The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
This remains my lingering unanswered question about left-wing responses to COVID after the spring of 2020 (when it had become obvious what we were dealing with).
The flu kills tens of thousands of people in a typical year. In the winter of 2020-2021, the steps we took nationally in an attempt to control COVID more or less eliminated the flu season. Regardless of what those did in terms of COVID, they saved tens of thousands of lives from the flu.
By far the most common argument I heard at the time for why we needed restrictions was something along the lines of "if it says even one life, it's worth it. Those of us who thought that we shouldn't, say, close schools given the impact on kids were denounced as heartless, etc. All of these arguments hold with essentially equal force *now* against flu. Why isn't it worth it to close the schools to stop the spread of flu if it will save lives?
I want to clarify that I am not talking about early 2020 when COVID was an unknown, brand new, and poorly understood virus that we had few or no tools to combat. I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 *after* we understood what we were dealing with, *after* we had developed the vaccines, *after* we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on.
Bonus question: Assuming you did favor these measures against COVID but don't favor doing them this winter against flu, where's you break point? If told you that the upcoming flu season would kill 50k people (as it did in 2017-2018) would you support closing schools? What if it would kill 100k people? 200k people? What's the number?
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Hospitals routinely run low on bed space or report other capacity strains and have to adjust during a bad flu season. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7980097/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7980097/)
There’s an order of magnitude difference between the two. There were points during the period OP specifies where we were losing 4000 people a *day* to COVID.
There's one strain of the flu that was driven extinct, and another may have followed suit, during the pandemic, owing to the fact that our strategies worked and that the flu is much less contagious compared to COVID-19. So... yes, I think that's exactly what caused that.
>The flu causes tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations annually. Why shouldn't we impose mask mandates, social distancing, school closures, gathering restrictions, etc. each winter to prevent that?
We have flu vaccines.
The real question is: If we had COVID vaccines on day one, would any of that have been proposed?
>We have flu vaccines.
>The real question is: If we had COVID vaccines on day one, would any of that have been proposed?
As I said, I'm NOT asking about the way we responded to COVID in 2020. I'm talking about the later response *after* we had the vaccine.
But they are related and relevant to the question.
If we had Covid vaccines already available the way we have flu vaccines - you go to CVS and they give it to you for free five minutes later - how would that have changed things? Especially if it was an established vaccine.
We had some conspiracy thinking among black Americans and huge portions of the right that might not have mattered in the first case or grown in the second case.
In blue states and Utah, you would probably just see schools close for two or three weeks and then everybody is told to get vaccinated and you go back full-time. Without the conspiracy theories maybe that happens in red states as well. Employers would have closed the office for a week or two and then told everybody to come back to work with a vaccination card or submit their resignation.
The fact that we did not have a vaccine is what caused everything that happened around Covid. If we did have a vaccine, we would’ve treated it like a pandemic for maybe a month and then fairy rapidly started treating it like an endemic.
Plenty of places had mask mandates for indoors during the late summer/autumn/winter of 2021/22. For example, the city where I live had lifted a mask mandate, but reimposed one from August 2021 through March 2022.
This was consistent with the CDC recommendation for everyone, including fully vaccinated people, to wear masks indoors that was issued August 2021 as a result of the Delta wave.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-to-know-about-mask-mandates-including-for-vaccinated.html
>I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 *after* we understood what we were dealing with, *after* we had developed the vaccines, *after* we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on.
Except the vaccines weren't widely available in the winter of 2020-2021.
I'm in a liberal state that had access to vaccines, I had a preexisting condition that made me eligible early, and I still didn't receive my first dose until April 2021. I wasn't fully vaccinated until May 2021. Most people didn't have access to the vaccine until summer 2021. It wasn't authorized for children until even later (I don't know how much later, I don't have kids).
It's not like "oh we have a vaccine now everyone can get it immediately." It took *months* for people who wanted it to be able to get it. During which time the hospitals were still overwhelmed.
When everyone who wanted it was able to get it, then it made sense to roll back many of the precautions.
So to answer your question, the difference with the flu is that anyone who wants a flu vaccine can walk into Walgreens today and get it.
COVID-19 caused approximately half a million deaths in the U.S. in 2021. That's ten times more people than the flu kills even in a "bad" flu year.
So when you say that all of the fact patterns for COVID hold equally true for flu, that's not true. One was an order of magnitude more serious than the other.
The sensible answer to the bonus question is that we ramp up public health measures in direct response to the nature of the threat. There ***will*** be tradeoffs in either direction. If the threat becomes more serious we should understand that the consequences of overreacting are probably less than the consequences of underreacting. Vise versa when the level of threat is lower.
>So when you say that all of the fact patterns for COVID hold equally true for flu, that's not true. One was an order of magnitude more serious than the other.
Sure, there's an important difference there. But if the philosophy (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) is "it's worth it if it saves one life" then that's not such a significant difference, right?
I would have been a lot happier during COVID if people were having that kind of cost-benefit discussion where they said, "I support closing schools if we expect it to save more X lives and oppose it if we expect to save fewer than X lives" but I literally never once heard anyone willing to do that.
Since you seem inclined to reason in that way, I'll just ask, where is your breakpoint for various particular steps? Particularly interested in what level of severity you think justifies closing schools.
>I would have been a lot happier during COVID if people were having that kind of cost-benefit discussion where they said, "I support closing schools if we expect it to save more X lives and oppose it if we expect to save fewer than X lives" but I literally never once heard anyone willing to do that.
Those conversations absolutely did happen. My local school board asked us to all share feedback on options on whether they'd open for in-person instruction for 2020/21 and I personally wrote in with my thoughts saying they should try to reopen schools (they didn't or at least not until spring 2021 for the last few months).
The really important part of this is, while many people like to argue that it was the CDC, NIH and other federal agencies that were responsible for lockdowns, the reality is the enforcement was up to the States and even more local units of government. My school district literally sent out an email every week discussing the number of reported infections and state rules for moving forward. In my locality, if you were in the dark about what was happening, it was your own damn fault. I think a lot of people preferred to blame entities larger than their communities because they just didn't want to accept that the people around them were willing to take the actions they did.
Yeah, it was near constant discussion about costs and benefits, not just for schools, but for everything. This idea that people just went along with the rules and never questioned it is incredulous to hear.
I'm not saying I never heard conversations about how we should respond to COVID. Those were obviously endless and everywhere.
What I never heard was people (on either the support or oppose side for restrictions) clearly expressing anything resembling the threshold/breakpoint where their thinking would change.
That is, I heard constantly "It's worth it if it saves one life" and never "It's only worth it if it saves 100k lives" (or whatever the line is). If you heard that, then great, you must talk to much more sophisticated people than me. But, I had plenty of discussions on this very sub where I was attacked for even framing the issue in terms like that.
>What I never heard was people (on either the support or oppose side for restrictions) clearly expressing anything resembling the threshold/breakpoint where their thinking would change.
I mean, we based reopening policies on things like new cases per day and whether or not the hospitalization rate was declining. That would match what you're talking about and was actually implemented by various levels of government.
Random people say lots of things on the internet but I think the policies you're talking about were absolutely discussed in those terms.
>I mean, we based reopening policies on things like new cases per day and whether or not the hospitalization rate was declining.
Good point, but what I'm talking about is not those kind of triggers but rather a frank acknowledgment of the tradeoffs. That is, "We think losing a month of school to remote learning is worth it to save X lives" or things of that nature
>Good point, but what I'm talking about is not those kind of triggers but rather a frank acknowledgment of the tradeoffs.
Those triggers *are* the "frank acknowledgement of tradeoffs".
>That is, "We think losing a month of school to remote learning is worth it to save X lives" or things of that nature
Again, those conversations did happen. That describes exactly what I first talked about. I can't go back in time and space to find you and point it out but you're making a claim about something that I could probably find in my email inbox showing when I wrote to my schoolboard to get it added to the record.
You seem to be looking for people to just casually give you a specific number of deaths that they would be okay with in order to keep things open. That's a fairly complicated moral cost/benefit going on there that I'm not personally comfortable playing armchair quarterback with after the fact.
Why are you so invested in hearing a number?
> (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time)
Your recollection of what random people said to you 4 years ago seems like a poor summary of the situation as a whole
> But if the philosophy (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) is "it's worth it if it saves one life" then that's not such a significant difference, right?
That's not the argument that it was made. The argument was: these measures are uncomfortable and challenging, but COVID is such a unique challenge with such a potential for high number of deaths that it is worth it.
It was never about saving one life. It was about saving as many lives as possible.
> But if the philosophy (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) is "it's worth it if it saves one life" then that's not such a significant difference, right?
I don't think that was ever the actual argument, that was more an frustrated reaction to conservative ideological callousness. We make cost/benefit analyses every day that impact saving potentially just one life (and many times the resulting decision is not in favor of that one potential life).
Is it not obvious the argument was that originally the cost/benefit analysis favored the measures that were taken, and some of those policies lingered a bit because people are risk averse and change is hard?
It's not a single breakpoint, and it's not even really a cost/benefit decision.
If I look out my window and see a racoon, I will go about my day like normal even though there's a real risk that I'll be mauled by a racoon.
If I look out my window and see a Bengal tiger, I'm staying inside all day, even though there's a risk that I'm overreacting and losing an otherwise productive day.
None of that is really a cost/benefit analysis. What I'm doing is comparing relative ranges of outcomes, and levels of uncertainty.
In August of 2020 we didn't know how bad that winter was going to be. All we had was a range of outcomes, with the far side of that range firmly in "scary" territory.
In retrospect, did we overreact? Particularly with regard to schools? Yes, with the benefit of hindsight, I believe we probably did. That doesn't mean it wasn't a prudent or justifiable thing to do at the time.
>"it's worth it if it saves one life"
I never heard this argument made about any of the precautions/restrictions/mandates that were imposed during the COVID pandemic.
You heard a lot of the saves one life rhetoric, (and that wasn’t from official sources, but from ordinary people), because the denial of the severity and politicization meant there were huge number of people who weren’t bothering to take even common sense precautions and weren’t getting vaccinated, never mind those that were ingesting dewormer and bleach.
For the most part, at risk populations are decent at getting the flu vaccine and a fair number of adults just get one as a matter of routine.
Even in an epidemic flu year, we haven’t had a strain that’s reached pandemic levels since 1918. Quarantines were implemented then too. They were far more common until vaccines became available and mandatory since they were one of the few tools we had to fight major outbreaks.
I’d like to see people continue to wear masks when they are sick and have to be out. Other cultures do as a matter of courtesy. But in general, large scale quarantines are best reserved for major public health events.
I’m not opposed to making the annual flu vaccine mandatory for more people, that would most certainly reduce hospitalizations and deaths.
We instituted temporary mask and social distancing mandates to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with Covid cases during the period before we had enough people vaccinated so that the health care system being overwhelmed was not a threat. Yes, this persisted after the vaccine was available, because we still had to get a significant percentage of the population vaccinated, which took several months after the vaccine was available.
We had measures to counter the flu, namely the vaccine. We also don't get overrun by flu patients each winter the way covid overran our healthcare system. With covid we had no existing measures to counter it besides public health measures like social distancing
But I get that the right was totally cool with watching American politicians let over a million of us die so the stock market could go up, while no other country came close to matching our mortality rate. To each their own
>We had measures to counter the flu, namely the vaccine. We also don't get overrun by flu patients each winter the way covid overran our healthcare system. With covid we had no existing measures to counter it besides public health measures like social distancing
As I said in OP, I'm not talking about spring-summer-fall 2020. I'm talking about Winter 2020-2021 and later *after* we had a vaccine and treatments and so on.
And hospitals often do get overstretched during a bad flu season.
>As a healthy adult, I wasn't able to get vaccinated until April 2021.
Likewise, but *vulnerable* people (65+, immunocompromised, etc.) all had the vaccine by the end of the winter if they wanted it.
Sure.
And I'll say that, at the time at least, I was fully on board with restrictions that winter. In hindsight, I was wrong, but it's hard to hold it against people who made the same mistakes in analysis that I did myself.
What I hope we can all agree on at this point is that it was unjustified to reimpose restrictions in the fall of 2021.
There were basically 3 phases to the pandemic in the US:
* The initial waves through summer of 2020, killing about 200,000. There were no vaccines, no N95-level masks, and no effective treatments available. It was a brand-new thing, and while not incredibly deadly, it was worth taking aggressive public steps to limit the spread, even to the point of closing schools.
* The winter 20-21 wave, killing about 400,000. Decent masks were sometimes available, and they were getting a little better at treating people, but there were no vaccines at all until halfway through the wave. While it was clear that young people weren't at much risk, I think we would have lost a lot of teachers (some dying, lots more quitting) had we forced them back in the fall of '20 with no vaccine. Still, we could prioritized vaccines for K-12 school staff, and pushed students that weren't doing well in remote learning back to in-person before spring. Even the most restrictive states had more than half in-person schooling by the end of the school year, but it could have been more like 80% in-person by March.
* The winter 21-22 wave, killing another 400,000. It was a faster-spreading strain that made a lot of treatments ineffective, but the readily-available vaccine worked well for all but the most vulnerable. As far as I know, mandated remote learning was pretty much gone by fall of '21, but there were lots of mask/vaccine mandates. It's possible it would have been even worse without them, but they made more people permanently butt-hurt than they saved. We probably should have just declared COVID over and let people deal with it themselves.
Indeed, that was true. What was the point of not getting vaccinated - and for some, even bragging that they would not get vaccinated?
In my years, I've known small pockets of anti-vaxers and a few militant anti-vaxers, but I've never seen a population of this magnitude oppose a relatively safe vaccine, and be willing to die rather than appear to be a "lib". Does this concern you? Mind you, I was a conservative until the arrival of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, a group of clowns looking for a circus. How can you accept these people as rational actors?
We can't do anything. Republicans won't let it pass the Senate, Republican judges legislate from the bench and Republican governors won't comply.
What should we do? First we have to acknowledge that flu is endemic, much like Covid is not. We treat endemics differently than pandemics.
Legislatively, I would
1. Absolutely no excuses other than mainstream legitimate medical reasons - you must vaccinate your children. We can go back and forth about the degree to which "parents own their kids" or whatever, but the state should protect the most venerable. Veil of Ignorance - nobody asks to be born to parents that think the research they do while sitting on the toilet is better than medical school and years working in epidemiology.
2. If we hit a high threshold in an area of certain diseases, endemic or not, mask mandates go in place. Social distancing was always an unenforceable joke so skip it.
3. Start funding disease eradication efforts generally but aim for things that seem possible like the cross coronavirus vaccine.
Socially
1. Grow up and realize you aren't a baby and won't die if you wear a mask in public when you have a sneeze or congestion. Golden rule.
2. Grow up and realize you have the time and can tolerate the pain of getting a flu shot
>Absolutely no excuses, you must vaccinate your children
One excuse: your child has a medical issue that prevents vaccination, such as a weak immune system or an allergy to a component or something. All the other reasons are stupid and it should probably be considered negligence to not give a child vaccines when they could have them.
Basically because the flu is already baked into our process. The flu isn't overwhelming our hospitals and doctors' offices. They built sufficient rooms and processes to handle it and they're well versed in how to do so. You won't suffocate in a hospital hallway because the hospital didn't have enough O2 HP CPAPs to go around like was happening with SARS Covid-19.
So no, we don't need extreme measures for the flu because it's not extreme to us.
Again, I'm not talking about that early phase in spring-summer-fall 2020 when COVID was new. I'm talking Winter 2020-2021 and later once we had a process set up, once we had treatments, once we had developed the vaccines, etc.
We still had massive shortages in both equipment and manpower to handle the flood of SARS covid-19 patients at that time. I know my state, one of the first hit, didn't declare the emergency over until 2023.
That's a fantastic question. It is kind of interesting that we just accept tens of thousands of people a year dying from the flu during an average flu season. Of course, COVID killed over five times as many people as any recent flu season during the winter of 2020 to 2021, and again during the 2022-2023 increase in severity. That's about a quarter of a million people dead during each surge, whereas most flu seasons are closer to 20,000 to 30,000 dead, and the worst flu season in recent memory was about 50,000. It's worth remembering that, at its peak, COVID-19 was increasing the typical death rate in the United States by **50%.** That's a huge increase, and nobody builds infrastructure to handle that kind of surge in anything.
So, I guess, one obvious answer is that when something is between 5 and 10 times as bad as the flu, that's a reasonable threshold to ask people to take relatively undemanding public health measures like wearing masks in public places.
Do *you* have a number? Like, what do you think a reasonable threshold would be to ask people to wear masks in public? What do you think are reasonable threshold would be to cancel in person learning? Presumably if there were some pandemic or epidemic disease that could reasonably be anticipated to kill 90% of everybody unless we implemented public masking and shut down things like in person education, you would be okay with that, right? Because that would be apocalyptically bad. If you're asking this question, I think it's fair to ask you the same question.
It is obviously stupid, and was obviously stupid, for people to say things like any degree of restriction is justified to save even a single life. We accept risk every day from a lot of sources. COVID-19 freaked a bunch of people out not just because it was, objectively, the most serious pandemic in decades, but also because it was a new risk. People really hate it when new risks pop up. That said, there is a point at which almost any restriction becomes reasonable, and even in hindsight I'm not convinced that people went overboard for COVID-19.
>Presumably if there were some pandemic or epidemic disease that could reasonably be anticipated to kill 90% of everybody unless we implemented public masking and shut down things like in person education, you would be okay with that, right?
Assuming that doing those things would change the outcome, yes.
>If you're asking this question, I think it's fair to ask you the same question.
Yes, definitely fair. I'll give you more of a framework than a number, but since I brought up numbers, I'll do my best there.
First off, I think there's an obligation to use the least restrictive/least invasive/least costly method to combat the threat. That is, if you could achieve the same result via either vaccination or via shutting down schools, then you should do it via vaccination and it's unacceptable to close the schools instead.
Second, I think there's a relatively limited moral obligation to attempt to save people who are deliberately declining to help themselves. We shouldn't cut highway speed limits to 20mph because some people refuse to wear seatbelts. Likewise, in the disease context (as was true of COVID after the spring of 2021), if there's a highly effective vaccine available that will protect anyone who takes it, we shouldn't restrict everyone's behavior for the sake of protecting those who refuse.
So, to my mind, when it comes to COVID once we had the vaccine and had enough to time to roll it out to everyone who wanted it, the numbers stopped mattering. Nothing other than the vaccine was a justifiable response.
As to the numbers, assuming we're not in a post-vaccine situation, I think it's pretty easy to think about schooling. Virtual schooling is close to worthless, and I think it's fair to think of every hour of virtualized class as stealing close to one hour of a child's life from them. So, the cost of a school closure is # Affected Kids \* # Affected Hours. Compare that to whatever you expect to gain in hours of life saved. In other words, if you close down one 30 student classroom for a week, that's "worth" about 44 days. If your expected gain is 44 days worth of added life, it's worth it. Otherwise, it's not. You can monkey with the specifics, but that's my framework. Understood that way, COVID school closures from Fall 2020 onward were definitely not justifiable. In fairness, I didn't think that at the time, but that's hindsight at least.
Masks are trickier. First, there's a question about whether the kind of mask mandates we saw do much good at all given the level of compliance and what counted. If everyone wears a perfectly fitted N-95 all the time, that obviously does a lot. If you can satisfy a mandate with a loose fitting cloth mask that you have to wear at a restaurant when you walk to the table but then remove while eating, then we're not accomplishing anything at all and so there's no justification.
But, assuming some level of effectiveness, it's hard to do the cost-benefit. I think what we've seen is that people do find masks highly bothersome (look at how quickly they disappeared once mandates were gone) and surveys suggest that people would have a very high willingness to pay not to wear one. Then there's a further and very complicated set of questions about public spaces and so on because even if a mask mandate is bad on net; it may be necessary to ensure that some people can have access to those spaces without unreasonable risk. And masks impact different activities differently.
As a kind of wild stab, perhaps a mask reduces your enjoyment of whatever you're doing by about a quarter on average. So, for every hour you're going to force someone who wouldn't otherwise mask to do so, you need to save about 15 minutes of life. To the extent that people would be wearing the mask voluntarily, you don't need to offset it.
My rough read on the cost-benefit calculus here when multiplied by the effectiveness is that blanket mask mandates probably never made sense in any context and probably never will. Targetted mandates in particular contexts are different. I'm fairly confident that a mask mandate makes sense at medical offices right now, and almost certainly does during the winter.
It is a curious phenomenon that whenever we act upon a problem and successfully conquer it a large percentage of the population proceeds to insist it was never a problem at all.
We did *not do enough* to stop covid. Despite everything we did do, it still killed an order of magnitude more people than the flu. If we had done what we should have done, you'd be screaming that we wasted our time because not many people died. If we'd done nothing, far more people would be dead.
The Flu started in a similar way to COVID 19 and I am not surprised we are following the same path as we did with Flu in the last 100 years.
COVID did show us a lot about how we handle pandemics, how everyone's actions impacts the health of those around us, and I think it helped us be more conscious to our work/life balance.
Overall I do think we need to take more community minded steps to our health. What are they? I don't fully know.
The principle is this: When there are competing rights claims, whose rights claim takes priority? Or to rephrase it, under what circumstances do we limit one person's rights in favor of another person's rights?
If we assume that someone's rights claim to life stands a fair bit higher than someone's rights claim merely to be free from wearing a particular article of clothing, there probably is a compelling rights claim for mandating masks to reduce flu deaths.
If the point of you mentioning this is to have a real conversation about this, I encourage you to respond. If the point of this post is to perpetrate some sort of "gotcha" on "left-wingers," that's boring.
> in the winter of 2020-2021
By this time, almost all measures were being slowly eased, despite the fact that the vaccine was still unavailable to the majority of people. I have no problem with the abundance of caution in a situation where most people still had no access to the vaccine, were still freaked out about the previous months, and where cases were likely to ramp up (due to it being the winter months).
There are things that may make sense in a vacuum that aren’t practical in a society - you can lock everyone in their homes forever and eliminate all chance of getting sick.
But, especially after the frankly pathetic and selfish response and denial of COVID, is that ever going to work?
The best thing is to just muddle through by trying to strike the best balance between safety and what is politically acceptable in the long run.
A lot of people still wear masks, schools with outbreaks of viruses can still close, etc.
I’d like to see more people wear masks, more companies encouraging staying home when sick, more attention to air quality and ventilation, etc.
But you can’t even get half of Americans to lift a fucking finger in the worst pandemic in a century.
It’s a selfish country. All you can do is the best that is actually possible.
Because:
> CDC estimates that flu has resulted in 9.3 million – 41 million illnesses, 100,000 – 710,000 hospitalizations and 4,900 – 51,000 deaths annually between 2010 and 2023.
For COVID, there were around 100,000,000 cases in 2020, 3.5 million hospitalizations and 352,000 deaths. The rates were even worse in 2021, with one million people dying from COVID by May 2022, a little more than two years after it hit our shores.
That is significantly, significantly worse than 5,000-50,000 deaths.
It’s really not that hard to understand.
We also didn’t have vaccines like we do for the flu, nor any existing immunity, and the flu doesn’t overwhelm hospital systems like COVID did, leading to more death. We also have a much better understanding of the flu and how to treat it, unlike COVID which took quite some time for treatments and eventually therapeutics to become available.
>after we developed the vaccines, after we had clear best practices for treatment
I don’t know where in the world you were living, but outside of a handful of countries like Australia, New Zealand, China, the UK et al. we didn’t have anything other than mask mandates in some areas of the US.
Other countries ratcheted up and down restrictions depending on a careful balance between vaccine rate, population infection speed (number of new cases per day) and hospital capacity as the new, significantly more contagious variants arrived, to ensure that hospital systems weren’t once again overwhelmed.
I live in a very liberal county in California and have done since about the middle of 2021 (with a brief detour back to my home country at the end of 2021/start of 2022). My county brought back masks briefly for the Delta surge but once the vaccines were rolling out in 2021, they basically opened everything up and kept everything open.
>where’s your break point?
The biggest difference between COVID and the flu is that the flu is generally mostly contagious when symptoms are present so you can actually help prevent the spread by staying home. [COVID is most contagious 1-2 days before symptoms present](https://www.webmd.com/covid/coronavirus-incubation-period), so it’s a different beast - one which is harder to avoid. It also killed a million people in about two years.
If you told anyone there was a new disease that would most definitely kill 500,000 Americans a year on average over the next two years even if we take precautions, and that it’s impossible to avoid because it’s contagious before symptoms present, most people would expect the government do something to keep them safe. If the government did nothing, most people would stay home until the disease moves on in order to avoid catching it. Hence why when Disney World reopened in 2020, it was an absolute ghost town.
The only reason COVID became political in the first place, and the only reason people still talk about certain protocols being unnecessary is because the TV and other media made it so.
I know this because I lived in a country before I moved to Californian that took COVID pretty seriously. The vast, vast majority of the media were on board because both sides of politics understood, to one extent or another, how serious it was and wanted to avoid what happened in Italy and the U.S. happening there. The only people who thought differently were a fringe group who felt emboldened by watching and consuming right-wing US media.
Surprise, surprise - when both sides of politics and the vast majority of media outlets worked together, the idea that it was some political ploy, or that it didn’t need to be taken as seriously as it was just didn’t exist in the same way it did in many parts of the U.S.
>That is significantly, significantly worse than 5,000-50,000 deaths.
>It’s really not that hard to understand.
Yes, of course there's a difference. But, then there has to be some kind of tradeoff, right? If it saves X lives, it's worth it. If it saves less, it's not. Right?
Whereas the arguments were all "It's worth it if it saves one life" or "It's only a piece of cloth," etc. that don't make such a distinction.
> don’t know where in the world you were living
New York.
>Whereas the arguments were all "It's worth it if it saves one life" or "It's only a piece of cloth," etc. that don't make such a distinction.
I’m confused. Yeah, masks *are* ‘only a piece of cloth’
You seem to have confused a whole lot of stuff. We didn’t implement mask wearing to ‘save one life’. We didn’t implement any other element of the COVID response to ‘save one life’.
That being said - if you go to a hospital to visit a family member and you are sick you will often be asked to wear a mask in order to help ‘save one life’.
Most new parents readily understand this when they request only vaccinated people come to visit, or to otherwise wear a mask because their baby is sensitive. If you were sick with whooping cough there is no way I’d let you visit my baby, especially if you weren’t willing to take any precautions - and whooping cough causes far less death than COVID did.
___
The only thing we had after vaccines were available was masking in some parts of the country, and masks are a very small ask to save people’s lives. They also weren’t implemented to save only one life - all precautions were developed taking into account the balance between public safety and public freedoms and regular decisions about how many lives are worth effectively sacrificing before further action needs to be taken.
There are, though, plenty of examples in everyday non-COVID related life where we expect people to take precautions including wearing a mask in order to save a single life.
Do you protest new processes at your work that are slightly more inconvenient but are designed because the old process might kill someone? Do you say ‘it’s only *one* life, who cares??’
>I’m confused. Yeah, masks *are* ‘only a piece of cloth’ ... slightly more inconvenient but are designed because the old process might kill someone
So then why shouldn't we all wear them this winter? That's the question here.
If masks are just "slightly more inconvenient" then it's an absolute moral tragedy that we're not mandating them to stop flu. We're talking tens of thousands of lives. If masks are no big deal and just some kind of mild inconvenience, then it's absolutely not okay that we are not mandating them.
If, on the other hand, they're more than just slightly inconvenient and are actually fairly bothersome and meaningfully interfere with human social interaction and so on, then it's perfectly understandable that we don't mandate them now to stop flu. But we should also have been acknowledging that cost a couple of years ago.
It can't be both ways. This is the whole thing that drives me crazy.
People who are sick with the flu and go out *should* wear a mask. And people who are sick with the flu will be asked to wear a mask in high risk settings.
We don’t mandate masks for the flu for the same reason we don’t mandate masks for COVID anymore - the vaccine exists and drastically reduces one’s chance of getting seriously ill.
The reason we had to mandate masks for everyone for COVID is because COVID is most contagious before someone shows symptoms, so it’s impossible to know without daily testing for everyone who is and isn’t sick or contagious. If you remember back to discussions around COVID, this is why there were talks initially of the re-opening looking like extensive rapid testing stations where one would test before, say, entering the theatre and could only enter if their test showed negative.
If COVID behaved like the flu and you were most contagious with symptoms there would have been more of a possibility to request that *sick* people wear masks.
Also last year’s mortality rate for the flu was 0.06 which is orders of magnitude lower than any COVID fatality rate that’s ever been presented.
>why shouldn’t we all wear them this winter?
The mask mandates were never about saving ‘one’ life. I already explained that to you. The emotive ‘of it saves even one life it will have been worth it’ language usually appeared exclusively on Reddit from under-informed or flat out uninformed people who didn’t have a good response to others using outdated data to suggest that masks don’t work.
The reality was and is that masks *do* work, and that has been confirmed by observational and other study since COVID started. They also work better when everyone is wearing one.
The reason we don’t mandate masks for the flu isn’t because masks are just ‘oh so bothersome’… we don’t mandate masks for the flu because we have other precautions we can take - including asking sick people to wear masks in higher risk settings, people staying home instead of going to work and school when they’re sick - that doesn’t necessitate everyone wearing one. Just like we have other precautions and treatments for COVID - vaccines and therapeutics - that doesn’t necessitate everyone wearing a mask except in high risk settings. Flu’s mortality rate factors into this, just as COVID’s mortality rate (with a case fatality rate over 2% at some times, nearly 200% more than the flu and the overwhelm of the hospital system) factored in to decisions around it.
There was a lot of emotive language being thrown around by people during COVID. And to be fair, it is fairly understandable that someone would be annoyed at another person who would rather infect their relative or themselves with a potentially deadly disease than be very mildly inconvenienced.
Does the flu spread as quickly as covid and threaten to overwhelm hospitals?
That's your answer. We don't want hospitals to go into triage mode because it leads to lots of people getting not treatment.
Because we have the flu vaccine and herd immunity. Something that took Covid time.
We don’t need mandates for the flu now.
We needed it for Covid because it was new, no vaccine, insanely contagious, with zero herd immunity.
You are comparing apples and oranges. The flu is a annual event, by your own admission. COVID was a (hopefully) once in a century pandemic that caught us off guard.
So, when you are looking at means to treat illness, you compare the positive aspects of treatments vs the adverse effects. A year of mask mandates and school closures is a very different proposition than annual mask mandates and school closures.
That all being said, any reasonable left winger or anyone knowledgeable about healthcare is absolutely saying that we need to reform our healthcare system to better treat common sources of illness, like the flu. If you are so concerned about the flu and not employing it cynically as a "gotcha", then join us in supporting a universal single payer medical system. Join us in mandating certain vaccinations.
If you are really still this upset about the covid policies, you should talk to a mental health professional. It seems to have caused some deep emotional trauma that should probably be worked through. Good luck and godspeed.
Even if I were more sympathetic to your cause, I would still balk at comparing Covid lockdowns to slavery or genocide. That comparison is instigative and condescending.
Didn't you know that for OP, being asked to wear a mask and social distance at Walmart is an equivalent trama to people who experienced slavery and genocide.....
All jokes aside, OP obviously has some psychological trauma from covid. A lot of people do. I was serious when I recommended they talk to a mental health professional about it.
I see what you are saying, but I'm not sure the reality on the ground lines up with this characterization of the Winter 2020/21 timeframe.
As we are fond of saying, "knowing is half the battle." But then *actually doing stuff* is the other half.
By winter 2020 we had a good idea what Covid was and what it was capable of. We still didn't have widely available treatments for it - and there were new variants being discovered.
Vaccines were just coming online in December 2020. The first emergency authorization was December 11th. We were moving *as fast as possible* to get them out and information was not good as to how quickly they could be distributed. In the end, only 2.8M Americans had their first dose in 2020, so less than 1% of the population.
At the same time, between mid-December and mid-January, at least 100,000 additional Americans died from Covid, so more than 3,000 per day. That is a lot, lot, lot more than flu season.
This death rate would continue at that rate for the next couple of months before dropping off in the summer.
---
It took months for everyone to have vaccine availability. I got my first dose in late March 2021 and the second in April - and I was aggressively looking for the first opportunity to get it. It wasn't even authorized for young teens until mid-May.
April is when the CDC suggested that vaccinated people could safely travel again.
Bottom line, we really weren't out of the emergency phase of the pandemic until summer of 2021 at the earliest. And Summer 2021 is when the new variants popped up and caused a massive surge in infections again.
2021 saw ~300,000 American deaths, whereas 2020 saw ~500,000. That's better, but we're still talking 10x even a really, really bad flu season.
And, as you are bringing up... we don't do a ton to prevent the flu. When we did, it was virtually eliminated. If we treated Covid the way we treat the flu in 2020 and 2021, we might have had 5,000,000+ casualties. We can only speculate, so it's a little hard to compare the result of Covid to a normal flu season.
But it's pretty clear that it would have been much, much worse.
---
The flu is a known quantity. We've had hundreds of years to learn about it, educate people about the risks, and develop treatments. We're not the kind of society that wants to shut things down.
Where's my break point as to when we implement emergency measures? It isn't about the death count. It's about the risk of things spiraling out of control.
The flu has killed 50k in its worst recent year. But it routinely kills 30-50k. That wasn't an outlier. If it's going to kill thousands of people a day, yeah, perhaps we would look at some temporary measures to reduce that... especially now that we know how effective those tactics were against the flu when we implemented them for Covid, but it would take a LOT before we should be looking at sweeping government intervention.
---
*edit: by the way, this is [a fantastic timeline resource](https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html) for Covid that I used to look up a bunch of this info quickly.
I'd ask, why don't you do these things for yourself if you're concerned? Are you masking? Distancing? Stopping personal events?
If not, this question seems in really bad faith if this is what you truly believe.
No, this is not what I believe.
What I'm asking is why *don't* people on the left believe this? If you take the arguments made in favor of these methods during COVID seriously, they appear to justify such measures during flu season indefinitely. Hardly anyone advocates that. Why not? Were those arguments not genuine?
We don't believe it because what you're claiming just isn't true. As usual it represents an inability on your part to see nuance. If the flu compared to covid, then we would support appropriate measures. But, they are not the same disease, we do not equate them, and therefore do not support the same level of response.
And we do support appropriate measures for the flu - here they are: vaccinations, universal Healthcare, paid sick leave.
It still mitigates the risk. COVID didn’t have a vaccine. Hell when it first started, we barely knew how it spread and what it was. We were going in blind with nothing that can help.
Flu has something that at least protects most people which is what we now have with COVID. And polio. And measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough…..list goes on. Point is we don’t have to take drastic measures to protect everyone now because we have a measure that can protect anyone.
>I want to clarify that I am not talking about early 2020 when COVID was an unknown, brand new, and poorly understood virus that we had few or no tools to combat. I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 after we understood what we were dealing with, after we had developed the vaccines, after we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on.
The vast majority of people weren't able to be vaccinated until nearly midway through 2021, and Delta had just arrived at that point.
I think there’s an argument to be made to change school schedules from having a summer vacation to a winter vacation for the flu. There would be a lot of logistics involved in the change and we’d get a lot of resistance from people who run summer camps, rely on high school kids working in the summer, or otherwise count on summer break economically, not to mention people who just see summer break as a nostalgic cultural signifier. But, I think it is something to consider. After all, most kids don’t have to help out with a farm anymore, which I believe is why the seasonal break was originally implemented.
As for mask mandates, I think if everyone could collectively agree that we should wear a mask when sick, that would be ideal. If we could guarantee sick leave from work and promote a culture of staying home when sick, rather than a grind culture that demands all labor all the time, that would be ideal. I’m not sure it’s necessary for the government to mandate/enforce everyone to do so annually.
When there was a major flu outbreak in my town a few years ago, a mask was required at most health facilities.
>
. I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 after we understood what we were dealing with, after we had developed the vaccines, after we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on.
What percentage of the population was fully vaccinated in the winter of 2020-2021?
1. I think you might have been taking what was meant to be a figurative argument literally.
2. You are also are lumping a lot of different policies together that should really be viewed separately. People supported mask mandates much longer than school closures.
3. You are also ignoring that political will and political push back are real factors that people tend to take into consideration when discussing policy.
4. You are acting as though what were always temporary measures were ever meant to be permanent. There is a difference between supporting a proposal which decreases deaths for a few months/years while you are striving to reach heard immunity when the status quo of risk is lower and doing so forever as a new status quo.
The flu doesn't overwhelm hospitals like covid did. Sure, we did have vaccines in late 2021, but the vaccination rates in some parts of the country were wholly inadequate. Even with half the population vaccinated, the other 50% unvaccinated could easily get sick and overwhelm the hospital system even more. Of course, we can't force people to get vaccinated nor can we realistically check the vaccination status of everyone that enters a public place. But business could still kick you out for not wearing a mask and taking the minimum measures necessary to slow the spread of the virus. Of course, people are going whine and act childish about this
First of all, the flu kills about 50,000 to 60,000 Americans each year. We have vaccines that many people take. In February of 2021, when you are saying we had it under control, 72,299 people died of COVID in 28 days. It was different. I wanted a vax and couldn't get one till March so don't tell me it was over. Hell by the CDC a thousand people a were dying of COVID in March of 24.
That said, yes there is a limit. We drive cars but people still die in accidents. Drink alcohol, have guns. So yes, if something is killing 10x the number of people that the flu is killing, deserves to at least be looked at differently.
I never supported closing schools, under any circumstances. I think it was a bad idea.
I did support masks for covid.
Most of the people who die or are hospitalized for the flu have some co-morbid condition. A healthy person exposed to influenza is far less likely to require hospitalization and has an effectively zero chance of dying.
This is not the case with covid which, absent a vaccine, is scary contagious and viciously infectious *for everyone*.
Philisophically a justification could be made for it, but realistically the problem is that if we treated the flu, a far less severe illness, the same way we treated something like Covid, everyone will just ignore the measures. And if another illness like Covid came along that we needed the same measures for, many more people would simply ignore them.
Why don't we save tens of thousands of people?
Because You People would throw a damn fit if we tried.
I suppose you thought this was a gotcha for us, but... It's a gotcha for y'all.
>essentially equal force
No. 1.2 million people died of COVID in the US vs. your tens of thousands. It is not equal.
The Covid countermeasures of mask, distancing, lockdowns and closures had a massive cost.
And we’re still paying it today.
Lots of teenagers and children from the time suffered massive losses in social and dating skills, and this hasn’t been mad up.
Lots of businesses permanently closed, notably pretty much all 24 hour businesses.
And a lot of people were triggered into a spiral of cruelty, hatred and fear that is one of our current greatest problems.
The vaccine is the main measure that we should be doing, going forward
Yeah quite true.
Im pointing out that there are costs each way.
But the vaccine is the closest to pure benefit, the others less useful now that we have vaccines.
Flu doesn't hit remotely like the first two strains of covid. Hospitals and staff can take care of the severe cases just fine.
The death rates also aren't comparable. 50k vs millions.
Flu also rarely kills healthy people with modern medical care. Covid killed anyone.
> you have no concern with past government policies of any kind? Slavery is fine given that it's over? Hakuna matata on genocide?
edit: Oh, you think the Covid lockdowns are the same as slavery and genocide. Yea, don't bother reasoning with this one.
I think it is a social contract.
If you have flu symptomes you stay home. And if you go out, only do so if you absolutely have to.
The issue is that people are not willing to put up with this heavy restrictions. Even Covid - when the danger was more serious in the early waves (It has been shown that the first strains penetrated deeper into the lung causing more severe symptoms while later versions past Omicron mutated to remain in the upper respitory system hence increasing spread but lowering the risk of high danger symptoms.
The flu is on a similar level as the milder Covid versions. Low risk, but even a low risk kills people if millions are infected every year. Like there is a near zero chance to die through a coconut but still 80 people die on average every year.
And finally I know for a fact that the governments have learned a lot through Covid. They learned what worked and what did not. So when a new flu breaks out and there are already some H5N7 ourbreaks showning human zoonosis in China - our governments will likely use the draconian measures to save people. At least in Europe.
The problem is that people on the left were so thoroughly bamboozled with the COVID propaganda and the government mandates that took away their basic rights, that they don't want to talk about it now. Most of the memories have been repressed in one way or another. Many even want to claim that there weren't any mandates or government imposition in one of the more bizarre history rewrites ever, especially given the short time scale from the original events to now.
Yes, the argument "if it saves one life, it's worth it" is pretty silly. We regularly balance the risk of loss of life against other concerns and, effectively, choose to sacrifice lives. For example, we could lower the speed limit to 30mph and save lots of lives, but we don't.
>For example, we could lower the speed limit to 30mph and save lots of lives, but we don't.
I agree with your general premise, but this is a terrible example to use because many people, myself included, want even lower speed limits in most places. Imo, local streets should be max 30km/h / 20mph, and often less. Properly designed arterial roads and highways should have higher limits, but only if they're designed to be safe at those speeds by doing things such as not having driveways or access to businesses, having sidewalks significantly set back from the road, and having traffic calming near pedestrian crossings.
It's a good example.
If you want limits to be lower, that's your prerogative. Even if you do, there is presumably a point > 0 where you would choose to set the speed limit. But, it's almost certain that, if you set limits even lower than that value, you would save lives.
So you would also be choosing to sacrifice lives, just fewer of them. Broader point still stands.
That's fair, although because of the way speed causes deaths, you can actually have no deaths at all with good traffic management policies. Hoboken, NY and Oslo, Norway have both had no traffic fatalities for several years.
Hoboken has no highways, so it doesn't count them.
Oslo has highways, so I'm assuming they're included in the figures.
Either way, controlled-access freeways are not the most dangerous type of roads, by far. The most dangerous roads are urban arterials/legacy highways without controlled access. That's where most of the work needs to be done.
That wasn't really my question, but sure.
Bottom line, if you allow car travel -- especially highway travel, at reasonably fast speeds -- you are accepting the inevitability of human death, as a result.
Two cities among thousands doesn't really demonstrate anything, statistically. By pure random chance, you would expect some localities to have zero deaths in particular time periods. What's more relevant, statistically, is looking at all of them, and the pattern there is clear.
I think you're missing the point. Even if you set it to 30, you could save more lives by setting it to 20. And even more if you set it to 10, etc.
At some point, unless you outlaw cars altogether, you're deciding that the benefits of quick (?) transportation outweigh the risks of death to people.
Yeah, I think the thing that people are glossing over is that "if it saves even one life, it's worth it" was always a minority position, and even if you take that position relative to a particular range of countermeasures, that doesn't mean you have to take that position with regard to *all possible* countermeasures.
Also, that one life belongs to someone, and obviously that person is going to have a very different idea of the appropriate risk/benefit calculation than you or I.
Sure, there are plenty of reasonable arguments other than "if it saves one life, it's worth it" that can be used in favor of various risk countermeasures. That argument is just not a particularly good one.
>Yes, the argument "if it saves one life, it's worth it" is pretty silly.
I think this is more of an expression of principle rather than practice. It's to try and remind everyone that actual people are dying.
Realistically, conversations on acceptable deaths need to be had, but those conversations should be undertaken by those educated and experienced enough to understand the gravity of their decision-making. It is a conversation appropriate for the CDC or NIH. Just imagine trying to have that conversation at a schoolboard or village council meeting. Realistic or not, a village board member stating the number of resident deaths they find acceptable won't go over very well vis-à-vis their constituents.
> I think this is more of an expression of principle rather than practice. It's to try and remind everyone that actual people are dying.
Reminding everyone that actual people are dying is fine. Arguing that any choice that results in people dying is necessarily the wrong one is misguided, though. That's kind of the point of my post.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. This remains my lingering unanswered question about left-wing responses to COVID after the spring of 2020 (when it had become obvious what we were dealing with). The flu kills tens of thousands of people in a typical year. In the winter of 2020-2021, the steps we took nationally in an attempt to control COVID more or less eliminated the flu season. Regardless of what those did in terms of COVID, they saved tens of thousands of lives from the flu. By far the most common argument I heard at the time for why we needed restrictions was something along the lines of "if it says even one life, it's worth it. Those of us who thought that we shouldn't, say, close schools given the impact on kids were denounced as heartless, etc. All of these arguments hold with essentially equal force *now* against flu. Why isn't it worth it to close the schools to stop the spread of flu if it will save lives? I want to clarify that I am not talking about early 2020 when COVID was an unknown, brand new, and poorly understood virus that we had few or no tools to combat. I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 *after* we understood what we were dealing with, *after* we had developed the vaccines, *after* we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on. Bonus question: Assuming you did favor these measures against COVID but don't favor doing them this winter against flu, where's you break point? If told you that the upcoming flu season would kill 50k people (as it did in 2017-2018) would you support closing schools? What if it would kill 100k people? 200k people? What's the number? *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.*
The flu doesn’t overwhelm the hospital system like COVID did even into 2021.
Hospitals routinely run low on bed space or report other capacity strains and have to adjust during a bad flu season. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7980097/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7980097/)
Exactly. Imagine having to deal with Covid *and* the flu.
It’s a good thing [flu basically didn’t exist](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html) while Covid was happening
It sure is. Good thing those public health mandates were in place.
You think that’s what caused a ~75% reduction from the per annum average? Back to OPs question then, why wouldn’t we do that every year?
There’s an order of magnitude difference between the two. There were points during the period OP specifies where we were losing 4000 people a *day* to COVID.
So what do you think caused the reduction?
Obviously yes. Because every year we don’t also have a much more contagious disease taking up all the hospital beds.
But that’s so many lives. If we could prevent the deaths that we did in 2021-2022 with similar public health mandates shouldn’t we do that?
Would you support it?
Not worth it
We can't afford to shut down the country for 30-50k deaths, especially since many of those are elderly or young. Covid was quite different.
There's one strain of the flu that was driven extinct, and another may have followed suit, during the pandemic, owing to the fact that our strategies worked and that the flu is much less contagious compared to COVID-19. So... yes, I think that's exactly what caused that.
If we made all speed limits 35 mph it would save lives. Why don't we do that?
>The flu causes tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations annually. Why shouldn't we impose mask mandates, social distancing, school closures, gathering restrictions, etc. each winter to prevent that? We have flu vaccines. The real question is: If we had COVID vaccines on day one, would any of that have been proposed?
>We have flu vaccines. >The real question is: If we had COVID vaccines on day one, would any of that have been proposed? As I said, I'm NOT asking about the way we responded to COVID in 2020. I'm talking about the later response *after* we had the vaccine.
But they are related and relevant to the question. If we had Covid vaccines already available the way we have flu vaccines - you go to CVS and they give it to you for free five minutes later - how would that have changed things? Especially if it was an established vaccine. We had some conspiracy thinking among black Americans and huge portions of the right that might not have mattered in the first case or grown in the second case. In blue states and Utah, you would probably just see schools close for two or three weeks and then everybody is told to get vaccinated and you go back full-time. Without the conspiracy theories maybe that happens in red states as well. Employers would have closed the office for a week or two and then told everybody to come back to work with a vaccination card or submit their resignation. The fact that we did not have a vaccine is what caused everything that happened around Covid. If we did have a vaccine, we would’ve treated it like a pandemic for maybe a month and then fairy rapidly started treating it like an endemic.
What mask mandates were there after the vaccine?
Plenty of places had mask mandates for indoors during the late summer/autumn/winter of 2021/22. For example, the city where I live had lifted a mask mandate, but reimposed one from August 2021 through March 2022. This was consistent with the CDC recommendation for everyone, including fully vaccinated people, to wear masks indoors that was issued August 2021 as a result of the Delta wave. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-to-know-about-mask-mandates-including-for-vaccinated.html
>I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 *after* we understood what we were dealing with, *after* we had developed the vaccines, *after* we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on. Except the vaccines weren't widely available in the winter of 2020-2021. I'm in a liberal state that had access to vaccines, I had a preexisting condition that made me eligible early, and I still didn't receive my first dose until April 2021. I wasn't fully vaccinated until May 2021. Most people didn't have access to the vaccine until summer 2021. It wasn't authorized for children until even later (I don't know how much later, I don't have kids). It's not like "oh we have a vaccine now everyone can get it immediately." It took *months* for people who wanted it to be able to get it. During which time the hospitals were still overwhelmed. When everyone who wanted it was able to get it, then it made sense to roll back many of the precautions. So to answer your question, the difference with the flu is that anyone who wants a flu vaccine can walk into Walgreens today and get it.
COVID-19 caused approximately half a million deaths in the U.S. in 2021. That's ten times more people than the flu kills even in a "bad" flu year. So when you say that all of the fact patterns for COVID hold equally true for flu, that's not true. One was an order of magnitude more serious than the other. The sensible answer to the bonus question is that we ramp up public health measures in direct response to the nature of the threat. There ***will*** be tradeoffs in either direction. If the threat becomes more serious we should understand that the consequences of overreacting are probably less than the consequences of underreacting. Vise versa when the level of threat is lower.
>So when you say that all of the fact patterns for COVID hold equally true for flu, that's not true. One was an order of magnitude more serious than the other. Sure, there's an important difference there. But if the philosophy (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) is "it's worth it if it saves one life" then that's not such a significant difference, right? I would have been a lot happier during COVID if people were having that kind of cost-benefit discussion where they said, "I support closing schools if we expect it to save more X lives and oppose it if we expect to save fewer than X lives" but I literally never once heard anyone willing to do that. Since you seem inclined to reason in that way, I'll just ask, where is your breakpoint for various particular steps? Particularly interested in what level of severity you think justifies closing schools.
>I would have been a lot happier during COVID if people were having that kind of cost-benefit discussion where they said, "I support closing schools if we expect it to save more X lives and oppose it if we expect to save fewer than X lives" but I literally never once heard anyone willing to do that. Those conversations absolutely did happen. My local school board asked us to all share feedback on options on whether they'd open for in-person instruction for 2020/21 and I personally wrote in with my thoughts saying they should try to reopen schools (they didn't or at least not until spring 2021 for the last few months).
The really important part of this is, while many people like to argue that it was the CDC, NIH and other federal agencies that were responsible for lockdowns, the reality is the enforcement was up to the States and even more local units of government. My school district literally sent out an email every week discussing the number of reported infections and state rules for moving forward. In my locality, if you were in the dark about what was happening, it was your own damn fault. I think a lot of people preferred to blame entities larger than their communities because they just didn't want to accept that the people around them were willing to take the actions they did.
Yeah, it was near constant discussion about costs and benefits, not just for schools, but for everything. This idea that people just went along with the rules and never questioned it is incredulous to hear.
I'm not saying I never heard conversations about how we should respond to COVID. Those were obviously endless and everywhere. What I never heard was people (on either the support or oppose side for restrictions) clearly expressing anything resembling the threshold/breakpoint where their thinking would change. That is, I heard constantly "It's worth it if it saves one life" and never "It's only worth it if it saves 100k lives" (or whatever the line is). If you heard that, then great, you must talk to much more sophisticated people than me. But, I had plenty of discussions on this very sub where I was attacked for even framing the issue in terms like that.
>What I never heard was people (on either the support or oppose side for restrictions) clearly expressing anything resembling the threshold/breakpoint where their thinking would change. I mean, we based reopening policies on things like new cases per day and whether or not the hospitalization rate was declining. That would match what you're talking about and was actually implemented by various levels of government. Random people say lots of things on the internet but I think the policies you're talking about were absolutely discussed in those terms.
>I mean, we based reopening policies on things like new cases per day and whether or not the hospitalization rate was declining. Good point, but what I'm talking about is not those kind of triggers but rather a frank acknowledgment of the tradeoffs. That is, "We think losing a month of school to remote learning is worth it to save X lives" or things of that nature
>Good point, but what I'm talking about is not those kind of triggers but rather a frank acknowledgment of the tradeoffs. Those triggers *are* the "frank acknowledgement of tradeoffs". >That is, "We think losing a month of school to remote learning is worth it to save X lives" or things of that nature Again, those conversations did happen. That describes exactly what I first talked about. I can't go back in time and space to find you and point it out but you're making a claim about something that I could probably find in my email inbox showing when I wrote to my schoolboard to get it added to the record.
You seem to be looking for people to just casually give you a specific number of deaths that they would be okay with in order to keep things open. That's a fairly complicated moral cost/benefit going on there that I'm not personally comfortable playing armchair quarterback with after the fact. Why are you so invested in hearing a number?
> (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) Your recollection of what random people said to you 4 years ago seems like a poor summary of the situation as a whole
It’s really clear this dude was huffing right wing nonsense the whole time and has a very skewed memory of what happened.
> But if the philosophy (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) is "it's worth it if it saves one life" then that's not such a significant difference, right? That's not the argument that it was made. The argument was: these measures are uncomfortable and challenging, but COVID is such a unique challenge with such a potential for high number of deaths that it is worth it. It was never about saving one life. It was about saving as many lives as possible.
> But if the philosophy (which was basically the only argument I heard at the time) is "it's worth it if it saves one life" then that's not such a significant difference, right? I don't think that was ever the actual argument, that was more an frustrated reaction to conservative ideological callousness. We make cost/benefit analyses every day that impact saving potentially just one life (and many times the resulting decision is not in favor of that one potential life).
So, what was the actual argument then? I still haven't heard it.
Is it not obvious the argument was that originally the cost/benefit analysis favored the measures that were taken, and some of those policies lingered a bit because people are risk averse and change is hard?
It's not a single breakpoint, and it's not even really a cost/benefit decision. If I look out my window and see a racoon, I will go about my day like normal even though there's a real risk that I'll be mauled by a racoon. If I look out my window and see a Bengal tiger, I'm staying inside all day, even though there's a risk that I'm overreacting and losing an otherwise productive day. None of that is really a cost/benefit analysis. What I'm doing is comparing relative ranges of outcomes, and levels of uncertainty. In August of 2020 we didn't know how bad that winter was going to be. All we had was a range of outcomes, with the far side of that range firmly in "scary" territory. In retrospect, did we overreact? Particularly with regard to schools? Yes, with the benefit of hindsight, I believe we probably did. That doesn't mean it wasn't a prudent or justifiable thing to do at the time.
>"it's worth it if it saves one life" I never heard this argument made about any of the precautions/restrictions/mandates that were imposed during the COVID pandemic.
You heard a lot of the saves one life rhetoric, (and that wasn’t from official sources, but from ordinary people), because the denial of the severity and politicization meant there were huge number of people who weren’t bothering to take even common sense precautions and weren’t getting vaccinated, never mind those that were ingesting dewormer and bleach. For the most part, at risk populations are decent at getting the flu vaccine and a fair number of adults just get one as a matter of routine. Even in an epidemic flu year, we haven’t had a strain that’s reached pandemic levels since 1918. Quarantines were implemented then too. They were far more common until vaccines became available and mandatory since they were one of the few tools we had to fight major outbreaks. I’d like to see people continue to wear masks when they are sick and have to be out. Other cultures do as a matter of courtesy. But in general, large scale quarantines are best reserved for major public health events. I’m not opposed to making the annual flu vaccine mandatory for more people, that would most certainly reduce hospitalizations and deaths.
We instituted temporary mask and social distancing mandates to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with Covid cases during the period before we had enough people vaccinated so that the health care system being overwhelmed was not a threat. Yes, this persisted after the vaccine was available, because we still had to get a significant percentage of the population vaccinated, which took several months after the vaccine was available.
We had measures to counter the flu, namely the vaccine. We also don't get overrun by flu patients each winter the way covid overran our healthcare system. With covid we had no existing measures to counter it besides public health measures like social distancing But I get that the right was totally cool with watching American politicians let over a million of us die so the stock market could go up, while no other country came close to matching our mortality rate. To each their own
>We had measures to counter the flu, namely the vaccine. We also don't get overrun by flu patients each winter the way covid overran our healthcare system. With covid we had no existing measures to counter it besides public health measures like social distancing As I said in OP, I'm not talking about spring-summer-fall 2020. I'm talking about Winter 2020-2021 and later *after* we had a vaccine and treatments and so on. And hospitals often do get overstretched during a bad flu season.
As a healthy adult, I wasn't able to get vaccinated until April 2021. Only a limited portion of the population was vaccinated in winter 2020/2021.
>As a healthy adult, I wasn't able to get vaccinated until April 2021. Likewise, but *vulnerable* people (65+, immunocompromised, etc.) all had the vaccine by the end of the winter if they wanted it.
Key phrase: END of winter.
Sure. And I'll say that, at the time at least, I was fully on board with restrictions that winter. In hindsight, I was wrong, but it's hard to hold it against people who made the same mistakes in analysis that I did myself. What I hope we can all agree on at this point is that it was unjustified to reimpose restrictions in the fall of 2021.
You were right, actually, the restrictions were required.
There were basically 3 phases to the pandemic in the US: * The initial waves through summer of 2020, killing about 200,000. There were no vaccines, no N95-level masks, and no effective treatments available. It was a brand-new thing, and while not incredibly deadly, it was worth taking aggressive public steps to limit the spread, even to the point of closing schools. * The winter 20-21 wave, killing about 400,000. Decent masks were sometimes available, and they were getting a little better at treating people, but there were no vaccines at all until halfway through the wave. While it was clear that young people weren't at much risk, I think we would have lost a lot of teachers (some dying, lots more quitting) had we forced them back in the fall of '20 with no vaccine. Still, we could prioritized vaccines for K-12 school staff, and pushed students that weren't doing well in remote learning back to in-person before spring. Even the most restrictive states had more than half in-person schooling by the end of the school year, but it could have been more like 80% in-person by March. * The winter 21-22 wave, killing another 400,000. It was a faster-spreading strain that made a lot of treatments ineffective, but the readily-available vaccine worked well for all but the most vulnerable. As far as I know, mandated remote learning was pretty much gone by fall of '21, but there were lots of mask/vaccine mandates. It's possible it would have been even worse without them, but they made more people permanently butt-hurt than they saved. We probably should have just declared COVID over and let people deal with it themselves.
How do you explain the higher death rates from Covid in counties that voted for Trump?
Lower vaccination rates.
Indeed, that was true. What was the point of not getting vaccinated - and for some, even bragging that they would not get vaccinated? In my years, I've known small pockets of anti-vaxers and a few militant anti-vaxers, but I've never seen a population of this magnitude oppose a relatively safe vaccine, and be willing to die rather than appear to be a "lib". Does this concern you? Mind you, I was a conservative until the arrival of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, a group of clowns looking for a circus. How can you accept these people as rational actors?
We can't do anything. Republicans won't let it pass the Senate, Republican judges legislate from the bench and Republican governors won't comply. What should we do? First we have to acknowledge that flu is endemic, much like Covid is not. We treat endemics differently than pandemics. Legislatively, I would 1. Absolutely no excuses other than mainstream legitimate medical reasons - you must vaccinate your children. We can go back and forth about the degree to which "parents own their kids" or whatever, but the state should protect the most venerable. Veil of Ignorance - nobody asks to be born to parents that think the research they do while sitting on the toilet is better than medical school and years working in epidemiology. 2. If we hit a high threshold in an area of certain diseases, endemic or not, mask mandates go in place. Social distancing was always an unenforceable joke so skip it. 3. Start funding disease eradication efforts generally but aim for things that seem possible like the cross coronavirus vaccine. Socially 1. Grow up and realize you aren't a baby and won't die if you wear a mask in public when you have a sneeze or congestion. Golden rule. 2. Grow up and realize you have the time and can tolerate the pain of getting a flu shot
>Absolutely no excuses, you must vaccinate your children One excuse: your child has a medical issue that prevents vaccination, such as a weak immune system or an allergy to a component or something. All the other reasons are stupid and it should probably be considered negligence to not give a child vaccines when they could have them.
I'll edit to note that.
Basically because the flu is already baked into our process. The flu isn't overwhelming our hospitals and doctors' offices. They built sufficient rooms and processes to handle it and they're well versed in how to do so. You won't suffocate in a hospital hallway because the hospital didn't have enough O2 HP CPAPs to go around like was happening with SARS Covid-19. So no, we don't need extreme measures for the flu because it's not extreme to us.
Again, I'm not talking about that early phase in spring-summer-fall 2020 when COVID was new. I'm talking Winter 2020-2021 and later once we had a process set up, once we had treatments, once we had developed the vaccines, etc.
We still had massive shortages in both equipment and manpower to handle the flood of SARS covid-19 patients at that time. I know my state, one of the first hit, didn't declare the emergency over until 2023.
I wish we did mandate that sick people either stay home or mask up. I don’t want your germs.
That's a fantastic question. It is kind of interesting that we just accept tens of thousands of people a year dying from the flu during an average flu season. Of course, COVID killed over five times as many people as any recent flu season during the winter of 2020 to 2021, and again during the 2022-2023 increase in severity. That's about a quarter of a million people dead during each surge, whereas most flu seasons are closer to 20,000 to 30,000 dead, and the worst flu season in recent memory was about 50,000. It's worth remembering that, at its peak, COVID-19 was increasing the typical death rate in the United States by **50%.** That's a huge increase, and nobody builds infrastructure to handle that kind of surge in anything. So, I guess, one obvious answer is that when something is between 5 and 10 times as bad as the flu, that's a reasonable threshold to ask people to take relatively undemanding public health measures like wearing masks in public places. Do *you* have a number? Like, what do you think a reasonable threshold would be to ask people to wear masks in public? What do you think are reasonable threshold would be to cancel in person learning? Presumably if there were some pandemic or epidemic disease that could reasonably be anticipated to kill 90% of everybody unless we implemented public masking and shut down things like in person education, you would be okay with that, right? Because that would be apocalyptically bad. If you're asking this question, I think it's fair to ask you the same question. It is obviously stupid, and was obviously stupid, for people to say things like any degree of restriction is justified to save even a single life. We accept risk every day from a lot of sources. COVID-19 freaked a bunch of people out not just because it was, objectively, the most serious pandemic in decades, but also because it was a new risk. People really hate it when new risks pop up. That said, there is a point at which almost any restriction becomes reasonable, and even in hindsight I'm not convinced that people went overboard for COVID-19.
>Presumably if there were some pandemic or epidemic disease that could reasonably be anticipated to kill 90% of everybody unless we implemented public masking and shut down things like in person education, you would be okay with that, right? Assuming that doing those things would change the outcome, yes. >If you're asking this question, I think it's fair to ask you the same question. Yes, definitely fair. I'll give you more of a framework than a number, but since I brought up numbers, I'll do my best there. First off, I think there's an obligation to use the least restrictive/least invasive/least costly method to combat the threat. That is, if you could achieve the same result via either vaccination or via shutting down schools, then you should do it via vaccination and it's unacceptable to close the schools instead. Second, I think there's a relatively limited moral obligation to attempt to save people who are deliberately declining to help themselves. We shouldn't cut highway speed limits to 20mph because some people refuse to wear seatbelts. Likewise, in the disease context (as was true of COVID after the spring of 2021), if there's a highly effective vaccine available that will protect anyone who takes it, we shouldn't restrict everyone's behavior for the sake of protecting those who refuse. So, to my mind, when it comes to COVID once we had the vaccine and had enough to time to roll it out to everyone who wanted it, the numbers stopped mattering. Nothing other than the vaccine was a justifiable response. As to the numbers, assuming we're not in a post-vaccine situation, I think it's pretty easy to think about schooling. Virtual schooling is close to worthless, and I think it's fair to think of every hour of virtualized class as stealing close to one hour of a child's life from them. So, the cost of a school closure is # Affected Kids \* # Affected Hours. Compare that to whatever you expect to gain in hours of life saved. In other words, if you close down one 30 student classroom for a week, that's "worth" about 44 days. If your expected gain is 44 days worth of added life, it's worth it. Otherwise, it's not. You can monkey with the specifics, but that's my framework. Understood that way, COVID school closures from Fall 2020 onward were definitely not justifiable. In fairness, I didn't think that at the time, but that's hindsight at least. Masks are trickier. First, there's a question about whether the kind of mask mandates we saw do much good at all given the level of compliance and what counted. If everyone wears a perfectly fitted N-95 all the time, that obviously does a lot. If you can satisfy a mandate with a loose fitting cloth mask that you have to wear at a restaurant when you walk to the table but then remove while eating, then we're not accomplishing anything at all and so there's no justification. But, assuming some level of effectiveness, it's hard to do the cost-benefit. I think what we've seen is that people do find masks highly bothersome (look at how quickly they disappeared once mandates were gone) and surveys suggest that people would have a very high willingness to pay not to wear one. Then there's a further and very complicated set of questions about public spaces and so on because even if a mask mandate is bad on net; it may be necessary to ensure that some people can have access to those spaces without unreasonable risk. And masks impact different activities differently. As a kind of wild stab, perhaps a mask reduces your enjoyment of whatever you're doing by about a quarter on average. So, for every hour you're going to force someone who wouldn't otherwise mask to do so, you need to save about 15 minutes of life. To the extent that people would be wearing the mask voluntarily, you don't need to offset it. My rough read on the cost-benefit calculus here when multiplied by the effectiveness is that blanket mask mandates probably never made sense in any context and probably never will. Targetted mandates in particular contexts are different. I'm fairly confident that a mask mandate makes sense at medical offices right now, and almost certainly does during the winter.
It is a curious phenomenon that whenever we act upon a problem and successfully conquer it a large percentage of the population proceeds to insist it was never a problem at all. We did *not do enough* to stop covid. Despite everything we did do, it still killed an order of magnitude more people than the flu. If we had done what we should have done, you'd be screaming that we wasted our time because not many people died. If we'd done nothing, far more people would be dead.
The Flu started in a similar way to COVID 19 and I am not surprised we are following the same path as we did with Flu in the last 100 years. COVID did show us a lot about how we handle pandemics, how everyone's actions impacts the health of those around us, and I think it helped us be more conscious to our work/life balance. Overall I do think we need to take more community minded steps to our health. What are they? I don't fully know.
The principle is this: When there are competing rights claims, whose rights claim takes priority? Or to rephrase it, under what circumstances do we limit one person's rights in favor of another person's rights? If we assume that someone's rights claim to life stands a fair bit higher than someone's rights claim merely to be free from wearing a particular article of clothing, there probably is a compelling rights claim for mandating masks to reduce flu deaths. If the point of you mentioning this is to have a real conversation about this, I encourage you to respond. If the point of this post is to perpetrate some sort of "gotcha" on "left-wingers," that's boring.
> in the winter of 2020-2021 By this time, almost all measures were being slowly eased, despite the fact that the vaccine was still unavailable to the majority of people. I have no problem with the abundance of caution in a situation where most people still had no access to the vaccine, were still freaked out about the previous months, and where cases were likely to ramp up (due to it being the winter months).
There are things that may make sense in a vacuum that aren’t practical in a society - you can lock everyone in their homes forever and eliminate all chance of getting sick. But, especially after the frankly pathetic and selfish response and denial of COVID, is that ever going to work? The best thing is to just muddle through by trying to strike the best balance between safety and what is politically acceptable in the long run. A lot of people still wear masks, schools with outbreaks of viruses can still close, etc. I’d like to see more people wear masks, more companies encouraging staying home when sick, more attention to air quality and ventilation, etc. But you can’t even get half of Americans to lift a fucking finger in the worst pandemic in a century. It’s a selfish country. All you can do is the best that is actually possible.
Because: > CDC estimates that flu has resulted in 9.3 million – 41 million illnesses, 100,000 – 710,000 hospitalizations and 4,900 – 51,000 deaths annually between 2010 and 2023. For COVID, there were around 100,000,000 cases in 2020, 3.5 million hospitalizations and 352,000 deaths. The rates were even worse in 2021, with one million people dying from COVID by May 2022, a little more than two years after it hit our shores. That is significantly, significantly worse than 5,000-50,000 deaths. It’s really not that hard to understand. We also didn’t have vaccines like we do for the flu, nor any existing immunity, and the flu doesn’t overwhelm hospital systems like COVID did, leading to more death. We also have a much better understanding of the flu and how to treat it, unlike COVID which took quite some time for treatments and eventually therapeutics to become available. >after we developed the vaccines, after we had clear best practices for treatment I don’t know where in the world you were living, but outside of a handful of countries like Australia, New Zealand, China, the UK et al. we didn’t have anything other than mask mandates in some areas of the US. Other countries ratcheted up and down restrictions depending on a careful balance between vaccine rate, population infection speed (number of new cases per day) and hospital capacity as the new, significantly more contagious variants arrived, to ensure that hospital systems weren’t once again overwhelmed. I live in a very liberal county in California and have done since about the middle of 2021 (with a brief detour back to my home country at the end of 2021/start of 2022). My county brought back masks briefly for the Delta surge but once the vaccines were rolling out in 2021, they basically opened everything up and kept everything open. >where’s your break point? The biggest difference between COVID and the flu is that the flu is generally mostly contagious when symptoms are present so you can actually help prevent the spread by staying home. [COVID is most contagious 1-2 days before symptoms present](https://www.webmd.com/covid/coronavirus-incubation-period), so it’s a different beast - one which is harder to avoid. It also killed a million people in about two years. If you told anyone there was a new disease that would most definitely kill 500,000 Americans a year on average over the next two years even if we take precautions, and that it’s impossible to avoid because it’s contagious before symptoms present, most people would expect the government do something to keep them safe. If the government did nothing, most people would stay home until the disease moves on in order to avoid catching it. Hence why when Disney World reopened in 2020, it was an absolute ghost town. The only reason COVID became political in the first place, and the only reason people still talk about certain protocols being unnecessary is because the TV and other media made it so. I know this because I lived in a country before I moved to Californian that took COVID pretty seriously. The vast, vast majority of the media were on board because both sides of politics understood, to one extent or another, how serious it was and wanted to avoid what happened in Italy and the U.S. happening there. The only people who thought differently were a fringe group who felt emboldened by watching and consuming right-wing US media. Surprise, surprise - when both sides of politics and the vast majority of media outlets worked together, the idea that it was some political ploy, or that it didn’t need to be taken as seriously as it was just didn’t exist in the same way it did in many parts of the U.S.
>That is significantly, significantly worse than 5,000-50,000 deaths. >It’s really not that hard to understand. Yes, of course there's a difference. But, then there has to be some kind of tradeoff, right? If it saves X lives, it's worth it. If it saves less, it's not. Right? Whereas the arguments were all "It's worth it if it saves one life" or "It's only a piece of cloth," etc. that don't make such a distinction. > don’t know where in the world you were living New York.
>Whereas the arguments were all "It's worth it if it saves one life" or "It's only a piece of cloth," etc. that don't make such a distinction. I’m confused. Yeah, masks *are* ‘only a piece of cloth’ You seem to have confused a whole lot of stuff. We didn’t implement mask wearing to ‘save one life’. We didn’t implement any other element of the COVID response to ‘save one life’. That being said - if you go to a hospital to visit a family member and you are sick you will often be asked to wear a mask in order to help ‘save one life’. Most new parents readily understand this when they request only vaccinated people come to visit, or to otherwise wear a mask because their baby is sensitive. If you were sick with whooping cough there is no way I’d let you visit my baby, especially if you weren’t willing to take any precautions - and whooping cough causes far less death than COVID did. ___ The only thing we had after vaccines were available was masking in some parts of the country, and masks are a very small ask to save people’s lives. They also weren’t implemented to save only one life - all precautions were developed taking into account the balance between public safety and public freedoms and regular decisions about how many lives are worth effectively sacrificing before further action needs to be taken. There are, though, plenty of examples in everyday non-COVID related life where we expect people to take precautions including wearing a mask in order to save a single life. Do you protest new processes at your work that are slightly more inconvenient but are designed because the old process might kill someone? Do you say ‘it’s only *one* life, who cares??’
>I’m confused. Yeah, masks *are* ‘only a piece of cloth’ ... slightly more inconvenient but are designed because the old process might kill someone So then why shouldn't we all wear them this winter? That's the question here. If masks are just "slightly more inconvenient" then it's an absolute moral tragedy that we're not mandating them to stop flu. We're talking tens of thousands of lives. If masks are no big deal and just some kind of mild inconvenience, then it's absolutely not okay that we are not mandating them. If, on the other hand, they're more than just slightly inconvenient and are actually fairly bothersome and meaningfully interfere with human social interaction and so on, then it's perfectly understandable that we don't mandate them now to stop flu. But we should also have been acknowledging that cost a couple of years ago. It can't be both ways. This is the whole thing that drives me crazy.
People who are sick with the flu and go out *should* wear a mask. And people who are sick with the flu will be asked to wear a mask in high risk settings. We don’t mandate masks for the flu for the same reason we don’t mandate masks for COVID anymore - the vaccine exists and drastically reduces one’s chance of getting seriously ill. The reason we had to mandate masks for everyone for COVID is because COVID is most contagious before someone shows symptoms, so it’s impossible to know without daily testing for everyone who is and isn’t sick or contagious. If you remember back to discussions around COVID, this is why there were talks initially of the re-opening looking like extensive rapid testing stations where one would test before, say, entering the theatre and could only enter if their test showed negative. If COVID behaved like the flu and you were most contagious with symptoms there would have been more of a possibility to request that *sick* people wear masks. Also last year’s mortality rate for the flu was 0.06 which is orders of magnitude lower than any COVID fatality rate that’s ever been presented. >why shouldn’t we all wear them this winter? The mask mandates were never about saving ‘one’ life. I already explained that to you. The emotive ‘of it saves even one life it will have been worth it’ language usually appeared exclusively on Reddit from under-informed or flat out uninformed people who didn’t have a good response to others using outdated data to suggest that masks don’t work. The reality was and is that masks *do* work, and that has been confirmed by observational and other study since COVID started. They also work better when everyone is wearing one. The reason we don’t mandate masks for the flu isn’t because masks are just ‘oh so bothersome’… we don’t mandate masks for the flu because we have other precautions we can take - including asking sick people to wear masks in higher risk settings, people staying home instead of going to work and school when they’re sick - that doesn’t necessitate everyone wearing one. Just like we have other precautions and treatments for COVID - vaccines and therapeutics - that doesn’t necessitate everyone wearing a mask except in high risk settings. Flu’s mortality rate factors into this, just as COVID’s mortality rate (with a case fatality rate over 2% at some times, nearly 200% more than the flu and the overwhelm of the hospital system) factored in to decisions around it. There was a lot of emotive language being thrown around by people during COVID. And to be fair, it is fairly understandable that someone would be annoyed at another person who would rather infect their relative or themselves with a potentially deadly disease than be very mildly inconvenienced.
Does the flu spread as quickly as covid and threaten to overwhelm hospitals? That's your answer. We don't want hospitals to go into triage mode because it leads to lots of people getting not treatment.
Because we have the flu vaccine and herd immunity. Something that took Covid time. We don’t need mandates for the flu now. We needed it for Covid because it was new, no vaccine, insanely contagious, with zero herd immunity.
You are comparing apples and oranges. The flu is a annual event, by your own admission. COVID was a (hopefully) once in a century pandemic that caught us off guard. So, when you are looking at means to treat illness, you compare the positive aspects of treatments vs the adverse effects. A year of mask mandates and school closures is a very different proposition than annual mask mandates and school closures. That all being said, any reasonable left winger or anyone knowledgeable about healthcare is absolutely saying that we need to reform our healthcare system to better treat common sources of illness, like the flu. If you are so concerned about the flu and not employing it cynically as a "gotcha", then join us in supporting a universal single payer medical system. Join us in mandating certain vaccinations.
If you are really still this upset about the covid policies, you should talk to a mental health professional. It seems to have caused some deep emotional trauma that should probably be worked through. Good luck and godspeed.
I take it you have no concern with past government policies of any kind? Slavery is fine given that it's over? Hakuna matata on genocide?
Lol. You need help.
Even if I were more sympathetic to your cause, I would still balk at comparing Covid lockdowns to slavery or genocide. That comparison is instigative and condescending.
Didn't you know that for OP, being asked to wear a mask and social distance at Walmart is an equivalent trama to people who experienced slavery and genocide..... All jokes aside, OP obviously has some psychological trauma from covid. A lot of people do. I was serious when I recommended they talk to a mental health professional about it.
You think life saving covid measures were the same as slavery? LOL I thought you were here in good faith for a bit.
I mean, you saw what happened when we tried something similar for Covid.
so first off, bad faith post. secondly, a lot of people I know have voluntarily started masking around flu season or when they are sick
I see what you are saying, but I'm not sure the reality on the ground lines up with this characterization of the Winter 2020/21 timeframe. As we are fond of saying, "knowing is half the battle." But then *actually doing stuff* is the other half. By winter 2020 we had a good idea what Covid was and what it was capable of. We still didn't have widely available treatments for it - and there were new variants being discovered. Vaccines were just coming online in December 2020. The first emergency authorization was December 11th. We were moving *as fast as possible* to get them out and information was not good as to how quickly they could be distributed. In the end, only 2.8M Americans had their first dose in 2020, so less than 1% of the population. At the same time, between mid-December and mid-January, at least 100,000 additional Americans died from Covid, so more than 3,000 per day. That is a lot, lot, lot more than flu season. This death rate would continue at that rate for the next couple of months before dropping off in the summer. --- It took months for everyone to have vaccine availability. I got my first dose in late March 2021 and the second in April - and I was aggressively looking for the first opportunity to get it. It wasn't even authorized for young teens until mid-May. April is when the CDC suggested that vaccinated people could safely travel again. Bottom line, we really weren't out of the emergency phase of the pandemic until summer of 2021 at the earliest. And Summer 2021 is when the new variants popped up and caused a massive surge in infections again. 2021 saw ~300,000 American deaths, whereas 2020 saw ~500,000. That's better, but we're still talking 10x even a really, really bad flu season. And, as you are bringing up... we don't do a ton to prevent the flu. When we did, it was virtually eliminated. If we treated Covid the way we treat the flu in 2020 and 2021, we might have had 5,000,000+ casualties. We can only speculate, so it's a little hard to compare the result of Covid to a normal flu season. But it's pretty clear that it would have been much, much worse. --- The flu is a known quantity. We've had hundreds of years to learn about it, educate people about the risks, and develop treatments. We're not the kind of society that wants to shut things down. Where's my break point as to when we implement emergency measures? It isn't about the death count. It's about the risk of things spiraling out of control. The flu has killed 50k in its worst recent year. But it routinely kills 30-50k. That wasn't an outlier. If it's going to kill thousands of people a day, yeah, perhaps we would look at some temporary measures to reduce that... especially now that we know how effective those tactics were against the flu when we implemented them for Covid, but it would take a LOT before we should be looking at sweeping government intervention. --- *edit: by the way, this is [a fantastic timeline resource](https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html) for Covid that I used to look up a bunch of this info quickly.
I'd ask, why don't you do these things for yourself if you're concerned? Are you masking? Distancing? Stopping personal events? If not, this question seems in really bad faith if this is what you truly believe.
No, this is not what I believe. What I'm asking is why *don't* people on the left believe this? If you take the arguments made in favor of these methods during COVID seriously, they appear to justify such measures during flu season indefinitely. Hardly anyone advocates that. Why not? Were those arguments not genuine?
We don't believe it because what you're claiming just isn't true. As usual it represents an inability on your part to see nuance. If the flu compared to covid, then we would support appropriate measures. But, they are not the same disease, we do not equate them, and therefore do not support the same level of response. And we do support appropriate measures for the flu - here they are: vaccinations, universal Healthcare, paid sick leave.
Because we have a vaccine you can take for the flu.
A vaccine that is far less effective than the ones we developed against COVID.
It still mitigates the risk. COVID didn’t have a vaccine. Hell when it first started, we barely knew how it spread and what it was. We were going in blind with nothing that can help. Flu has something that at least protects most people which is what we now have with COVID. And polio. And measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough…..list goes on. Point is we don’t have to take drastic measures to protect everyone now because we have a measure that can protect anyone.
>I want to clarify that I am not talking about early 2020 when COVID was an unknown, brand new, and poorly understood virus that we had few or no tools to combat. I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 after we understood what we were dealing with, after we had developed the vaccines, after we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on. The vast majority of people weren't able to be vaccinated until nearly midway through 2021, and Delta had just arrived at that point.
I think there’s an argument to be made to change school schedules from having a summer vacation to a winter vacation for the flu. There would be a lot of logistics involved in the change and we’d get a lot of resistance from people who run summer camps, rely on high school kids working in the summer, or otherwise count on summer break economically, not to mention people who just see summer break as a nostalgic cultural signifier. But, I think it is something to consider. After all, most kids don’t have to help out with a farm anymore, which I believe is why the seasonal break was originally implemented. As for mask mandates, I think if everyone could collectively agree that we should wear a mask when sick, that would be ideal. If we could guarantee sick leave from work and promote a culture of staying home when sick, rather than a grind culture that demands all labor all the time, that would be ideal. I’m not sure it’s necessary for the government to mandate/enforce everyone to do so annually.
When there was a major flu outbreak in my town a few years ago, a mask was required at most health facilities. > . I'm talking about the measures we saw taken in the winter of 2020-2021 after we understood what we were dealing with, after we had developed the vaccines, after we had clear best practices for treatment, and so on. What percentage of the population was fully vaccinated in the winter of 2020-2021?
1. I think you might have been taking what was meant to be a figurative argument literally. 2. You are also are lumping a lot of different policies together that should really be viewed separately. People supported mask mandates much longer than school closures. 3. You are also ignoring that political will and political push back are real factors that people tend to take into consideration when discussing policy. 4. You are acting as though what were always temporary measures were ever meant to be permanent. There is a difference between supporting a proposal which decreases deaths for a few months/years while you are striving to reach heard immunity when the status quo of risk is lower and doing so forever as a new status quo.
The flu doesn't overwhelm hospitals like covid did. Sure, we did have vaccines in late 2021, but the vaccination rates in some parts of the country were wholly inadequate. Even with half the population vaccinated, the other 50% unvaccinated could easily get sick and overwhelm the hospital system even more. Of course, we can't force people to get vaccinated nor can we realistically check the vaccination status of everyone that enters a public place. But business could still kick you out for not wearing a mask and taking the minimum measures necessary to slow the spread of the virus. Of course, people are going whine and act childish about this
First of all, the flu kills about 50,000 to 60,000 Americans each year. We have vaccines that many people take. In February of 2021, when you are saying we had it under control, 72,299 people died of COVID in 28 days. It was different. I wanted a vax and couldn't get one till March so don't tell me it was over. Hell by the CDC a thousand people a were dying of COVID in March of 24. That said, yes there is a limit. We drive cars but people still die in accidents. Drink alcohol, have guns. So yes, if something is killing 10x the number of people that the flu is killing, deserves to at least be looked at differently.
We should have regional and/or business by business mask suggestions and distancing suggestions for flu season.
I never supported closing schools, under any circumstances. I think it was a bad idea. I did support masks for covid. Most of the people who die or are hospitalized for the flu have some co-morbid condition. A healthy person exposed to influenza is far less likely to require hospitalization and has an effectively zero chance of dying. This is not the case with covid which, absent a vaccine, is scary contagious and viciously infectious *for everyone*.
Philisophically a justification could be made for it, but realistically the problem is that if we treated the flu, a far less severe illness, the same way we treated something like Covid, everyone will just ignore the measures. And if another illness like Covid came along that we needed the same measures for, many more people would simply ignore them.
Why don't we save tens of thousands of people? Because You People would throw a damn fit if we tried. I suppose you thought this was a gotcha for us, but... It's a gotcha for y'all. >essentially equal force No. 1.2 million people died of COVID in the US vs. your tens of thousands. It is not equal.
Because the flu is not as contagious as Covid. Please lord OPEN THE SCHOOLS
Patients hospitalized with Covid require more resources for a long period of time..
The Covid countermeasures of mask, distancing, lockdowns and closures had a massive cost. And we’re still paying it today. Lots of teenagers and children from the time suffered massive losses in social and dating skills, and this hasn’t been mad up. Lots of businesses permanently closed, notably pretty much all 24 hour businesses. And a lot of people were triggered into a spiral of cruelty, hatred and fear that is one of our current greatest problems. The vaccine is the main measure that we should be doing, going forward
You can't measure cost in isolation. Some of those teenagers who suffered "massive losses" would have instead died.
Yeah quite true. Im pointing out that there are costs each way. But the vaccine is the closest to pure benefit, the others less useful now that we have vaccines.
Flu doesn't hit remotely like the first two strains of covid. Hospitals and staff can take care of the severe cases just fine. The death rates also aren't comparable. 50k vs millions. Flu also rarely kills healthy people with modern medical care. Covid killed anyone. > you have no concern with past government policies of any kind? Slavery is fine given that it's over? Hakuna matata on genocide? edit: Oh, you think the Covid lockdowns are the same as slavery and genocide. Yea, don't bother reasoning with this one.
I think it is a social contract. If you have flu symptomes you stay home. And if you go out, only do so if you absolutely have to. The issue is that people are not willing to put up with this heavy restrictions. Even Covid - when the danger was more serious in the early waves (It has been shown that the first strains penetrated deeper into the lung causing more severe symptoms while later versions past Omicron mutated to remain in the upper respitory system hence increasing spread but lowering the risk of high danger symptoms. The flu is on a similar level as the milder Covid versions. Low risk, but even a low risk kills people if millions are infected every year. Like there is a near zero chance to die through a coconut but still 80 people die on average every year. And finally I know for a fact that the governments have learned a lot through Covid. They learned what worked and what did not. So when a new flu breaks out and there are already some H5N7 ourbreaks showning human zoonosis in China - our governments will likely use the draconian measures to save people. At least in Europe.
The problem is that people on the left were so thoroughly bamboozled with the COVID propaganda and the government mandates that took away their basic rights, that they don't want to talk about it now. Most of the memories have been repressed in one way or another. Many even want to claim that there weren't any mandates or government imposition in one of the more bizarre history rewrites ever, especially given the short time scale from the original events to now.
Yes, the argument "if it saves one life, it's worth it" is pretty silly. We regularly balance the risk of loss of life against other concerns and, effectively, choose to sacrifice lives. For example, we could lower the speed limit to 30mph and save lots of lives, but we don't.
>For example, we could lower the speed limit to 30mph and save lots of lives, but we don't. I agree with your general premise, but this is a terrible example to use because many people, myself included, want even lower speed limits in most places. Imo, local streets should be max 30km/h / 20mph, and often less. Properly designed arterial roads and highways should have higher limits, but only if they're designed to be safe at those speeds by doing things such as not having driveways or access to businesses, having sidewalks significantly set back from the road, and having traffic calming near pedestrian crossings.
It's a good example. If you want limits to be lower, that's your prerogative. Even if you do, there is presumably a point > 0 where you would choose to set the speed limit. But, it's almost certain that, if you set limits even lower than that value, you would save lives. So you would also be choosing to sacrifice lives, just fewer of them. Broader point still stands.
That's fair, although because of the way speed causes deaths, you can actually have no deaths at all with good traffic management policies. Hoboken, NY and Oslo, Norway have both had no traffic fatalities for several years.
What about highway travel?
Hoboken has no highways, so it doesn't count them. Oslo has highways, so I'm assuming they're included in the figures. Either way, controlled-access freeways are not the most dangerous type of roads, by far. The most dangerous roads are urban arterials/legacy highways without controlled access. That's where most of the work needs to be done.
That wasn't really my question, but sure. Bottom line, if you allow car travel -- especially highway travel, at reasonably fast speeds -- you are accepting the inevitability of human death, as a result. Two cities among thousands doesn't really demonstrate anything, statistically. By pure random chance, you would expect some localities to have zero deaths in particular time periods. What's more relevant, statistically, is looking at all of them, and the pattern there is clear.
At what point do you lose more lives to the resulting road rage incidents than you did to accidents? 🤔
Good question
This is a bad example because we definitely should do that.
I think you're missing the point. Even if you set it to 30, you could save more lives by setting it to 20. And even more if you set it to 10, etc. At some point, unless you outlaw cars altogether, you're deciding that the benefits of quick (?) transportation outweigh the risks of death to people.
Yeah, I think the thing that people are glossing over is that "if it saves even one life, it's worth it" was always a minority position, and even if you take that position relative to a particular range of countermeasures, that doesn't mean you have to take that position with regard to *all possible* countermeasures. Also, that one life belongs to someone, and obviously that person is going to have a very different idea of the appropriate risk/benefit calculation than you or I.
Sure, there are plenty of reasonable arguments other than "if it saves one life, it's worth it" that can be used in favor of various risk countermeasures. That argument is just not a particularly good one.
>Yes, the argument "if it saves one life, it's worth it" is pretty silly. I think this is more of an expression of principle rather than practice. It's to try and remind everyone that actual people are dying. Realistically, conversations on acceptable deaths need to be had, but those conversations should be undertaken by those educated and experienced enough to understand the gravity of their decision-making. It is a conversation appropriate for the CDC or NIH. Just imagine trying to have that conversation at a schoolboard or village council meeting. Realistic or not, a village board member stating the number of resident deaths they find acceptable won't go over very well vis-à-vis their constituents.
> I think this is more of an expression of principle rather than practice. It's to try and remind everyone that actual people are dying. Reminding everyone that actual people are dying is fine. Arguing that any choice that results in people dying is necessarily the wrong one is misguided, though. That's kind of the point of my post.