Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense.
…and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
And that is with the biggest lockdowns seen in human history.
It's ridiculous to me that people seem to downplay the severity.
And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse.
Many things can be true at once.
Wrong. Here is a meta study which found that 79% of studies determined that lockdowns substantially reduced transmission:
And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really.
I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.
> shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts
Seems like you should be directing this comment at yourself.
But you know what? Fuck those people. They are wrong. And so are you. None of our response to Covid made any sense at all. The math never made sense. And it never will. All your “science” and “data” amount to nothing but a pile of appeals to authority. And even then it was the layer of tribal politics that really sealed in the multi-year mass hysteria.
Pull your head out of your ass and it’s clear as day. None of it adds up. Sorry. You are quite simply, wrong. Wake up dude. You got tricked. You are wrong.
Why was “reducing transmission” so much more important than providing children a sanctuary from abusers at home by way of open schools? Why was “reducing transmission” a greater problem to solve for than “elderly dying alone in an assisted living facility”.
Your study is a perfect example of the extremely myopic focus on COVID. It was as if absolutely nothing else was allowed to be a priority.
Also I’m curious, if this paper is true why did Florida or Sweden not have dead bodies lining the streets? They either ended their lockdowns earlier than most or didn’t have them at all? Did Florida feed them all to the gators? Was there a hidden “mass death” in Sweden I wasn’t aware of?
Or perhaps is “reduced transmission” not a good metric?