I for one am sick of all the covid related back biting and second guessing. There was no way a major pandemic was going to be anything but an unmitigated natural disaster of global proportions. Policies chosen as “least bad” are still bad. Maybe they were worse, maybe they were just less bad. No one sold them as good. Now the job of science is to pick out what was efficacious and what was worse. But the moaning about policies that were unpleasant to my mind ignores the fact that it was a global natural disaster and it was never going to be ok, or pleasant, or not inconvenience you. For some people the policies were worse than the disease. For millions that didn’t die, they were better. As a species I wish we could put down our gripes and figure out how to make the next time less bad, but we need to realize even then it’s going to be a global natural disaster and those might interfere with your preferred daily routine.
Edit: to those who brought up ways that the inconvenience was greater than disrupting their preferred daily routines (missed funerals - same happened to me, loneliness, other tragedies). First, I had my share as well and I empathize and mine were fairly horrific with profound impact on me and my family I still struggle with. That comment wasn’t meant for you, but there are many who just simply didn’t like the inconveniences. The rest was for you. It was a global disaster. Disasters are tragedies, heaped upon tragedies. We made good decisions, bad decisions, ineffectual decisions, but ultimately nothing would have made it good, ok, or anything but a disaster of monumental proportion. I’m sorry it was hard for you, it was for me too. It was hard for everyone. I’m down with healing together. I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain.
I still can't get over how we shut down schools in a huge amount of the world for a long period of time, and didn't come out of that with high-quality, open source, government-sponsored software for remote education. Instead, we just waited it out on every level, while the rich got a lot richer.
That we don't have that anyway is mind-blowing. An open-source corpus of educational material seems like an obvious social good in excess of many things that do get huge quantities of money sprayed at them.
Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some educational company.
The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
Introductory Calculus, my friend, a teacher, during a period, where a new edition proved to be more buggy then the rest, abandoned text books. A recent HS grad, walked into their class, and was dismissed... then dropped my name, and was told to sit down. There are things from recent work that is now being incorporated into the curriculum, cleaner approaches... but the text books have not kept pace, except for one important exception: The amount of free textbooks has ballooned, and a great new proof of integral (1/x)
Being away from a bad family environment and around non-threatening people for a few hours every day is a huge benefit to many people. But there are also good families, where children thrive and can learn well remotely or through homeschooling. Not all families or students are the same. Indeed the effects of the lockdowns on students prove that. Some kids did well. Those who were already struggling got permanently destroyed (for all intents and purposes) by the lockdowns. Overall the lockdowns were bad because, imo, teachers cannot teach well remotely. Remote learning is not a hard problem. Remote teaching— that’s the problem.
It's only close to true for those kids that would have done reasonably anyway.
For those kids that don't have the kind of family environment that will allow them to catch up, it's gonna be a long haul. And they may never get there. That weighs on them for the rest of their time — on the education system, while they're still in it. And it weighs on us, in terms of the resources they take away from other children in education, and then on wider society later in life.
Since the lockdowns, there seems to have been a change in the mindset of some groups — skipping school has been made acceptable. There's a whole bunch of kids that might never return to education as a normal routine. It's likely the hangover will be long and painful for some groups.
Reading the teachers subreddit I have seen post after post complaining about letting kids graduate who willfully missed 100-200 days of school. I was not aware it was as large of a problem if the reddit posts are to be believed.
I think you're really missing the forest for the trees.
Schools aren't the solution to the problem you're describing (children with bad homes) and was a problem before COVID.
Bigger picture is that it is better to keep a larger portion of the population from dying or developing long term complications than slightly (very) protect a few children that are already being abused.
If you're really going to stand by your position then I suggest a reasonable compromise and that is expanding access to licensed professional social workers and community health programs that are there to help parents and children succeed in life.
Perhaps but I’d argue society has moved to where this is better (children must have an education) vs the alternative say getting a job or whatever children did 100 years ago. Also it is being paid for, at least in my area, through quite high property taxes where over 60% go to school. So if the alternative is find day care or educate them myself I expect my taxes to go down where I can use that money for education and day care.
When you observe school policy debates at the local level, you come to realize that, for many parents, school's main function is free daycare for the kids so that they can go to work. Remote school doesn't help much on that front.
Because remote education doesn't really work. Humans are just not wired for it.
One of my friend's daughter was 6 years old in the middle of the mess. He simply could NOT get her to "mode switch"--if she was home and daddy was home it's "vacation time" and anything else was a miserable fight.
He and couple of other families finally got together to pay a teacher and have a "pod" of 4 other children in their local housing development. That way the daughter went to "school" for some number of hours a day and her father didn't have to fight the "mode switch" any more.
All four of those students are now WAY ahead of all their classmates.
I agree but would also note that your proof isn’t very fullproof. You can pull 4 students and send them to a tutor under any condition, and those students will come out ahead. You prove only that a teacher with a 4 person classroom of students of concerned parent-types tends to outperform the baseline, a pandemic remote learning environment with a mix of students and public school salaried teacher.
The point was that my friend couldn't get his daughter to learn, period, without a fight until he solved the mode switch problem. And that parents in the same housing development didn't seem to be able to solve it either as their children are now far behind those of my friend's daughter and her compatriots from that pod.
Neither individual home tutors nor parental tutoring nor online schooling seemed to be able to solve the problem. The solution required an in-person mode switch of the teacher and environment.
Now, this could obviously be different for, say, college age or adult learners. Young children don't have the same general understanding of conditions that adults do. On the other hand, "mode switch" is a thing even for adults as we talk about "flow" all the time.
I think you’re right. I’d just love better data. I used to do the typical Silicon Valley commute and arrive at work unable to focus for an hour or two because mode switching so quickly know it’s a thing. What I wonder about is why is it more of a thing in some situations compared to others, and is it not a thing we want to make students practice doing.
Outschool is pretty amazing. I think through a Darwinian process a lot of remote education tools will emerge. I think people ignore that remote education tech is helpful for homeschooling, for extracurriculars, for people trying to get a degree while working, people in very rural areas, developing countries, and a whole host of other use cases. There was definitely a “we will hack this stuff together and throw it aside asap” mentality which baffled me as an engineer, but I’m certain a lot of very capable and smart people have learned amazing things and built great tech. It’ll take a while for the bitter after taste to wear off, and as I discussed above, the back biting and second guessing and the indignation that they had to sacrifice or suffer in some way in a disaster. But as emotions cool, I think we will see a resurgence of the techniques and technologies.
Re: governmental open source - the government is typically bad at such things. It’ll be private sector, educator, and contributor sourced as with all great things in the space of tech, for better or worse.
The UK Government Digital Service has produced some pretty excellent, useable and consistent online services, with a particular focus on accessibility. Also great care taken to keep the services functional on very old and low-spec devices, far in excess of any private company I have used a website from, which are usually so bogged down with JS glitz that they barely actually work.
I have seen a few teachers who discovered their new talents during COVID, and made YouTube lessons for their students. Most of them simply filmed themselves in front of the blackboard, talking and writing, just like they would in a classroom full of students.
The ones I know about were mostly elementary school math teachers, so it was like you had online lessons covering grade 5-9 math, almost overnight. Of course it made me think: "How much work would it take to systematically cover everything?" At least, everything on the elementary and high school level -- perhaps universities are a special case, but for every elementary or high school lessons, you have hundreds of teachers that teach it every year, so a few of them should be capable and willing to do a solid work in front of the camera.
And it would be so incredibly easy! Not in the sense that I would underestimate the work of a good teacher required to make a good lesson... but in the sense that the teachers are already preparing those lessons anyway -- it is their everyday work. The only thing that is needed is for them to repeat the lesson once again, in an empty room in front of the camera.
The greatest actual obstacle is probably that many don't think about it, or don't want the extra work of learning to use the camera, buying the right camera, cutting the video, making and maintaining an online account, etc. Which is why this would benefit from some division of labor. How about letting the teacher prepare and do the lessons, and have someone else operate the camera and cut the videos? The advantage is that the camera person can be the same for many different subjects. More teachers would probably be willing to join the project this way.
Now imagine the easiest possible implementation: very simply edit the videos (just remove the mistakes, or maybe the parts where the teacher took a break, speed up 3x the erasing of the blackboard, etc.), upload those videos to YouTube (to the teachers' accounts if they have some, or to a project's common account if they don't), and then create a simple web catalogue of all the videos. So that the person would visit the homepage, choose the subject, choose the grade, choose the topic, and then see a list of videos from different teachers teaching that topic.
I think the "minimum viable product" should cover at least one subject in one grade completely, so that it is a reliable resource that the user can keep visiting during the entire year, knowing that they will always find what they are looking for. Otherwise, there is really not much advantage over using Google. Expand from there to cover more grades and more subjects. Basically, always provide an equivalent of a textbook for the entire grade, not just a video here and a video there and a disappointment everywhere else. -- But of course, once you have the entire grade of a subject covered, you can keep adding more videos from other teachers even if they do not cover the entire grade. If you have 1 video for one topic, and 3 different videos for another topic, that is perfectly okay. The important thing is that all topics (in given subject and grade) are covered at least by 1 video. Alternative videos are good, because if you don't get it after watching a video, it might help to hear another person explain it differently.
I think you could do all this relatively quickly and cheaply. I mean, if you find teachers willing to do this for free (and I believe you could, considering the fact that a few of them already did it alone), and if the schools provide the empty classrooms in the evening, you basically just need to pay someone with the camera to record the videos, someone to cut the videos, and someone to make the web front end. That would be like, three people's salary, and in return you get hundreds of videos each year.
Providing all those videos for free could dramatically change the experience of education. Anytime a child didn't understand the lesson at school, or was sick, they could watch the lessons at home. This would be an awesome resource for homeschoolers, or for talented kids who want to learn the knowledge of higher grades. Adults could refresh their knowledge, whether out of sheer curiosity, or because they want to help their kids.
And because the contents of school education do not change so fast (except maybe for computer science lessons), the content once produced could be used for decades. And once it is there, it can still be further improved -- like, if you think that some teacher did not explain a certain topic properly, make a better video yourself. If certain knowledge becomes obsolete, or something is added to the curriculum, just record that one lesson.
You could also dub those lessons to the languages of minorities (by different people, again the division of labor), etc.
*
In before "but isn't Khan Academy doing exactly this?" -- yes and no. Yes, Khan Academy provides awesome online education, a strong alternative to schools. And it does much more than I propose here; such as automatically evaluated exercises, tracking of student progress, etc. But the cost is that preparing all this takes a lot of time. Also, the barriers to contributing are high; a random teacher cannot just record their lessons and add them.
I would like to see a system where contributing is simple for teachers, and therefore we could reasonably expect to have the elementary and high school education covered systematically; to have alternative explanations for the same topic, to keep getting new and improved videos for the existing topics, etc. (And there is nothing wrong with having Khan Academy as an alternative to this; the more options, the better.)
What? Why'd we implement them then? Plenty of people were criticizing the policies, but they were generally overruled in favor of vague goals which were "sold as good," like "flattening the curve."
Relatedly, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about the harms of lockdowns but frame it as "the damage that covid did to children's education." It wasn't the virus that did that damage. It was the policies.
Uh, they were sold as better than the alternatives.
And even without the policies, things were going to happen.
The initial economic impacts preceded any of the policies by weeks, for instance, and the social changes (including WFH) started rolling out before any formal policies did. The tech companies started to do it weeks ahead of public policy on the matter for instance, because they didn’t have any better alternatives, and it would have been worse otherwise.
Of course they did. The alternative was to just keep calm and carry on, like for every other virus outbreak. The idea that COVID required unique measures is not true and had been proven untrue many times in many ways. The correct response was the traditional one: let doctors get on with it and otherwise continue with normal life.
The hospitalisation rate made this implausible. Sure, we could have kept calm and carried on, but the health care system would have collapsed. It almost did in a bunch of European countries, including mine. And that's with the lockdowns.
Yeah. There were areas in the US (parts of Texas, Los Angeles County, New York) where the system did start to collapse, even with lockdowns and warnings. It likely would have been much worse without them. It likely would have been much better if folks had taken the warnings more seriously. Most didn't.
Oh how we forget!
I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year.
And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words).
Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
It wouldn't. Governments said the hospitals were collapsing because they needed to justify their actions, whilst simultaneously publishing dashboards that showed plenty of free capacity.
The problem is that most COVID cases in hospitals were of people who were infected in hospital itself. They weren't admitted for it. Just looking at "covid cases in hospitals" would therefore be misleading. That was never highlighted by the media or government officials because it was embarrassing but sometimes dashboards would reveal it.
As an example look at Switzerland's data. It's useful because it was still being updated as recently as May.
As you can see, it made no difference whatsoever and actually at the start of the dataset the hospitals are way under utilized.
Some countries have worse hospital systems than Switzerland, and regularly experience shortages of care even in normal times. But this example shows that for a good healthcare system COVID could be handled easily without even coming close to running out of capacity.
Switzerland have like one of the best numbers of beds per person in the OECD.
Ireland (where I live) have one of the worst, and I followed the numbers religiously for most of Covid. Without the lockdown/other measures to reduce spread, the health care system would have collapsed multiple times (hence why we had some of the longest lockdowns in the world).
Like, my mother had cancer and suffered massively due to the lockdowns (I firmly believe it was a large contributor to her death last year) but that doesn't mean that they weren't necessary, at least in Ireland.
You had lockdowns because politicians were following the instructions of corrupt academics. Lockdowns made no impact on hospital load (can you determine the dates and times of interventions by looking at the graphs I just linked?). Nor did they have any impact on death rates or anything else.
> the health care system would have collapsed
You were told that but the Swiss were told that too. In fact they were told the hospitals were collapsing, even as their own dashboard said the exact opposite.
Governments lied about COVID, all the time. Lockdowns had no impact on spread, and there's a ton of studies showing that by now, just go searching for them on Google Scholar. But you don't even need studies. Just eyeball the graphs of various countries and try to spot the impact on case numbers of these supposedly mandatory interventions. There isn't any. SARS-CoV-2 like all coronaviruses spreads like a gas and these viral clouds can hang around and travel long distances in the air. Lockdowns are meaningless given such a modality of spread.
While I agree with you that a lot of the damage we did wasn't the virus, I feel like OP was quite clear in saying if there's only bad and worse, pick bad.
Which logically I agree with, although I still think that post CDC study on statistically negligible outdoor transmission, any government that didn't allow people to socialize and gather outside was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.
I think we could have done a lot better, even with the available evidence at that time, in finding ways to socialize that wouldn't cause so much mental and economic harm.
> was not listening to science and picking worse over bad.
The problem was anyone trying to say this, no matter how much evidence they had, was censored and ignored. Called an idiot. Asked "why they wanted to kill grandma". So on and so forth.
"Worse" was treated as "good" for years in spite of the science.
Because they were, as the post you're replying to makes pretty clear, still in the realm of less bad, or at least very probably less bad. The point GP is making is that there were zero "good" options. In a global pandemic, every choice has only bad options, and you try to pick the least bad.
Or in other words, they're saying that the "correct" decision was still ultimately a bad one. And you're trying to frame that statement as though the decisions made were incorrect. That's pretty rhetorically unkind of you.
I see this argument a lot but I don't understand it. Are you suggesting the dead people would have been grateful for the policies that didn't stop them from dying? Or are you suggesting the policies didn't go far enough, and if the dead people could complain, then we'd be convinced to implement even stricter policies next time?
I think the argument would be more convincing if there were a group of people who are still alive that could say they would have been dead without the policies. Obviously this is impossible for anyone to say with certainty, but given that it's the corollary of the "if dead people could talk" argument, perhaps that indicates that both arguments are unfalsifiable and thus ineffective.
It’s an argument about survivorship bias in any critique of Covid policies that imply Covid response was unnecessarily harmful
My personal pandemic experience was luckier than many . 3 wilderness years of lost time only; of no growth. no loss of business, work , home etc. more importantly I’m alive and so is everyone I love
The implication of this argument is that if people are dying, the government can implement any policy they want with the nominal intention of "saving lives," and nobody has any right to complain about "inconveniences" because they're not dead, unlike the people who died despite the policies meant to prevent their deaths.
While I agree with your statement, I think you might be projecting a little - this is a simple comment, kind of like saying "nothing new under the sun". Not all statements are necessarily prescriptive.
This is used to keep things in perspective when talking about such emotional subjects, not be a final word, I believe
This is complete historical revisionism. For basically the entire time that schools were remote and weeks after, any time a school tried to open so many teachers became sick that operating the school became infeasible. It was a choice between sick and dead teachers (and some children) with unknown future consequences and schools shut down without staff, or schools shut down to do remote schooling with significantly lower mortality rates. We saw what your proposed solution did when the policies were abandoned; millions of people died and are still dying, and life expectancy in the US is still 2-6 years below what it was four years ago. That has wiped out 20-40 years of improvements to life expectancy in the US, depending on the population under discussion.
Huh, my kids went back to school in September of 2020 here in Vancouver British Columbia. There was a short shutdown later in the fall, then schools were open for the duration.
No teachers died, and there was very little in school transmission. Our provincial health officer in charge made the choice based on the data available. BC has a very low overall COVID death rate compared to other jurisdictions. You can go look up the data on deaths and satisfy yourself that closing schools as long as many jurisdictions did was a stupid idea. The idea that we didn't know that at the time is also suspect, since data driven decision makers like the one in BC opened schools back up once the risk of transmission between children was determined.
The difficult thing for the USA is that we treat healthcare as a profit center. This leads to focusing on efficiencies instead of extra capacity. You don't want extra beds, unless you have a pandemic. There aren't hospital beds as a services.
Except we actually did make that extra capacity in several parts of the country in March 2020, those extra beds went almost entirely unused, were quietly disassembled in April 2020, and everyone forgot they existed.
We likely won’t see any real retrospectives for another 5-10 years. It’s still too raw and difficult to process the reality, as you can see in some of the other responses.
We realistically won’t see a good retrospective until the political leaders in 2020 have exited the political scene. Until then reactions to Covid stuff will just be a culture war reflex response of self-preservation.
There are many covid counterfactuals we'll never know the answer to, but personally, I wish we could see the timeline where Trump won the election. Would the vaccination positions have been completely flipped? Pre-election you had democrat leaders saying things like "I wouldn't take a Trump vaccine." If we could only see that play out, I think it would expose how arbitrary much of the US political division really is.
I find it curious that you have to take out of context statements to paint this as “both sides”. The Democratic Party position on vaccines didn’t change. There was a lack of trust in Trump not vaccines or science. This would be much more obvious if you’d use an actual quote instead of paraphrasing to obfuscate the meaning.
"Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word."
"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."
The US partisan divide, yes. Actual US political division between left and right wing politics is around and was not going to change for people on the left (not just socially on the left or in the US bubble of how many confuse liberalism and leftism).
This seems very inconsistent with what I remember. "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine" is completely incongruent with the fact that the vast majority of "the gubment can't make me wear a mask or take a vaccine" were in the middle of trump country. Trump got boo'd for promoting the vaccine after he lost. They would have been just as anti-gubment regardless. There was a brief period of time I heard "I wouldn't take a trump vaccine", but that was about a month or two before the election. It completely disappeared as soon as it was obvious that the FDA wasn't going to let trump circumvent basic safety controls to push a vaccine in 6 months (before the election) instead of 12 months (after the election).
There was a period of time where the political rhetoric was definitely going in that direction. If I remember correctly, it was when Trump was trying to get it fast tracked before the election and people were freaking out about that. Which, given the circumstances, is kind of understandable.
Personally, I read the study data for it (and for some of the other 150+ vaccines that had been attempted), and figured I'd go for it when it was available. Which took forever.
You’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about if the lockdowns were better or worse, not even a bit. It’s about whether or not governments should have the power and ability to enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were absolutely necessary. Now that the data, retrospectively, seems muddled and unclear, the conversation can recenter on if the government we want should even have the power to do what they did.
It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group.
Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions.
I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.
It’s about whether or not governments should have the power and ability to enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were absolutely necessary.
I'd never mock the perspective, the situation is too serious.
When there was an active fire threatening my town a couple years, emergency issued an evacuation order and arrested people who came into the area. When I worked as a teacher in the 1990s, I had to get various vaccines as a condition for having a job. When I traveled in 2012, I also had to get some vaccines to visit various countries. Health departments have for a long time required restaurants to control the behavior of their customers including preventing them from, say coughing on the salad bar.
Covid involved the state using it's existing powers on a larger scale, no doubt. And how well it did that can certainly be debated. But all the powers the state used existed already.
So the arguments that try to put paint this situation as fundamentally new and wrong are incorrect. That they were accompanied by efforts to also falsify the nature of the illness itself reinforces the perspective that they were disingenuous. But I recognize people can convince themselves of a lot when it suits them.
if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off
As far as I can tell, the anger about state actions against and claims that it was some new are part of the generally polarized state of American politics. So, I think I understand. People are map 'cause they're convinced themselves of self-serving baloney. That's not an unusual source of anger for humans. But this doesn't make me "understanding" as you can imagine. Indeed, those people sure aren't the only angry ones and shouldn't be treat as special for their anger.
My early memory is when I was a kid they were drafting 18 year olds and sending them to Vietnam. 15 years before that they were sending young men to Korea. And before that 10 million men to Europe and the Pacific.
If you want something more related in 1948 or some such there was a small outbreak of smallpox in New York. And they vaccinated 80% of the city in a couple of months.
Speaks to me that while the state has and always had had these powers it's become loath to use them.
Whether or not you agree if these particular lockdowns were needed, I can't believe anyone would argue there is NO situation where a government should have the legal authority to order a lockdown.
What if Covid had a 50% mortality rate? Would that not have justified a lockdown?
It wouldn't have been needed. Nor was the one we did have. The huge amount of fear in March 2020 resulted in evidence of that*: Cell phone tracking data in the US showed people were staying home about a week before a single lockdown started. The lockdown orders had no effect, no additional people stopped moving around, and movement started creeping back upwards only a few weeks later while the lockdowns were still in full effect.
*I've looked for this over and over since then and haven't been able to find it, I get the feeling it might have been taken offline.
No, not even a 100% mortality rate justifies a lockdown
Movement of individuals (as long as he/she is not moving into your home/territory etc.) is IMO a sacred 'right' that one must offer one's fellow humans. It's a slippery slope if a dire situation however real is used as a justification for a lockdown.
After reading your comment, I have a better understanding of the thoughts that may be going through the mind of "Tuberculosis Tammy", who has infectious TB and has been on the run from isolation/treatment since January 2022[1].
I disagree with the concept that individual freedoms trumps the safety of other's, as does society at large, which deems some level of negligence to be criminal.
I hope the next pandemic has a short incubation period and ultra-high mortality.
I was hoping you'd explain in more detail, so I wont have to assume what your reasoning. By "do both", were you perhaps referring to measures like masks mandates while allowing people move freely? Unsurprisingly, some people felt mandates violated the sanctity of their individual rights too.
>I was hoping you'd explain in more detail, so I wont have to assume what your reasoning. By "do both",
sangnoir, Think really hard and you will be able to come up with something (where 'both' can be done).
If you cannot come up with anything then I'd say that even having a discourse with someone who can potentially come up with something is pointless because of the wide chasm.
I think it is a slippery slope to say that freedom of movement trumps all other rights. No one has the right to kill me and my children just so they can exercise their right to go wherever they want whenever they want.
At least as far as COVID is concerned, and that's because COVID isn't a realistic concern for most children.
There are people (children, but also others) for whom it is a marked concern, and appropriate risk mitigation strategies should be taking. Working with the gung-ho assumption that all spaces are essentially risk free would represent a fail in your duty of care.
I was not necessarily talking about Covid, but about a hypothetical worse pandemic with a much higher fatality rate. The person I replied to said there would be no situation worth restricting freedom of movement for, no matter how deadly the disease.
If you're of child rearing age your risk of dying was like driving 10,000 miles. Also, you're delegating your responsibility to the "other". As other posters mentioned if that level of risk is unacceptable you can choose to take measures that bring the risk more inline with whatever tolerance you have.
Some of us are more afraid of an all powerful state using any excuse to further their own interests.
We have to ban accounts that post like this, no matter how incorrectly someone else read a comment, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This is really interesting. So you would genuinely be okay with with the death of something like 99% of the human population, because government imposed lockdowns are worse? Because that's what a 100% mortality rate COVID means without NPIs, 90-95% of people dead from the virus directly and almost all of the rest dead because society had collapsed around them. I am absolutely fascinated by the kind of person that can genuinely believe that, is it a sort of extreme libertarianism? Or maybe an ecological thing, you think the death of humanity would be a genuinely good thing and this 100% mortality COVID would just be a means to an end?
>okay with with the death of something like 99% of the human population
No, certainly not. I want people to make their own informed choices. It can be heart-wrenching for oneself to observe people make (what you think) an obvious wrong choice, but if you had any any life experiences of substance, you will realize that all you can do is give people the most accurate information that you have, but you should never, ever impose your decision (even if it's for the person's good) if the person does not consent to it. One could probably make an exception for very young kids.
Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Side note: who exactly decides what is good for the individual?
>No, certainly not. I want people to make their own informed choices.
These are two contradictory sentences. Wanting people to make their own informed choices unimpinged by government action while a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate exists is definitionally being okay with the death of 99% of the human population. Like, that is the outcome so by definition if you're in favour of only dealing with pandemics through personal responsibility and you're saying that would be the case even with a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate, then you are saying that the death of 99% of people in existence is an acceptable outcome. What I am asking is why you believe that.
What? are even _trying_ to understand me? People can stay at home and impose their own 'lockdown' and save their own lives. The one's that venture out should know that they will die, it's their choice.
The obvious outcome of that is that 99% of existing people will die. I am not asking about and do not care about whether they're "choosing to die" (an absurd thing to say about the need for food and water, anyway), I am asking why you are okay with the outcome where 99% of people are dead.
So you assume that people are too stupid (a fair assumption) to know the correct decision to take . Who is to say that you (or the govt) are not stupid, in the eyes of others? The arrogance here that you actually think you know better than others (again a fair assumption) and you want your way to be the only way(the really evil part).
>I am asking why you are okay with the outcome where 99% of people are dead.
Do you have any real life experiences? this happens all the time, why the fuck do you keep repeating that I actually _want_ people to die? Really evil things happen, when you try and help people even if it is for their own good without their consent. Often _more_ than 99% people will die if you do that. Let me repeat: you do not have enough life experiences. Let me also say another thing: you do not read enough history especially of the 'extermination' kind. There is also a good possibility, that you are a nerd/sociopath if you do not understand the concept of live, and let live.
I mean ultimately the answer is yes. People look at COVID and say it's not a big deal, but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse. We're not at all prepared if we have something like a Black Death 2.0 and ultimately your ability to function as an individual depends on society's ability to actually function. Even the half-assed measures we took against COVID helped prevent our hospital systems from completely collapsing which would've led to far more deaths.
The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0 for people to understand this.
> but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse
So it wasn’t. We knew it was mild, certainly worse than flu, but still mostly killing the elderly above life expectancy.
- We knew newspapers were grossly exaggerating information to the point of saying obvious bait (“the vaccine enlarges the penis” — yup they said it),
- We knew newspapers were under gag order to publish misinformation.
- We knew that most governments declared the law of exception and state of emergency, so from that point, no information could be trusted.
We knew it was mild because everyone was in a state of hysteria, from “SO YOU WANT TO KILL ALL GRANDMOTHERS” to “IN NYC THEY USE GIANT DUMPSTER TRUCKS TO CARRY THE DEADS TO THE MORGUE, SO WHY ARE YOU AGAINST LOCKDOWNS”. We knew it was all a gross exaggeration.
The assumption here though is that there is not a situation where lockdowns are not only entirely appropriate, but would be uncontroversial except for a tiny majority. But there are trivial examples where it would be.
Like outbreaks of:
- Smallpox
- Ebola
- Weaponized Anthrax
- Some other novel bug with high fatality rates.
You don't have to go very far back to figure out WHY the laws being used were put in place. Even in the 60's-70's, if someone had Measles they'd be in enforced quarantine in their house along with the rest of their family until it cleared. Because not doing that kills people. Innocent people. Often a lot more innocent people than the original infected, all because someone got selfish and couldn't control what they were doing.
Public Health == Police == Fire fighting. They all exist to protect the population. They are peers. That some how Public Health would occur outside of the government is truly odd. Would you be in favor of Fire Departments being left up to individuals?
Slight tangent but that's an interesting example, because while healthcare and police have (at least in theory, not the point here) training/accountability requirements, there are many places with locally organised fire response units alongside of the gov organised ones. Especially in areas far away from larger towns, communities pick up a lot of organisation and responsibility for practical reasons. In extreme cases of very isolated farms, it's literally the individuals that deal with the problems unless it's likely to becomes a widespread issue.
> I’m down with learning and evaluating. I’m down with building a better society from our pain.
No offense, but from the first part of your comment, it is clear you were part of the problem, not the solution, on this front.
We did all the things you suggest after the last pandemic. The findings strongly cautioned against attempting another lockdown. For covid, that advice was ignored, and now we are seeing excess deaths comparable to the “isolate just the most vulnerable, and get it over with in a month or two” approach, along with huge economic and societal costs from the lockdowns.
This is revisionist nonsense in America. We didn’t do a damn thing here and 1m people died. We didn’t have real lockdowns here, we had 1 year of remote school but, beyond that not much.
It was perhaps the single greatest tragedy in America since WWII and we basically said “think of the economy!” and happily sent everyone back after a very limited period of time.
Missing my grandmas funeral or my parents missing the birth of their granddaughter are not minor changes to a ‘preferred daily routine.’ Lockdowns were a not only a useless public health measure they caused additional damage on top of the damage the pandemic was doing. Plenty of smart people warned against lockdowns but those in power ignored them. Sorry not gonna let this stuff go.
I don’t wish in any way to minimise or attempt to refute how you feel about the events your family missed, and I know a great many other people had similar experiences.
Lockdowns, when done properly, do work. Here in New Zealand, we enjoyed more than a year of _normal_ life between our first Nation-wide lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, and the eventual emergence of omicron in the community. That period not only provided time for the population to be vaccinated (we got to 92% fully vaccinated) but also saved many many lives, and allowed people to do things like attend funerals and births which they wouldn’t have been able to do (safely) if there was no lockdown.
History will record that it was the right approach.
The US has 70 times the population of New Zealand, an underclass that's larger in percentage terms and less functional than New Zealand's, a porous border through which literally millions of people pass illegally-outside of the government's control, and tens of millions of illegal residents who have illegal or no ID and studiously avoid being tracked by the government. New Zealand is an island country with only a handful of international airports. There was no possible way that the US could ever have implemented New Zealand's policy successfully, even if Americans wanted to do so.
Sure - I think I agree that the same approach wouldn't have worked in the USA. But it's also not a binary choice between 'lockdown until elimination' and no lockdowns, but having said that, I don't know what the US or similarly large countries should have done.
You're using terms differently. What New Zealand did was border closures. The word lockdowns refers to forcing everyone to stay at home, closing all the businesses and schools.
Neither approach worked. The NZ approach merely delayed the inevitable and was horrific for citizens who wanted to return home and were unable to do so. One NZ citizen had to rely on the kindness of the Taliban because nowhere else would take her. Incidents like that are nothing to be proud of.
Meanwhile, good luck implementing such controls in places where it's easier to get to!
History will record that the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe, revealing the truth that expert advice was damaging and futile. Something that was already clear in 2020 to anyone who cared to look.
New Zealand did both, and both worked - it did delay the inevitable, but that allowed time for the population to become vaccinated, for supplies of PPE to build up, for hospitals to build ICUs etc, and provide time for the virus to change to the much-less deadly omicron (delta and alpha never spread widely in NZ - we avoided all of that). Per head of population, our death rate was lower than almost any other country in the world. And we enjoyed an entire year of normal life between the successful elimination of alpha/delta and the eventual emergence of omicron while the rest of the world suffered.
All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice, and you'd be hard pressed to find a significant number of New Zealander's that think now that the better strategy would have been to 'let her rip'. Of course you can find personal examples where lockdowns/border closures were a worse outcome for some people (I have a friend whose brother was unable to see his dying father), but being able to quote examples like that doesn't refute the strategy, because we only have to look to other countries to see what the alternatives were - a much, much, higher death rate.
You say "the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe", but you don't say what that country was - did it have a lower death rate than NZ did?
I was referring to Sweden, which did neither lockdowns nor border closures and ended up with one of the lowest death rates in Europe. Lockdowns didn't work, they just made things worse.
Anyway, death rates are garbage data during COVID. They were classifying murders by shooting as COVID deaths. They were classifying people who died at 95 as COVID deaths. Where lockdowns were implemented they wanted the measured death rates to be as high as possible to justify what was being done, so classification criteria were as loose as possible. In NZ the political narrative relied on border closures being effective so they needed deaths to be as low as possible. Public health is so corrupt and malign that you can never really know what's going on if you listen to them.
> All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice
Then they are idiots because COVID wasn't eliminated, was it? As you said yourself, their strategy was at best one of delaying the inevitable.
It works when (or rather almost entirely because) you’re in a geographically isolated island.
Maybe the Netherlands could have pulled this of if they really wanted to, like them time they flooded half of the country to keep out the French but it’s not applicable to any other country in Europe
It doesn't take much time to find articles from reputable sources that show that Sweden most definitely did not have 'an equally good outcome' (if I understand you correctly and you're comparing to New Zealand).
For example:
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-s...
I work in healthcare and attended on COVID wards when that was a thing.
One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families.
There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID.
They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy.
To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.
Would you rather one person lose a hand or many people lose a finger, that's effectively what you advocate for here.. distribute the impact that would natural affect few onto the many and with no actual analysis to see if we minimized harm overall. I think the lack of empathy can cut both ways.
I think your argument is disingenuously reductive but I'll bite: yeah. Life over limb is not a hard argument. Thankfully nobody is going around chopping off fingers. Would you donate blood to save lives? Or reduce a company's profit a bit to have less environmental impact through regulations?
I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing.
You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.
Way to not address the issue at all. Some people have dog allergies should we outlaw dogs to save the unfortunate few? How do you balance the benefits of your interventions with the damages?
I acknowledge your point but disagree with the logic behind it. Perhaps someone has died from a dog allergy but not any significant amount to affect society and the medical systems capability to deal with everything else. This was a one in a few generation pandemic and clearly a different situation. Why someone would expect a perfect public policy response to this I also can't imagine and lessons are hopefully learned from it. I think there was a lot of grift in there as humans are oft to do with bailouts, subsidies, contracts and when it got politicized it all went to hell so I can't defend that.
As an aside certainly some have died from aggressive dog breeds. I personally agree with the bans that exist in some municipalities on them to prevent a toddler from getting mauled. But I can see how some don't and that is a valid perspective.
Yes my original comment was honestly in response to your comment that you are losing faith in humanity based on the response you are seeing. I have no conclusion really on which way I think things should have been decided and think the only way things can be improved upon is if we take an honest critical look at what we are doing. My analogies are not similar in extent to COVID but are hopefully illustrative of the pitfalls of solving one problem and creating others and the need to practically account for it, at least after the fact acknowledge it, don't get butthurt because not everyone could immediately get with the program.
GP certainly exaggerated by labelling the situation as minor inconvenience. It was a major upheaval to all our lives. There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help - at least where conducted properly and with support of the populace (there's little hope if people are not even trying to cooperate though); the first "lockdown" (it was called like that but actually there were only curfews here) in Germany comes to mind - things went only downhill here after the first partially re-opened summer when different states and politicians discovered the situation as a way to compete with each other.
This is hindsight though. In the beginning there was no reliable information on transmission vectors or infectiousness and the lack of tests, drugs, vaccines and treatments (even simple things like positioning patients prone to make breathing easier) or simply protection equipment left imo little choice than to treat the situation as severe as possible (better save than sorry).
All in all I think that most of it was unavoidable, although I absolutely agree that this was in every way a situation that was hard to deal with for all of us.
Curfews and other such measures had no effect and this is clear in the data. It's been looked at extensively and there's no correlation between severity of lockdown measures and outcomes.
It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time.
And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is:
1. Wrong
2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.
> There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help
I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
Omicron is certainly less deadly that the earlier variants, and the time gained with lockdowns allowed the population to get vaccinated, and gave hospitals time to build more ICUs. I think it's fair to say that these things are facts, not opinions!
The point was the delay of cases. During COVID many people died of preventable diseases or issues because COVID patients were siphoning our hospital and medical systems of resources. This man died of something that could've been prevented because hospitals were full and he couldn't get an ICU bed [1]. There are many more stories of this during the height of COVID of people dying from things that were low risk emergencies that became high risk ones because of hospitals being stressed.
In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed.
i would argue they did help. i have not gotten covid yet as far as I know. If and when I do, I guarantee I will be much happier to have gotten it when vaccines, treatments and therapeutics are improved compared to 3 years ago.
I think the sentiment here applies generally. The world would be a much kinder place if we embraced radical cooperation. Why wait for disaster to strike before we start working together? But humans are egotistical by nature. That goes not only for the individuals that defied mandates, but for the policy makers too.
I think it's hard to define the "greater good" and even harder to tell who represents it. If you want to have the kind of cooperation you're talking about, it first requires trust. The data confirms trust makes a difference when you compare vaccine uptake in countries like Japan vs. Russia.
There's certainly much to be fed up about, but we can at least derive some practical questions from this experience.
* What was the source of distrust during the pandemic? Was it legitimate or illegitimate?
* Have our institutions earned trust since then so we can do better next time around?
> The world would be a much kinder place if we embraced radical cooperation.
It would be a horrific dystopia as everyone who tried to implement that has found. Competitive and free socialists always outcompete "radically cooperative" societies because the latter is always implemented through violence and coercion. There's no such thing as "radically cooperative" and also kind, the two are incompatible.
>Global proportions...
So you agree its a pandemic?
It fit the logistics curve to <0.1%, except for super spreader events, which afterwards, it still was very close.
All the policies, were designed around herd immunity which maximizes deaths, except for the WHO which fallowed Fauchi.
An acquaintance of mine, M, lost 19 family members to the pandemic. My family, mostly very well educated, went super paranoid, and we only had two late Omichron infections.
I am sorry it was hard for everyone, I wish we followed proticalls.
I raised a child during the pandemic, during the lockdowns. His grandparents missed out on most of the first year of his life because of travel restrictions. They lived just across town.
What lesson did I learn from this?
I learned that toddlers will throw an epic hissy fit if they don't get what they want, even if what they want is impossible, impractical, or goes against either their own personal interest or the interests of their family. They'll insist on doing things that have a very decent chance of killing them on the spot.
"I want it!" followed by 120 decibel screeching is the behaviour of a toddler.
We're teaching him better, of course. We're teaching about sharing. About saying sorry. Telling him when to say "thank you" and "please". I'm also teaching him not to poke metal utensils into power sockets or to sneeze in my face.
Apparently not all parents bothered with this. Their children grew up to be big children, unable the grasp these simple concepts despite having adult bodies.
Yes, the speed limit on the highway is inconvenient for you if you're late for a meeting. No, nobody cares about you and your stupid appointment, we care about the family of four you might kill for your own convenience if we let you drive as fast as you possibly can.
This is the crux of it. Some people think being allowed to drive as fast as they can is freedom, and any curtailment of that freedom is oppression.
What's truly sad about all of this is not the political polarisation over the type of health policy that goes back centuries[1]. No, it's that Katalin Karikó, the woman who spent here entire life toiling away in obscurity, never got a proper "Thank you!" from the world that she saved.
She should be more famous than Beyoncé and richer than Bill Gates, and instead she's a little-known scientist with a few pats on the back from jealous colleagues mumbling "I could have invented that" under their breath.
[1] Go look up how old the word "quarantine" is and where it originated from.
Oh hell no. I did not live through an "inconvenience". I and my kids now inhabit a world that will deal with the societal and economic damage for many years.
And no, I'm not just going to let slide a historically unprecedented, in scope and scale, change in citizen/government dynamics, and for a disease where you couldn't even begin to question the official narrative without being branded an evil anti-vaxxer.
We absolutely need to analyse what was done, and sort the panicked, fear-driven polices from what was useful.
So maybe analyze it instead of leading with the conclusion first? Don't forget to come up with a plausible better concrete alternative so we can compare/contrast.
i swear, with the exception of china, no country has had anything remotely resembling a lockdown since early 2021. what are you still complaining about? you won, no one likes a sore winner.
Where I live (Wales, UK), we had "local lockdowns" (where citizens were not allowed to leave they county they lived in) until late 2021. Even without that, there were still significant restrictions in place on our daily lives, like in many other places.
>what are you still complaining about? you won, no one likes a sore winner.
"Won" means that we are all allowed out of our houses?
I'm complaining about the damage that has been done.
The main claims seems to be accidental release of a virus. If it was deliberate, you probably wouldn't release it right at the lab that developed it...
Okay, but if you’re driving recklessly and cause a car crash which kills someone, I don’t say they died “naturally”.
There’s a reason the US banned that variety of gain of function — and a reason why people are outraged Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance sponsored it in China to circumvent that.
Yeah, my grandmother was very social. She had dementia and didn’t understand what was happening. She cried about how lonely she was every single day for months until she passed.
My grandfather had been holding off the worsening of his vascular dementia for a long time because he had a lot of family around him to remind him who he was. Cutting him off from the world resulted in quick decline and death. Lockdown killed dementia patients: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-isola...
What if both of you are right? Or wrong for that matter? Everybody acknowledges that some people got hurt pretty badly by policies applied, and those people are in millions on global scale. Clearly you are one of them.
Yet we saved by some estimates lower tens of millions of lives, and we tested en masse extremely promising new way of administering cures/vaccinations. Attacking that takes more than just some emotional outbursts, better come with some cold hard facts. Ie I don't know a single person who doesn't have in circle of family or close friends somebody who passed away directly due to covid.
No but we hsve things like Sweden with a demographic and social systems very similar to its neighbors (norway, denmark,finland) ending up with 2x the mortality of said neighbors by choosing milder interventions.
Sweden had a higher mortality at the start but ended up with the lowest excess mortality in Europe starting January 2021 [1]. The country had the lowest excess mortality overall during the SARS2 years 2020-2022 [1].
>who doesn't have in circle of family or close friends somebody who passed away directly due to covid.
Maybe true, but in every case that I know of, it's some variation of "Mavis died of Covid in the end, but she'd been in poor health for years and it wasn't a surprise to anyone."
Sorry for the slow response, I wanted to investigate the data before responding —
Here is a chart listing their cumulative mortality, from the OECD dataset. Measured as fractions of their current populations. This chart assumes all COVID deaths are excess (which undercounts real excess).
I’m not sure I’d count this to interventions, which when directly measured seem to provide lower benefits, versus the fact US healthcare is questionable and the US unhealthy in ways dangerous during COVID — as measured by expected mortality being higher.
One of the things that isn’t talked about enough in a reasonable and calm way is the impact COVID can have on the immune system long term.
It’s talked about in terms of Long COVID and whether or not it’s psychosomatic, the policies made during the lockdowns, and so forth, but always with so much emotion, and sometimes for good reason. I don’t want to dismiss that or trivialize it. Those are important topics to discuss for how we’ll handle future pandemics.
But the evidence is accumulating that COVID does seem to impact CD8+ T cells, causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector response. One running hypothesis is that the impaired immune response is caused by a persistent viral reservoir infection, particularly in the gut (although not all people show signs of a spike protein months after the initial infection) causing your CD8+ T cells to express more inhibitory receptors (similar to what happens in HIV or cancer with excessive and prolonged exposure to cancer cells).
Another hypothesis that is lesser known but I find particularly compelling is gut dysbiosis following a COVID infection causing a persistent immune activation that leads to T cell exhaustion or impaired T cell functionality especially through persistent activation of the dendritic cells (which are important for presenting antigens to the adaptive immune systems (i.e. T cells, B cells, etc)).
I think a researcher put it best when they said COVID is roughly halfway between HIV and the common cold in terms of the impact it has on the immune system. It may also not be accurate. We have to find out.
For context, think about how long it took to realize the Epstein Barr virus was a causal factor in multiple sclerosis. It took years of evidence collecting and data analysis to eliminate other confounding variables.
We shouldn’t rush to judgement or a narrative, but remain calm and dispassionate here and examine what’s going on, both for the virus, the vaccine, and the actions taken during the pandemic. It’s important we get it right.
In the interest of being "calm and reasonable," I'd like to point out that some of the language you used in your third block might need a few caveats to be aligned with the state of the research.
In particular:
- "COVID does seem to impact CD8+ T cells": the adjustment I'd make here is that evidence exists that COVID *can* influence T cells, not that it always does.
- "causing T cell exhaustion and reduced effector response.": a quick google suggests there is some conflicting evidence on this point, and most of the studies are done on t cell responses to vaccines delivered after infections, which is a very particular thing.
It seems like you're drawing very heavily from Anthony Leonardi, who, while definitely a scientist and likely right about some things, isn't exactly someone with median (or emotionless) opinions on long covid. The HIV comparison in particular is really out there and unnecessary.
I really want to echo this. We are talking about millions of lives a year right now, and basically every human has been infected. We need a solid answer for why some people have long term health impacts and others do not. There are many brilliant people working on this problem. Let's accept that this might actually be a complicated long term problem.
I don't personally know anyone who has definitely not had COVID. I know some people who suspect they had it, but couldn't or didn't get tested at the time. Everyone else I know confirmed they had it, some with symptoms and some without.
It's possible some significant percentage of people had it, but don't know they had it due to lack of symptoms and no positive test, I'll give you that.
I doubt the percentage of people who has never had it at all is over 1% though, I'd guess closer to 0.01-0.1%
> but don't know they had it due to lack of symptoms and no positive test
Let's try not to be lazy with language: If they had no symptoms, then they didn't have COVID-19, the disease defined by a combination of its cause and symptoms.
Are you suggesting symptom-free people who still tested positive didn't actually have it?
Because I suspect for every asymptomatic person who only know they had it due to a positive test (maybe they were being cautious following a possible exposure), there are more asymptomatic people who never thought to get tested, and therefore don't know they had it.
They were infected with SARS-CoV-2, they didn't get COVID-19.
I've poked at it on and off for years, but it does really annoy me how people mean the first when they say the second. It's been so bad for so long that few people actually understood Pfizer's press release for their vaccine back in 2020, which did distinguish between the two terms. Ended up in pretty regular arguments with people claiming "Pfizer said..." when Pfizer said no such thing, they just didn't understand what Pfizer did say. This includes media and politicians (not that I was arguing with them, but that they were also wrong and people were using them as sources).
I live in Canada, where pharmacies have been giving out free "COVID-19 antigen" tests, which initially were required to take for people who either had symptoms of COVID-19 or had been in contact with other people who had tested positive, even if they didn't have symptoms.
I took a look at the test kit right now, and it doesn't make this distinction; whether or not you're symptomatic, the test tells you whether you have likely been infected with COVID-19 if you test positive for COVID-19 antigens. Let me read you some of what's on the box:
> If you do not have symptoms of COVID-19, you will need at least two tests per person.
> COVID-19 Antigen self-test for infection detection
> in-vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19
From the instruction booklet included:
> If your first or second test is positive, then proteins from the virus that causes COVID-19 have been found in your specimen and you likely have COVID-19
It does insinuate that there's a possibility you could test positive and still not have COVID-19, but there's no indication that this is related to whether or not you're symptomatic. Everything about the packaging and instructions indicates to me that if you test positive, you likely have COVID-19, even if you're asymptomatic
You're going to need to define "had it" then. Symptomatically? Definitely not. Exposed to the virus in any quantity, even if the body defeated it without any particular specific response? Maybe.
I would say half of my social circle never got COVID. A decent chunk of which had to test frequently throughout the whole thing due to the circumstances of their work. I never had it.
Exposed does not mean infected. That's an entirely different claim. Most people have probably been exposed. Further, I'm not claiming there are large homogenous groups that are unilaterally uninfected.
Me & my family had covid at least 6 times, possibly 7-8. It happens when you have small kids in kindergarten who yet don't grok concepts of sanitation. Very anecdotal, but no observed immunity impact. What I do, eat, train/workout, sleep, expose ie to cold etc. has much higher impact on immunity. Sure as hell hope that's also valid long term.
Maybe in Western Europe and in North America, here in Romania we've had the month of March with the lowest number of deaths for the last 10 years (maybe more, I didn't look further back), and the same went for February. We also had a much higher number of deaths during the height of the pandemic (October 2021 had about 100% more deaths compared to a "normal" month of October), and one of the lowest vaccinations rates in the European Union.
Which goes to say that many of the people who would have died now, so to speak, have in fact died one or two years prior, during the pandemic. Can't find the link, but a similar effect was noticed in Netherlands after their great famine of 1944-1945, which was followed by about a decade of bellow average death numbers.
For those interested the Excel with the official data is in here [1], it's in Romanian but relatively easy enough to understand the data in there.
There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that heart deaths are up by a significant amount, that those deaths _may_ account for most or all of excess deaths currently seen, and that they _may_ be related to safety issues with some of the mRNA vaccines.[0]
I resent the fact that statements like this have become political and that I now have to explain myself. Nevertheless, here we go: I have no vested interested in this being true. I've had two doses of the stuff, I want it not to be true. However, there are legitimate questions here that have not been satisfactorily addressed. I'm raising this because reading the article and the other comments I can see nobody else has.
I would encourage people to look at the link and scrutinise the evidence presented themselves before deciding whether or not there might be an issue here that needs looking at.
Well, anecdata, but I'm generally very healthy, vaccinated, what not... I managed to not get covid until early this year.
I was so tired for two weeks, I literally spent a good hour watching a shadow moving across the wall, hyping myself up thinking "when that bit of shadow hits that spot, I will have the energy to get up from this chair"
It was no joke, and with young kids, I caught my fair share of other bugs over the last 6 years. I'm not surprised at all that this pushes some people over the edge, like influenza.
I got it last year, reasonably healthy, late twenties, vaccinated. Thought I was gonna die on the first day. Then two weeks of really bad influenza and two months of having to catch my breath after a flight of stairs. Since then — heart arrhythmias, irritable bowel, all kinds of pain in all kinds of places, generally much worse mood. I was okay through the lockdowns btw, but fuck Covid itself.
So 307 / 100,000 = 0.3% of the population above what would naturally occur.
I wonder how this trend plays out in the long run. I.e. how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of existing health conditions?
It's interesting how people reacted during the pandemic.
While I sympathise with anyone that has a loved one that is vulnerable to disease (I certainly have some!), one could make the case that many lives could be saved by banning sugar and forcing mandatory gym memberships. You could argue that one is within our control vs the other - but you could also argue that many are not in control of their addictions (food for example) as well.
The scariest part of it all for me was the way government quickly attempts to rewrite the rules and gain control. Being in Melbourne where the gov tried pushing through a bill to give them seemingly unlimited power during "emergencies" (as defined by them) was really crazy.
If they were "due to die", you'd see negative excess mortality in future years because the people who were going to die in those years already died. And excess mortality has continued to be positive and high.
> I wonder how this trend plays out in the long run. I.e. how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of existing health conditions?
Assuming the cause is covid and it matches the past three years, like 80-90% of them. The average age of covid deaths has always been above the average life expectancy.
> how many of the 0.3% were due to die in the next few years because of existing health conditions?
“They were going to die anyways!” was always a common argument one among the “muh freedoms!” crowd. When someone dies in a car crash, we don’t just shrug it off if the victim was terminally ill. Why is this different? A preventable death is still a preventable death and their life still has value whether it’s for another 20 years or 20 days.
> their life still has value whether it’s for another 20 years or 20 days.
This is avoiding the question by being emotive and vague. Would you trade the life of somebody who had 30 years more to live for the life of someone who had 30 seconds to live? Why or why not?
If anyone is reading this, please don't exercise very hard when you're recovering from COVID. I went on two bike rides two weeks after I got my negative test. I was so eager to get out of the house and back on my goal of 3,000 miles for the year. And that's when all my symptoms like tremors, brain fog, and memory issues started. There were also a few times I struggled to understand people. There are many similar anecdotes out there of formerly athletic people trying to get back to training too soon, and that's when their long COVID symptoms started. So, if you're reading this, please give yourself at least a month of slow movement and don't jump back into vigorous activities right away.
This is important advice. I was lucky to have heard this before getting infected. The immediate infection hit me hard for a week, but I waited a good couple of months before trying any exercise more vigorous than a long walk. Even so, an hour after my first (short!) run, my watch gives me a high heart rate alert. Heart continues to clock 100bpm for the next three hours while I lay around doing nothing. Freaked me out. Take getting back to normal very slowly, and watch for weirdness.
We said the vaxx would cause more heart attacks, blood clots and cancers, and few people listened. Those things happened, deaths skyrocketed starting in mid-2021, and everyone is still in denial.
If you don’t believe me, go to this website, filter by 25-44 and set the time range from Jan 2020-2023.
The big jump in deaths for young people happened in the middle of 2021… do people think Covid only started killing young people mid-2021? That the virus waited over a year before killing in this age group?
About 45k people died of Covid in the age group we’re talking about during entire pandemic. Every week of 2021 thousands of excess deaths occurred in that age group. So Covid deaths come nowhere close to covering young people’s excess deaths. It’s the stupid vaccine - Covid doesn’t even cause myocarditis, see this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
All studies funded by CDC that say “Covid causes more myocarditis than vaxx” were damage control. They fabricate data and the science is fraudulent. If you do country by country comparisons by vaccination rate as in the first link it becomes very obvious.
Here in Australia we had pretty long lockdowns compared to many other places. Our excess deaths are multiple times lower than say the US or UK for example.
"Tiny island nation which has extremely tough rules on biological imports shielded itself from the rest of humanity for two years" does not have the same ring to it.
Be careful to equate correlation, i.e. fewer deaths due to stringent lockdowns to causation
Or just contrast what you said with what at the time came known as the "Swedish Experiment". You know, letting kids and teenagers go to school.
Population wise we're small but not tiny. We're 2.5X Sweden population, we're more populous than all of Scandinavia. Land wise we're around the size of the continental USA.
"shielded itself from the rest of humanity for two years"
We also did ok stopping it spreading within the nation also.
I actually sort of enjoyed the lockdowns, but I have a job that I can do from home and I’m not a particularly social person. Pretending that they didn’t or couldn’t have harmed other people - significantly - is arrogant.
Pretending to no effect whatsoever of lockdowns on people would be arrogant. I'm glad we agree. It's also not what the parent commentator said, when they point to lockdown as the root cause (not a cause) of the 5% increased death rate. The activity you labeled as arrogant is denying the antecedent to what the parent and my comment said.
That would be a negative correlation. The map seems to indicate a positive correlation overall, negative correlation only if you ignore Africa and half of South America.
Wealthy countries have way more old people, and way more vaccines. COVID is still more dangerous to elderly vaccinated people than to unvaccinated teenagers.
You can sometimes even see this effect in one country, if all the old people are vaccinated and none of the young people are, you'll still probably get more COVID deaths per old person. If you just look at mortality by vaccination status you'll see lots more COVID deaths in the vaccinated cohort, but that's because the vaccinated cohort is just old.
Probably because while it's a simple observation, it's not an intuitive one, so a lot of us had to have it pointed out recently. It's the nature of the math, not anything that has to do with covid or can be sensibly argued with.
The upper estimates are that Russia has suffered 50k KIA in the war which is a lot but in the grand scheme of things won’t show up much in excess deaths.
> maybe there's also some other factor inducing excess death in Russians?
It’s just that buying a fake vaccination was(still is?) a thing. I don’t know the extent of this, but you could just bribe a doctor to issue a vaccination certificate and throw the vaccine in the thrash. The whole affair was very disappointing.
Yes, there is [1]. I remember vividly this one cop that quit his job of so many years over a vaccine mandate. He was invited on TV, and was all proud and righteous of his great deed. He died of COVID. His name was Robert LeMay [2].
I wonder how many deaths could have been avoided were it not for vaccine skepticism.
My problem with this is that there seem to be two related but not really correlated points of opinion:
1. How bad Covid was, like was it a big deal or not.
2. The effectiveness of the means we had at our disposal to do anything about it.
At least in the US everyone’s responses are highly correlated.
For example: if you think Covid is a big deal you think we should have taken all the measures we took and that relaxing restrictions was a mistake.
If you’re on the other team you feel like we shouldn’t have done the interventions and lockdowns because you think Covid is not that big a deal and is overhyped.
I feel most attracted to the group that agrees that Covid is a pretty big deal and very deadly and an incredible tragedy.
I also think that except for the vaccines we’ve never had much control over it at all, and that for the most part the various lockdowns and mandates were pretty pointless after the first few months had passed and we knew what we were dealing with.
Not much of a constituency for this point of view in the narrative, though I feel like it might be commonly held.
I know where I live the concern was about overwhelming hospitals. The early experience in Italy drove their thinking about it. When it seemed like the hospitals were going to be ok, "lockdown" measures were dropped.
One thing that stuck with me since the early stages was the remark that if by looking at it after it's over the measures that were taken don't look like an overreaction it means we didn't do enough. My guess is that we'll see the effects of covid for decades both in the form of long covid and socio-economic impacts.
I remember that line too but it’s just a slogan, it doesn’t really have normative meaning.
For example, closing public beaches was an overreaction. It was pointless and had no positive effect at all. Noticing that doesn’t prove that we did enough.
It’s still possible that we didn’t manufacture vaccines or staff hospitals fast enough for example.
We didn’t know at the time that closing beaches was useless. Once we found out, those bans started to be reversed.
That is why the ‘slogan’.
If you take proactive precautions based on what might help, you’ll always look like you were overreacting afterwards because not all of them will be true.
On the flip side, if you wait for solid evidence of what is actually effective or not, you’ll definitely end up with much larger spread and more damage, because it takes a lot of time for that data to be gathered, confounding variables to be identified, etc.
In the face of an unknown pathogen, (like an unknown enemy in a war), it’s important to defend against apparent threats, not just wait to see which ones are real - as by then it’s too late.
I don't fully agree, some overreactions were simply crowd management pointed at lowest denominator, or most stupidly behaving individuals. In France, one of bastions of freedom (liberte, at least on paper) there was a long period when people could only go 1km from their permanent residence. Even if you were a sporty person, wanted to keep fit, and did completely alone with absolutely 0 risk trail running in the alps around you, you were breaking the law. Cops could get nasty if they caught you. Neighboring Switzerland never applied similar restrictions, they trust their population way more. That was smarter approach, and it sure as hell looked as that even during those times.
In my crappy eastern europe home country, there was curfew after 8pm long after most of western europe abandoned any restrictions. I like to clear my head by long evening walks. I simply couldn't when being home, it felt I came to North Korea since cops back there are overzealous and often enjoy flexing their powers on common folks.
Many policies were good and at least somewhat effective, some were outright restrictive or punitive bullshit with 0 positive effect, just fucking up people mentally more than they already were. That I think was the main point of critique - policy makers looked hard on numbers alone, not on psychological impacts of pushing too far. Its like chasing everything that kills people, you soon end up banning all cars since numbers alone are pretty horrible.
We have generation of kids who are subtly (or not) fucked up, more than they should have been. Maybe 50 million affected? Many grandmas would gladly increase their risks a bit if they could see more freedom to their grandchildren, you have different (often better) priorities when older.
Every generation is subtly (or not) fucked up, near as I can tell.
But most old folks I know were explicitly NOT visiting folks, not because of policies, but because they didn't want to die.
And some I know that did anyway did in fact die - and their family has to deal with knowing they infected them and caused them to die. Which also causes some serious head fucking up.
I mean, coronaviruses are some of the most studied human pathogens on the planet, especially after SARS. The whole “we don’t know what we’re dealing with” shtick was hard to swallow.
Health authorities should have been better prepared for a respiratory pandemic, period. We spend too much money on public health for the response we got.
During the first year of the pandemic, figuring out much of anything except that bodies were piling up faster than they could be managed in all the cities was extremely difficult, and there was a lot of clear political manipulation of the numbers everywhere, so trust was... thin. To put it mildly.
COVID was clearly not as bad as SARS, but it was also clearly not the Flu.
'The authors note that they included only patients who were hospitalized for SARS treatment. "If additional infections in the community do not lead to admission to hospital or death, the case fatality rate based on all infections would be lower," they state'
In other words, they didn't have much of a handle on what subclinical SARS-coronavirus case fatality rate was. I'm not sure if hospitalized COVID-19 patients recovered better or worse than SARS.
SARS was definitely much worse than COVID, and less infectious. It also wasn't infectious without symptoms. That helped it be contained, and it never escaped containment for very long like COVID did. It is very unlikely there were a lot of uncaught infections (unlike COVID) due to those factors. Not impossible a few slipped through though, which is why they put that in the paper. If it had, the death toll would have been astronomical. It was closer to Ebola than the Flu, and that had similar limiting effects in spread - it couldn't fly under the radar long enough, and it scared people enough that they took it seriously.
With COVID, it could spread asymptomatically (and did), and it was never clearly fatal enough that EVERYONE took it seriously, which allowed it to spread easier.
Another huge part of it IMO was it took awhile to develop reliable tests. The PCR test had up to 50% false negative rate for infections depending on when during the infection the samples were taken, and took awhile to get results back.
Antibody tests didn't happen for a long time, so even retroactive knowledge was spotty, and antigen tests were a year+ out, and also had a relatively high false negative rate but at least were faster and more reliable (fewer false positives).
Since it was clearly infectious without major symptoms, and the symptoms were often so vague (cold and flu like unless it got really bad) it was really hard to figure out what was actually going on.
Here's one easy one: Don't use medical jargon in news/media. For example, they shouldn't have called it a "novel coronavirus". It means something specific and totally different in a medical context as it does to the layperson, and I expect it was a huge part of the overreaction.
Novel coronavirus isn’t medical jargon though? Or at least not very much? It was indeed novel, and it was indeed a coronavirus. They could have called it a ‘SARS novel variant 2019’ if they wanted to really stir up shit right?
Unless the CDC gave everyone talking points they had to stick to (and somehow enforced it, aka China) it’s also not in the gov’ts power to tell the press how they should present things.
There were a lot of mistakes, but that we can see them instead of being shot for noticing them is a pretty big plus - and definitely better than how a lot of places handled it!
"Novel coronavirus" in a medical context means "no one has immunity to this particular coronavirus".
"Novel coronavirus" to the layperson means "this is a totally new virus and we don't know anything about how it's going to act", so all previous knowledge about coronaviruses was thrown out and relearned over the past three years.
Even after all this time, I didn’t realise the distinction.
I thought it was based in the “China created it” vs. “came from bats” arguments, i.e., man made (and this novel; of at least partial descent that our immune system had never before encountered), versus natural.
> not in the gov’ts power to tell the press how they should present things.
Is that really people’s understanding?
Governments the world over made it their business to control what what put out — through the MSM, and many other channels.
Many outlets were cautious of breaching the rules. In many cases, control was hands off — through peer pressure, if you will — but there were many well-publicised cases of direct intervention (for example, but it’s only one example, see the Twitter Files).
Feel free to prefix 'In the US' to statements like that I make, since this forum is US centric.
In other places, yes the gov't sends the press what they are allowed to say and if they deviate they'll be shot.
No one (even the US) ignores the press entirely, especially when foreign actors are actively trying to manipulate the press. It's the degree of independent that matters though.
By all means then, if you're an expert then why didn't you tell us about the disease when it got started? Think of all the lives you, personally, could've saved if you shared your expert knowledge. Knowledge that no one else in the entire world knew about apparently as the disease transitioned to a pandemic.
I assume that at least one health authority on this planet would've been prepared and know exactly how to respond, according to your expertise.
I’m kind of exhausted with public policy elites lecturing me about hindsight bias.
Year after year we’re treated to idiotic policy decisions with obvious consequence like invading middle eastern countries for no reason, allowing obviously illegal and harmful market consolidation and mergers, mass delivery of opiates to literally everyone, and so forth.
All the while people who gain massive amounts of power and money from the system tell us we’re just not “serious” when we predict the consequences. We’re told to trust the experts but then the self apointed expert class is not held accountable whatsoever when they come true.
Fuck that, if people want to be entrusted with policy power they should get things right. And if they get it wrong, fine, but let’s hold them accountable and notice who was right the whole time.
A lot of the Covid policy decisions were idiotic and symbolic and wildly inconsistent, and many were based on lies or conflict of interest. It’s fine to notice that this is a problem.
Those things you're talking about don't seem to have anything to do with the topic at hand though?
I agree re: many of the Covid policy decisions you mention at the end, but frankly given the options they had available I'm not sure I (or anyone) could have done anything different given the circumstances.
The systematic corruption of basically all our public policy institutions over the last two generations has quite a bit to do with the topic at hand, which was the response to the pandemic.
And not you obviously, but my point is that "nobody could have predicted" is such an overused response by people with authority it should be banned.
In every relevant instance of major policy failure people actually did predict it, but the people in charge were corrupted by the wrong incentives, made predictable mistakes, and don't feel like being held accountable for it.
If no one could have actually predicted it though, isn’t it a valid excuse?
Who exactly should be held accountable how, anyway?
Near as I can tell, none of them were meaningfully violating any laws. If anything, they were being extremely cautious not to. The public health acts give them a LOT more power than they were using.
I think broadly speaking there were plenty of outdoor measures that quickly felt like overreactions. Indoor measures often felt the opposite (at least in terms of how they actually played out)
I pretty much agree with that. I think the evidence strongly suggests that vaccines help to reduce the effect of COVID especially in more vulnerable populations though it may not do much in terms of spread--especially with later, more infectious, strains.
In aggregate, other interventions probably did some good at the margins? Especially early on? But it's easy to look at the policies in some countries and declare success--so long as you look at the right time window.
Excess deaths are the number of deaths above the expected number of deaths. The expected number of deaths usually comes from a model that takes into account how the number of deaths would normally change from one year to the next. This model would incorporate the effect of changes in the composition of the population that are occurring over long timescales.
There is no conclusion that all of those deaths were due to COVID, and the article is irresponsible for implying as much even after repeatedly saying that attributing all the excess deaths to COVID is jumping to conclusions.
Some other things that have happened since before COVID which would cause an increase in pre-COVID forecasts include a war between the world's two global superpowers, a global recession and disruption of the supply chain, a massive shortage of healthcare workers in many countries, and an enormous spike in usage of fentanyl in the developed world.
COVID plus any or all of those factors are contributing to excess deaths.
The direct losses between the war and fentanyl won't account for much.
100k of those are drug overdoses in the US (the place with by far the highest rate of fentanyl use). There is a similar number of killed in the first year of the Ukraine war. The economist is pointing out the estimates are off by 3M lives, so those two directly account for less than 10%.
Your points of a global recession, disruption of the supply chain and shortage of healthcare workers could quite easily be attributed to covid because excess deaths during the initial outbreak contributed to massive burnout and a loss of workforce.
As much as hospital administrators love to blame COVID for underpaying and overworking healthcare professionals, a person dying because they got a late cancer diagnosis because they couldn't see a family doctor for 6 months because of a shortage caused by burnout is too far removed to attribute to COVID in good faith.
From everything we know the opposite is true in that deaths directly due to COVID are undercounted, not overcounted. Multiple states in the US were directly seen undercooking the numbers so that it looked better. See here [1]
Also even in the scenario you post as a semi-gotcha moment wouldn't be counted as COVID-related, but I would hope it would be obvious to you that certain fast growing cancers have significantly better prognosis if caught early.
Yup. Anyone in power has an incentive to say “we’ve got this under control, trust us everything’s fine.”
This is true at every level. From downplaying mistakes in nursing homes in NY, to fudging numbers in FL, to Trump wishing we’d stop testing, to Biden proclaiming victory upon the vaccine rollout, it’s all the same incentive.
And it wasn't just medium-long term issues like cancer diagnosis that was impacted but very time sensitive medical emergencies also, like heart attacks. The pandemic increased ambulance response times, time to emergency room beds, stretching of healthcare resources over emergency departments, even things like the added PPE requirements slowed everything down.
Let's assume that eradicating covid (if somehow possible) via lockdowns and distancing would cost a 25% quality of life decrease for 2 years. That's equivalent losing 1% of all current human life.
Or perhaps we would not eradicate COVID, but we'd avoid dying from it, and we'd have reduced quality of life forever.
I feel very torn on this topic. I still wear a mask in situations like a crowded airplane and likely always will. I was for much tighter lockdowns and am vehemently pro-vaccine and even people I highly respect cannot really convince me that school shutdowns were a mistake. I'm also really worried about long COVID and am worried what might happen with repeated infections. Yet I personally lost three loved ones during the pandemic. One person was my grandma. She was in her late nineties, had advanced dementia and died of a COVID infection. The other two were friends who died from causes related to mental health and I think there is a good chance they'd still be around right now if it wasn't for the pandemic and the isolation that came with it.
But lockdowns don't solve it. Just delay it. Unless you're going to implement global lockdown (including all the developing countries), which will, almost guaranteed, cause more death than any natural disaster.
And the vaccines didn’t stop the spread of the virus. So there never was a exit strategy other than basically what we did. I’m quite confused what the COVID forever die-hards would have us do
I'd recommend looking into the "swiss cheese" model of risk reduction. The idea being that each method of prevention has holes in different locations, but combining some or all will be better at stopping infection than each on their own.
as a forever covid die-hard, in my ideal world I'd like to see:
better mask education - the US did an absolutely awful job at recognizing that all masks are not created equal, specifically that cloth and surgical masks are not as effective as KN95 or N95 masks
free mask distribution - not everyone can afford to purchase new, high quality masks for regular use.
free covid testing - if we're not giving people free access to testing, then how can anyone make a proper risk assessment of current covid levels?
mask mandates - this does not have to be legally enforced by any means, but a mandate would show folks that masks are encouraged and needed at this time. Some people wearing masks is better than no one.
indoor air testing/filtration improvement - for everyone who can't or won't wear masks, having minimum air quality levels for large indoor spaces/events would also help cut down on transmission.
there's probably some more here i'm forgetting, but my point being is that an individual doesn't have to do everything here for us to decrease transmission of covid, nor do we have to shut down society to have that same effect.
That's not so unreasonable given significantly reduced economic output for long enough would inevitably result in a significant number of deaths that wouldn't have otherwise occurred (and yes, this would also be an argument for not being overly hasty in winding down fossil fuel usage, but given there's almost no indication any country in last 20 or 30 years has been willing to do so at a "hasty" rate, I don't think it needs to be made).
Plus measures to prevent Covid spreading had a lot more downsides than just being a brake on economic growth.
Ultimately you could see it as some sort of balance between aiming for "quantity" vs "quality" of life, though of course many have had the quality of their lives significantly disrupted by becoming ill with COVID.
I don't think you intended economic output as a strawman, but it seems like everyone replying to you turned it into one.
There are an awful lot of public health measures not being taken that would have little to no impact on economic output, yet, society still can't seem to be bothered.
World population is larger than what the planet can sustain, so 5% higher death rate, even if unfortunate and sad at the individual level, helps humanity become more sustainable at a collective level.
Also, 5% less demand for cattle and resources or so.
