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Comment by bigfudge | Hacker News Reader

This sort of argument is reductio ad absurdum. At the start of COVID there was no 99.999% sure scientific evidence about anything. Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles, both on the knowledge of the virus and on behavioural norms among the public, and especially key groups who needed to follow the rules to save lives.

Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.

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> Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles

I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made.

Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions.

There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened.

It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.

"never let a good crisis go to waste" - politician in an administration i won't name to avoid flaming.

> Knowing where to draw the line is hard

Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way.

So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.

How was avoiding open areas in small groups and washing your groceries first principles? They also claimed that you shouldn’t wear a mask but instead focus on washing your hands. It’s unfortunate how many don’t want to learn from the mistakes made during the epidemic.

Sorry, science only gets one single shot to be 100% correct on everything. Otherwise it’s lies and misinformation to advance the science on a specific topic. Heliocentrism is a MSM misinformation propaganda campaign.

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