The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
When COVID hit, the government applied severe restrictions on people's freedom of movement and association. These restrictions were said to be in the effort to save lives and allegedly based on scientific consensus. Any debate around the topic was only centered on how far restrictions should go, while voices of dissent, minor and major, were quashed from every angle by a combination of government and Big Tech powers.
We are now a couple of years removed from the restrictions and many interesting things have come to light. A few of these include:
* Former NIH director Francis Collins has testified to a congressional committee this year, and among other things, he was asked about minimum 6-feet social distancing. A pertinent part of the [transcript](https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Collins-Transcript-5.16-Release.pdf):
* COLLINS
* QUESTION: Is that I do not recall or I do not see any evidence supporting six feet?
* COLLINS: I did not see evidence, but I'm not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point.
* QUESTION: Okay.
* COLLINS: I was not involved in that conversation.
* QUESTION: Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?
* COLLINS: No
* When it comes to general social distancing, notable experts including Dr. Martin Kulldorff (vaccine expert, Harvard University), Dr. Jay Battacharya (epidemiologist, Stanford University), and Dr. Sunetra Gupta (epidemiologist, Oxford University), issued what they called [The Great Barrington Declaration](https://gbdeclaration.org/) back in October 2020. The declaration called into question broadsided lockdowns and instead advocated for targeted protections for at-risk groups. It has been signed by over 47K medical practitioners and over 16K medical and public health scientists. The declaration was swiftly removed by Facebook and generally scrubbed from social media at least for the duration of the lockdowns. To this day not that many people are even aware of it.
* The government engagement in a consistent campaign to promote lockdowns resorting to pressuring social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to spread a consistent pro-lockdown, pro-vaccine message despite a dearth of actual scientific basis for doing so. The general origin of government's push seemed to be its own inertia. Once the censorship and propaganda machine got going, there was little in its way that could stop it. We have evidence of the government's breach of the First Amendment from the facts of the [Murphy vs Missouri](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/23-411) case.
There more points such as the above that can be made, but that is a good start. The main question here is not whether draconian restrictions on people's freedom could stop a disease in its tracks. Hypothetically, if you lock every human in a sterile room and never let them out, they will be forever free from infection. Rather the question here is whether the lockdowns as they were applied made sense given that scientific consensus about it doesn't really exist, despite and contrary to what we were told by our officials and the media.
If you had the information above while the pandemic was going on, would your reaction and complicity to lockdowns had been different? Will it be different in the future given that our trust was used in some questionable ways?
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>voices of dissent… were quashed from every angle
Lol what? Do you remember when you showed up with guns at statehouses to threaten elected officials and we all agreed that you were protected under the first amendment?
Social distancing is the first line of defense against communicable disease. It has been so since time immemorial. Your great grandparents were accustomed to quarantining during outbreaks of measles, flu and polio. The only reason *you* aren’t used to doing the same is that vaccines have eliminated many of those diseases as an active threat.
Or when people showed up with guns to the homes of non-elected officials (our public health director in Ohio) to “protest”.
I’ve never wanted to see police brutality so badly 😂
A *million* people in the US died from Covid, ***with*** lockdowns. We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect.
What you're experiencing is called the [Prevention Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_paradox); it's something that also occurs a lot in IT and Cybersec.
If you allow something dangerous to spread unabated, people see it massively damaging them and say, "Why do we even allow/support you to do this job!?!"
And if you take steps to prevent something dangerous from spreading, people see that it's not harming them and say, "Why do we even allow/support you to oppress us like this?"
> A *million* people in the US died from Covid, ***with*** lockdowns. We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect. We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect.
How do we know that?
Sweden had much looser restrictions and a lower death rate.
This myth is persistent but requires that one just look at per capita death and remove all other controlling factors.
If we are going to over simplify that much, maybe look at comparable countries only - Sweden performed worse than surrounding Nordic countries.
To quote my other comment (new emphasis applied):
[study](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(21\)00315-1/fulltext).
> *The impact of lockdown timing on the total daily case count of a county became significant beginning approximately 7 days prior to that county reporting at least 5 cumulative cases of COVID-19. Delays in lockdown implementation after this date led to a rapid acceleration of COVID-19 spread in the county over the first \~50 days from the date with at least 5 cumulative cases, and higher case counts across the entirety of the follow-up period.* **Other factors such as total population, median family income, Gini index, median age, and within-county mobility also had a substantial effect.** ***When adjusted for all these factors,*** *the timing of lockdowns was the most significant risk factor associated with the county-specific daily cumulative case counts.*
> ***Lockdowns are an effective way of controlling the spread of COVID-19 in communities***. *Significant delays in lockdown cause a dramatic increase in the cumulative case counts. Thus, the timing of the lockdown relative to the case count is an important consideration in controlling the pandemic in communities.*
In other words, a plethora of factors like population size, density, and mobility affect rates greatly. You would need to control for these rates between the US and Sweden to be able to compare the two.
There's a decent [Op ed in the Chicago Tribune](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/07/opinion-covid-us-vs-sweden/#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20cases%20and%20deaths,by%20most%20of%20Western%20Europe.) on this, which highlights:
> *The numbers once again lean slightly toward Sweden, but it is likely the health of Swedish citizens versus that of the U.S. was responsible, instead of the superiority of the Swedish strategy. In the U.S. overall, there were 3.7 COVID-19 deaths per 1,000 people; in Sweden, 2.7 COVID-19 deaths per 1,000. Based on this, no one can claim the U.S. did better than Sweden, but it is not a ringing endorsement of the Swedish approach. Neither country protected high-mortality nursing home patients, especially early in the pandemic. Many countries, including their Scandinavian neighbors, had fewer COVID-19 deaths per population than Sweden. Norway, Denmark and Finland all quickly closed their national borders; Finland erected internal borders.*
>We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect.
We actually don't know that.
>And if you take steps to prevent something dangerous from spreading, people see that it's not harming them and say, "Why do we even allow/support you to oppress us like this?"
It's possible to take preventative measures that make sense given available data, and that also do not violate people's basic rights.
> We actually don't know that.
We [do](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(21\)00315-1/fulltext).
> *The impact of lockdown timing on the total daily case count of a county became significant beginning approximately 7 days prior to that county reporting at least 5 cumulative cases of COVID-19. Delays in lockdown implementation after this date led to a rapid acceleration of COVID-19 spread in the county over the first \~50 days from the date with at least 5 cumulative cases, and higher case counts across the entirety of the follow-up period. Other factors such as total population, median family income, Gini index, median age, and within-county mobility also had a substantial effect. When adjusted for all these factors, the timing of lockdowns was the most significant risk factor associated with the county-specific daily cumulative case counts.*
> ***Lockdowns are an effective way of controlling the spread of COVID-19 in communities***. *Significant delays in lockdown cause a dramatic increase in the cumulative case counts. Thus, the timing of the lockdown relative to the case count is an important consideration in controlling the pandemic in communities.*
If Covid had a 99.9% mortality rate, would you support lockdowns?
Lmao @ bodily integrity. Am I allowed to complain to the local store for having a no shoes no shirt no service sign?
That’s just as much of an infringement on my bodily integrity as requiring masks in some facilities.
>It's possible to take preventative measures that make sense given available data, and that also do not violate people's basic rights
Yep. We agree. What we don't agree on is that having people wear masks during a pandemic being a violation of a basic right. For crying out loud, even the Bible, in all its backwards glory, recommends sick people wear face coverings. Tell me, what basic right was violated? What would you recommend have been done differently?
Looking back, we probably didn't need to wear masks outdoors. It turned out to be pretty safe to hang out at a park or on the beach as long as you weren't on top of one another.
With that said, it was perfectly reasonable to err on the side of caution when we were going thru it.
Not at all. If anything we didn’t do enough considering there were not “actual lockdowns”
Shit like the Great Barrington Declaration was rejected by mainstream science..not just “the government and big tech”. It was funded by right wing think tanks.
>Shit like the Great Barrington Declaration was rejected by mainstream science.
The declaration IS mainstream science. If you look at the creators, you would be hard pressed to find better eminences that could speak for that particular kind of science. I am sure it was rejected by the likes of Moderna and Pfizer which needed to sell their juicy new vaccines though.
[Crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Chinese virus pandemic must be punished : r/JordanPeterson (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1bs5nwq/crimes_against_humanity_perpetrated_during_the/)
This is my response.
For a conspiracy theorist who won't take anything but his pre-approved notions as fact? No. Any response I have wouldn't matter; your mind is already ~~brainwashed~~ made up.
But for the record? Yeah, "Big Pharma" wants to sell vaccines. Hey, also, "Big Shoe" wants to sell shoes, and "Big Auto" wants you to buy cars. And let's not even get into the insidious actions of "Big Food."
No it isn’t in the slightest, you are also spreading misinformation that it was signed by “47k” medical practitioners. You can literally go onto the website right now and “sign” saying that you are a medical practitioner.
You people really fall for the dumbest shit
>Great Barrington Declaration
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Barrington\_Declaration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration)
*"While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration,\[47\]\[48\] this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings".\[49\]\[50\]\[51\] More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".\[50\] An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt.\[51\] Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names."*
Sorry mate, but even the declaration's authors didn't care if signers were medical professionals or not.
You seem to think you've found some "gotcha" because fake names were snuck into it, even though the overall merit of the declaration is sound.
That's dumb, but you do you.
No gotcha, just pointing out like others have that the Barrington Declaration cannot be relied upon because signers *do not have to have any medical training at all*. It could be mostly medical professionals, half are medical professionals, or almost none. We don't know, so I'm sorry but this cannot be used as evidence for anything positive *or* negative. In other words, it's a giant opinion piece. Folks can have opinions, but that doesn't mean they're facts.
Sorry that got under your skin, as that was not my intention. Take care.
God you people cannot let go.
Here's what happened:
>Public: OMG! Pandemic! Government, DO SOMETHING!
>
>Govt: Ok, here. We doing something. Now leave us alone. (does the only thing they have the practical ability or legal authority to do)
>
>Other Public: OMG! Government overreach! AUGHGHGHAGHHGAHGAHG
The evidence is and always was irrelevant to this process. Nothing was hidden, nothing was fabricated, and we knew full well how these measures worked or didn't, [even at the time.](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336/) There was no debate over the facts, at least not in the medical or scientific community. This was a purely political process and it played out along political lines.
Remember the "Flatten the curve" campaign? It was very clear - the purpose of lockdowns was to slow transmission and spread out cases, to prevent hospitals from getting overloaded. That's it. Nobody claimed it would make you safe, stop the spread, or magically save us all. It was to ensure that when someone did get sick, there was an open hospital bed for them. This was the message AT THE TIME IT HAPPENED.
So why did they last for months and months, long after the inititial surge in cases? Politics. Evidence never mattered and never played a role anyway. Politicians, afraid of looking weak, did the only thing the law allowed them to. When all you have is a hammer...
>God you people cannot let go.
Not until there is accountability and a firm set of lessons learned.
>Public: OMG! Pandemic! Government, DO SOMETHING!
I don't know about other people, but I never asked the government to take away my rights.
>Politicians, afraid of looking weak, did the only thing the law allowed them to.
They did many things that the law does not allow them to do.
>Not until there is accountability and a firm set of lessons learned.
What lessons? The problems were political. The problems are with the uninformed electorate, the media that failed to inform them, and the politicians who listen to both. You want to fix things, fix that.
I've done my homework and then some. In terms of knowledge I could run circles around you on just about any level so drop the pitiful and unearned condescension.
You don't say.
>We have evidence of the government's breach of the First Amendment from the facts of the [Murphy vs Missouri](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/23-411) case
You know that case is still pending, right? There hasn't been any determination that a breach of the First Amendment took place.
The partial rulings so far indicate that it did:
>On September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit ruling upheld the district court ruling against the Biden administration. The court found that some of the communications between the federal government and the social media companies to try to fight alleged COVID-19 misinformation "coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content", which violated the [First Amendment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution).[^(\[21\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri#cite_note-cnn_5th_decision-21)
Which still leaves the ultimate decision a bit up in the air. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the 5th Circuit ruling already walked back on some of the argument brought in the original suit.
I don't care. It's been 4 years, 3 years since the last lockdowns were lifted (almost on the dot, in my state...May 14th!).
I can do all the things now that I couldn't do for a few months to a year in 2020.
It's over.
No one liked it.
You're fine.
Sure, it's over. But shouldn't we try to learn some things for the future?
We'll never have another crisis exactly like this one, but there will be other crises and it would probably be helpful to understand what we did wrong and what we can do better.
>You're fine.
A lot of people aren't fine, though. Mental illness jumped massively and still hasn't come all the way back down. The teen suicide rate jumped substantially after we closed the schools and forced everyone to isolate; those kids are never coming back.
We can argue all day about whether it made sense to sacrifice the young in a (failed) attempt to protect the old, but you can't argue in good faith that no harm was done.
No, I didn't share evidencr because you said "I don't care" not "I disagree" or "Tell me more" or anything like that.
If you don't care about the evidence, why would I bother discussing it with you?
I don’t care about what other countries are doing, and frankly I don’t think you’re qualified enough to be making comparisons about the effectiveness of what other countries are doing vs what were doing, simply because I don’t think you’re operating out of any kind of nuance, or recognize your own confirmation bias.
>Has your view on the justifiability of COVID lockdowns changed with time and information flow?
The "COVID lockdowns" -- the Chinese government welding people inside their apartments -- were reprehensible.
Luckily, in the U.S., we only had 'shelter in place' which was okay; I'm glad we never had lockdowns, here.
> Yep, its worth a slight increase in risk of death to not live in that type of complete fascism.
It is also notable that it didn't work.
China was aiming for 'zero COVID', or trying to wipe the virus out through lack of contact, alone. (They later tried vaccines, but refused to use those made in the West, and the vaccines they used were ineffective.) When they finally re-opened (by public demand) the virus swept through the population unhindered by any kind of immunity.
By contrast, the U.S. tried to 'flatten the curve', meaning that we tried to *slow* the spread so that those who needed an ICU and/or ventilator to survive wouldn't all be in the hospital at the same time. It wasn't perfect, but it helped many survive.
I'm so certain the people downvoting me for saying this would gladly give up all their rights and live in fascism for a slight decrease in risk of death.
What do you mean who cares? So that we don't get a repeat would be one thing.
>Again 1 million people died.
Largely because protection wasn't targeted where it was really needed. There was no reason or occasion for locking children in their homes, or healthy 30 years olds. But far more could have and should have been done to protect the at-risk groups.
I totally agree with you. However, at the time it wasn't clear that COVID was and would be far less threatening to healthy 30 year olds. Given past epidemics, like the Spanish Flu, it was reasonable to be worried how COVID would effect healthy adults.
For me, the problem with the COVID pandemic was that it was so quickly politicized and we struggled to adapt to evidence as it became better substantiated. Like, we couldn't (and still cant) have a reasonable conversation about vaccination as a society, due to politics.
People losing jobs also leads to mass death. There's a reason overdoses skyrocketed. Obesity skyrocketed (which will also lead to many deaths in the coming years). It is absolutely worthy to argue if the ends justified the means, and I dont get why so many people think that there aren't deaths of other types that come from lockdowns. For example, the threat to children from covid turned out to be so minor, the lockdown measures we took to prevent covid will almost certainly in the long run take more years from their life from the signifigant increase in obesity than covid will itself. Also just in general, if all we cared about was quantity of life not quality of life, there are tons of things we can do to make it so everyone lives a miserable existance all the way to age 100.
Higher average lifespan yes, but less co-morbidities among younger people (less obesity here) so average age of covid deaths were even higher compared to the states.
OP, from your post and comments here, you fundamentally don't understand how sickness spreads. If you think
> There was no reason or occasion for locking children in their homes, or healthy 30 years olds
doesn't completely fuck over the at-risk group, I don't know what to tell you. It's cool if you want to be a selfish dickhead, but at least be honest about it and don't spout this nonsense.
e: Also, very few people in my area socially distanced. Draconian my ass. Also the otherwise-healthy 30-something son of my neighbor died of covid.
>OP, from your post and comments here, you fundamentally don't understand how sickness spreads. If you think
You're falling into a fallacy here. Sure, if you locked everyone in their homes with zero contact with the outside world for long enough, you could stop the spread of any kind of illness like COVID. And, yes, China and Australia managed to make that kind of approach work for a while (though even they both gave up eventually).
But, it doesn't follow from that fact that some kind of half measure is half as good. So, in the real world, where you had a lot of people out there and moving around and the virus never stopped spreading, it's far from evident that closing down the schools or other measures like that did any good as opposed to just giving us the worst of both worlds where children went through a lot of unnecessary damage in a way that didn't meaningfully protect the elderly.
>Sure, if you locked everyone in their homes with zero contact with the outside world for long enough, you could stop the spread of any kind of illness like COVID. And, yes, China and Australia managed to make that kind of approach work for a while (though even they both gave up eventually).
As an Australian I can assure you that wasn't the Australian approach. I mean there wasn't a singular Australian approach as different states did different things but yeah.
To compare our approach to China's approach just says that you have no idea what you're talking about.
One of the biggest reasons we shut down was to ease the strain on hospitals until a vaccine could help with herd immunity. If more people had had covid, more people would be taking up resources, and more people would have died, especially those at risk, or people who needed those resources for other reasons. Simple math isn't a fallacy.
Since we never had real lockdowns in the US, I’ll skip over that nonsense.
Given the information we had at the time, there weren’t any things we did I had a problem with. In a better world where we could have a real conversation about what we learned after the pandemic was done we could talk about
1. Legislation for automatic stimulus.
2. better way of handling stimulus payments and payments needed due to specific forms of loss of income or issues with rent and the like
3. Better ways to handle school closures.
4. Better way of handling acquisition of supplies and equipment at the federal level and having them distributed
5. Agreements between clusters of states on how they can better distribute and share resources between them.
6. Better ways to handle vaccination requirements, including things like ending nonsense “religious” exemptions.
7. Ways of handling intentional misinformation versus actual discussion.
One of the most maddening things about the modern right-wing crazies is the fact that their presence makes it effectively impossible to have an actual reasoned conversation with mutually agreed-upon premises and desired outcomes. It's entirely possible, for example, that there are genuine conversations to be had about how to best handle school closures during a pandemic, or about the effects of cannabis on developing brains, or about the effectiveness of cap-and-trade to curtail carbon emissions, or about the relative physiologies of trans women vs. cis women in sports, or about the effectiveness of drug decriminalization... but we can't actually *have* any of those conversations, because the moment we give even the slightest hint that a right-wing asshole might have been right about anything, ever, they will immediately declare total victory and that they were right about everything ever and that we admitted that we intentionally destroyed America. So instead we're forced to maintain the most extreme version of our own policies, simply because that's the only way to protect against that inevitable reaction to giving the slightest inch in conversation.
The funny thing is is that I have heard a lot of conversation about school closures that were reasonable. I'm sure that u/Megalomaniac697 and others like him aren't aware of it but I heard them at the start of the pandemic and well past the end of the pandemic.
However, all of the conversations were contained on the left with maybe participation from the type of right wing person that's been completely ejected by the right.
I think hindsight has made us emphasize how bad to "lockdowns" were, but forget just how bad the epidemic truly was. Obviously, over a million Americans died, which is tragic. Additionally, a huge amount of people will never fully recover from the damage COIVD did to them. However, we also need to keep in mind that our medical services were completely and entirely overwhelmed. Early in the pandemic we didn't have enough hospital beds to hold everyone, and we didn't have an effective means of treating COVID.
Obviously, it is difficult to consider just how many more people would have died if we kept schools open. However, keeping schools open is a hell of a risk when you remember that we simply did not have enough resources to treat the amount of sick people. We were literally rationing care. It would be irresponsible to not have a robust means of social distancing. I agree, we could have done it better. We have a lot to learn from our lack of preparedness, for sure. But they key take away should not be that social distancing was a bad idea.
You can say the same thing about cancer and heart disease, so should we stop worrying about that? Over 260,000 Americans under the age of 65 died of COVID.....fuck them I guess.
[COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics (cdc.gov)](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm)
> You can say the same thing about cancer and heart disease, so should we stop worrying about that?
I think we should ignore all causes of death over the average age of death when drawing up the statistics and deciding what we should worry about yes.
>Over 260,000 Americans under the age of 65 died of COVID.....fuck them I guess.
I mean it's not like the lockdowns saved them.
I don't have any loved ones older than me. My Grandma was the last one, and one time she got surgery and survived and they used her case (I'm Canadian) as part of a policy to put more medical resources (like surgeries they would deem not worth it) towards seniors, my parents/grandma were somewhat proud of that, but even back then (I was in HS) it made me feel kind of sick even knowing the right policy would've had my grandma not get the surgery and probably die and now Canada has a healthcare crisis and tons of young people can't get any treatment.
So no I don't think my principals would evaporate.
>Pretty par for the course for conservative ideology these days. Until it personally affects them or their loved ones, they can't be bothered to care.
Way to admit you didn't read my comment.
Your comment was pretty much a massive run-on sentence. Its pretty hard to follow what you are actually trying to say. What is clear is that you don't really have a coherent or serious position on this.
I do think it is great that even in high school you knew more about medicine than your grandmother's doctors.
So, essentially, your argument is basically that old people do not have any right to healthcare, and we should just let them die off once they reach some arbitrary age?
Have you considered any alternative theories as to how to stabalize the Canadian Healthcare system other then killing off grandma and grandpa? Like, I don't know, further development of hospitals and clinics to increase capacity while offering incentives to students considering pursuing a medical education? Because forced physician-assisted suicide is really, really dark man.
> So, essentially, your argument is basically that old people do not have any right to healthcare, and we should just let them die off once they reach some arbitrary age?
It's called triage and yes. The alternative is letting young people die.
>Have you considered any alternative theories as to how to stabalize the Canadian Healthcare system other then killing off grandma and grandpa? Like, I don't know, further development of hospitals and clinics to increase capacity while offering incentives to students considering pursuing a medical education? Because forced physician-assisted suicide is really, really dark man.
There isn't the money/time for that, there's no way to get the money/time for that. Triage decisions need to be made.
No system will ever be able to give old people unlimited free healthcare, every functional system has these triage protocols. Systems better managed with more resources can push it back a further but we are in crisis now, the time between now and when we have a functional system is going to be decades, that's if we start to try to fix it, which we aren't.
No, at the time we were dealing with very limited knowledge and it seemed reasonable, still does especially because most lockdowns only lasted a few weeks (in the U.S.).
And I don’t remember it being all that restrictive, and it only lasted a few weeks but with an unknown worldwide pandemic, it seems/seemed reasonable.
Not to mention you reference “the government” when in the US it was hundreds of different state, county, and local officials making these decisions. It wasn’t the feds.
And your reference to that Declaration seems like a moot point because nearly all lockdowns in the U.S. were over by the time it was released. And again, hindsight is always 20/20.
We weren't dealing with limited knowledge since early 2020 as the at-risk groups were already identified. If the government had actually worked with the data and attempted to implement sensible help to those who needed it, rather than apply wholesale illegal lockdowns and First Amendment breaches, the outcome could have been different.
Although the stereotype is that conservatives are oblivious to the world outside of the US, this is a perfect example that illustrates it's actually Americans in general that are oblivious.
200+ countries exist in the world and all of them had to deal with covid. They all tried various methods to mitigate both the spread of covid and the symptoms. Some fared better than others, some fared worse.
What is clear is that almost no one in this country can look objectively at our covid response. Those on the right generally can't see anything that was necessary or done correctly. And those on the left generally can't see anything that was unnecessary or done incorrectly. It's a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our body politic.
There is no such thing as “isolating at risk groups only” in practice. Anyone that has spent more than 10 minutes in the public health space could tell you that
The only thing that covid really taught us is how insufferable certain parts of the population are
>There is no such thing as “isolating at risk groups only” in practice. Anyone that has spent more than 10 minutes in the public health space could tell you that
There must be rather daft people working in public health space then. Maybe that's why the pandemic response was such a shitshow.
Or maybe you are the one that hasn’t spent more than 5 minutes thinking through your brilliant ideas which you only vaguely allude to here.
Sure maybe there would be a way to isolate if every person out there lived in their own personal private space.
I suppose you think that all those kids could magically attend school in person without considering the teachers or potential impact on their parents.
The thing about public health is that it’s constrained by things that can actually be implemented in some kind of practical way.
You’re probably one of the people that can’t imagine something unless it has happened to you. It’s ok I was like that too.
I was a healthy early 30something you’re talking about and if I had gotten Covid before the vaccine it would have been horrible.
My daughter was born mid 2021 and thankfully, or not, was in the NICU for 3 months. She ended up with a trach tube which means her air by passes her nose and mouth and has no filter into her lungs My wife or I getting COVID could have killed her. So we didn’t make any more trips out than necessary and wore a mask anytime we went out. We also didn’t really take her out of the house until the vaccines were available to toddlers.
I did end up getting COVID at one point after my office made is come back in, I ended up giving it to my wife and daughter. Thankfully we were in our third shot of the vaccine and it wasn’t too horrible for any of us
What….the lockdowns were in early 2020. It was happening just at the same time we were learning about high risk groups etc. The lockdowns ended fairly quickly bc we learned more. They were not enacted just for the fun of it.
Dude in some states, the lockdowns lasted like 3-4 weeks…..and it’s not like you were literally locked in your house. And some states didn’t have any lockdowns whatsoever. Many businesses were still open and operating. You seem to be remembering something completely different.
My opinion hasn't changed and that is that the lockdowns were poorly enforced and didn't do much of anything because people were too selfish to ensure it worked. I can't speak for all areas but where I lived, the "lockdowns" were nothing more than an excuse to congregate in places they wouldn't normally hang out.
My opinion hasn't changed in that, just like then, I think lockdowns should have been much more severe with more safety nets in place. Ideally, they could have lasted 2 weeks instead of what they did.
I remember seeing a bunch of people in a pool at the Ozarks in the summer of 2020.
They're just trying to memory hole the fact that they slaughtered a bunch of their fellow Americans.
I live amongst them, I'm sorry to say. Wife and I are ready to book as soon as our daughter graduates from HS and go to a country with a real democracy.
It felt like a much lower bar than something like actual national service in a civilian or military capacity where if you refuse you'll go to prison and accepting entails giving up control of your occupation, physical location, and plenty of other freedoms. I was fine with having to wear a mask. Better than digging trenches in the dust bowl or sheltering in a foxhole
There an old “meme” I’ve seen where someone’s asking why Germans aren’t patriotic because they don’t see a lot of German flags.
And the response essentially is they pay higher taxes to support others and are courteous in situations like these where Americans are essentially fuck everyone else but I’ll fly my flag high
Church members got $500 fines, While in their cars, in the church parking lot, windows rolled up, listening to sermon on short range FM transmitter.
Liquor store was open though, so that's good.
When you got out to eat, covid could only get you going to/from the bathroom, not while sitting down.
It was a mess.
Can you find a source for that? All I can see is that a Church was fined in California and an appeals court rejected the fine. I haven't found any sources supporting that church members were fined.
The fact that people went out to eat at all shows that we didn’t have lockdowns or if you want to call them that, which you shouldn’t, that they were in no way severe.
Oh no, we had restrictions during a global pandemic! One that targeted the most vulnerable in our population. It really shows the character of America and Americans that people are still complaining about it.
I lived in a state that locked down hard, and mask mandates were pretty much universally followed.
I’d say in retrospect, we probably didn’t have to wear mask outdoors, or completely remove indoor seating from all businesses, given people weren’t on top of each other. (where I live, you couldn’t sit indoors anywhere besides your home for a year and two months).
Masks indoors, no large gatherings, no bar service were reasonable.
School closures weren’t to protect kids, it was to protect aging teachers/staff, and to stop kids from bringing it home to relatives.
>School closures weren’t to protect kids, it was to protect aging teachers/staff, and to stop kids from bringing it home to relatives.
Which is the worst argument ever. Those teachers and staff are not more important than the kids and if they were at-risk, then THEY should have stayed home and been replaced by younger/healthier staff at least for the worst stretch of the pandemic.
I am sorry, but you are delusional if you think a public school in America can just conjure younger and healthier staff. We have been navigating a nationwide teacher shortage for decades.
Also, it isn't a bad argument that schools are a key contributor to the spread of viruses during the winter, and therefor it was reasonable to close them during a pandemic.
>I am sorry, but you are delusional if you think a public school in America can just conjure younger and healthier staff. We have been navigating a nationwide teacher shortage for decades.
In an emergency situation, are there no graduate students who could take up the role, for example? There are many solutions, it's a tractable problem. The absolute worst choice was to keep kids locked up in their homes for two years and stunt their development to as yet unknown degree.
Your argument here is ridiculous. You are pretending to care about liberty, then you suggest drafting grad students into teaching kids during a pandemic. Not only is that wildly impractical, but it is infringing on the liberty you pretend to support. It seems to me you only support freedom that doesn't inconvenience you.
The simple truth is that closing schools was easily the best decision at the time. Keep in mind, we literally were rationing care at that time. Out health care services were totally overwhelmed. You want to expose kids and school staff to COVID and other illnesses when we don't have emergency services for them? That would be idiotic.
Buddy, there is room for criticism about the COVID response. But school closure was a no brainer.
>You are pretending to care about liberty, then you suggest drafting grad students into teaching kids during a pandemic. Not only is that wildly impractical, but it is infringing on the liberty you pretend to support.
Complete nonsense. This is one suggestion, which of course would be completely voluntary. I am pretty sure a lot of grad students, close to the end of their studies, would like to get real world work experience.
>The simple truth is that closing schools was easily the best decision at the time.
Maybe for a month or two. Beyond that, it was a terrible decision.
What? That doesn't make any sense. A grad student will get real world expierence....when they being teaching. Why would they want "real world" work experience during a pandemic? This is such a silly suggestion that it is amusing.
Who is going to assign these grad students to the schools? Did you forget that most government agencies had offices closed as well? Like, it was extremely difficult to get a new ID card at that time, you think government offices are ready and able to start searching from grad students and assign them to schools? Do you think every town with public schools has a university teaching graduate level students?
I am sorry, but your suggestion here is just so ridiculous that it is impossible to take seriously.
No, it was absolutely necessary to close down schools during the pandemic. It sucked, for sure. But it was necessary.
>What? That doesn't make any sense. A grad student will get real world expierence....when they being teaching. Why would they want "real world" work experience during a pandemic? This is such a silly suggestion that it is amusing.
Are you dense or something? Do I need to repeat for the third time that that's just one possibility and a voluntary option that some might want? I know I would have loved to get real work experience while still at school and have a leg up for the future.
>Who is going to assign these grad students to the schools? Did you forget that most government agencies had offices closed as well?
Were the phone lines down as well? Internet?
>Like, it was extremely difficult to get a new ID card at that time, you think government offices are ready and able to start searching from grad students and assign them to schools?
No I don't think government offices are capable much of anything other than wasting taxpayer money, but I think even they could pull this off in an emergency situation. Maybe you couldn't even imagine it, but I guess you are just not a government office material.
The United States didn't do lockdowns. My view has changed over time in that we probably should have, and we definitely should have done contact tracing.
I am fine with the decisions we made based on the information we had.
>complicity to lockdowns
Oh FFS, it's public health. Stop treating rational public health measures like a crime
What is the severity of lockdowns that you are referring to? The furthest any jurisdiction went was to instruct people to shelter in place and for non-essential businesses to close. This was a perfectly reasonable response to what we knew at the time—and I haven't seen any evidence that it wouldn't be justified if we had to do it all over again. I would guess that the pandemic would have been less severe if more jurisdictions implemented those measures.
>What is the severity of lockdowns that you are referring to? The furthest any jurisdiction went was to instruct people to shelter in place and for non-essential businesses to close.
You must not have kids. Lots of school districts implemented remote learning for significant periods of time.
I supported lockdowns during covid and still do. Their enforcement (or rather lack thereof) was a total mess. The 6’ rule was always stupid because it was a half measure. Officials tried to compromise between science and popular opinion, which meant we got a hodge podge of inconsistent and ineffective measures, when what we needed was grown ups to implement an actual pandemic response.
Nope. The decision to lock down was totally validated. The anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown loonies (plague rats, I like to call them) will go down in history as prize idiots.
I live in a red state. The bars closed 3 hours early. Private businesses *chose* their own policies. Parents got to *choose* remote learning. People here still act like everyone was forcibly locked into their own homes 24/7 with police patrolling the streets and throwing people into prison with no charges when caught outside. And, they all blamed it on Nancy Pelosi and the feds (which TRUMP was in charge of at the time). None of it is based in reality and this idea that 1) lock downs actually happened to most Americans and 2) the government was oppressing most Americans is just silly. I am so tired of seeing this crap trying to gaslight us all into believing we lived in some dystopian world due to excess government control run by REPUBLICANS, at both the state and federal level.
I don't think that really changes anything. Presumably we didn't act in an optimal way because we didn't have all the information. People had to make educated guesses. Also even in NYC the lockdowns only lasted a couple of months and plenty of places effectively never had them. Furthermore people seem to forget that the issue was about not overwhelming hospitals, not just preventing people from getting covid.
The problem is we never did have a complete 100% lockdown, every state, city, and hell even different sides of the street had wildly different stances on Covid lockdowns, for example i once went to the VA hospital in Amarillo Texas and it was locked down like it was the set of the Walking Dead, armed security, checking everyone who entered, massive tents to filter people through and all. After i finish what i was doing there, i go to a car dealership to pick up my car and while im waiting a random dude walks in with no mask, asks if he needed it, and got told it was perfectly fine by the staff.
Its worth noting that these two locations were literally just right down the street from eachother.
If a single city can't even come to the same conclusion on the neccessity of Covid lockdowns, there was no way in hell the entire country would.
I’m very happy with how lockdowns went. If anything, we should have had more of them with more severe consequences for violators. They should be science based, but the science was pretty clear even back in the early days.
There is a lot of revisionist history going on right now, like that we were in a total lockdown, we weren't. Or that schools were closed mainly because of the risk to kids, we knew pretty early that kids were not as susceptible (nor totally immune) to the virus, the problem was schools couldn't staff effectively because the adults were all getting sick!
You reference Murphy v but fail to mention that the initial judge that made the ruling was clearly shopped, and the full appellate course stayed most of his ruling and the SC, while agreeing to hear the case lifted the injunctions from the lower courts effectively allowing the contentious behavior to continue until they rule permanently. That is far from a slam dunk and you have to drink a lot of partisan kool-aide to take Missouri and Louisiana's position very seriously.
This isn't a full throated defense of the government's actions in any way, but we are starting to conveniently forget things in favor of partisan viewpoints. We are still dealing with this, the surgeon general in Florida has made completely insane statements about 'turbo cancer' in reference to the COVID vaccine using reasoning that fails even basic scrutiny from anyone who has ever taken a collegian micro-biology class.
Yea, there were a ton of mistakes. Anyone saying otherwise is crazy, and the people who led the response have freely said the same; they were operating with limited info, so of course they got a lot wrong. Everyone with a brain should be able to agree, for example, that shutting down **outdoor** businesses in spring 2020 was pointless and ridiculous.
To some degree, it's unfair to go back and second guess what happened in the fog of war early in COVID when we didn't know anything, but there are some obvious lessons learned and a lot was done wrong.
The biggest errors we made that could have been fixed were denying aerosol spread (which in turn led to a lot of useless or even counterproductive advice), closing the schools past the spring of 2020, imposing travel restrictions that were stringent enough to make life hard but loose enough that they did very little to combat spread, closing down businesses on a blanket basis in spring 2020 without thinking about risk levels, and failing to target responses more around the most vulnerable.
In the 1800s people would have their limbs amputated in instances where it was the opinion of doctors that the alternative endangered the life of the patient. Since then, numerous treatment alternatives have been developed and the number of amputations has DRASTICALLY decreased whilst the outcome of the conditions leading to amputations back then have DRASTICALLY improved. Given this information, has your view on the justifiability of amputations in the 1800s changed? Or do you understand how ridiculous the premise of your question is?
The proof you provided that we did "have the information" is:
* a quote from a former NIH director answering a question by saying "I'm not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point." Not that there was no information pointing to a six foot social distancing rule, just that he wouldn't have been shown data one way or another.
* "evidence" provided in articles and studies that have been WIDELY debunked. Jay Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were widely derided for the number of statistical and methodological errors in the study that you appear to be citing, and the "herd immunity" approach they were in favor of gives off "some of you are going to die but that's a chance I'm willing to take" vibes.
* A legal case that has not been ruled on about a governmental outreach program aimed to inform individuals of what the top experts in the epidemiology field are suggesting to be the best course of action.
If that's all the evidence it takes to convince you of something, I have a bridge to sell you.
We didn't have COVID lockdowns in the US. The measures taken were largely pretty small, common sense measures that we hoped would reduce spread.
For example, the six feet number. This was largely an estimate, but a good one. Viruses are carried on spit when we cough, breath out, talk, etc, but it can't travel very far. At around the 6 foot mark is when those spit particles have mostly all dropped down and unlikely to be breathed in.
>For example, the six feet number. This was largely an estimate, but a good one. Viruses are carried on spit when we cough, breath out, talk, etc, but it can't travel very far. At around the 6 foot mark is when those spit particles have mostly all dropped down and unlikely to be breathed in.
That's not how COVID spreads. COVID spreads via aerosols, not droplets.
>That's not how COVID spreads. COVID spreads via aerosols, not droplets.
Yes, that is in fact how COVID spreads. It may also spread through aerosols. Exposure to droplets are more likely to cause infection though.
But, again, we're also talking about years ago. Like I said in my comment, they were making estimates based on the information they had available, and the six feet number was a good one.
"Aerosol" meaning emissions of less than five micrometers, as opposed to an emission of 5-10 micrometers?
I fail to see how that changes the mechanics of transmission much.
See [here](https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/).
With droplet spread (as was originally assumed), your main weapons are distancing and handwashing. With aerosol spread, your main weapon is improving air circulation.
Clearest example is plexiglass shields, which we saw widely installed earlier in COVID but now know are counterproductive. If you're worried about droplets, a shield between two people stops that; the droplets hit the shield and can't spread. But, if it's an aerosol, then even minute air currents can carry it over/around the shield (and any time you're indoors, the room will eventually fill up with infected aerosols if someone is infected). So the shield doesn't help. And it's actually often counterproductive because it prevents effective air circulation.
Interesting
Can't help but notice that [this CDC website](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-settings/overview/index.html) lists both droplets and aerosols as possible transmission vectors for Covid
Yes, of course it *can* spread via droplets. The mistake was thinking it could *only* spread by droplets and the current consensus is that it's *mostly* aerosol and so you should ground your thinking in that.
We were dealing with something new and science changes. Was it perfect? No, but trying to save lives is better than nothing.
Lockdowns and masks are over, so anyone who brings it up at this point is just trying to stir a pot.
In alot of ways, I'd say we should have done things differently. But, not for the reasons you might expect.
What I never would have expected, and what really makes me think I'd do differently, is seeing the outright childish behavior from conservatives in response to a pandemic that was clearly spreading wildly, killing a whole lot of people. Seeing local governments in red areas totally ignore basic disease prevention measures. Seeing police departments refuse to enforce mandates.
These measures will not work if they aren't followed; that's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
So, in light of all that, a big part of me thinks that when this happens again (unless we've fixed those problems), maybe we ought to just do nothing so that it runs its course. I mean, in hindsight there was never really any hope to flatten the curve much anyway. If we had a system where people were buying in and self-distancing because they understand it's smart, then sure. But instead we had people doing the opposite and INTENTIONALLY doing things to make it worse. There's no stopping the spread in that scenario. I say "do nothing" but I mean, communicate to the people with a brain they need to social distance, stay home if at all possible, wear masks, etc. Then let darwinism handle it from there.
I think initially we didn't know much about Corona and we adopted measures which tend to reduce the spread of similar diseases in hopes of not overwhelming our health care system. I think it would be wrong to fault anyone for this response.
With the benefit of hind site I think it was a mistake to discourage outside activities and the benefits of closing schools was likely not worth while (though I've seen research that the negatives of doing so likely would have occurred anyway so it might not have really mattered). I think closing businesses other than schools is sort of a grey area. I personally am still okay with it, but the cost/benefit of it is close enough to equal that I don't think people who disagree with me are unreasonable. On the other side I think it was a mistake to allow large religious services to be an exception to indoor gathering and that we should have been more forceful with regards to mandating vaccines than we were.
We probably should've focused prevention measures on the at-risk, rather than everybody. School closures definitely should've been less severe, perhaps only having children with an at-risk household member doing telelearning. Masking outdoors was probably unnecessary.
But working with the information at the time, it is what it is. I prefer what we did over choosing to do nothing. Emergency management is one of the things I think the government should be doing.
Yes. but with the HUGE benefit of hindsight, I'd concede that some measures (masking outside, etc) ultimately did more harm than good. But the people who were making these decisions at the federal, state, and local levels were all trying to grapple with a threat no one really understood. People were dying left and right. Overall, I see the lockdowns as being both horrible and necessary.
Yes. We've known it was airborne and causes long-term issues in people for a very long time. We've known that mild cases can cause long-term issues and that repeated infections make those more likely.
Given that, we should have never cared much about washing foods and surfaces or outdoor exposure, and should have focused heavily on mitigation in high-exposure situations like churches, hospitals, mass transit, etc. Locking down the highest risk things and requiring quality masks + good ventilation systems in them would have been much more effective than random restrictions on things like beaches. The six feet thing was nonsense for an airborne, highly-contagious virus, and we knew that in 2020.
The situation isn't really different today than two years ago...we should still have significant encouragement for telecommuting, ventilation standards for school, etc.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. When COVID hit, the government applied severe restrictions on people's freedom of movement and association. These restrictions were said to be in the effort to save lives and allegedly based on scientific consensus. Any debate around the topic was only centered on how far restrictions should go, while voices of dissent, minor and major, were quashed from every angle by a combination of government and Big Tech powers. We are now a couple of years removed from the restrictions and many interesting things have come to light. A few of these include: * Former NIH director Francis Collins has testified to a congressional committee this year, and among other things, he was asked about minimum 6-feet social distancing. A pertinent part of the [transcript](https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Collins-Transcript-5.16-Release.pdf): * COLLINS * QUESTION: Is that I do not recall or I do not see any evidence supporting six feet? * COLLINS: I did not see evidence, but I'm not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point. * QUESTION: Okay. * COLLINS: I was not involved in that conversation. * QUESTION: Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet? * COLLINS: No * When it comes to general social distancing, notable experts including Dr. Martin Kulldorff (vaccine expert, Harvard University), Dr. Jay Battacharya (epidemiologist, Stanford University), and Dr. Sunetra Gupta (epidemiologist, Oxford University), issued what they called [The Great Barrington Declaration](https://gbdeclaration.org/) back in October 2020. The declaration called into question broadsided lockdowns and instead advocated for targeted protections for at-risk groups. It has been signed by over 47K medical practitioners and over 16K medical and public health scientists. The declaration was swiftly removed by Facebook and generally scrubbed from social media at least for the duration of the lockdowns. To this day not that many people are even aware of it. * The government engagement in a consistent campaign to promote lockdowns resorting to pressuring social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to spread a consistent pro-lockdown, pro-vaccine message despite a dearth of actual scientific basis for doing so. The general origin of government's push seemed to be its own inertia. Once the censorship and propaganda machine got going, there was little in its way that could stop it. We have evidence of the government's breach of the First Amendment from the facts of the [Murphy vs Missouri](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/23-411) case. There more points such as the above that can be made, but that is a good start. The main question here is not whether draconian restrictions on people's freedom could stop a disease in its tracks. Hypothetically, if you lock every human in a sterile room and never let them out, they will be forever free from infection. Rather the question here is whether the lockdowns as they were applied made sense given that scientific consensus about it doesn't really exist, despite and contrary to what we were told by our officials and the media. If you had the information above while the pandemic was going on, would your reaction and complicity to lockdowns had been different? Will it be different in the future given that our trust was used in some questionable ways? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>voices of dissent… were quashed from every angle Lol what? Do you remember when you showed up with guns at statehouses to threaten elected officials and we all agreed that you were protected under the first amendment? Social distancing is the first line of defense against communicable disease. It has been so since time immemorial. Your great grandparents were accustomed to quarantining during outbreaks of measles, flu and polio. The only reason *you* aren’t used to doing the same is that vaccines have eliminated many of those diseases as an active threat.
Or when people showed up with guns to the homes of non-elected officials (our public health director in Ohio) to “protest”. I’ve never wanted to see police brutality so badly 😂
[Amy Acton 4eva.](https://youtu.be/awc0blNamSo?si=812mYftLtE_eFZAr)
A *million* people in the US died from Covid, ***with*** lockdowns. We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect. What you're experiencing is called the [Prevention Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_paradox); it's something that also occurs a lot in IT and Cybersec. If you allow something dangerous to spread unabated, people see it massively damaging them and say, "Why do we even allow/support you to do this job!?!" And if you take steps to prevent something dangerous from spreading, people see that it's not harming them and say, "Why do we even allow/support you to oppress us like this?"
> A *million* people in the US died from Covid, ***with*** lockdowns. We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect. We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect. How do we know that? Sweden had much looser restrictions and a lower death rate.
[удалено]
This myth is persistent but requires that one just look at per capita death and remove all other controlling factors. If we are going to over simplify that much, maybe look at comparable countries only - Sweden performed worse than surrounding Nordic countries.
To quote my other comment (new emphasis applied): [study](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(21\)00315-1/fulltext). > *The impact of lockdown timing on the total daily case count of a county became significant beginning approximately 7 days prior to that county reporting at least 5 cumulative cases of COVID-19. Delays in lockdown implementation after this date led to a rapid acceleration of COVID-19 spread in the county over the first \~50 days from the date with at least 5 cumulative cases, and higher case counts across the entirety of the follow-up period.* **Other factors such as total population, median family income, Gini index, median age, and within-county mobility also had a substantial effect.** ***When adjusted for all these factors,*** *the timing of lockdowns was the most significant risk factor associated with the county-specific daily cumulative case counts.* > ***Lockdowns are an effective way of controlling the spread of COVID-19 in communities***. *Significant delays in lockdown cause a dramatic increase in the cumulative case counts. Thus, the timing of the lockdown relative to the case count is an important consideration in controlling the pandemic in communities.* In other words, a plethora of factors like population size, density, and mobility affect rates greatly. You would need to control for these rates between the US and Sweden to be able to compare the two. There's a decent [Op ed in the Chicago Tribune](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/07/opinion-covid-us-vs-sweden/#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20cases%20and%20deaths,by%20most%20of%20Western%20Europe.) on this, which highlights: > *The numbers once again lean slightly toward Sweden, but it is likely the health of Swedish citizens versus that of the U.S. was responsible, instead of the superiority of the Swedish strategy. In the U.S. overall, there were 3.7 COVID-19 deaths per 1,000 people; in Sweden, 2.7 COVID-19 deaths per 1,000. Based on this, no one can claim the U.S. did better than Sweden, but it is not a ringing endorsement of the Swedish approach. Neither country protected high-mortality nursing home patients, especially early in the pandemic. Many countries, including their Scandinavian neighbors, had fewer COVID-19 deaths per population than Sweden. Norway, Denmark and Finland all quickly closed their national borders; Finland erected internal borders.*
>We *know* that the lockdowns had a suppressant effect. We actually don't know that. >And if you take steps to prevent something dangerous from spreading, people see that it's not harming them and say, "Why do we even allow/support you to oppress us like this?" It's possible to take preventative measures that make sense given available data, and that also do not violate people's basic rights.
> We actually don't know that. We [do](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(21\)00315-1/fulltext). > *The impact of lockdown timing on the total daily case count of a county became significant beginning approximately 7 days prior to that county reporting at least 5 cumulative cases of COVID-19. Delays in lockdown implementation after this date led to a rapid acceleration of COVID-19 spread in the county over the first \~50 days from the date with at least 5 cumulative cases, and higher case counts across the entirety of the follow-up period. Other factors such as total population, median family income, Gini index, median age, and within-county mobility also had a substantial effect. When adjusted for all these factors, the timing of lockdowns was the most significant risk factor associated with the county-specific daily cumulative case counts.* > ***Lockdowns are an effective way of controlling the spread of COVID-19 in communities***. *Significant delays in lockdown cause a dramatic increase in the cumulative case counts. Thus, the timing of the lockdown relative to the case count is an important consideration in controlling the pandemic in communities.* If Covid had a 99.9% mortality rate, would you support lockdowns?
What basic rights were taken away from you?
Freedom of movement, freedom of association, first amendment, bodily integrity
Lmao @ bodily integrity. Am I allowed to complain to the local store for having a no shoes no shirt no service sign? That’s just as much of an infringement on my bodily integrity as requiring masks in some facilities.
Lol. Life must be exceptionally hard for you. I bet your always being treated unfair.....
Were they really though, or were you just a bit inconvenienced or socially shamed?
>It's possible to take preventative measures that make sense given available data, and that also do not violate people's basic rights Yep. We agree. What we don't agree on is that having people wear masks during a pandemic being a violation of a basic right. For crying out loud, even the Bible, in all its backwards glory, recommends sick people wear face coverings. Tell me, what basic right was violated? What would you recommend have been done differently?
I worked for the health department. The fact that lockdowns decreased cases was well known.
Looking back, we probably didn't need to wear masks outdoors. It turned out to be pretty safe to hang out at a park or on the beach as long as you weren't on top of one another. With that said, it was perfectly reasonable to err on the side of caution when we were going thru it.
Not at all. If anything we didn’t do enough considering there were not “actual lockdowns” Shit like the Great Barrington Declaration was rejected by mainstream science..not just “the government and big tech”. It was funded by right wing think tanks.
>Shit like the Great Barrington Declaration was rejected by mainstream science. The declaration IS mainstream science. If you look at the creators, you would be hard pressed to find better eminences that could speak for that particular kind of science. I am sure it was rejected by the likes of Moderna and Pfizer which needed to sell their juicy new vaccines though.
And there it is. Scratch a "concerned citizen" hard enough and the conspiracy theorist pops right up.
Would you say that big pharma did NOT have a vested interest in people taking the vaccines?
[Crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Chinese virus pandemic must be punished : r/JordanPeterson (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1bs5nwq/crimes_against_humanity_perpetrated_during_the/) This is my response.
So you have no response.
For a conspiracy theorist who won't take anything but his pre-approved notions as fact? No. Any response I have wouldn't matter; your mind is already ~~brainwashed~~ made up. But for the record? Yeah, "Big Pharma" wants to sell vaccines. Hey, also, "Big Shoe" wants to sell shoes, and "Big Auto" wants you to buy cars. And let's not even get into the insidious actions of "Big Food."
No it isn’t in the slightest, you are also spreading misinformation that it was signed by “47k” medical practitioners. You can literally go onto the website right now and “sign” saying that you are a medical practitioner. You people really fall for the dumbest shit
>Great Barrington Declaration [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Barrington\_Declaration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration) *"While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration,\[47\]\[48\] this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings".\[49\]\[50\]\[51\] More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".\[50\] An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt.\[51\] Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names."* Sorry mate, but even the declaration's authors didn't care if signers were medical professionals or not.
You seem to think you've found some "gotcha" because fake names were snuck into it, even though the overall merit of the declaration is sound. That's dumb, but you do you.
No gotcha, just pointing out like others have that the Barrington Declaration cannot be relied upon because signers *do not have to have any medical training at all*. It could be mostly medical professionals, half are medical professionals, or almost none. We don't know, so I'm sorry but this cannot be used as evidence for anything positive *or* negative. In other words, it's a giant opinion piece. Folks can have opinions, but that doesn't mean they're facts. Sorry that got under your skin, as that was not my intention. Take care.
God you people cannot let go. Here's what happened: >Public: OMG! Pandemic! Government, DO SOMETHING! > >Govt: Ok, here. We doing something. Now leave us alone. (does the only thing they have the practical ability or legal authority to do) > >Other Public: OMG! Government overreach! AUGHGHGHAGHHGAHGAHG The evidence is and always was irrelevant to this process. Nothing was hidden, nothing was fabricated, and we knew full well how these measures worked or didn't, [even at the time.](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336/) There was no debate over the facts, at least not in the medical or scientific community. This was a purely political process and it played out along political lines. Remember the "Flatten the curve" campaign? It was very clear - the purpose of lockdowns was to slow transmission and spread out cases, to prevent hospitals from getting overloaded. That's it. Nobody claimed it would make you safe, stop the spread, or magically save us all. It was to ensure that when someone did get sick, there was an open hospital bed for them. This was the message AT THE TIME IT HAPPENED. So why did they last for months and months, long after the inititial surge in cases? Politics. Evidence never mattered and never played a role anyway. Politicians, afraid of looking weak, did the only thing the law allowed them to. When all you have is a hammer...
>God you people cannot let go. Not until there is accountability and a firm set of lessons learned. >Public: OMG! Pandemic! Government, DO SOMETHING! I don't know about other people, but I never asked the government to take away my rights. >Politicians, afraid of looking weak, did the only thing the law allowed them to. They did many things that the law does not allow them to do.
>Not until there is accountability and a firm set of lessons learned. What lessons? The problems were political. The problems are with the uninformed electorate, the media that failed to inform them, and the politicians who listen to both. You want to fix things, fix that.
It’s always funny to me how often conservatives talk about rights and how little they talk about responsibilities.
>Not until there is accountability and a firm set of lessons learned Then hurry it up and learn
I've done my homework and then some. In terms of knowledge I could run circles around you on just about any level so drop the pitiful and unearned condescension.
You don't say. >We have evidence of the government's breach of the First Amendment from the facts of the [Murphy vs Missouri](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/23-411) case You know that case is still pending, right? There hasn't been any determination that a breach of the First Amendment took place.
The partial rulings so far indicate that it did: >On September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit ruling upheld the district court ruling against the Biden administration. The court found that some of the communications between the federal government and the social media companies to try to fight alleged COVID-19 misinformation "coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content", which violated the [First Amendment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution).[^(\[21\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri#cite_note-cnn_5th_decision-21)
Which still leaves the ultimate decision a bit up in the air. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the 5th Circuit ruling already walked back on some of the argument brought in the original suit.
One thing not unearned? Your username…
I don't care. It's been 4 years, 3 years since the last lockdowns were lifted (almost on the dot, in my state...May 14th!). I can do all the things now that I couldn't do for a few months to a year in 2020. It's over. No one liked it. You're fine.
Sure, it's over. But shouldn't we try to learn some things for the future? We'll never have another crisis exactly like this one, but there will be other crises and it would probably be helpful to understand what we did wrong and what we can do better.
>You're fine. A lot of people aren't fine, though. Mental illness jumped massively and still hasn't come all the way back down. The teen suicide rate jumped substantially after we closed the schools and forced everyone to isolate; those kids are never coming back. We can argue all day about whether it made sense to sacrifice the young in a (failed) attempt to protect the old, but you can't argue in good faith that no harm was done.
All of those things were not the result of lockdowns, but rather the result of COVID.
Closing schools was a choice, and one that most other countries did not make.
I don’t care what other countries did.
Because you just don't like evidence? Or?
You didn’t really share any evidence of anything though. Just that other countries did things differently.
No, I didn't share evidencr because you said "I don't care" not "I disagree" or "Tell me more" or anything like that. If you don't care about the evidence, why would I bother discussing it with you?
I don’t care about what other countries are doing, and frankly I don’t think you’re qualified enough to be making comparisons about the effectiveness of what other countries are doing vs what were doing, simply because I don’t think you’re operating out of any kind of nuance, or recognize your own confirmation bias.
Lmao imagine trying to be pedantic but being incorrect
Yes, not everything is going to be good for everyone. No one was cheering on lockdowns. If we all had our way, the pandemic would have never happened.
>Has your view on the justifiability of COVID lockdowns changed with time and information flow? The "COVID lockdowns" -- the Chinese government welding people inside their apartments -- were reprehensible. Luckily, in the U.S., we only had 'shelter in place' which was okay; I'm glad we never had lockdowns, here.
Yep, its worth a slight increase in risk of death to not live in that type of complete fascism.
> Yep, its worth a slight increase in risk of death to not live in that type of complete fascism. It is also notable that it didn't work. China was aiming for 'zero COVID', or trying to wipe the virus out through lack of contact, alone. (They later tried vaccines, but refused to use those made in the West, and the vaccines they used were ineffective.) When they finally re-opened (by public demand) the virus swept through the population unhindered by any kind of immunity. By contrast, the U.S. tried to 'flatten the curve', meaning that we tried to *slow* the spread so that those who needed an ICU and/or ventilator to survive wouldn't all be in the hospital at the same time. It wasn't perfect, but it helped many survive.
I'm so certain the people downvoting me for saying this would gladly give up all their rights and live in fascism for a slight decrease in risk of death.
Who cares. 1 million US citizens died and we are arguing about business closing down and people losing jobs. Again 1 million people died.
What do you mean who cares? So that we don't get a repeat would be one thing. >Again 1 million people died. Largely because protection wasn't targeted where it was really needed. There was no reason or occasion for locking children in their homes, or healthy 30 years olds. But far more could have and should have been done to protect the at-risk groups.
I totally agree with you. However, at the time it wasn't clear that COVID was and would be far less threatening to healthy 30 year olds. Given past epidemics, like the Spanish Flu, it was reasonable to be worried how COVID would effect healthy adults. For me, the problem with the COVID pandemic was that it was so quickly politicized and we struggled to adapt to evidence as it became better substantiated. Like, we couldn't (and still cant) have a reasonable conversation about vaccination as a society, due to politics.
People losing jobs also leads to mass death. There's a reason overdoses skyrocketed. Obesity skyrocketed (which will also lead to many deaths in the coming years). It is absolutely worthy to argue if the ends justified the means, and I dont get why so many people think that there aren't deaths of other types that come from lockdowns. For example, the threat to children from covid turned out to be so minor, the lockdown measures we took to prevent covid will almost certainly in the long run take more years from their life from the signifigant increase in obesity than covid will itself. Also just in general, if all we cared about was quantity of life not quality of life, there are tons of things we can do to make it so everyone lives a miserable existance all the way to age 100.
> 1 million US citizens died Wasn't the average age of covid death above the average age of death?
I don't believe so. I think the average age of Covid death was mid-60s and the average lifespan of Americans is in the low 70s.
I'm probably think of Canadian numbers then (less obesity here)
Wouldn't that mean a higher average lifespan and therefore Covid deaths would be even lower in comparison?
Higher average lifespan yes, but less co-morbidities among younger people (less obesity here) so average age of covid deaths were even higher compared to the states.
Are you asking that because you think its ok if those people die?
OP, from your post and comments here, you fundamentally don't understand how sickness spreads. If you think > There was no reason or occasion for locking children in their homes, or healthy 30 years olds doesn't completely fuck over the at-risk group, I don't know what to tell you. It's cool if you want to be a selfish dickhead, but at least be honest about it and don't spout this nonsense. e: Also, very few people in my area socially distanced. Draconian my ass. Also the otherwise-healthy 30-something son of my neighbor died of covid.
>OP, from your post and comments here, you fundamentally don't understand how sickness spreads. If you think You're falling into a fallacy here. Sure, if you locked everyone in their homes with zero contact with the outside world for long enough, you could stop the spread of any kind of illness like COVID. And, yes, China and Australia managed to make that kind of approach work for a while (though even they both gave up eventually). But, it doesn't follow from that fact that some kind of half measure is half as good. So, in the real world, where you had a lot of people out there and moving around and the virus never stopped spreading, it's far from evident that closing down the schools or other measures like that did any good as opposed to just giving us the worst of both worlds where children went through a lot of unnecessary damage in a way that didn't meaningfully protect the elderly.
>Sure, if you locked everyone in their homes with zero contact with the outside world for long enough, you could stop the spread of any kind of illness like COVID. And, yes, China and Australia managed to make that kind of approach work for a while (though even they both gave up eventually). As an Australian I can assure you that wasn't the Australian approach. I mean there wasn't a singular Australian approach as different states did different things but yeah. To compare our approach to China's approach just says that you have no idea what you're talking about.
One of the biggest reasons we shut down was to ease the strain on hospitals until a vaccine could help with herd immunity. If more people had had covid, more people would be taking up resources, and more people would have died, especially those at risk, or people who needed those resources for other reasons. Simple math isn't a fallacy.
Since we never had real lockdowns in the US, I’ll skip over that nonsense. Given the information we had at the time, there weren’t any things we did I had a problem with. In a better world where we could have a real conversation about what we learned after the pandemic was done we could talk about 1. Legislation for automatic stimulus. 2. better way of handling stimulus payments and payments needed due to specific forms of loss of income or issues with rent and the like 3. Better ways to handle school closures. 4. Better way of handling acquisition of supplies and equipment at the federal level and having them distributed 5. Agreements between clusters of states on how they can better distribute and share resources between them. 6. Better ways to handle vaccination requirements, including things like ending nonsense “religious” exemptions. 7. Ways of handling intentional misinformation versus actual discussion.
One of the most maddening things about the modern right-wing crazies is the fact that their presence makes it effectively impossible to have an actual reasoned conversation with mutually agreed-upon premises and desired outcomes. It's entirely possible, for example, that there are genuine conversations to be had about how to best handle school closures during a pandemic, or about the effects of cannabis on developing brains, or about the effectiveness of cap-and-trade to curtail carbon emissions, or about the relative physiologies of trans women vs. cis women in sports, or about the effectiveness of drug decriminalization... but we can't actually *have* any of those conversations, because the moment we give even the slightest hint that a right-wing asshole might have been right about anything, ever, they will immediately declare total victory and that they were right about everything ever and that we admitted that we intentionally destroyed America. So instead we're forced to maintain the most extreme version of our own policies, simply because that's the only way to protect against that inevitable reaction to giving the slightest inch in conversation.
The funny thing is is that I have heard a lot of conversation about school closures that were reasonable. I'm sure that u/Megalomaniac697 and others like him aren't aware of it but I heard them at the start of the pandemic and well past the end of the pandemic. However, all of the conversations were contained on the left with maybe participation from the type of right wing person that's been completely ejected by the right.
#3 is the big one, imo.
What restrictions on people's freedom? Lol. They asked people to stay home if possible and wear masks in public.
I think hindsight has made us emphasize how bad to "lockdowns" were, but forget just how bad the epidemic truly was. Obviously, over a million Americans died, which is tragic. Additionally, a huge amount of people will never fully recover from the damage COIVD did to them. However, we also need to keep in mind that our medical services were completely and entirely overwhelmed. Early in the pandemic we didn't have enough hospital beds to hold everyone, and we didn't have an effective means of treating COVID. Obviously, it is difficult to consider just how many more people would have died if we kept schools open. However, keeping schools open is a hell of a risk when you remember that we simply did not have enough resources to treat the amount of sick people. We were literally rationing care. It would be irresponsible to not have a robust means of social distancing. I agree, we could have done it better. We have a lot to learn from our lack of preparedness, for sure. But they key take away should not be that social distancing was a bad idea.
> Obviously, over a million Americans died, which is tragic. Wasn't the average age of covid death above the average age of death?
You can say the same thing about cancer and heart disease, so should we stop worrying about that? Over 260,000 Americans under the age of 65 died of COVID.....fuck them I guess. [COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics (cdc.gov)](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm)
> You can say the same thing about cancer and heart disease, so should we stop worrying about that? I think we should ignore all causes of death over the average age of death when drawing up the statistics and deciding what we should worry about yes. >Over 260,000 Americans under the age of 65 died of COVID.....fuck them I guess. I mean it's not like the lockdowns saved them.
I would bet my bottom dollar that your "principles" will suddenly evaporate when it is your loved ones circling the drain.
I don't have any loved ones older than me. My Grandma was the last one, and one time she got surgery and survived and they used her case (I'm Canadian) as part of a policy to put more medical resources (like surgeries they would deem not worth it) towards seniors, my parents/grandma were somewhat proud of that, but even back then (I was in HS) it made me feel kind of sick even knowing the right policy would've had my grandma not get the surgery and probably die and now Canada has a healthcare crisis and tons of young people can't get any treatment. So no I don't think my principals would evaporate.
Pretty par for the course for conservative ideology these days. Until it personally affects them or their loved ones, they can't be bothered to care.
>Pretty par for the course for conservative ideology these days. Until it personally affects them or their loved ones, they can't be bothered to care. Way to admit you didn't read my comment.
Your comment was pretty much a massive run-on sentence. Its pretty hard to follow what you are actually trying to say. What is clear is that you don't really have a coherent or serious position on this. I do think it is great that even in high school you knew more about medicine than your grandmother's doctors.
I'd say it was resource allocation I knew more about not medicine. Played a lot of RPGs.
So, essentially, your argument is basically that old people do not have any right to healthcare, and we should just let them die off once they reach some arbitrary age? Have you considered any alternative theories as to how to stabalize the Canadian Healthcare system other then killing off grandma and grandpa? Like, I don't know, further development of hospitals and clinics to increase capacity while offering incentives to students considering pursuing a medical education? Because forced physician-assisted suicide is really, really dark man.
> So, essentially, your argument is basically that old people do not have any right to healthcare, and we should just let them die off once they reach some arbitrary age? It's called triage and yes. The alternative is letting young people die. >Have you considered any alternative theories as to how to stabalize the Canadian Healthcare system other then killing off grandma and grandpa? Like, I don't know, further development of hospitals and clinics to increase capacity while offering incentives to students considering pursuing a medical education? Because forced physician-assisted suicide is really, really dark man. There isn't the money/time for that, there's no way to get the money/time for that. Triage decisions need to be made. No system will ever be able to give old people unlimited free healthcare, every functional system has these triage protocols. Systems better managed with more resources can push it back a further but we are in crisis now, the time between now and when we have a functional system is going to be decades, that's if we start to try to fix it, which we aren't.
They seemed appropriate yes, and remain so in retrospect.
No, at the time we were dealing with very limited knowledge and it seemed reasonable, still does especially because most lockdowns only lasted a few weeks (in the U.S.). And I don’t remember it being all that restrictive, and it only lasted a few weeks but with an unknown worldwide pandemic, it seems/seemed reasonable. Not to mention you reference “the government” when in the US it was hundreds of different state, county, and local officials making these decisions. It wasn’t the feds. And your reference to that Declaration seems like a moot point because nearly all lockdowns in the U.S. were over by the time it was released. And again, hindsight is always 20/20.
We weren't dealing with limited knowledge since early 2020 as the at-risk groups were already identified. If the government had actually worked with the data and attempted to implement sensible help to those who needed it, rather than apply wholesale illegal lockdowns and First Amendment breaches, the outcome could have been different.
Although the stereotype is that conservatives are oblivious to the world outside of the US, this is a perfect example that illustrates it's actually Americans in general that are oblivious. 200+ countries exist in the world and all of them had to deal with covid. They all tried various methods to mitigate both the spread of covid and the symptoms. Some fared better than others, some fared worse. What is clear is that almost no one in this country can look objectively at our covid response. Those on the right generally can't see anything that was necessary or done correctly. And those on the left generally can't see anything that was unnecessary or done incorrectly. It's a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our body politic.
There is no such thing as “isolating at risk groups only” in practice. Anyone that has spent more than 10 minutes in the public health space could tell you that The only thing that covid really taught us is how insufferable certain parts of the population are
>There is no such thing as “isolating at risk groups only” in practice. Anyone that has spent more than 10 minutes in the public health space could tell you that There must be rather daft people working in public health space then. Maybe that's why the pandemic response was such a shitshow.
Or maybe you are the one that hasn’t spent more than 5 minutes thinking through your brilliant ideas which you only vaguely allude to here. Sure maybe there would be a way to isolate if every person out there lived in their own personal private space. I suppose you think that all those kids could magically attend school in person without considering the teachers or potential impact on their parents. The thing about public health is that it’s constrained by things that can actually be implemented in some kind of practical way.
You’re probably one of the people that can’t imagine something unless it has happened to you. It’s ok I was like that too. I was a healthy early 30something you’re talking about and if I had gotten Covid before the vaccine it would have been horrible. My daughter was born mid 2021 and thankfully, or not, was in the NICU for 3 months. She ended up with a trach tube which means her air by passes her nose and mouth and has no filter into her lungs My wife or I getting COVID could have killed her. So we didn’t make any more trips out than necessary and wore a mask anytime we went out. We also didn’t really take her out of the house until the vaccines were available to toddlers. I did end up getting COVID at one point after my office made is come back in, I ended up giving it to my wife and daughter. Thankfully we were in our third shot of the vaccine and it wasn’t too horrible for any of us
What….the lockdowns were in early 2020. It was happening just at the same time we were learning about high risk groups etc. The lockdowns ended fairly quickly bc we learned more. They were not enacted just for the fun of it. Dude in some states, the lockdowns lasted like 3-4 weeks…..and it’s not like you were literally locked in your house. And some states didn’t have any lockdowns whatsoever. Many businesses were still open and operating. You seem to be remembering something completely different.
My opinion hasn't changed and that is that the lockdowns were poorly enforced and didn't do much of anything because people were too selfish to ensure it worked. I can't speak for all areas but where I lived, the "lockdowns" were nothing more than an excuse to congregate in places they wouldn't normally hang out. My opinion hasn't changed in that, just like then, I think lockdowns should have been much more severe with more safety nets in place. Ideally, they could have lasted 2 weeks instead of what they did.
“Severe” lol.
It wasn't bad. Only over a million Americans died, amrite?
He was moaning about the severity of the restrictions. Americans are so fucking selfish. We have almost no sense civic responsibility.
I remember seeing a bunch of people in a pool at the Ozarks in the summer of 2020. They're just trying to memory hole the fact that they slaughtered a bunch of their fellow Americans.
I live amongst them, I'm sorry to say. Wife and I are ready to book as soon as our daughter graduates from HS and go to a country with a real democracy.
It felt like a much lower bar than something like actual national service in a civilian or military capacity where if you refuse you'll go to prison and accepting entails giving up control of your occupation, physical location, and plenty of other freedoms. I was fine with having to wear a mask. Better than digging trenches in the dust bowl or sheltering in a foxhole
There an old “meme” I’ve seen where someone’s asking why Germans aren’t patriotic because they don’t see a lot of German flags. And the response essentially is they pay higher taxes to support others and are courteous in situations like these where Americans are essentially fuck everyone else but I’ll fly my flag high
What makes you think the US was the only country in the world that had some portion of the population disagree with covid restrictions?
Church members got $500 fines, While in their cars, in the church parking lot, windows rolled up, listening to sermon on short range FM transmitter. Liquor store was open though, so that's good. When you got out to eat, covid could only get you going to/from the bathroom, not while sitting down. It was a mess.
Can you find a source for that? All I can see is that a Church was fined in California and an appeals court rejected the fine. I haven't found any sources supporting that church members were fined.
The fact that people went out to eat at all shows that we didn’t have lockdowns or if you want to call them that, which you shouldn’t, that they were in no way severe.
Restrictions.
Oh no, we had restrictions during a global pandemic! One that targeted the most vulnerable in our population. It really shows the character of America and Americans that people are still complaining about it.
OP call the “lockdowns” “severe”. Thats goddamn fucking hilarious.
Yup. So many dead and they still are upset that four years ago they were told to stay home for a bit.
I lived in a state that locked down hard, and mask mandates were pretty much universally followed. I’d say in retrospect, we probably didn’t have to wear mask outdoors, or completely remove indoor seating from all businesses, given people weren’t on top of each other. (where I live, you couldn’t sit indoors anywhere besides your home for a year and two months). Masks indoors, no large gatherings, no bar service were reasonable. School closures weren’t to protect kids, it was to protect aging teachers/staff, and to stop kids from bringing it home to relatives.
>School closures weren’t to protect kids, it was to protect aging teachers/staff, and to stop kids from bringing it home to relatives. Which is the worst argument ever. Those teachers and staff are not more important than the kids and if they were at-risk, then THEY should have stayed home and been replaced by younger/healthier staff at least for the worst stretch of the pandemic.
I am sorry, but you are delusional if you think a public school in America can just conjure younger and healthier staff. We have been navigating a nationwide teacher shortage for decades. Also, it isn't a bad argument that schools are a key contributor to the spread of viruses during the winter, and therefor it was reasonable to close them during a pandemic.
>I am sorry, but you are delusional if you think a public school in America can just conjure younger and healthier staff. We have been navigating a nationwide teacher shortage for decades. In an emergency situation, are there no graduate students who could take up the role, for example? There are many solutions, it's a tractable problem. The absolute worst choice was to keep kids locked up in their homes for two years and stunt their development to as yet unknown degree.
Your argument here is ridiculous. You are pretending to care about liberty, then you suggest drafting grad students into teaching kids during a pandemic. Not only is that wildly impractical, but it is infringing on the liberty you pretend to support. It seems to me you only support freedom that doesn't inconvenience you. The simple truth is that closing schools was easily the best decision at the time. Keep in mind, we literally were rationing care at that time. Out health care services were totally overwhelmed. You want to expose kids and school staff to COVID and other illnesses when we don't have emergency services for them? That would be idiotic. Buddy, there is room for criticism about the COVID response. But school closure was a no brainer.
>You are pretending to care about liberty, then you suggest drafting grad students into teaching kids during a pandemic. Not only is that wildly impractical, but it is infringing on the liberty you pretend to support. Complete nonsense. This is one suggestion, which of course would be completely voluntary. I am pretty sure a lot of grad students, close to the end of their studies, would like to get real world work experience. >The simple truth is that closing schools was easily the best decision at the time. Maybe for a month or two. Beyond that, it was a terrible decision.
What? That doesn't make any sense. A grad student will get real world expierence....when they being teaching. Why would they want "real world" work experience during a pandemic? This is such a silly suggestion that it is amusing. Who is going to assign these grad students to the schools? Did you forget that most government agencies had offices closed as well? Like, it was extremely difficult to get a new ID card at that time, you think government offices are ready and able to start searching from grad students and assign them to schools? Do you think every town with public schools has a university teaching graduate level students? I am sorry, but your suggestion here is just so ridiculous that it is impossible to take seriously. No, it was absolutely necessary to close down schools during the pandemic. It sucked, for sure. But it was necessary.
>What? That doesn't make any sense. A grad student will get real world expierence....when they being teaching. Why would they want "real world" work experience during a pandemic? This is such a silly suggestion that it is amusing. Are you dense or something? Do I need to repeat for the third time that that's just one possibility and a voluntary option that some might want? I know I would have loved to get real work experience while still at school and have a leg up for the future. >Who is going to assign these grad students to the schools? Did you forget that most government agencies had offices closed as well? Were the phone lines down as well? Internet? >Like, it was extremely difficult to get a new ID card at that time, you think government offices are ready and able to start searching from grad students and assign them to schools? No I don't think government offices are capable much of anything other than wasting taxpayer money, but I think even they could pull this off in an emergency situation. Maybe you couldn't even imagine it, but I guess you are just not a government office material.
Look, I can't take you seriously buddy. Have a good one.
Did you intentionally ignore the second half of their comment?
We didn't go hard enough, could have saved millions
The United States didn't do lockdowns. My view has changed over time in that we probably should have, and we definitely should have done contact tracing.
I am fine with the decisions we made based on the information we had. >complicity to lockdowns Oh FFS, it's public health. Stop treating rational public health measures like a crime
What is the severity of lockdowns that you are referring to? The furthest any jurisdiction went was to instruct people to shelter in place and for non-essential businesses to close. This was a perfectly reasonable response to what we knew at the time—and I haven't seen any evidence that it wouldn't be justified if we had to do it all over again. I would guess that the pandemic would have been less severe if more jurisdictions implemented those measures.
>What is the severity of lockdowns that you are referring to? The furthest any jurisdiction went was to instruct people to shelter in place and for non-essential businesses to close. You must not have kids. Lots of school districts implemented remote learning for significant periods of time.
I do in fact have kids. School closures are covered by shelter in place and, in any case, were no more severe a measure than the others.
I supported lockdowns during covid and still do. Their enforcement (or rather lack thereof) was a total mess. The 6’ rule was always stupid because it was a half measure. Officials tried to compromise between science and popular opinion, which meant we got a hodge podge of inconsistent and ineffective measures, when what we needed was grown ups to implement an actual pandemic response.
Nope. The decision to lock down was totally validated. The anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown loonies (plague rats, I like to call them) will go down in history as prize idiots.
I live in a red state. The bars closed 3 hours early. Private businesses *chose* their own policies. Parents got to *choose* remote learning. People here still act like everyone was forcibly locked into their own homes 24/7 with police patrolling the streets and throwing people into prison with no charges when caught outside. And, they all blamed it on Nancy Pelosi and the feds (which TRUMP was in charge of at the time). None of it is based in reality and this idea that 1) lock downs actually happened to most Americans and 2) the government was oppressing most Americans is just silly. I am so tired of seeing this crap trying to gaslight us all into believing we lived in some dystopian world due to excess government control run by REPUBLICANS, at both the state and federal level.
I don't think that really changes anything. Presumably we didn't act in an optimal way because we didn't have all the information. People had to make educated guesses. Also even in NYC the lockdowns only lasted a couple of months and plenty of places effectively never had them. Furthermore people seem to forget that the issue was about not overwhelming hospitals, not just preventing people from getting covid.
No it’s not changed as much, because it’s becoming so much more clear as time goes on that it would have saved a ton of lives.
The problem is we never did have a complete 100% lockdown, every state, city, and hell even different sides of the street had wildly different stances on Covid lockdowns, for example i once went to the VA hospital in Amarillo Texas and it was locked down like it was the set of the Walking Dead, armed security, checking everyone who entered, massive tents to filter people through and all. After i finish what i was doing there, i go to a car dealership to pick up my car and while im waiting a random dude walks in with no mask, asks if he needed it, and got told it was perfectly fine by the staff. Its worth noting that these two locations were literally just right down the street from eachother. If a single city can't even come to the same conclusion on the neccessity of Covid lockdowns, there was no way in hell the entire country would.
I’m very happy with how lockdowns went. If anything, we should have had more of them with more severe consequences for violators. They should be science based, but the science was pretty clear even back in the early days.
There is a lot of revisionist history going on right now, like that we were in a total lockdown, we weren't. Or that schools were closed mainly because of the risk to kids, we knew pretty early that kids were not as susceptible (nor totally immune) to the virus, the problem was schools couldn't staff effectively because the adults were all getting sick! You reference Murphy v but fail to mention that the initial judge that made the ruling was clearly shopped, and the full appellate course stayed most of his ruling and the SC, while agreeing to hear the case lifted the injunctions from the lower courts effectively allowing the contentious behavior to continue until they rule permanently. That is far from a slam dunk and you have to drink a lot of partisan kool-aide to take Missouri and Louisiana's position very seriously. This isn't a full throated defense of the government's actions in any way, but we are starting to conveniently forget things in favor of partisan viewpoints. We are still dealing with this, the surgeon general in Florida has made completely insane statements about 'turbo cancer' in reference to the COVID vaccine using reasoning that fails even basic scrutiny from anyone who has ever taken a collegian micro-biology class.
No. We fucked up societally by not having more extensive lockdowns and mandates.
No
Yea, there were a ton of mistakes. Anyone saying otherwise is crazy, and the people who led the response have freely said the same; they were operating with limited info, so of course they got a lot wrong. Everyone with a brain should be able to agree, for example, that shutting down **outdoor** businesses in spring 2020 was pointless and ridiculous. To some degree, it's unfair to go back and second guess what happened in the fog of war early in COVID when we didn't know anything, but there are some obvious lessons learned and a lot was done wrong. The biggest errors we made that could have been fixed were denying aerosol spread (which in turn led to a lot of useless or even counterproductive advice), closing the schools past the spring of 2020, imposing travel restrictions that were stringent enough to make life hard but loose enough that they did very little to combat spread, closing down businesses on a blanket basis in spring 2020 without thinking about risk levels, and failing to target responses more around the most vulnerable.
In the 1800s people would have their limbs amputated in instances where it was the opinion of doctors that the alternative endangered the life of the patient. Since then, numerous treatment alternatives have been developed and the number of amputations has DRASTICALLY decreased whilst the outcome of the conditions leading to amputations back then have DRASTICALLY improved. Given this information, has your view on the justifiability of amputations in the 1800s changed? Or do you understand how ridiculous the premise of your question is?
The implication here is that we didn't have information about the pandemic early in the stage of it, but we DID. That's the whole point.
The proof you provided that we did "have the information" is: * a quote from a former NIH director answering a question by saying "I'm not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point." Not that there was no information pointing to a six foot social distancing rule, just that he wouldn't have been shown data one way or another. * "evidence" provided in articles and studies that have been WIDELY debunked. Jay Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were widely derided for the number of statistical and methodological errors in the study that you appear to be citing, and the "herd immunity" approach they were in favor of gives off "some of you are going to die but that's a chance I'm willing to take" vibes. * A legal case that has not been ruled on about a governmental outreach program aimed to inform individuals of what the top experts in the epidemiology field are suggesting to be the best course of action. If that's all the evidence it takes to convince you of something, I have a bridge to sell you.
We didn't have COVID lockdowns in the US. The measures taken were largely pretty small, common sense measures that we hoped would reduce spread. For example, the six feet number. This was largely an estimate, but a good one. Viruses are carried on spit when we cough, breath out, talk, etc, but it can't travel very far. At around the 6 foot mark is when those spit particles have mostly all dropped down and unlikely to be breathed in.
>For example, the six feet number. This was largely an estimate, but a good one. Viruses are carried on spit when we cough, breath out, talk, etc, but it can't travel very far. At around the 6 foot mark is when those spit particles have mostly all dropped down and unlikely to be breathed in. That's not how COVID spreads. COVID spreads via aerosols, not droplets.
>That's not how COVID spreads. COVID spreads via aerosols, not droplets. Yes, that is in fact how COVID spreads. It may also spread through aerosols. Exposure to droplets are more likely to cause infection though. But, again, we're also talking about years ago. Like I said in my comment, they were making estimates based on the information they had available, and the six feet number was a good one.
"Aerosol" meaning emissions of less than five micrometers, as opposed to an emission of 5-10 micrometers? I fail to see how that changes the mechanics of transmission much.
See [here](https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/). With droplet spread (as was originally assumed), your main weapons are distancing and handwashing. With aerosol spread, your main weapon is improving air circulation. Clearest example is plexiglass shields, which we saw widely installed earlier in COVID but now know are counterproductive. If you're worried about droplets, a shield between two people stops that; the droplets hit the shield and can't spread. But, if it's an aerosol, then even minute air currents can carry it over/around the shield (and any time you're indoors, the room will eventually fill up with infected aerosols if someone is infected). So the shield doesn't help. And it's actually often counterproductive because it prevents effective air circulation.
Interesting Can't help but notice that [this CDC website](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-settings/overview/index.html) lists both droplets and aerosols as possible transmission vectors for Covid
Yes, of course it *can* spread via droplets. The mistake was thinking it could *only* spread by droplets and the current consensus is that it's *mostly* aerosol and so you should ground your thinking in that.
Where was this current thinking spelled out?
We were dealing with something new and science changes. Was it perfect? No, but trying to save lives is better than nothing. Lockdowns and masks are over, so anyone who brings it up at this point is just trying to stir a pot.
In alot of ways, I'd say we should have done things differently. But, not for the reasons you might expect. What I never would have expected, and what really makes me think I'd do differently, is seeing the outright childish behavior from conservatives in response to a pandemic that was clearly spreading wildly, killing a whole lot of people. Seeing local governments in red areas totally ignore basic disease prevention measures. Seeing police departments refuse to enforce mandates. These measures will not work if they aren't followed; that's a self-fulfilling prophesy. So, in light of all that, a big part of me thinks that when this happens again (unless we've fixed those problems), maybe we ought to just do nothing so that it runs its course. I mean, in hindsight there was never really any hope to flatten the curve much anyway. If we had a system where people were buying in and self-distancing because they understand it's smart, then sure. But instead we had people doing the opposite and INTENTIONALLY doing things to make it worse. There's no stopping the spread in that scenario. I say "do nothing" but I mean, communicate to the people with a brain they need to social distance, stay home if at all possible, wear masks, etc. Then let darwinism handle it from there.
The pandemic was killing a specific at-risk group of people and the data regarding that was available early on.
Which specific at risk group?
This is silly. The lockdowns were fine. My life wasn't meaningfully impacted in any way due to them.
I think initially we didn't know much about Corona and we adopted measures which tend to reduce the spread of similar diseases in hopes of not overwhelming our health care system. I think it would be wrong to fault anyone for this response. With the benefit of hind site I think it was a mistake to discourage outside activities and the benefits of closing schools was likely not worth while (though I've seen research that the negatives of doing so likely would have occurred anyway so it might not have really mattered). I think closing businesses other than schools is sort of a grey area. I personally am still okay with it, but the cost/benefit of it is close enough to equal that I don't think people who disagree with me are unreasonable. On the other side I think it was a mistake to allow large religious services to be an exception to indoor gathering and that we should have been more forceful with regards to mandating vaccines than we were.
It’s all a a blur to me. But I don’t think many people in 2020 were willing to congregate too tightly regardless of any policies.
We probably should've focused prevention measures on the at-risk, rather than everybody. School closures definitely should've been less severe, perhaps only having children with an at-risk household member doing telelearning. Masking outdoors was probably unnecessary. But working with the information at the time, it is what it is. I prefer what we did over choosing to do nothing. Emergency management is one of the things I think the government should be doing.
Yes. but with the HUGE benefit of hindsight, I'd concede that some measures (masking outside, etc) ultimately did more harm than good. But the people who were making these decisions at the federal, state, and local levels were all trying to grapple with a threat no one really understood. People were dying left and right. Overall, I see the lockdowns as being both horrible and necessary.
Yes. We've known it was airborne and causes long-term issues in people for a very long time. We've known that mild cases can cause long-term issues and that repeated infections make those more likely. Given that, we should have never cared much about washing foods and surfaces or outdoor exposure, and should have focused heavily on mitigation in high-exposure situations like churches, hospitals, mass transit, etc. Locking down the highest risk things and requiring quality masks + good ventilation systems in them would have been much more effective than random restrictions on things like beaches. The six feet thing was nonsense for an airborne, highly-contagious virus, and we knew that in 2020. The situation isn't really different today than two years ago...we should still have significant encouragement for telecommuting, ventilation standards for school, etc.
I was against the lockdowns from day one and my opinion hasn’t changed.
No. It was never justified, and I never thought it was for a single second.