational. So, no, we can't all agree on that.
> I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate,
Math education levels in the world, especially in North America, leave a lot to be desired, I agree with that. But let's not call everybody illiterate who is of differing opinion. Especially as somebody who accuses others of ad hominem and may themselves need a refresher for concepts like "null hypothesis".
This is an old wives’ tale, we’re swimming in pathogens at any moment of our lives. Our immune system is always working.
Is this a true statement? If so, do you have any sources to back up your "spring 2020" claim? Heck, I didn't even think this was a true statement now, that is my understanding was that airborne transmission was the primary route, but transmission by fomites was still possible, e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...
By mid-2021, we started seeing news reports like the following:
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...
Stuff like that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Sadly, the widespread foolishness continued throughout Canada for most of 2022.
Even now, there are still remnants of it remaining in some cases, along with the irreparable long-term harm caused by the numerous unjustifiable policies put in place then.
So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!
A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1].
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
> So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!
You should be ashamed of yourself for this hyperbole, you people have ruined many young people's lives for nothing, the least you could do is apologize. And this habit of constantly looking for numbers that are always wrong and feeding into your taste for impending doom is the greatest setback to science and the rational spirit I have ever witnessed in my entire life.
See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... for example.
It's also disingenuous to say that all deaths of people who had Covid were due to Covid. Many of them who caught Covid while in hospital for serious conditions would have died regardless of Covid.
Lockdowns increased social dysfunction, and this is the root of excess deaths. Funny how you also aren't mentioning the education disaster that the hysterical, statistically illiterate cowards who closed schools caused. Schools in EU and Asia were open. Just the North American fools closed theirs.
Btw, I know many people who blame excess deaths on the mRNA vaccines. They have the same data that you do for your theory of covid infection causing excess deaths: correlation and nothing else.
Drug overdoses are way up. Crime is up. Loneliness and depression and mental illness are at all time highs.
The vast majority of covid deaths were senior citizens. The vast majority of excess deaths happening now are working age people. And cowards who became irrational won't admit this because it's too painful for them to admit their complicity.
Is that per capita or absolute numbers? Could you provide a reference?
Just saying correlation isn't causation is a cop out, just because something is correlated doesn't mean it can't be reasoned about, used as a data point.
Everything you say is true, it was hard times for a lot of people, drug use, crime, suicides, all up. What is wrong is using that to justify that we should have let more people die from the disease itself.
"Man, we would be so much better off, with less drug us, less crime, less suicides, if we had just allowed more people to die. If we only had the courage to let this spread naturally and allow more people to die, and be put out of their misery, times would be better now".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...
This is false and full-on misinformation. It's sad to to see it in a forum like HN.
> They didn't lock down.
This is misleading as well. The Swedish public works differently. There is a high trust in government and authorities. The govt said this is dangerous, stay at home if you can, so people did. The degree of distancing was on par with all other Western countries. Source: I live there.
It's not possible to do this in other countries because people wouldn't give a damn unless there is a fine.
I won't comment the rest, you are too deep into conspiracy theory territory.
Sweden indeed has the lowest excess deaths from all cause mortality, according to the OECD statistics referenced and linked to in this article, which is one of hundred published on this topic. Note that Sweden's excess deaths were not the lowest in the height of the pandemic, but fell to the lowest in 2022.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...
"Conspiracy theory territory" is an ad-hominem smear with zero substance behind it. I said nothing in my comment to claim any "conspiracy", and if you think that then you should reread what I wrote.
No we didn’t and it obviously can. What we found out is that it spreads very efficiently through aerosols, thereby making contact-based infection nearly irrelevant for public health.
We've known for decades that hand sanitizer (and antibiotic soap) kills off the beneficial bacteria on your hands, and also dries out skin, increasing the percentage of pathogens that survive contact with skin, and also increasing the percentage that manage to get past skins' protective barriers.
We also knew that coronavirus was airborne well before 2019.
The medical and microbiology/virology communities provided advice that was the exact opposite of what the epidemiologists suggested, and were ignored.
Epidemiologies are closer to being historians or sociologists than doctors, so letting them run the show made no sense, and, in hindsight, what was obvious at the time turned out to be correct. The lockdowns were absurdly expensive, created massive secondary public health problems, and didn't save as many people as the approach dictated by conventional wisdom would have.
Conventional wisdom said we should figure out which people were most vulnerable (the elderly, obese and people with chronic medical conditions), and aggressively quarantine just them. That would allow covid to spread through the rest of the population in a month or two, and wouldn't require the entire economy to shut down. Instead, something like 5% of the workforce would call in sick for a month or two.
At this point, the excess mortality from the pandemic is above the expected mortality rate for low risk groups, so, in hindsight, we now know for sure that we should have listened to the medical community, and the findings of the (now retired) epidemiologists that studied the last pandemic.
Having more supporting evidence now doesn't change the fact that all of this was obvious at the beginning of the pandemic, but that it was ignored / actively censored by our leaders.
Anyway, at the end of the day, covid is a strain of the common cold, not some crazy alien pathogen that we have zero experience with. Also, humans have dealt with dozens of pandemics during recorded history. The whole "this was a brand new thing we had no experience with" argument just doesn't hold water.
Right from wiki, this sure sounds like Epidemiologist are the ones to make the call. : Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.
It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results (including peer review and occasional systematic review). Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.[1]
> how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball?
They certainly pretended that they knew hard enough to react in an extreme way.
Huh? Like 1 in 10 people that caught the virus died? Where do you think this happened?
This may have been true for very tiny portions of the pouplation, like people over the age of 90 (who had a 20% ifr according to https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) but otherwise the country with the highest ifr seems to be portugal at 2%, and even that would have been heavily concentrated in those who were at risk of death from just about anything due to age and comorbidities.
The same would happen in the technical community if there were a breach and procedures were ignored and made up based on hunches. The medical community does not get a pass.
:: Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.
In hindsight, we had vaccines created and in testing 5 days [1] after the WHO called that virus a pandemic [2].
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5
[2]: https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments...
If you can manufacture a vaccine that you cannot sell then you have wasted production space. Like the trials had a pre-determined duration so if you know the trial ends in August and you know it takes 1 month to staff up the production line then at the end of June check the preliminary data and make a call to staff up the factory in anticipation of the trial succeeding.
But in order for the vaccines to be in a trial (testing) by March they had to have already been in development before March, I suspect a lot of these companies decided in like January/February to start staffing people to work on a vaccine; how and why would that have been faster if those federal people weren't fired?
That, of course was not clearly communicated, like everything else. So the OP's confusion of very small batches with industrial manufacture was excusable, but he is complaining about a wrong thing.
Instead, 6 months in when we knew it was transmitted through air, we continued to make businesses sanitize their checkouts while people walked around in ineffective cloth masks.
Really fucked the dog there.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ont...
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081
Then, get this, a few years later, they needed them!
Best part was I already worked at an organization that required mask fitting for all employees, but when the pandemic hit that this was in preparation for, everybody wanted them and there weren’t any available.
Keep in mind the disease was already all over the world when it was discovered.
Obviously, there's a preparedness issue which is probably the base root of that issue, but early enthusiastic masking instead of trying to send all the construction workers home probably would have gone a lot farther.
Wut
But at what cost? We knew that benzene is toxic. Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction than a rational one, IMO.
> Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction
No, it is a reaction grounded in the last hundreds of year of proper hygiene practice
You can't know that. The regulations and testing requirements were suspended, so companies were free to use benzene and nobody would know.
We already know for sure that some companies did use benzene, and its not hard to imagine companies switching to a cheaper, lower grade source for their alcohol.
In any case, the government simultaneously saying "Its okay to put benzene in hand sanitizer" and "Everyone should constantly disinfect with hand sanitizer" was not a good move.
I worry about the real thing hitting someday. When the discussions start again and people refuse to do the most basic things (yes, some of them obviously nonsense and some of them perhaps in hindsight) and the conspiracy theories spreading and everybody being a hobby virologist, and when we realize that a significant fraction of us will die and society will collapse and we could have prevented it but now it's too late. Then it won't help me anymore to say "told you so". But at least society will deserve its collapse.
I think you're really underplaying this. If the FDA hadn't suspended the rules about benzene, then fine. No biggy.
But the government literally encouraged people to slather themselves with carcinogens on a hunch that it might help with COVID.
I would even be fine with it if we had proof that hand sanitizer was the most effective way to stop COVID, and then the FDA relaxed the regulations secure in the knowledge that it would save lives.
But COVID is airborne, hand sanitizer does basically nothing to protect against it, and people are going to die from leukemia as a result of all this for no reason.
And we won't have time for waiting for proof that it does or doesn't work. Of course in hindsight everybody is smart. But when the big one hits, there is no time for hindsight. By then we're all dead (or deep into a civil war).
Start with cautious. Adjust/relax rules when knowledge becomes available. Sanitizing your hands and wearing masks are the obvious immediate solution.
You make it sound like all companies suddenly poured toxic waste over the population, ordered by the government. Maybe it's not the government that was exaggerating here.
You may find it interesting to learn the first national hand hygiene guidelines were not published until the 1980s
You will find biblical references to hand washing dating back several thousands years, but i'm not sure you count that
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/ch...
> Based on that data, they inferred that 90 percent of the population was infected in little more than a month.
> While the figure is high, epidemiologists who were not involved with the project said such a rate was plausible. And in January, a leading government epidemiologist said on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that 80 percent of the population had been infected. Some European companies’ operations in China saw infection rates of 90 percent among their employees in December, Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Times in an interview.
Well of course it's not from China in any case.
I think one could say a lot of the reaction of governments around the world was knee-jerk, "let's copy what that other government is doing" kind of thinking. Not that this is specific to the CoVid situation, there's plenty of it going on at any given moment.
You pay attention to the news reports showing that despite locking down the passengers of the Pacific Princess cruise ship in their cabins, the disease continued to spread from cabin to cabin?
What other theory than airborne spread fits that data?
I knew earlier than that. I considered buying a hazmat suit but realised it was a meme and settled for buying some masks etc in early 2020.
Going by the comments at least.