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During the pandemic I read various descriptions of what disease outbreaks were like during various times. Including descriptions of the plague of 1665. What is interesting is that the approach to managing outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases hasn't really changed that much. Because we discovered relatively early on what helps. (Though we no longer nail houses shut with infected people inside them and post armed guards outside).
What policies would you suggest to manage outbreaks of infectious diseases? How many deaths do you think is acceptable? Can you pick a number?
It will be interesting to see what happens during the next pandemic. Because there will be pandemics in the future. Do you think that a population disinclined to act cautiously in a situation where correct information will be scarce for months, possibly years, is a good thing or do you think it might represent a problem.
The most sinister thing a government could possibly do would be to do as little as possible and just accept loss of human life.
It was mostly ignored, worse, its impact was minimized by upper class journals, all the while hospitals were running out of space.
(So comparisons with Covid are hard to make, since the response was so different.)
The medical sector paid attention after the fact though, and supposedly the reaction to it basically created the (postmodern?) discipline of epidemiology !
Given the the world still exists, I think the pre-2022 policies were a gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in the Soviet Union.
It's also possible that both instituting a lockdown and subsequently removing that lockdown were both essentially correct. While I believe the government waited far too long to remove lockdown restrictions I don't think instituting them in the first place was the wrong decision.
There's a tendency amongst folks who have strong opinions on covid measures to create false dichotomies and ignore how context changed over time. Lockdowns appear to have been a good idea during some of the disease (i.e. before we knew how to treat it, and before vaccines became readily available), and became less important as the context changed.
Yeah, and those people have the habit of ignoring how bad things got at the start in a few countries (Italy and France come to mind, but there were others) where bodies were piling, there were military hospitals deployed in parking lots, hospitalised patients were being transported to other countries, people were dying, and there was a general lack of clarity and understanding of how to treat sick people, and importantly, lack of medical care capacity to treat them or any others (a friend had their uncle die because the ambulance took a few hours to arrive due to medical services being completely overwhelmed). Any country that looked into those countries and decided "nah, this doesn't concern us because we're better humans" was led by utterly incompetent idiots.
Did some countries overreact with their measures? Maybe, but based on the limited information available in 2020, overreaction was a better idea than doing nothing.
You could watch consent manufacturing in real time as former hardliner outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic started to insert timid opinion pieces that questioned school lockdowns and masking of children.
The Ukraine invasion may also have played an additional role in getting Western leaders focus on important things again.
If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like
It is tempting to conclude from this that you are saying immunization, through vaccines and post infection, played no role and that the situation before and after the lockdown was essentially the same in terms of risk of poor health outcomes if exposed to covid?
> Given the the world still exists,
Yes, the world where there were vaccines and lockdown. Not the alternative version where these things didn't happen.
> I think the pre-2022 policies were a > gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an > eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in > the Soviet Union.
Two questions:
1) what precisely are you referring to when you say "comparable to what happened in the soviet union"?
2) In the face of an outbreak of a contagious disease, would you be comfortable with government not implementing any restrictions that might slow or stop the spread of disease?
Would your answer to question #2 change if the disease in question was Marburg or Ebola? If yes, why?
He also deserves to be locked up.
As for COVID policies, those were pretty universal among industrialized nations. and if you think those were Russian style I’d say you know very little about Russia (I’ve lived there so I know what I’m talking about). Our COVID policies were nothing like China — that was authoritarian.