Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

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I live in a relatively wealthy town and most people here had a pretty safe series of lockdowns (bit hair-raising for me as a freelancer but ehh). We are collectively massively pro-vaccine; I know only two people who loudly resisted (and one of them nearly died in hospital from COVID).

But I can tell you that our collective sense of (unusually strong) community has taken six years since the first lockdown (four and a half years since the end of mask restrictions) to truly return to what it was before.

So even in this quite cushioned place I think we didn't really return to a sense of proper ordinary community positivity for quite a long time (it helps that we had a pretty great summer). Last summer things still felt very disjointed.

Kids, young adults, I can assure you, resent what happened and how poorly we managed it.

In other towns where community was weak, a lot of damage has been done, and you can see that in how little collective spirit there is in dealing with new challenges. Even around where I live, things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely. We have done damage to young people by simply deleting community things we benefited from that they no longer will.

Kids here don't resent covid happened. If they resent it at your place, it is on adults. But of course it is not exactly the same as before, people adapted and carried some adaptation with them. I work a lot from home and I am not giving it up unless I really have to for example.

For years now, kids go to school as before, they go to do sports as before and those whose parents dont allow unlimited gaming meet each other in person.

> In other towns where community was weak, [...] things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely

That has nothing to do with covid or covid handling. This is about your community not wanting to pay community services regardless of covid.

> If they resent it at your place, it is on adults.

Isn’t that exactly what I said? I mean, who else would it be on?

> That has nothing to do with covid or covid handling. This is about your community not wanting to pay community services regardless of covid.

No, it’s the result of cynical regional government exploiting how long communities took to bounce back from a series of mismanaged lockdowns to claw back some money. But that is not the point. The point is it is another reason young people resent how adults handled COVID and direct consequences. These systems needed time to recover footfall. Instead adults fucked it up gor kids.

Of course kids and young adults resent it: a part of their childhood and formative years sucked ass.

But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, it’s towards the reality. It sucks covid happened and it shouldn’t have. But there’s nothing that could have been done to save their youth; it was already ruined for those years.

I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen and instead a few million more people died, would they have preferred that? I doubt it, especially considering such a situation would inevitably result in even stricter restrictions going forward. After all, lockdown was a reaction. If you make the thing it’s reacting to even bigger, even more of a problem, then… well… the reaction will be more extreme.

> But the resentment isn’t towards the handling,

Oooooh yes it is. They are so mad at how badly we handled it. And they are right to be.

> I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen

That isn't their complaint. Their complaint is not the first one (except that in our case in the UK it was idiotically weeks late and major sporting events happened; the older ones understand how stupid that was). It's the fact that we subsequently undermined it, and then did it again. And again. And again.

I kind of touched on this. Lockdown was a reaction. If it didn’t happen, then the thing it’s reacting to would have been worse, and then lockdown would have been worse.

No, but the point is not that lockdown happened.

Kids are not angry that there was a lockdown; they understand the science of it (in many cases better than adults) because it was a pretty rich topic of conversation in their tedious remote lessons.

They are angry that we fucked up the first lockdown (rolling it out too late after demonstrably obviously bad decisions like letting major sporting events continue, followed by utterly stupid measures that undermined it after it was lifted). They understand there had to be another winter lockdown; they thought we undermined that by having stupid, arbitrary "zones" when another national lockdown would have been safer.

The older ones also IMO pretty correctly feel resentful being stuck individually in their expensive rooms at universities when they are not a high risk population and could at least have been quarantined collectively or just provided distance learning without wasting massive amounts of money on accommodation.

Believe me when I say, young people have absolutely got the receipts. They know what happened, why it happened, and who fucked up.

Millions of people die because of covid in Australia? Is that what you’re suggesting the outcome would’ve been if we didn’t lockdown?

That’s basically all the elderly or an entire cohort, I’m really struggling to believe that.

The US response to covid was much less locking down than Australia.

If you look at the "deaths by covid" graphs for 2020 and 2021, Australia barely rates a blip. Meanwhile, the US has 850 000 deaths in those first two years.

Sorry, I’m saying this from a US perspective, where we had 1 million or so covid deaths. We also had lockdowns, but it was state dependent.

The point is: if the lockdown didn’t happen, would the outcome be better? Remember, it’s not like Covid would go away. It’s not like we get teleported to an alternate dimension in which everything is okay.

Lockdown was a reaction.

I think people would like for Covid to have never happened, and they think that if lockdown didn’t happen then it would be just like before Covid. No, it wouldn’t be, it would still be a new world. That much was inevitable.

In the U.S. we hardly had what you’d call “lockdowns”, more like government suggestions that you shouldn’t expose yourself or your loved ones to a potentially deadly virus. Restaurant goers, teachers, commuters, and others wanted to avoid sickness and death, so many organically avoided activities that would leave them exposed.

That the path we took was the only path is where I draw issue. It was a choice to lockdown, I think it was a bad one. Covid killed even with lockdowns & vaccines. Birdflu is apparently ravaging Australian bird populations, just because it hasn't jumped species yet doesn't mean it won't... maybe we should lockdown just in case right?

I'm not in a position of power to make the calls as if something like this was to happen again, I'd only caution we look the prior experience to be a guide for what comes instead of pretending outbreaks haven't happened before.

I'm saying that if did not lock down, then there would have been millions more deaths, and then an even more severe lockdown would occur. It's an inevitability, that's just how life and the world works sometimes. Sometimes bad things happen and they're just bad, and there's no way to make them good. Covid was one of those things. Covid was bad, a lot of people died, and that's that. There's no alternate reality in which Covid exists and everything is fine. That's a dream. A nice dream, but a dream.

We locked down AFTER people started dying, not before!

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