"Ah shit, here we go again..."
But seriously, if we did have another similar viral outbreak as COVID-19, what do you think will go better than last time, or worse?
But seriously, if we did have another similar viral outbreak as COVID-19, what do you think will go better than last time, or worse?
The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't.
The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic.
... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?
Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.
Deaths of Immediate family or a few close friends. Most people didn't think they would die and the overwhelming majority didn't.
For a lot of people, I think their intuitive reaction works out pretty close to chance of death vs years lost due to quarantine.
This means that beyond the family, friends, co-workers and other professional relations, and "the village/church" so to speak it actually doesn't matter at the individual level what happens to those outside of that circle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
Which honestly probably plays into the perception a lot, as anything with lower mortality becomes probability rather than self experience.
And if there's one thing that the lottery has taught us -- most people are terrible at intuiting correctly about probability.
It could be 1:1,000 or 1:10,000 or 1:1,000,000, and it'd essentially be the same to someone who relies on their gut perception.
My elderly parents wanted to keep seeing people, even if they were exposed. They said their remaining life expectancy was probably 10 years. They weren't going sacrifice a few of those precious years for even a 5% mortality rate.
Many of them still don't blame not getting the vaccine.
The fault is instead with hospitals not prescribing hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
This is for want of a nail stuff.
If anything, it highlighted the mental health crisis going on from the lack of actual community due to a lack of family and religious connections that have decimated by no longer being just down the street and now require a 15+ minute drive, thanks to the isolating nature of the car.
And on top of that, thanks to the mobile phone, there's no spontaneous visits from what community is left.
This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)
People seem far more affected by the economic fallout, inflation, etc to do it all again.
You sure about that?
Seems more like "the anti-maskers are inside the house." https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1gsgjdz...
When the CDC Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee is recommending against N95s for respiratory illness, that's not a great sign.
Only myocarditis seems to have been possible with just "long COVID," and that is still unclear in cases without hospitalization. It's also possible that it might be a side effect of the vaccine, too - the science on all of this is very messy and needless to say it's a political hot potato.
So yes, modifying your behavior because you think you might get brain damage from COVID is an irrational fear.
shows ~5% of the somewhat young population with long covid, 1% with significant impairment. It's not a death sentence but it's definitely bad.
Seems pretty sad.
If the response to COVID was more appropriate we wouldn't be in this situation.
Which - by the way - was predicted countless times early on in the pandemic. That, if the public health response was too overboard, people will just ignore it the next time around. Crying wolf and all that.
So like, congratulations.
You know, that sort of thing.
Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around.
What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).
The FDA screwed the pooch with testing. Many institutions could do tests, but the FDA wanted to maintain control and there process was flawed.
Operation Warp speed got a vaccine, but it went from Sterilizing vaccine, to lessen symptoms and hospitalization.
They failed to explain the difference between vaccine side effects and disease effects. Myocarditis? Could be a side effect of either. Perhaps they should have developed a test to determine which?
They let an idiot spout nonsense on TV and no one on stage correct him or clarified, letting the issue become political.
And have they really clarified what we are dealing with. A supposed respiratory virus that causes, myocarditis, neurological issues, stroke , blood clots , and multiple organ failures - is that really a respiratory virus.
Then we’ve declared victory too soon. And everything has left a bad taste in our mouths, such that no one will accept a lockdown again unless the disease has a 20% mortality rate. Ebola could break out and some people would compare the bleeding to lots of paper cuts.
With a more broadly lethal virus, they would have fared badly, but with what happened, it appears correct.
"...the Danish and Norwegian agencies were opposed to closing borders and schools, but political considerations trumped their concerns. Even in Britain, where the popular perception is that the government eventually agreed to a lockdown because scientific advisers called for it, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s powerful political adviser Dominic Cummings pressed the government’s independent scientific advisers to recommend faster and broader lockdown measures."
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/sweden-during-pandemic#
"Polls in March and April 2020 showed that more than 70 percent of Swedes trusted the public health agency and in January 2022, 68 percent did."
"By early July 2020, Sweden had not suffered the 82,000 deaths that the models had assumed, but 5,455—less than 7 percent of what was predicted."
On the other hand:
"By July 1, 2020, Sweden had experienced 517 COVID-19 deaths per million people, which was lower than Italy and Spain but as much as 5 to 10 times higher than its geographically and culturally closest neighbors, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. This made Sweden’s approach to COVID-19 look like a fiasco."
However:
"Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland."
"After all was said and done, astonishingly, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries, and less than half that of the United States."
"The world economy was 2.9 percent smaller after 2021 than it would have been according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecast before the pandemic; the Eurozone 2.1 was percent smaller, and the U.S. economy 1.2 percent smaller. The Swedish economy was 0.4 percent bigger. This is even more exceptional since the Swedish government introduced much less fiscal stimulus than most other countries."
More importantly, general vaccine hesitance was averted:
"In 2020 the Swedish childhood vaccination rate was 97.2—up by a tenth of a percentage point from the year before."
"Sweden’s alternative model was to rely more on recommendations, have faith in voluntary adaptations to the pandemic, and try to keep as much of society up and running as possible. Based on what we now know, this laissez faire approach seems to have paid off."
- Poverty (economic shrinkage) also causes excess deaths
- Herd immunity for a moderately lethal virus is very much a thing
The issue at the beginning of the pandemic was... nobody knew how lethal COVID-19 was at population scale (or how lethal it might become).
If it was less-lethal and wouldn't become more lethal, the winning move was to minimize restrictions, keep the economy humming, and be okay with many people getting infected quickly.
If it was more-lethal or became more lethal, the above would leave a country fucked, with absolutely no way of reversing course short of a China style "everything stops" lockdown. Which would cause major economic pain and excess mortality as a consequence of that.
So gambling with an entire country's population... which choice do you make? Impossible call to be "right" about.
... in reality, ignorant politicians will override them, more often than not.
Restaurants and bars were closed until Feb. 2021 (with a brief reprieve in fall 2020) and heavily restricted (capacity restrictions, curfews) for months longer.
Schools were mostly shut down with some brief windows of reopening until Sept. 2021. Yes 2021, so 18 months. Masks were still required in schools for several months longer.
Masks were required on the subway until Sept. 2022. Yes 2022, so 30 months.
So adults were living under severe restrictions for nearly a year, and kids in public school for a year and a half. We were living under some form of restrictions for two and a half years.
So that's better.
Like 80% of COVID deaths were over age 65. For young people with no comorbidities, COVID was mostly benign. Magnitude aside, that's more or less a normal disease.
Polio was paralyzing thousands of healthy children every year with no end in sight. People freak out way more about something like that.
Right. Which the general public figured out - accurately - about a month into the lockdowns.
People will self-isolate for a week or two the next time around, but it's going to have to be a very different disease before we permit ridiculous extended lockdowns again.
Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.
we won't be as blindsided or unprepared as we were by covid for this one
Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."
> specifically which experts
Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.
Your timeline makes no sense. Fauci or anyone would not have been talking about boosters for _years_ after lockdowns started. Booster of what? No vaccine existed.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s...
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/st...
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/30/822448199/how-15-days-became-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/covid-a-year-later-trumps-15...
In no uncertain terms, your obtuse dismissal of history that most of us here literally witnessed with our own eyes is appalling.
Everyone in a position of power, including Trump and Fauci, fucked up because everyone wanted to use covid for political ends. Noone is going to trust the government, Trump or otherwise, the next time and for good reason.
What part of Fauci (and many others) being a member of the Coronavirus Task Force do you not understand?
For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.
Covid should not have been politicized, regardless where you are on the spectrum.
This is an enormous claim to toss out without support. You’d need to start by establishing what you’re even referring to since, for example, speech was not regulated and it’s unclear why people who wanted to get rid of Trump would have given him “unprecedented” power so you’d want to explain that theory a bit more.
And yet your links do not contain the word "booster" anywhere in the text (in the npr one the word appears in headlines it wants me to read next, but they're _way_ later in timeline as I expected).
So, what is appalling about what I said then?
Hint: You cannot.
You’ll find Trump and his appointed Surgeon General (who is also the ONLY person in authority who said concretely “masks don’t work” instead of “we don’t know if masks work,” which was true)
As we can see in the video, the experts knew from the get-go that 15 days wouldn't be enough. But they named the policy/slogan that way anyway in the hope that it would improve cooperation "oh it's just 15 days, we can all do it!".
I think it's fair to say that the population shouldn't take such slogan as being absolute during an evolving unprecedented situation. But it's also fair to say that the experts (or at least the politicians) were being deliberately misleading and, rightly or wrongly, some people felt duped/lied to once they realized that.
Calling them dumb for feeling duped by an official slogan isn't helping anyone. Let's agree that things could/should have been communicated better and let's all learn from it so that history doesn't repeat itself.