[flagged]
When Y2K passed without incident, it wasn't because the threat wasn't real - it was because thousands of us worked tirelessly behind the scenes to avert it. Similarly with pandemic surveillance - the data systems we built helped inform decisions that saved lives. Those decisions were often described as authoritarian overreach by people who pointed to the mortality they averted as evidence.
The irony is painful: The more effectively we prevent a crisis, the more people claim there was never a real threat. Those who dismiss these efforts as authoritarian overreach are enjoying the very safety that our 'overreaction' provided them.
Analyst visits his lumberjack cousin one Christmas at his cabin. Notices the cousin puts an amount of fire in the fireplace, which is correlated with the outside temperature, while the inside temperature remains constant (uncorrelated with firewood or outdoor temperature). Analyst wonders what his cousin is wasting all his wood for.
Whereas with COVID we don't have that. Particularly since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily so the compulsory aspects are quite hard to justify. Eg, if a fellow want to live as a hermit they can just do that. The government doesn't need to shut down big chunks of the economy for them to go into seclusion.
And then there were all those vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers. Turns out they didn't. Without that, the justification for a mandate is flimsy even assuming that there is good medical evidence.
The medical establishment should have been championing against these measures and, charitably assuming they were, they really weren't visible enough in their opposition. I can imagine a lot of voters in the US would be asking "why do we fund these people?".
With novel diseases, it's usually impossible to have accurate enough estimates of the numerical parameters in advance to determine if lockdowns and vaccine mandates are going to work. And the compliance rate is fundamentally political. A few key individuals, such as politicians and judges, can have an outsized effect on it. Containment that would have worked otherwise may fail due to the actions of those individuals.
The useful part of quarantines was to protect hospital capacity. We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances. (I think we should. Particularly with vaccines. Modelled off the Arizona stupid motorist law.)
> vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers
Do you have a medical source that claimed this? It seemed to mostly be right wingers who didn’t understand the polio vaccine was also non-sterilising. (In some forms, negatively so.)
No, I just observed that everyone I know got vaccinated, then got COVID.
But if you want me to throw a PDF at you, "the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people" & "Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Which matches pretty closely what I see in real life. Before vaccinations, everyone was going to get COVID. After vaccinations, everyone ... got COVID. No change in transmission profile.
> We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances.
Yes, people should be able to take responsibility for their own health rather than have the economy burned down around their ears. Maybe the CDC should have been pointing that out? Something COVID-like is going to happen in the future, it isn't that unusual an event. A respiratory pandemic is probably a 1:50, 1:20 year style event given how interconnected the world is now.
Or at least, we never tested positive, and had no mysterious flu-like ailments that struck us down for days or weeks. Either we were exceptionally lucky, or the vaccine worked.
Best exemplified by the anti-vax movement. They don't see measles anymore, so they think measles isn't a threat, and then they read some "alternative" health site saying that vaccines cause autism, and they don't vaccinate their kids.
I mean, it is probably too late for that, but the mandatory naivity with which these people were treated were contributing issue.
This administration is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle class up. If your doctor won’t call you when a pandemic emerges, you’re a net payer.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/growing-economic-segregat...
[2] https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.128...
It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced. The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the outcomes are the same as they've ever been.
There's also probably technology/knowledge effects, new things that are worth paying a lot for, people staying relatively healthy but getting fragile in the process, etc.
Doing so limits trade and restrict peoples free movement, but those costs were minor compared to the pandemic. The costs were also smaller than initially expected, a lesson that future leaders should remember.
For example China is authoritarian but has busses, trains and an open border (I've been to visit, I wish we could handle that sort of industrial excellence in the West).
One can hope those kind of lessons will carry over to future pandemics if they are of similar nature as covid.
Concretely, how do you do this when you don't know much about the pathogen?
> the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their credibility because the government used their work in vain
Eh, I think the propaganda machine did more damage than any actually poor decisions.
The right is one giant field of astroturf, paid for by hidden billionaires, acted out by bots and the easily duped, and disseminated over social media