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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom. This time of year will always remind me of those eerie first couple of weeks of lockdown. The cherry blossom trees, in all their Spring glory, standing lonely in the usually heaving central park at lunch time. Driving down the main motorway in and out of my city and not seeing a single other car at 5pm rush-hour on a weekday. The ease which unfounded terror was spread through the population during those weeks was eye-opening. The unquestioning acquiescence of all my fellow citizens made me realise for the first time just how subject to the whims of authority this society was and just how fragile and precious was my own freedom.

For the first couple of weeks, as the virus’s spread through Europe was meticulously tracked and broadcast, as carefully curated images of overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins were plastered across our screens, although I was already vehemently arguing against any imposed restrictions, I still retained some sympathy for the scared and frightened masses. But as the early data coming out of Italy and other places started to emerge and was so evidently at odds with the fearmongering propaganda all around me, my sympathy quickly gave way first to bewilderment and then slowly to anger.

As The Science™ took deeper hold and lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve turned into lockdown for the summer turned into second lockdown turned into third lockdown and still the people clamoured for more restrictions and railed angrily against even the mildest suggestion that maybe we should ease up on the tyranny. Any moment now, I thought, surely any moment now the people will break and rise up against this imprisonment. All their lives they’ve been told that they live in a free democracy and now they’re happy to be essentially locked inside their homes, told they can’t visit friends and family, told they can’t touch or hug their family members, even if they’re dying, while with their own eyes they should be able to see that the virus for which all this suffering is supposed to be in honour of is so much less potent than they were told, while with their own eyes they should be able to see the hypocrisy of being ordered that grandparents are not to hold or even visit their new-born grandchildren while thousands marched shoulder to shoulder in the streets in celebration protest of the death of a criminal in a land 4,000 miles away. But no, the people never rose up. As Orwell, who understood the crowd better than any, once observed “Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock” and so it proved as my cowed peers meekly submitted to every curtailment of their freedom.

I will always remember lying in an empty field, reading a book in the warm sunshine and being buzzed by a police helicopter for being outdoors while not undertaking my mandated single-allotted daily exercise. I will always remember being told by the police to move on while sat in the deserted central park. I will always remember the multiple other times I was interrogated by the police for not cowering at home like a good citizen. I will always remember the fear in the eyes of my brother’s girlfriend as she shied away from anybody who got within two metres of her. I will always remember the depths of persuasion I had to employ to convince two of my friends to come and spend a night in the countryside with me during summer 2020, and the lies they had to tell their mothers to even be allowed out (and back in) their homes. I will always remember my work colleague who got suspended for hugging another colleague. I will always remember being kept apart from my partner in a foreign country due to closed borders. I will always remember being told by my own parents that I was not welcome in their house.

Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom and life has returned to normal. The traffic is heavy and the parks are busy again. The Black Mirror-esque dystopian future that we got a horrifying glimpse of has faded away. Even the predictable economic and public-health consequences of lockdown have somewhat smoothed out. Covid came up in conversation the other day and my dad glibly remarked, “Covid? That’s ancient history now!” The world has moved on but, for me, the memory of Covid lockdowns still dominates my outlook. There is still a deep rage within me at the brutal illustration of the state’s power to strip away my freedom, cheered on wholeheartedly by the electorate. There is still a disbelieving resentment at how readily the populace succumbed to government control and willingly followed directives that just six months previous they would have loudly decried as inhumane. The hypocrisy of lockdown policies was responsible for a violent swing in my own politics, from casual left-wing socialist to hard libertarian, but most of all the lockdowns destroyed my faith in my fellow humans. The stark demonstration of just how easily manufactured-fear convinced the country to follow ridiculous commands replaced my underlying faith & trust in humanity with a smouldering disdain. The betrayal of even my own family, as they chose to follow the orders of tyrants and closed the door on their own child, drove a dagger into my heart.

I remember the lockdowns and I’m still angry.

Honestly, I think the lockdowns were good for me. Like, in the moment the personal isolation sucked, but moving to permanent work from home (still going strong three jobs later!) and the realization that I could and should take control of my social life, health, and joi de vivre has has profound positive effects on my life. Looking back, I think there was retrospectively enough information to conclude that the negative effects of learning loss on children by far outweighed the health concerns for any learn-from-home lockdown except the very first. Aside from that, I have a hard time judging any other type of restriction as particularly insane... at least for the midwestern city I lived in. China or europe or the blue coastal cities probably had it worse. If only the entire world could be as sane as a democrat-controlled city in a republican-controlled state.

How time flies, a few general thoughts:

I lean to the left of most of the users here posting on this issue, but I was and am willing to be persuaded. The first round of lockdown measures I was more forgiving, since the scientific and political information that leaders were dealing with was more or less novel. As things moved towards the next year I was less forgiving since we had a good model of what worked and what didn't. I don't know if anyone would find this relevant or care as I'm unlikely to post non-redacted proof but in the first few weeks of the pandemic period in the west:

  • I had chats with friends where I made it clear that this was not as dangerous or risky as being portrayed
  • Had chats with medical professional friends (mostly doctors and pharmacists) that their stance on masking is hilariously hypocritical and wrong, and that isolation mandates should be ignored because I personally have better judgment and understanding of data than the health minister, even though I'm just some guy
  • Told friends in mixed company that surely China owes us economic reparations for causing this whole situation

Most of the leaders in charge during this time promptly lost their next election. I don't understand the grumpiness of comments here talking about a lack of public accountability. If the next solution up is jailing BoJo or Justin Trudeau or whomever then I would point to the actual notion of qualified immunity - passing bad policy isn't a jailable offense. Even Mr Trudeau's attacks against the trucker convoy in Ottawa were found to be wildly unconstitutional, his just desserts for that are resigning and having many of his policy choices reversed by the following administration.

People underrate by a lot how much of the decline of society in the first months was caused by a genuine fear of people who don't want to get sick. The biggest economic and social downtown first predated any government mandate - I feel this has largely been memoryholed. I've had discussions with users on this forum who think that the vast majority of travel reduction in the USA was due to law and not fear.

Even as such, I'm surprised how vitriolic and grumpy users here sound. I suspect this has more to do with the vibes you felt during the pandemic and not the specific levels of of government policy failure or misalignment. Admittedly I had tonsillitis for most of that february and march so the differences were not immediately noticeable to me, being bedridden. Afterwards I continued to do the same activities I did before, except now there were sometimes more people to do them with since their things had been cancelled. A few restaurant closures annoyed me greatly. Forced masking annoyed me the most if I force myself to remember the era, but I don't think about it at all normally, as if it had never happened.

There are a number of upsides that people are ignoring. Kick starting the WFH era has undoubtedly led to large quality of life increases for the people who use it, and cost savings for firms. Being able to get out of any obligation short to medium term, cancel any flight, and refund any ticket just by saying "I tested positive" was immensely useful.

I am surprised more people here don't complain about outcomes vis-a-vis the massive stimmy that permanently affected the shape of the economy. It makes it much harder to get a grasp (especially for laypeople) of inflation over the last few years. That is what is purely caused by extra money and what is caused by disrupted infrastructure and supply lines.

Kids were trending down before and after the lockdown at similar rates. Blame social media or their parents or iPads. I'm willing to be convinced that lockdowns had a (even larger than I am giving credit for - which is still large) negative effect on them, but if in 15 years we're blaming every bad thing about people born 1998 to 2016 on the 2020-2021 time period I'm going to be skeptical.

Consider how much of the bad stuff in your personal life you blame on the pandemic and how much of that is actually rational. I have all of the friends I had before it, had to go to a few delayed weddings a year late, did not have any major work or life changes, I flew on airplanes the same amount I have before an after (Although I had to cancel some). Negativity I perceive during this period is the same way I watch the news, it is very annoying and interesting conceptually but it's not like its my house getting bombed.

I've had discussions with users on this forum who think that the vast majority of travel reduction in the USA was due to law and not fear.

Fear doesn't come out of nowhere; social restrictions can increase or decrease it. I would expect that if there weren't any restrictions and it didn't cause people to die in the streets, the fear level would go down pretty fast.

I’m not against people making their own choices. To be clear, I think the best model in the entire affair was Sweden who didn’t enforce laws forcing people indoors and forcing businesses to close. Such things are possible— give people proper information and the tools they need and they will find their own balance. If you live with someone at risk, the strongest measures make sense. If you’re a 21 year old co-Ed living in a college dorm, you can do anything you want without too much worry. And you can easily set yourself up to prioritize one thing (like your business) or another (your personal safety). We do this all the time, in pretty much every other context.

But the idea of the state enforcing the choice, the state deciding what I can do with my time, where I may shop, work and play is not freedom and in fact pretty tyrannical. Free people do not need permission from the state to move about, to work, play, socialize, or shop. The state, in a free society must get permission from the people to place restrictions on the people. The state doesn’t get to just decide by fiat that something is so dangerous that they get to decide what the people get to do until the state decides the danger is past.

A lot of my grumpiness comes from my experiences with the people around me, less so public figures. People who didn't know the difference between a bacteria and a virus or how the immune system works tried Educating me on The Science. They flipped from shaming anyone who tried socializing outdoors with precautions to shaming anyone who didn't go outside to protest against cops existing. Lockdown policies stuck around way past the "official" end of the pandemic, and I still see maskies out in public to this day. People would weaponize making a stink about masks and social distancing mid-conversation, like when the topic of how much money they owed me came up. They'd use selective anxiety to torture their partners or to get their way. It broke my faith in people as people.

It's odd how no one has suffered any public consequences for being wrong. Neither the people promoting lockdowns, nor the people fear-mongering on vaccine deaths, have been vindicated by time; but neither group has been chastened in their views, instead sharpening their arguments to refight the last war when the next comes around.

Which, when I read And The Band Played On and recognized so many names, I realized was how we got the retarded policies we did during COVID: the public health apparatus was refighting GRID/HIV-AIDS, and most of the policies implemented were policies that they wish they would have implemented in the early days of GRID.

It's odd how no one has suffered any public consequences for being wrong

I would call the massive increase in distrust and disillusionment with our societies institutions to be a "public consequence" but this is somewhat tangential vs what you're trying to say

Fauci's name is pretty muddy

Huge public consequence, but highly distributed, and did not hit anyone responsible as hard as it hit everyone else.

No goat got cooked, no crazy racist "ethicists" lost their jobs, et cetera and so forth.

What politician's career has been ruined? Trump was president when the lockdowns and masks were at their height, he is back in office. What businessman has faced consequences? The closest I can get is maybe Cuomo, but that was mostly other stuff and general distaste for him personally.

Various heterodox figures were predicting obscene consequences from vaccine deaths. They still have followings as large if not larger.

Fauci is a million years old, in a functioning society the same guy in power during AIDS shouldn't have been in charge six years ago anyway.

that was mostly other stuff and general distaste for him personally.

entirely for other stuff, at least on paper. His COVID Emmy got taken away for the other stuff.

Weird times.

He got a lot of flak for the nursing home policies, "grabbing fannies and killing grannies" as Sliwa put it. But that's a sort of technical Covid thing.

most of the policies implemented were policies that they wish they would have implemented in the early days of GRID.

Interesting psychology/cultural power dynamic there: you can restrict everyone, but you can't restrict only certain groups.

you can restrict everyone, but you can't restrict only certain groups

Because in the latter case, especially when said groups are a disjoint set with the people making the decisions, the relative weights of the costs and benefits get distorted.

In some circumstances, costs to the groups subject to restrictions are even perceived by the deciders as a benefit.

I remember the time between autumn 2021 and the beginning of the Ukrainian War. It did seem like the status quo stabilized and we’re in a new normal. Those who refused to get vaccinated were going to live as pariahs, modern untouchables, not permitted to travel, to fly with airlines, check into hotels etc. and those who were vaccinated were going to need to have their certificate of it on them.

I remember the lockdowns and I’m still angry.

Same. Might be a lifetime supply.

I don't usually talk to people about this. Not much of a point. "Remember when everyone turned into rabid witchhunters and tripped over themselves clamoring for harsher punishments for those filthy, subhuman enemies of all that is good and decent in the world, those who rejected the covid vaccines?" doesn't make for good conversation nowadays. But oh, I do remember. "Remember how it was absolutely essential to pretend to care about the lockdowns and the measures and the distancing and the vaccines, right until the war in the Ukraine distracted everyone?" isn't what people like to talk about. Do you recall the sheer hypocrisy of the recently-vaccinated congregating and spreading the virus after all, but hey, they're jabbed so it's okay? I remember. I remember how all the political parties were on board with the program, even the liberals I supported at the time, of which I had previously thought as a reasonable compromise. Well look what the compromise got me. There was exactly one party that was against all that, and I suppose I'm a nazi now. I remember having to drive for hours to find the right kinds of people to swab me so I could visit my newborn in the hopsital - where, of course, nobody so much as glanced at the test results I brought with me; they just wouldn't let me in without them (after three rounds of that nonsense, I sought and found a backdoor and just made my way in without going through security). Oooh, I remember. I remember what stuff my co-citizens are actually made of. I remember. I remember being banned from visiting my ailing grandparents because don't you know it's the unvaccinated who spread disease, only for my sanctimonious vaccinated aunt to bring it to them instead because she went to a party. I remember being told with great glee that, surely I was aware I could not go to the family gathering, unvaccinated as I was. I also remember sitting around a table with my sports buddies, chatting away all evening, but when I rose to go to the toilet and refused to put on a mask for that, I was threatened with being thrown out. I remember needing to bring negative test results to be allowed to participate in fencing practice, since I had no proof of vaccination. I remember the constant drone of politics, media and private people demanding that something must be done about those unvaccinated, source of all evil!

Yeah, I remember.

I remember going back to work during Covid (courts, particularly criminal can't wait forever regardless of what is happening outside). And a female colleague broke down crying about "why we the one's who have to die" (or something similar Its been years at this point). Our boss (a lady, or this would probably not be the funny story it is) poured some whiskey into a disposable coffee cup and offered it to her saying something like "alcohol is a sanitizer" (or again something like that). I started laughing and said I was also sick. Got my own cup. There were only like 5 of us left at the office at the time. It was certainly a time.

General comment on this thread, not a warning for any individual in particular:

Rarely do I see so many reports on posts that are almost entirely "This guy's opinion makes me mad."

The thread is interesting and obviously evokes lots of feelings. What depresses me about it is not any of the discourse about Covid and vaccinations and lockdowns. It's the constant reminder that on a forum where people supposedly value free speech, the average poster still just wants everyone they disagree with to be shut up.

Contemplate that while whining about vaccinations and lockdowns.

Surprised that people are reporting this one. Feel that hardcore lockdown criticism is the norm in hindsight, albeit people uncomfortable with rhetoric on young sacrificing for old and whatnot

I’m surprised that tensions are running so high in this thread (myself included). Meanwhile this forum has unusually civil discussions on many topics that would devolve into nasty flame wars pretty much anywhere else.

I’m not at all surprised. To watch government officials pass draconian restrictions that they refused to abide by themselves; to watch public health officials knowingly and intentionally lie, to see them brag about it on TV, and then to see the world still continue to treat their word as gospel; to be mistreated and maligned for years over an issue on which you were right; to become a victim of the mother of all moral panics; and then to see the perpetrators call for a period of national forgiveness and completely avoid taking responsibility for their actions—all that is enough to radicalize and permanently embitter almost anyone.

But of course the board also has some members who broadly agreed with their government’s approach, making the perfect setup for an acrimonious fight.

No I think what's surpring to some is seeing OP get any criticism on here at all. This board was my primary info(tainment) source on Covid way back then, and throughout the years I had just assumed everybody here would harshly criticise the lockdowns, or at least not get mad when someone does it. I'm really at a loss as to who here would report OP or get mad at it.

I got the impression that anti-lockdowners have been reporting the lockdown defenders’ posts, not that a lot of people have been reporting the OP. Perhaps @Amadan can clarify.

ETA: I see he did clarify below.

I imagine much of the frustration comes come from the middle/common sense feeling eroded- as someone who was mostly anti-lockdown (well pro common sense lockdown, which was swiftly abandoned) it certainly feels like a lot of anti-lockdown people deny COVID ever happened.

Having lived it through it...that's infuriating. I haven't reported but I can see a lot of people with personal experiences (like deaths in the family) freaking out.

"Common sense" doesn't work. "Common sense" gets you to Darwin's argument -- that the disease can't spread if people aren't near each other, so lockdowns are good.

How so? Initial flattening the curve was a real thing that actually helped, public health institutions, cowardly politicians, and Karen energy betrayed the parts that worked and kept things going indefinitely. Banning people from parks and from fucking being outside was nonsense and only made sense (if ever) in dense urban environments). Don't punish people who live in places where shit made sense!

Anger at broken institutions, excess of conservatism and so on? Sure!

Acting like COVID didn't happen? ...tis nonsense.

More comments

I think a couple of you have misunderstood: the OP himself did not get reported! (Actually he got quite a few AAQCs.) It's the arguments downthread that are getting reported- and it's both pro- and anti-lockdown posters reporting each other.

I joined TheMotte right around the start of Covid. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people did. It was one of the last places where people could talk freely about things that were radically changing their daily life. There was never anything like Covid before and hopefully never will be again.

here was never anything like Covid before and hopefully never will be again.

Sadly, mass hysteria is as old as the hills. The best I can say -- in general -- is that it was interesting to live through a mass hysteria event. But I would be pretty angry about the situation if I had had elementary-school-aged children at the time.

Yeah. COVID was a great recruiter for the motte since everybody was bored off their asses, and there was such a dearth of spaces to be COVID critical online that weren't full of straight up Lizardpeople conspiracy posters

That's an interesting perspective. I'm angry not because of the lockdowns, but because of the ignorance, politically-motivated thinking, and the incompetence.

As some choice examples of incompetence, I remember when the CDC and FDA blocked independent PCR tests, requiring that all coronavirus samples be shipped to Atlanta for testing. Then the "public health professionals" and the "medical ethicists" decried individual screening, as people cannot be trusted to interpret test results for themselves.

The CDC argued against testing symptomatic individuals in the general population for "wuhan flu", then declared that there was "no evidence of domestic transmission". The NPR listeners in my circles twisted themselves into knots explaining why private testing for novel diseases of pandemic concern is bad, actually, and also argued that the CDC was being intentionally hobbled by Trump.

Then the CDC required that private tests be validated against their in-house test suite - which contained faulty reagents.

Then the CDC rescued a bunch of Americans from Wuhan, put them together in group quarantine for 2 weeks, and didn't test them for a disease which spreads very well in confined spaces and has a 1-2 week incubation period. If a single person had been infected, they would have infected the whole group, then promptly been discharged into the population. We don't know whether this happened, because they were never tested.

USCIS started implementing epidemiological questionaires for people on planes, but there was no enforcement of quarantines, and the illicit means to walk across the borders were still available. I think the combination of pro-"open borders" with pro-"epidemiological controls" is a type of doublethink, but I'm the outgroup.

Then CDC and "public health experts" insisted that the disease wasn't airborne, despite strong epidemiological studies from other countries demonstrating airborne-only transmission: spread between members of a choir who had been religious about handwashing, examples of people infecting each other by walking past each other on the underground, a Daegu call center and a Daegu restaurant where probability of being infected was highly correllated with air handling direction rather than surfaces touched. Despite this, masks were not recommended.

Probably because the Chinese diaspora had already raided all the available mask supply in the continental U.S. and "public health officials" were afraid of inciting racism. I was friends with a member of the Chinese diaspora working for an American subsidiary of a Chinese manufacturing conglomerate. They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.

Then seemingly in April 2020, NYC hospitals were overflowing with positive cases, so they shifted positive cases into nursing homes. I may remind you that even then we knew that "CoViD-19" primarily killed the elderly.

And of course in May we learned that protesting was a public health risk, unless it was protesting for BLM. And in California restaurants and hair stylists were forced to close, unless you were friends with Gavin Newsom.

A lot of these closures would have been unjustifiable were it possible to track and trace efficiently, but there was a "shortage of qualified nurses" and "lack of budget" to do contact tracing as late as August 2020.

At risk of doxxing myself, I was in Korea at the time. In lieu of lockdowns, the Moon administration implemented effective procedures for figuring out who had been exposed, and effective tests to detect illness. (TBF, there was one short lockdown in Daegu before tests were available.) Instead of taking nurses out of patient care and being short on contact tracers, local government administrators were retasked into disease tracking. (Admittedly, this is a lot easier when there is a universal civil service exam: Local government administrators in Korea all pass some threshold of competence.)

Exposed people were identified by credit card purchase databases and CCTV (which were examined by the above administrators), and those individuals got texts asking them to quarantine at home if they were suspected to have been exposed. Breaking a quarantine order was a crime, but also the local government would leave two weeks of food and supplies outside your door so you didn't go hungry or run out of toilet paper.

Instead of banning private testing, the Korean government encouraged private companies and labs to develop tests. We had effective testing by late February, and by late March PCR testing was widely available enough to be required (for free) if you were showing symptoms. Exposed individuals were tested at the beginning and end of their quarantine period.

All people entering the country from abroad were required to test and quarantine, and this was remarkably effective at delaying the entry of new variants until they had evolved lower lethality, and until old people could be immunized.

The highly effective tracking and tracing revealed events with high chances of superspreading: raves and dance clubs, church choirs, "coin-room" (phone booth) karaoke, drunken gatherings. Events with a history of superspreading were banned, but if you weren't a fan of large or drunken gatherings, life mostly went on as normal. (A friend of mine got married in 2020. There was no reception and the audience was limited to 100 people, but the wedding happened in real life and the happy couple has a bunch of unmasked photos.)

In lieu of allowing the Chinese diaspora to buy and export all the available medical masks, the government requisitioned Samsung to quietly buy a few thousand tons of meltblown fiber, and banned export when it was becoming a problem. Starting in March/April, everyone in the country could visit a pharmacy with their national ID to receive two N95 masks per week. This was actually effective at minimizing transmission on the subway, and hospital staff were able to get their allocation, too.

In late 2020 there was a presidential election, and it was held in well-ventilated outdoor tents with free gloves and masks provided instead of by legalizing mail-in voting and the resultant loss of trust in voting systems.

It wasn't perfect: masks were required in parks / when outside, which is not a time of high transmission. Kids still did school on zoom. Workplaces installed infrared cameras at the entrance, which wasn't very effective. Daily epidemiological questionnaires were required to pass newly installed turnstiles at my workplace, and those access controls have persisted and made visiting old coworkers impossible. The rest of the testing and tracing Orwellian panopticon was only easy to dismantle because it was expensive and time consuming, and I think people were justified in their concerns that it might not be dismantled.

But I guess my point is that the US (and the UK) completely fudged it up when it came to lockdowns. There were demonstrated means available to achieve both disease control and functional life, but the US government is too incompetent, ignorant, and (likely) corrupt.

Nice write-up. You missed the part where within something like two weeks, the guidance on masks completely did a 180. First it was, well, masks aren't really effective because the layperson won't wear it properly. And also, we don't want people to stockpile them because we need to save them for medical staff. And also, they're not needed because it's not airborne. Then when there was absolutely no supply of masks to be had anywhere, suddenly it was, it is illegal to go outside without a mask. Don't you dare think of going out without a mask. What's that, you can't find any in stock? Well here's a handy diagram about how to sew your own. Yes, the CDC was giving people craft projects as their official guidance. To this day I can't believe no one ever had to answer for the absolute stupidity and failure on the part of multiple organizations in that period.

Plus the myriad 'so long as your face is somewhat covered' mask policies that evolved. Like I'm sure if everybody had a medical hygienist giving them a top quality mask and ensuring they never breach best practice there might have been a difference but in any practical terms nah

They were clearly lying so they could try and stockpile masks for medical uses before the zerg swarm figured out they were useful and panic-bought all of them (see: toilet paper)

Was it smart to lie, given that it would be obvious it would be walked back/discovered as a lie within weeks? No. But that was the choice they made.

The (first) lie was pretty much true though -- masks (as implemented) didn't work, and it was always obvious that there was no way they could work.

The second lie is much more interesting.

medical ethicists

I know AIs tailor responses to the individual, so maybe it was easy to predict my actual position, but I'm still amused that the first time I said something positive about bioethicists and bioethics as a field, Claude basically called them idiots. It's the only time I've encountered Claude say something negative about that kind of favored group without prompting.

I don't think Claude was wrong, mind you. Incredibly ideologically poisoned field. But still.

They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.

Fascinating!

Thank you for sharing. Sounds like it was, in the grand scheme, fairly tolerable to go through in a competent country.

I feel like I am now probably in the Covid denier anti-vaxx camp. And I believe it’s correct. I have a reasonable basis for believing I am usually smarter than others, but I think the true science says it was rational that I locked in before lock-downs but quit doing anything 2 months later (as an under 40 not fat person). I only got vaccinated once because I had an asymptomatic covid case and the first jab (probably signaling an immune response from having covid) knocked me out for 2 days. Which to me both signaled I had immunity and it’s just stupid to take a shot that puts you in bed.

Locking down did make sense to me as we didn’t have a full understanding of the virus for a few weeks.

Questions I would asks would be why were politicians probably a full week late shutting down. And why did locking down, 5 doses of vaccine (for younger people), wearing a stupid cotton masks became things for so long. Was it:

  1. Politicians are mostly dumber than me
  2. I’m autistic
  3. Changing policy is like turning the Titanic
  4. People just like playing political games. Calling righties a death cult and stupid was far too fun of a game to play that many people were ok suffering a lot themselves personally if they got to play that game.

Covid lockdowns were directly responsible for the end of my dream career, my marriage, and my faith in humanity. Six years later, I share in your anger as I navigate a similar PTSD this time of year.

Covid lockdowns actually enabled my dream career, letting me pretend to work from home instead of having to commute to pretend to work at the office. It definitely put unnecessary strain on my marriage though (which we fortunately worked through) and destroyed my faith in humanity and institutions.

I can match you 2 for 3 although I did pretty much stop dating as well.

The people didn't rise up, as they were told that these are temporary measures, which they indeed were, stupid as many of them were. The conspiracy theory crowd - insofar as it still remembers Covid and hasn't moved out to other topics - tends to nowadays just take continuous victory laps over how "conspiracy theorists are still 100% correct" whenever some authority admits that some of the measures were less-well-than-thought out or there's news about lab leak possibility being considered or whatever. However, they confidently predicted that the sheeple are wrong about all this being temporary and its just going to be an endless cycle of lockdowns and mandatory vaxx from here to eternity. It wasn't. That probably has a lot to do with why it's been forgotten so quickly (it shouldn't be, it should be pored over in detail for lessons on how to answer similar crises better in the future.)

They were initially told the measures will be temporary so as to flatten the curve, in other words they were justified by the logical-sounding reasoning that the epidemic will spread through the whole of society anyway, and it needs to be ensured that health services do not get overwhelmed. It was also claimed that this will take no more than two or so weeks.

I think you’re correct that the claims of “temporary measures” was why people didn’t rebel. It’s how most tyrannies begin. No dictator has ever marched to the steps of his Capitol claiming that he’s going to permanently end all civil rights and liberties, it’s always claimed as a temporary measure needed to meet some crisis and of course everyone should go along until the danger is passed. Humans are simply not built for recognizing that first step as the danger it is. I think most of it goes back to our beginning as humans in tribes. A claim of lions in the bushes turns off the rational brain and moves humans back to Stone Age tribes where the strong guy will save us if we do exactly what they say.

It’s one reason I am democracy skeptical. Most humans are better off being a follower and not suited at all to lead or build or invent. We are 90% peasants and a couple of inventors and thinkers and leaders. Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?

Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?

I'm sure the remnants of the Ancien Régime were asking themselves the same question all those years in Austria.

To give you a less quippy answer, I think the most persuasive argument for me is a moral one. People should have a say and a stake in how their lives are run. I'm not confident enough to claim it's a universal, but I think it's not a controversial claim to say the majority of humanity has an instinctual desire to be the masters of their own destiny, whatever compromises they have to make of their autonomy in the current socio-political-economic structure of the world. I mean, freedom is arguably the single most popular ideological concept there's ever been, with all but the most extreme authoritarians and totalitarians at least attempting to appeal to it. I think it's fundamentally a right you deserve, to at least have the modicum of political power your suffrage gives you in modern liberal democracies. I'd prefer much more devolved and local systems, though.

But for those who don't share my moral principles, how about avoiding violent, anti-elite revolutions? Do you really want to go back to killing hundreds of thousands of peasants because it's important to keep a rich, powerful guys club exclusive? Not to mention that, poor short-term electoral incentives to policy aside, democratic regimes tend to have much better long term capacity to self-correct. Whereas if dear leader decides to wage a hopeless, 13-year-long failing war to retain a pointless colonial empire, there's no formal, reliable mechanism to force a change of leadership or even policy. Have you always approved of your mayor, your governor, your president? Have you ever wanted somebody else in charge? And if the answer is yes, are you prepared to plan and execute a revolution or coup of your own, or to participate in or support one?

If not, I would suggest you are either one of the peasants, or you do, in fact, actually like the idea of democracy.

I mean I’d buy it if there were widespread interest in the kind of politics that ordinary people could understand and affect them much more than the federal government issues that people spend time arguing about. Nobody cares about the school board meetings, zoning committees, local or state government. They argue about stuff that they have no control over, and they never bother to do anything to actually understand the situation.

The conspiracy theory crowd - insofar as it still remembers Covid and hasn't moved out to other topics - tends to nowadays just take continuous victory laps over how "conspiracy theorists are still 100% correct" whenever some authority admits that some of the measures were less-well-than-thought out or there's news about lab leak possibility being considered or whatever.

Given how much effort went into censoring the views they were right about, the victory laps are completely justified, even if you can find some they were wrong about.

Yes its not the being right that makes me angry. Its the continued lying. Nature still won't publish the lab leak evidence. Apparently (according to Matt Ridley) they went from "not enough evidence" to "everybody already knows this no point in publishing it." I'm angry because my government paid to make the common cold MORE contagious, released it on the world, lied about it, made a vaccine that didn't work and was worse than the cold, and lied some more. And told anyone that objected toany of this that they were outre and people should exclude them.

Nature still won't publish the lab leak evidence.

What's the latest on this? I initially leaned lab leak, but now lean more wet market origins. I'm interested either way.

The lab leak always seemed like it was true to me. But all the evidence I've seen (including a fair bit from the rationalist space) indicates it's pretty unlikely it was a lab leak.

I haven't heard about this nature thing, but my assumption is that if there were potential smoking guns hanging around, I probably would have heard about them, so I doubt it's material.

all the evidence I've seen (including a fair bit from the rationalist space) indicates it's pretty unlikely it was a lab leak.

I'm no expert despite my username, but my opinion on the rationalist evidence is that it's centered on a couple people that are really good at constructing arguments (regardless of reality), and a lot of motivated reasoning around common sense being wrong.

I agree with Nybbler that no one outside of China has sufficiently granular and unfiltered data to even begin considering a clear distinction between the two.

edit:spelling

Great points!

There aren't any smoking guns around from either side. The smoking guns would be in China, and the Chinese government would have very good reasons to cover up lab-leak smoking guns, but none at all to cover up natural-origin smoking guns (and in fact they've tried to fabricate a few of those).

Most conspiracy theorists correctly recognized that the lockdowns were too retarded to be the new equilibrium(and indeed, one merely needed to remember things over the course of several weeks to recognize that). They may have predicted other outcomes from the lockdowns that did not happen, but not 'lockdowns forever'.

The dumbest COVID conspiracy that I widely heard IRL was that Tom Wolf imposed the restrictions because he hated the bar and restaurant industry and wanted to kill it entirely. These same people said he needed to be voted out during the next election and were disappointed when I told them that he was already on his second term, confirming that they had no idea about state politics whatsoever.

Overall it was amusing to witness, there were so many absurdities I'm sure that most will be forgotten, if they aren't already. For me this was the highlight of the whole thing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E2yXwUm5TNs

I personally think that COVID appeared plausibly enough like an apocalyptic bioweapon that Trump should have taken just about any measure necessary, no matter how authoritarian, including martial law and suspension of elections, to minimize its spread. But I also think that if he'd even leaned in that direction, it would simply have been the left rather than the right convinced in the end that it was some kind of tyrannical hoax.

The panic for the first two months or so I don't think was totally insane, but the continued cargo culting for another 2 years was nuts.

The panic for the first two months or so I don't think was totally insane, but the continued cargo culting for another 2 years was nuts.

Well one thing that was pretty crazy early on was the flip. What I mean is that in the early days, people who were concerned were dismissed as anti-Asian racists. People who were Correct Thinkers fully supported gatherings for Chinese new year.

The other thing is that it was reasonably clear -- even in the early days -- that you didn't face much risk if you were young and in good health.

I will concede that there may have been a brief period during which society was not wildly under-reacting or wildly over-reacting, but I'm not sure I would agree it was 2 months.

I mean, that's exactly what the Left did, initially. When the idea of Covid effectively being a Chinese-derived flu and talk of ceasing travel/immigration from Asian countries, it was the Left as a whole piling out and going on about hugging a Chinese person today.

Then, when it finally arrived, the Left were the ones driving Lockdown efforts, with the Right being turned into Covid-deniers.

And then BLM happened. And we all know how that turned out. So...

I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late. There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually, and all any lockdown measures did was "flatten the curve". Which they did do, but with great cost and little benefit. As soon as we lost containment it would have been better to focus on ramping up healthcare readiness and otherwise let people and the economy get on with their lives.

And if Trump was actually a giga genius he would have gone authoritarian just to get the left going anti-lockdown and then let their control of the media make that spread and dominate the manufactured consensus. Sure the right-wing would be mad at the left for spreading disease and killing their grandparents, but that happened anyway and the economy would be in much better shape.

I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late.

This would've been possibly January? Maybe December? Very few people in the US were paying attention at that point. Well. Publicly paying attention.

There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually,

Plenty of countries where it didn't (Korea, Japan, Taiwan being the clear-cut cases). That no western country managed the pandemic as well as those three was a policy choice.

Plenty of countries where it didn't (Korea, Japan, Taiwan being the clear-cut cases). That no western country managed the pandemic as well as those three was a policy choice.

what about Vietnam, Cambodia, the Phillipines, and other countries in the area with pretty much the same curves?

there was a wide disparity of approaches across all these countries and yet they have very similar curves, so similar in fact I doubt you could correctly pick out Japan, Taiwan, and Korea from the group of them

and there are other countries outside this region which had very similar approaches which failed spectacularly

one theory which explains the above is this region had pre-existing immunity from another similar virus which they had already been exposed to while other parts of the world had not, but what doesn't explain it is some Asian miracle where their efficient administration saved them

you'll notice it didn't save them as time went on and they were exposed to new variants despite them having the same attempt to control it

Also even the absolute worst case of a COVID epidemic isn't even that bad.

Western societies are currently getting absolutely beset with immigration and other such policies to try and offset the population pyramid getting stacked with the elderly and their associated costs. COVID would have ameliorated a lot of that if there were minimal responses.

No, despite the memes, COVID wasn't the Boomer Doomer; it was the Silent Killer. And the Silent Generation is both too old and too small to have much effect on the inverted population pyramid. COVID did essentially spread unchecked; it didn't "help".

It would still largely hit those who were already the unhealthiest which is going to reduce the short and medium-term burden on the system.

You know, while COVID was a bad time in India, the sheer poverty of the country saved us from the ridiculously prolonged lockdowns. Sure, we had them for maybe 2 or 3 months in early 2020, and then another one in late 2020 or early 2021 for the delta wave (much worse than the first one). But it quickly became apparent that society and the government itself would collapse if the majority of people weren't allowed to work. Also, it turned out that the revenue from liquor taxes was rather load bearing for the budget, and awkward adjustments were made quite quickly. The average person stopped regularly masking by early 2021, though I still had to wear one (and wanted to) till the middle of the year.

It's unfortunate that I was deemed an essential worker and had to suffer through it all, including work in overloaded Covid ICUs. We literally ran out of oxygen. The crematoria really did melt from overuse. N95s? I got one every month and had to wash it well past the point of usefulness. Caught the damn bug 4 times at the very least, and that's only considering the times I bothered to get tested. I could have used a break.

Anyway, I think it quickly became clear by the middle of 2020, well past reasonable doubt, that blanket lockdowns made little sense, and that only the elderly and sick needed special attention. What a farce.

I reckon reading that huge numbers of Indian peasants, then penniless urban seasonal workers, starved to death and died as they tried in vain to go back to their villages on foot, hoping to get home before the government locked down all travel as well.

Huge numbers? I don't think so, I was in the country and our media is not so compromised that this would have gone unnoticed. Maybe a few hundred people at most in a country of billions, and I'd be surprised if the numbers were that high. India is poor, but not so poor that people regularly starve to death with no recourse, not even during a pandemic.

I remember a friend in the extra-lockdown-loving Australia being told by police to hurry home by curfew. He'd gone out to get some Taco Bell and got a bunch of shit for it.

extra-lockdown-loving Australia

The average Australian spent less time locked down that the average Brit or American - only Melbourne had an extra-long lockdown.

Uh, ok, as long as you weren't unlucky enough to be outside the country, being subject to a mandatory 14 day quarantine when you return. And the border was closed to non-citizens for 20 months. Australia overreacted more than almost any other country in the world.

Average American? British person versus Australia I'd agree they copped more but the vast majority of the Australian population lives in the areas that had the worst lockdowns

Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID. I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic. The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines or effective antivirals, and there was a real fear of running out of ventilators.

Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly. Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool). Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary. And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.

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I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic.

I remember all the nurses so bored they made tiktoks all day.

New York was briefly overwhelmed, in part because they refused to work with field hospitals for braindead ideological reasons. Even that was briefly.

Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years

Lockdown isn't quarantine, either.

Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary

Alas, we finally could've done something about New Yorkers moving south.

Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly.

Well. Until they got sufficiently bored and found an ideological-acceptable reason to throw parties.

I remember all the nurses so bored they made tiktoks all day.

Having periods of inactivity while otherwise having to be available is not the rebuttal that you think it is.

I am providing the level of evidence and care that OP deserves. No one is going to change anyone's mind on this topic anyway, we all settled into camps nigh-on six years ago.

Personally, performing for social media while at work (as distinct from consuming while on a break or waiting for a run to complete or whatever) is unprofessional regardless of immediate busyness, and that particular trend was just one of the many social psychoses going around as a side effect, but to each their own.

If the triage admissions were packed to the gunwales I don't think they'd get bored

How often do you think new admissions should come in order to fill the empty beds of a hospital to capacity?

This is literal insanity. Arguably the main theme of modern Western politics is the gigantic population overhang of the Ageing population and figuring out how to balance the books in the face of it. COVID with gigantic, unwieldly response and maximal attribution as a cause of death hit barely anybody at a global scale. If it had been allowed to 'rip' it likely would have produced significantly better outcomes for most advanced economies.

If politicians were willing to argue openly that death of older or vulnerable people can be a good thing because it helps with demographic issues, and they got democratic support, then so be it – that's coherent. That wasn't at all the case though. Most arguing against lockdowns were also arguing that they didn't work and were a conspiracy done for other reasons than public health.

Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool).

Quarantines were enacted to isolate only those who were confirmed to be infected. Let's not misinterpret clear definitions.

Quarantine is from "quarantena", literally "40 days", the time period of isolation for new ships arriving in Venice. The whole point was that bubonic plague can be asymptomatic for a week after infection; if you were to immediately let people in just because they weren't confirmed to be infected, you would eventually let in people who were infected.

But this isn't what happened during the lockdowns. The entire population was subjected to them.

Right. If you'd said "quarantines were enacted to isolate only those who traveled from city to city" then that wouldn't have needed correcting.

Also, quarantines were NOT an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for a thousand years. The original quarantine was a measure against the Black Death. It failed.

Covid was built on a lie. We knew the hysteria was overblown not in mid 2020, but in March, before the first lockdowns in the western world, with the Diamond Princess. We knew it posed no danger to young, healthy people. We knew it was less contagious than commonly claimed. And the establishment just went and lied, lied, lied to push an agenda.

We knew the hysteria was overblown not in mid 2020, but in March, before the first lockdowns in the western world, with the Diamond Princess.

We had evidence from the Diamond Princess pointing to SARS-CoV-2 being less dangerous.

We also had evidence from Wuhan pointing to SARS-CoV-2 being more dangerous.

At the time, how do you determine which of these is the anomalous result?

The red Chinese were lying, this is something they’re known to do and the cruise ship data is known, reliable, and confirmed.

At that time, the Red-In-Name-Only¹ Peking Clique seemed to be lying in the opposite direction, concealing the true extent of the disaster to maintain the image of infallibility to which they felt entitled.

¹Does anyone have any examples of something that's red on the outside and brown on the inside?

Does anyone have any examples of something that's red on the outside and brown on the inside?

An m&m?

Wow. Are you incapable of just admitting you were wrong and apologize?

It is honestly incredible how wrong so many you were and how much damage it caused. And instead of any of you ever admitting you were wrong, you just make up nonsense as to why, if you think about it, you weren't really wrong and also even if you were it's totally understandable and also it was probably inevitable anyway and it's not as bad as burning down entire towns with all the people in it in 1348 so stop being a baby.

Not a single thing in this comment is accurate. No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID and if you seriously believe that do you think without the totalitarian response it would have been worse? The diagnosis and testing and classification were knowingly bad and they did it because it gave them horrendously exaggerated numbers which they wanted. And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN. World governments had plans for this exact event which they tossed out the window to launch on worldwide experiments and they all cowardly crowded along since being wrong when everyone is wrong is the least dangerous path. Lockdowns and quarantines are not the same thing. Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better. We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about. The covid injections cause more harm than it abates. The lockdowns didn't stop after 2 weeks to flatten the curve, they continued long after even the propaganda couldn't convincingly lie about it.

Never take complaints or arguments from covid zealots about human rights or laws seriously because they've already demonstrated the very low bar at which they will toss all that out the window. And they will do it again.

Never take complaints or arguments from covid zealots about human rights or laws seriously

It was certainly something to watch the party of "my body my choice" become "you must take a 'vaccine' via OSHA mandate or else we'll unperson you."

This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.

I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.

Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.

Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.

However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.

I find these 'I'm one of the reasonable ones' posts so tiresome because the status quo will lump you in with other dissidents to discredit you no matter how many times you post comments like these. It doesn't matter how much you ridicule and insult the people further down the "conspiracy nut" totem pole than you. Your only defense is just being correct and telling the truth.

Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease

I think part of this is my shorthand is leading to confusion.

admissions being down

Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were lower in February 2020 through at least April 2020 than previous years. This is findable data which I looked up years ago. You can think it's ridiculous all you like, but you are wrong and that is a true statement.

the dancing nurse/doctor phenomenon makes more sense (and you can just look into the periphery of the videos) when you realize part of the reason is the hospitals were not full, the pop-up tent hospitals were empty, and the hospital ships were empty

or ventilators killing more people

my claim is ventilators were overused and this overuse caused people to die

ventilators are dangerous and should only be used when the downsides of their lack of use are dire

in the early days of the covid hysteria, they were regularly being used on people when they shouldn't have been for various reasons but the result was people who would have lived otherwise fell into the ventilator spiral where they declined and then died

and this is why the protocol for their use w/re COVID19 treatment was significantly changed in the summer of 2020 which substantially reduced their use

vaccines being worse than the disease

have you ever heard of the 1976 flu vaccine which was pulled from use?

well shucks, this cannot be because it has the word "vaccine" in the name!

I get it dude, but these slimy 'I'm one of the reasonable ones!' posts gain you nothing and just make holding dissident beliefs harder and more costly as it reinforces exactly what you're complaining about.

After all: you're the conspiracy nutjob who thinks there was some crazzzzzzzzzzzzed conspiracy at local, state, and federal government and their corresponding institutions and people lied repeatedly about facts and stats on the ground and the known effects of lockdowns! I'm one of the reasonable ones, I don't believe lockdowns are the greatest crimes against humanity outside of war. Please don't lump me in with people like you.

Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were lower in February 2020 through at least April 2020 than previous years

Presumably because the lockdown stopped idiots like me from breaking bones playing sports and riding bikes (I've done both) and that decrease in hospital visits was larger than the increase due to COVID? Which was literally the point of lockdowns (at first, before we all went insane).

Had hospitals had to deal with both the regular base-line level of hospital admissions + COVID patients they would likely have gotten absolutely fucked and quality of care would plummet for all.

It also stopped people having heart attacks from going to the hospital, stopped people with cancer from having appointments, et cetera and so forth.

I really hope people with heart attacks, cancer appointments, etc still went

Them not going is a massive failure on our society

I'm not even pro-lockdown, I was very against them by mid 2020 when it was clear no one had a plan or coherent strategy.

I just dislike bad reasoning

I really hope people with heart attacks, cancer appointments, etc still went

A bunch of diagnostic services were cancelled which didn't necessarily reduce the amount of Triage attendees but impacted the discovery of major issues.

I really hope people with heart attacks, cancer appointments, etc still went

Probably varied heavily by region and severity, and we'll never really know the stats.

At one point early on I had some sort of gallbladder attack, with symptoms fairly similar to appendicitis. I bet on it not being that, and it turned out okay. But maybe somebody else ignored the same symptoms for the same reason and it didn't. So goes life.

I just dislike bad reasoning

As we should!

To be honest, I just don't believe you.

But more importantly, your thinking seems extremely blinkered, like you can't see the wood for the trees.

Covid was a very infectious disease, hence why even very strict lockdowns were mostly useless. Across the world a very large number of people died and probably a significant majority of the population was exposed to it.

How many people do you think died because of improper medical care from ventilators (keeping in mind the counterfactual where they might die anyway without any intervention)? What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures. It's a fraction of a fraction.

What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures

How are you defining side effect? Unless you're defining it narrowly, "side effect rate" is going to be like 90+% of people that take a vaccine- the vast majority of people have some degree of soreness and lethargy after a vaccine, and COVID vaccines seem worse for this than most.

I'm also left to wonder how many side effects were not identified as caused by the vaccines because the message was broadcast loud and clear to every doctor that if you question the vaccines you risk becoming a pariah and a crank.

My wife got a condition that could have also been blamed on the vaccines, but since there was another plausible explanation for it, doctors clung to that other one. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I'm saying I'm not confident that they gave the possibility that the vaccines were the cause a serious, scientific look. Multiply events like this all over and who knows what the death rate/side effect rate even is? That's what happens when achieving political objectives is more important to politicians and the high level medical establishment than achieving the correct medical outcomes.

Thoroughly seconded.

Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits.

This is pretty close to COVID being fake. The costs were deliberately overblown (faked) in order to justify the intervention. It's manufacturing consent, and it's clear if you have eyes to see.

However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on.

This is also deliberate as part of the same manufacturing of consent. This is how the demos is led around. This is how you condition people to hate, by providing approved targets and encouraging marginalization.

no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.

I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.

I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.

Lockdowns came in, and persisted, because ultimately the public in most countries were in favour of them.

If you want to stop them next time, then you need to get the average person on side - and for the average person, being associated with "5G causes cancer" is enough for an instant dismissal. Even today, you won't find that many people who really understand how incredibly damaging lockdowns were. You can't win a political argument just by being right

You have it backwards. People were in favor of lockdowns, because they came in and persisted.

Also on the opposing side - there's a lot more people thinking 5G causes cancer then there was before thr pandemic, because the establishment couldn't admit they were wrong. Look at any elite get-together, they've been crying about "regaining ze trust" for years now.

You're not stopping the crazies, you're literally paving the way for publically funded crystal healing.

You have it backwards. People were in favor of lockdowns, because they came in and persisted.

Maybe. Status quo is a powerful thing. But at the same time, now that lockdowns have been used, it's always going to be a tool people think about whenever there is some crisis. In the UK, for example, there has been a small outbreak of meningitis cases at a University. It's not remotely hard to find people calling for lockdowns. And polling exposed a huge chunk of the population who love being petty tyrants, even today you'll find something like 25% support for closing nightclubs forever.

Believing wrong things about 5G is less nuts than wanting to imprison the entire planet over a spicy cold. Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced. They're wrong but they're better than the other, more dangerously wrong group that actually got to call the shots.

Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced

I don't have any issue with being lumped in with other people, it's a very common method of trying to discredit an argument.

But like I said to KMC above, if you actually want to win the argument and prevent lockdowns next time, you need to stop very easy wins for the other side like being tied to extremely dumb conspiracy theories.

But like I said to KMC above, if you actually want to win the argument and prevent lockdowns next time, you need to stop very easy wins for the other side like being tied to extremely dumb conspiracy theories.

That's not your choice. It's the enemy's. (Or, equivalently, the media's)

Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better.

This really stuck with me. As clear as day that the "cure" was worse than the disease. Same with Remdisivir, I think, that also caused a lot of deaths.

We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about.

I'd love to speculate, so I'll start. It was because if there were treatments, the vaccine couldn't be pushed through in an emergency fashion. The vaccine needed to be pushed through, the emergency measures were the only way to do it, and therefore no alternative treatment could ever be allowed.

If you had to guess what happened to the few whistleblowers in late March who claimed the ventilator protocol was killing people, do you think it was 1) they were hailed as heroes for risking their careers and employment to save the lives of their patients or 2) they were fired, informally blacklisted by their state medical board and couldn't get employment elsewhere, and had their licenses threatened?

The protocol was changed shortly afterwards, but that started what would become a pattern: any licensed professional who came out against policies which were killing people would have their lives destroyed by public health institutions, the media, and state licensing boards. Any deviation from the approved message would be severely punished.

It was because if there were treatments, the vaccine couldn't be pushed through in an emergency fashion.

I'm honestly unsure. The powers that be appeared to have a strong interest in doing whatever to continue the emergency. Laws, constitutions, human rights, didn't matter much for multiple years there and courts simply refused to issue holdings restricting executive power w/re public health insanity. I seriously doubt an admission of an effective treatment would have stopped emergency approval/usage of stuff like remdeathivir or the injections many months later.

No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID

Probably true. It was less.

And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN.

Why do you think early admissions were down? Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?

We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about.

The effectiveness of drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine could not be repeated in larger, more rigorous trials. I don't think Ivermectin particularly should've been demonized the way that it was, but it just wasn't what it needed to be.

The covid injections cause more harm than it abates.

I don't think they do. If you have data to the contrary then I will try to look at it.

Either way, I'm sure 90% of those 36 million would have died within like 3 years anyway due to pre-existing illnesses.

Why do you think early admissions were down? Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?

That stat may or may not be true, I'd have to look at the data.

Keep in mind that the system can be overwhelmed with admissions dramatically down - entire surgical floors that should be filled with boring wound care and uncomplicated recovery being replaced with 1/4 of that but actually real sick respiratory patients is already enough to fuck everything up.

An increase in ICU level care but no ICU beds? Disaster.

Kill the variety and easy cases and things get fucked real fast.

All kinds of tensions like that caused problems.

because hospitals keep track of this data, local governments collect it, and publish it and you can just go look at the data

one of the reasons all those nurse/doctor dance videos caught on is because hospitals across the country didn't have many people in them and they had nothing else to do

have you looked?

Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?

you either undermine the need for lockdowns because hospitals are not overrun or you undermine the need for lockdowns by claiming people were staying home anyway

The effectiveness of drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine could not be repeated in larger, more rigorous trials.

wrong

had that one handy

If you have data to the contrary then I will try to look at it.

not easily at hand, have you looked?

generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up

because hospitals keep track of this data, local governments collect it, and publish it and you can just go look at the data

one of the reasons all those nurse/doctor dance videos caught on is because hospitals across the country didn't have many people in them and they had nothing else to do

have you looked?

you either undermine the need for lockdowns because hospitals are not overrun or you undermine the need for lockdowns by claiming people were staying home anyway

I'm not denying the claim that hospitals had an initial decrease in admissions. I'm granting it. I grant the claim. I'm asking why you think that is. Is it because everyone all of the sudden starting feeling fantastic when covid hit the states, or do you think people (even sick ones) actually quarantined themselves and stayed at home because they were scared of the virus's impact and the potential of being further exposed after seeing the news out of Europe? Do you think that is possible?

wrong

had that one handy

Yes, I had that one handy too. It used to be called ivmmeta. I used it to make the same argument you're making right now. There is no doubt these studies portray a marked improvement when ivermectin is used, but when you scratch past the surface and look at the critiques, the benefit from ivermectin in these studies isn't so clear. Many of these studies had issues with their methodology. There appears some benefit in symptom relief, but in terms of mortality, its observed benefits in symptom management did not significantly influence critical clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients. These outcomes, in comparison to monoclonal antibodies are not significant.

I used it to make the same argument you're making right now.

I have a hard time believing you scratched the surface and dove into the criticism which you found convincing on ivmmeta, e.g., inclusion/exclusion criteria criticism, but you're going to attempt to use that uncorrected meta analysis which includes a study which was retracted half a year before this was posted because its data is obviously fabricated (Elshafie et al.). The removal of this one study changes mortality RR from .91 to approx .73 after correction alone which is statistically significant lower mortality. Whoops.

Or the inclusion of studies with near death patients who are given a single low dosage of ivermectin. There are multiple significant errors just on first glance and each of these errors just so happen to affect the outcome in one direction. It must be complete coincidence.

I'm just way past the point of spending significant time wading through this crap and I'm done pretending these people are anything but dishonest.

The removal of this one study changes mortality RR from .91 to approx .73 after correction alone which is statistically significant lower mortality. Whoops.

What was ivermectin's efficacy compared to monoclonal antibodies even after the Elshafie oopsy in that study?

I'm just way past the point of spending significant time wading through this crap and I'm done pretending these people are anything but dishonest.

I empathize with this to some extent. My issue here is your suggestive claim about hospitals being empty, and your claim that the Covid vaccines themselves do more harm than good. If you don't want to take the vaccine, don't take it. If you don't want to use treatments other than Ivermectin, then don't use them. People should have had this option and they (and Ivermectin) shouldn't have been demonized the way that they were.

The kinds of people who would make that data have long since burned whatever credibility they have left.

That's the biggest part of the problem. Nobody has been hanged over this shit. Hell, nobody has even been shamed, tried, jailed, or punished. Fauci got a blanket pardon on the way out the door!

So while I'm sure your request seems reasonable to you, I hope you understand how I see you, and how you're seen more broadly. It's not reasonable, and it's not worth engaging with because it will ultimately boil down to appeals to authority.

Yes, they destroyed their credibility, but what data do you or others have to counter their data when it comes to vaccines? I'm not coming here to deny that a blanket vaccine mandate, and lockdowns, and the messaging from the public health apparatus were bad, but arguments about the vaccine causing "more harm than it abates" is absurd to me unless you have something to suggest otherwise.

So while I'm sure your request seems reasonable to you, I hope you understand how I see you, and how you're seen more broadly. It's not reasonable, and it's not worth engaging with because it will ultimately boil down to appeals to authority.

Yes, it seems I am only checking most of the boxes in your purity test, and not all of them. A grave sin.

but what data do you or others have to counter their data when it comes to vaccines?

Why would I address data from people with no credibility? I don't have to take their data at face value, since they're fucking liars with no credibility, that's the point. The null hypothesis is fuck off, I don't want any. The experiment is trusting these charlatans ever again.

You don't have to address the data from people who have no credibility. Provide data that refutes the noncredible people.

The Ethical Skeptic has the best charts, if you're into that sort of thing.

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And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN.

This is so absurd in the face of all the news I remember from the early days of the pandemic. Where did you see this information?

The covid injections cause more harm than it abates

Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good? This also goes against all information that I have seen.

I’m no Covid zealot. I have little emotion about the pandemic other than relief that it’s over, and concern that the next one will be far worse, that governments will be too cowardly to enact the measures necessary to deal with it due to the increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists.

A lot of the "covid vaccines might be bad, actually" data comes from the military. Infertility claims doubled in the year after vaccination. Women with completely steady cycles (in my entire life I'd never had a late period. as a teen it was every four weeks during chemistry on thursday, that predictable) had their cycles thrown off for months. Young men (again, the military data) had a ridiculous amount of heart complications. The MRNA processes hadn't been tested enough, and MRNA trials since covid have been pulled for having too many side effects. Never taking another MRNA shot again personally.

Hospitals were overwhelmed.... in villages in Italy where the average age was over 80. Some of those images were later recycled and falsely claimed to be hospitals in the US.

Bergamo, where most of the viral images of overwhelmed hospitals came from, is a municipality of 120,000 people with a metro area population of c. 500,000, unless you consider the whole Bergamo area a suburb of Milan. The population within city limits is 25.4% over 65, which is only marginally more geriatric than Italy as a whole.

I don't know why Bergamo was such a mess, although I suspect the answer is "they were the first city other than Wuhan to be hit badly and had no clue what they were doing".

Have you ever looked?

Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good?

Yes. The evidence of it being merely a wash is strongest in those with poor immune responses like the very elderly, but even there it doesn't have a significant positive effect on infection let alone mortality. Anyone under the age of approx. 75, it causes harm on net. It's honestly criminal it was ever approved generally for minors let alone babies where there is just no good argument at all w/re to health.

increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists

Hopefully that social capital has been burned for at least a generation.

generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up

Perhaps you lot should have thought about that before deciding to shut the world down over a virus that was dangerous enough to cancel normal life but not dangerous enough to release a vaccine before it was politically opportune.

Presumably, all the tiktoks and instagram reels nurses were making of hospitals completely empty of anything other than medical staff, occasionally interrupted by liking and reposting that stupid "comic book hereos bowing in respect to the real heroes" one-panel. And the completely unused medical aid ship in New York. If you saw bona fide crowded hospitals, then I can only assume you were watching stock footage, and not actual, real-time footage of hosptial admissions.

Dateline 1348: The vast majority of the Holy Roman Empire towns established flagellant parades, because something had to be done.

Far less damaging, and probably more effective, than lockdowns.

The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines

As a matter of fact, we had vaccine candidates on March 9 (2020), and had confirmed immune response in mice and started testing them in humans by April 23.

As a matter of law, it was simply illegal to give or sell the vaccines that we did have to non-test-subjects before efficacy testing finished, and on top of that it was illegal to recruit test subjects with a plan of "expose healthy volunteers to Covid deliberately and immediately under medical supervision" rather than "wait for six or seven months for a decent sample size to be exposed to Covid incidentally and unexpectedly out in the wild", so efficacy testing wasn't finished and mass manufacturing couldn't even be begun until cumulative world excess mortality was well over a million and rapidly growing.

As a matter of deduction, totalitarianism did not outperform freedom here. It killed millions, and got away with it only because it had already managed to strangle the globe so thoroughly (even in the United States!) that freedom was never tried.

What was stopping a pharma company from declaring their vaccine open to the public, as long as you signed up for their trial*?

*requires a deposit equal to the retail price of the vaccine

The FDA, obviously...?

Right, why couldn’t they just have expanded their trial?

The obvious reason is that the government would come down on them like a ton of bricks, even if they found a way to violate the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter.

But the legal reason is ... harder to find? There's a lot of letters of the law, so I'd think "you can't weasel out of testing requirements by declaring that your 'test' subjects might include half the country" has to be covered by one of them somewhere, but a quick skim didn't show me where.

Ah, wait, AI to the rescue; I was looking at the wrong parts.

21 USC 355 says "No person shall introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce any new drug, unless an approval of an application filed pursuant to subsection (b) or (j) is effective with respect to such drug."

Then 21 CFR 312 talks about the "Investigational New Drug Application (IND)" exemption to that, but part one of the exemption process is basically begging the FDA to approve your proposed trial protocols so you can run the trials you need to get the final approval. If your trial protocol is "give it to anyone who pays" or even just "give it to anyone who wants it", good luck getting that "trial" approved, and "A sponsor shall not begin a clinical investigation subject to § 312.2(a) until the investigation is subject to an IND".

Regarding challenge trials, 1Day Sooner came into being as a result of our clear failure here. COVID was a ridiculously good candidate for challenge trials: a disease that spreads quickly, so every day matters, and which is dangerous to one segment of the population but relatively harmless to everyone else. Our global failure here doesn't speak well for our prospects if a genuinely dangerous plague comes along. (Imagine if the disease had a 30% fatality rate to everyone. Challenge trials would be even more important, and a lot harder to justify ethically.)

I guess the most optimistic take is that if a real threat to society comes along (i.e. a plague which doesn't mostly just replace the "cause of death" for unhealthy seniors), we might actually be spurred to take appropriate measures. It's "only" the threat of creeping totalitarianism which we utterly failed at, enthusiastically cheering on lockdowns and unpersoning anybody who said "uh, wait a minute".

20 to 36 million people died of COVID

0.44% of the world? Almost certainly not true; the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship full of old people, had less than that. We get 7.1 million from WHO. Anything more goes down to counting excess deaths, which is both unreliable and also counts excess deaths due to lockdowns.

Diamond Princess had 712 confirmed cases and 14 deaths, a 2% mortality rate, which indeed makes sense for a ship full of old people.

Diamond Princess had 3,711 on board and 14 deaths, a rate of 0.38%. The 0.44% I gave was mortality due to COVID (36 million divided by 8.1 billion), not case fatality.

Yes, it only goes to less than that after adjusting for the Diamond Princess passenger list being unusually old, then consider the counterfactual that matches global population demographics.

Still, there are places that have more official covid deaths (and even more excess mortality) than the Diamond Princess (or any other statistical analysis of age-stratified mortality) should allow. Peru, for one. Back in mid-2021 when I was meticulously keeping track of the relevant stats, Peru had:

  • Worst excess deaths per capita in the world.
  • Worst official deaths per capita in the world. 0.6% of the population are official deaths from covid even though the age-stratified IFR for Peru shouldn't really permit this unless ~100% of the population were infected.
  • One of the most extreme lockdowns in the world, which never actually brought cases down. In 2020, cases only went down after restrictions began to be lifted.

Mainstream reasons offered for this failure are ad-hoc, post-hoc, and treat things that are common to all undeveloped countries as somehow being the cause of Peru's unique poor performance. Something went horribly wrong in Peru. And the best hypothesis standing for what happened is those unusually extreme, early, and lengthy lockdowns.

Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID.

Is this meant to be an argument in favour of the lockdowns that did nothing to stop them dying?

The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done

Nuking ourselves would also have been something to do. Doesn't make it a good idea.

Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly.

Wrong.

  1. The immediate QALY loss of being locked down for more than a few weeks outweighs any possible QALY gains from reduced covid deaths.
  2. Lockdowns didn't reduce deaths anyway.

Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary.

There is absolutely no historical precedent for the totalitarianism of the Covid Lockdowns. None at all, as much as some of those responsible tried to claim as such for legitimacy. And the reason should be pretty obvious, too. A stay at home policy imposed on a subsistence agriculture society would be an omnicidal disruption to the food supply.

And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.

If this justifies lockdown, then I would prefer burning the entire internet to the ground just to remove the justification.

I’m capable of being persuaded that lockdowns were ineffective and other measures would have been better, but you should lead with figures and statistics, not anger over the tyranny of stay-at-home orders. Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.

I spent 6 years leading with figures and statistics. Perhaps those who locked us down could provide theirs first for once. After all, they're the ones who were in charge.

But if you insist...

When you crunch the numbers on age stratified covid mortality compared and remaining life expectancy by age, you find that each covid infection is equivalent to 15 life days being lost. Therefore the absolute best case scenario for lockdowns, going from 100% of the population being infected to 0%, only gives everyone an extra 0.04 QALY per capita. Add in the reality that even lockdown proponents did not suggest this sort of swing in percentage infected would occur, and it's more like 0.02 QALY per capita. This is an incredibly small budget.

For comparison if you do a lockdown that lasts 200 days (about the UK's duration of stay at home policy, but not all restrictions) and make the incredibly generous assumption that lockdowns only reduce quality of life by 5%, that is 0.03 QALY lost per capita.

Nothing about this approach to public health is novel. QALYs is standard public health fare. I am not the only one to make this sort of observation. Caplan has and gets referenced here, and so has Scott

This would have made 10 million Swedes be under stricter lockdown for the three months of so of the first wave. By our calculations above, it might have saved about 2500 lives, but let’s be really generous and extend the confidence interval to 6,000 - ie it might have prevented every single case in Sweden. Here’s what the Guesstimate model says:

10 million people x 3 months = 30 million lockdown months. Between 2500 and 6000 lives saved, by our previous estimates each life is worth about 15 QALYs (by combination of deaths, associated nonfatal cases, and associated long COVID cases), and each QALY contains 12 months, for a total of 720,000 QALMs. So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.

And again

Maybe a more honest version of me would have rewritten the post to focus more on the emotional costs (the part which I made Conclusion 2). It really is a striking result that it's hard to justify the emotional costs of lockdown even given very optimistic assumptions about the number of lives saved / Long COVID cases prevented / etc. This argument is pretty unrelated to most of what people have talked about in the news, which is mostly (completely false) claims that lockdowns cause more suicides, lockdowns devastate businesses, etc. And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar (I realize for some people the emotional damages were deeper than that, but not everyone missed a family member's funeral - I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people). Maybe a more courageous post would have looked more like "Hey, when you add this really simple thing in to the analysis, lockdowns are really obviously bad, right?" But it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about.

Those implementing lockdowns would either be aware of the QALY implications, in which case they were malicious, or not aware, in which case they were incompetent to such a degree that their refusal to immediately resign from their post was malicious.

I made a more realistic model with the final results of the UK's cumulative lockdowns here: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18492

Note this entire exercise depends on the axiom that lockdowns actually reduced covid deaths as advertised. The experience of Sweden would suggest otherwise.

It feels almost too late to bother, but I do hope to one day write this all out in a lengthy blog post that explains every step in excruciating detail. Any omission here is just because I'm not going to write that blog post today.

The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage. A very real possibility at the time, given just how fast the disease was spreading and the amount of people expressing debilitating or life threatening symptoms. Instead of everyone falling ill during the same short timespan, the course of the pandemic was spread out over a longer period, allowing time to adapt and treat serious cases as they came in. Incidentally, this also bought time to develop a vaccine, resulting in less people becoming sick than would have otherwise been expected.

I will grant you that the lockdowns did not directly save lives compared to risking infections. Covid is not the bubonic plaque that so many make it out to be. To many, it was in fact no worse than the flu. But the effect of overloaded hospitals had the potential to be immense. Tons of people would have been unable to work as important operations were postponed. Healthcare workers would have been worn out and more likely to become sick themselves.

Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals. Modern morals dictate that if there is a path to treat everyone, then we must follow it. Even if it results in lowered quality of life for others.

You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely. The numbers of infected were constantly going up, breaking news showed bodies being transported through the streets, and anyone with a connection to healthcare (whether it be as doctor or patient) could see the situation slowly spiraling out of control. The public demanded action. History tells us that the main way to stop infection is to isolate the sick. So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"

Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments. And as I outlined above, there were legitimate arguments here. In retrospect, they may not have been sufficient, and we can hope that we will make better decisions in the future. I personally hope for hospitals that have the resources to handle sudden influxes in patients without resorting to triage. But in the end, our leaders were under pressure to act rapidly, and this was the best answer they could come up with at the time.

you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals

Completely false- modern society was quite happy to turn away people from organ transplants and other necessary surgeries if they didn't have the vaccine.

There was a whole Reddit community dedicated to mocking people that died of COVID. Pathetic cretin Jimmy Kimmel mocked them on national TV.

Modern society will absolutely turn people away, as long as they get to feel ideologically justified when they do so.

But in the end, our leaders were under pressure to act rapidly, and this was the best answer they could come up with at the time.

This is the most polite damning with faint praise I think I've ever heard.

Their best was completely and utterly retarded.

Modern society will absolutely turn people away, as long as they get to feel ideologically justified when they do so.

Who was turned away from treatment based on facts that weren't related to their refusal to accept medical procedures?

"If you want to get treated, do what the doctors say" was true long before covid in pretty much any place that had hospitals, to my knowledge.

How many people are still given medical aid despite refusing medical suggestions like losing weight or stopping smoking or ceasing their intake of their drug of choice?

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The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage.

The UK did lockdowns. Did not overload hospitals. But achieved the same negative outcomes we would have gotten from overloaded hospitals, as they just stopped treating patients instead.

Given the lack of empirical evidence that lockdowns slowed the spread in the UK compared to countries that did not lock down, why even propose this as the "point" of lockdowns? What mechanism is there for lockdowns to achieve this when they don't slow covid? Less traffic accidents to deal with?

Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals.

This is not true.

Firstly because no hospital invests infinite resources in a given patient.

Secondly because NICE specifically prevents certain treatments from being offered in the UK on the basis that they are not cost-effective.

You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely.

Well the end result was most of the politicians responsible got booted out by the public as a result of the catastrophic economic and social effects of their lockdowns, even if most voters failed to recognize that lockdowns were the cause.

So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"

Who gave them the impression that lockdowns would slow it down?

Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments.

Sweden had no such difficulty in not locking down. They simply chose not to lock down, and wow, lockdowns didn't happen. What a surprise.

What you post was the pravda. The claims that the Very Smart People made to support lockdowns.

They were patent nonsense, and they were always patent nonsense. The hammer and anvil didn't work and could not have, if they disease had followed the models the epidemiologists were using. In fact, it did not, and the epidemiologists continued to use those models (with more and more bizarre parameters, as shown by the Canadian COVID people constantly showing hockey sticks which never materialized). The lockdowns were not a good faith mistake. They were something some people wanted and were willing to manufacture theories and evidence to support, and to stick to long after it was clear none of that was true.

Who are the people that you believe supported the lockdowns, knowing that they were lying about the effects they would have? I have a hard time identifying any group that benefited from this, other than the hospitals which were under less pressure than would have otherwise been the case;

Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.

Your current attitude is holier-than-thou smugness. Not exactly any better. The anti-science vaccine denying populists were right, and their prescriptions were better than listing to 'science.'

Even the appeal to 'science' disgusts me. There is no such this as science! There are people making arguments, and there are people countering there arguments, and there are people shouting down their arguments.

Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.

and in the same vein, repeating debunked propaganda you remember from the covid hysteria will convince no one and just get pattern-matched with other covid zealots who aren't interested in being convinced anyway

But did you see where he said he was like, in a field, around nobody, and that was still not good enough?

COVID lockdowns were a beautiful example of the most important thing in modern democracy, compromise. The lockdowns in many western nations were strong enough to be annoying at best and oppressive at their worst, while also not being nearly good enough to actually contain virus spread much. In fact due to political pressure, governments would run completely hypocritical programs at the same time like the eat out to help out campaign. Government lockdowns hurt restaurants, so the government subsidized not locking down and instead going into restaurants. Genius!

Full lockdowns are obviously successful in controlling spread. Virus particles aren't magic, they don't teleport from person to person. If people avoid interaction and have physical barriers and disinfectant, it will work. Even masks seem to work quite well ... except for the pesky issue that people aren't perfect. They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.

Full authoritarian enforcement could in theory work, but instead we went with half measures that are the worst of both worlds. We lost time with our families and our friends and our loved ones, while also still spreading the virus around cause there was too many holes in the lockdowns.

Another example of bad results from compromise I always like to use here is bike lanes. There's all sorts of ways to do them and some are way better than others. The common "compromise" solution is the shoulder, bike lane or buffered bike lane methods in that image. But those suck for bikers, they're terrifying to use. The whole time you're scared of a car side swipping you because there's giant machines going 40 mph zooming past your frail human body. I would never use those. Meanwhile when I vacationed in Hilton Head, I rented a bike and was happy to use it to get around to the store and beach near my rental house. At least where I was staying they were seperated from the road and felt safe but those are more expensive and take up a lot more room to do so you either have to be a vacation area like Hilton Head (and even then, the main parts of the city still seemed mostly car centric) or have a strong biker culture. Otherwise you get the shitty compromise solutions at best where drivers lose space and would be bikers still don't feel safe to bike.

Rent control is another example I love to use. City politicians are stuck between the stereotypical NIMBY homeowners who want their property value to go up (but also no property tax increases!!) and no more development, while renters don't want their rent to surge up every year and want stable places to live. The renter class is also typically blind to why rents are going up so while there's political pressure to "do something", it's not necessarily pressure to upzone and allow development. Still at the end of the day it's is impossible to make both happy, but they're still both gonna be voting. So what do many politicians opt for instead? Rent control. You make the current tenants happy while not having to upset the homeowner NIMBYs, and the long term political and economic costs are abstract enough that only the weird policy wanks and nerds will oppose you.

Compromise is often pretty great though and I don't think we should be down on it just because there are flaws. Allowing people to have some wins with peace makes them unlikely to turn violent, and it forcibly moderates the idealogues and extremists to match closer to the center. I prefer our compromise society to any dictatorship. We really do get the best of both worlds in most cases. But sometimes, like with COVID or bike lanes or housing supply, half measures are actually worse than either.

They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.

As a COVID Never Forget, Never Forgive type, I feel an obligation to eat crow when this subtopic comes up. I think it was Scott Alexander that said something about the Noble Mask Lie being mostly wrong but yes people would wear them incorrectly; I agreed that yeah N95s are tricky to get exactly right but surely people will were surgical masks fine, and that's better than nothing.

Boy howdy was I wrong. Watching people wear their mask below their nose squashed what little hope I had for a lot of people. Absolute theatre.

I agree with this. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but travel back to the pandemic itself where government officials had insane levels of pressure coming from every direction. In a pandemic under a democracy, how do you keep:

  • your economy running
  • your health infrastructure from collapsing
  • people from panicking
  • approval ratings from falling
  • your politcal party happy
  • the infected from entering your country without pissing anyone off
  • the infected from leaving your country without pissing anyone off

Add to this the crazy amount of data coming from every which way (including social media stoking the fire) and the constant comparisons to neighbouring nations who were either doing it right or wrong and it's no wonder that such a shit show of half-measures ensued.

Especially important to note that most shutdowns and closures were state/local government decisions to begin with, it wasn't the president deciding things, it was your state legislatures and your local mayor/city council. Heck Biden was even trying to get schools to reopen right after inauguration but it didn't really matter much because school lockdowns are and were mostly a local government decision. Not to mention the staffing shortages, sometimes even schools that had previously reopened had to go back to remote because they just didn't have the people. Some states were even mobilizing their national guard because of staffing issues.

Polling from the early time period also suggest that the lockdowns were widely popular too. Even four years later, public support for closures and mandatory masking in public during the pandemic were popular among the majority of Americans looking back.

So not only do you not have control over the lockdowns from a federal perspective, but you're also dealing with most Americans wanting them at the time to begin with!

The whole time you're scared of a car side swipping you because there's giant machines going 40 mph zooming past your frail human body.

It's unlikely for a driver to do that unless they are malicious, drunk, or distracted. The actual danger is at intersections, which separated bike lanes do nothing to protect.

It's unlikely for a driver to do that unless they are malicious, drunk, or distracted

Drunk or distracted alone is terrifyingly common, but even if the statistics aren't that bad the psychological effect of being right next to cars zooming by you still exists and it's why I would never go out riding like that.

I don't think any authoritarian societies really did better with lockdowns except maybe in projecting the fantasy that they were followed.

I guess what I'm starting to think is, lockdowns don't really work in theory because the amount of social distancing you need to contain a virus is greater than people can actually really sustain. You can maybe sustain some amount over a small period of time. But anything that approaches solitary confinement, which is essentially what is needed for the theory to work, is impossible. It seems to hit up against some kind of soft biological limit because we need to spend time with other people. And in practice people created enough exceptions within the ideal of a lockdown that the virus could never be stopped.

I think with an authoritarian country like e.g. China they could pretend to have more rigorous lockdowns. And their draconian government could even keep the charade going at great cost long after it stopped working. But I'm not sure they actually got any better results.

China actually did succeed pretty well for quite a while, and we can know this by looking at the surge that happened after they ended lockdowns.

I was going to post this. I was in China for basically all of Covid. and they were able to stop the spread, it probably wasn't worth it but they could do it. But they would literally send a city of millions into lockdown over single digit case numbers. The two weeks after they lifted were like a ghost town as everyone got sick with Covid. My local bank had to shutdown because too many employees were sick.

COVID lockdowns were a beautiful example of the most important thing in modern democracy, compromise. The lockdowns in many western nations were strong enough to be annoying at best and oppressive at their worst, while also not being nearly good enough to actually contain virus spread much.

Britain ceased to be a democracy for much of 2020 and 2021 due to a combination of cancelled elections and the executive usurping power in a self-coup via the Coronavirus Act 2020. Britain also saw some of the most strict, severe lockdowns in the world. Stricter than Korea, Japan, and at a national level (though some cities there were worse), China. The list of countries that were stricter than Britain is a mix of other western countries, alongside a few eclectic examples like Peru.

Full lockdowns are obviously successful in controlling spread. Virus particles aren't magic, they don't teleport from person to person. If people avoid interaction and have physical barriers and disinfectant, it will work. Even masks seem to work quite well ... except for the pesky issue that people aren't perfect. They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.

Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread, starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.

It is funny that you bring up Peru. I have (thorough a strange set of coincidences) spent the first big lockdown wave in Peru for many months and nothing I have experienced later on in Europe (definitely not trivial) even came close to the intensity of the Peruvian lockdown. How do you know about this if I may ask?

Peru drew my attention by topping the league tables for lockdown deaths per capita for much of 2020 and 2021 And by a huge margin, too. A fact that so-called expects were curiously incurious about considering how severe Peru's lockdown was. So I looked into it a little. Nothing in great detail, only what's available via a cursory look at what restrictions were in place, for how long, and what the results were.

You should see some of the strange excuses for Peru's bad performance that came up in the rare case it even was mentioned. Basically saying Peru did bad because it's a developing country... While neglecting that every developing country did less bad, and that the top 10 at the time was all developed countries with the sole exception of Peru way out front.

Interesting. Peru in my experience is a much poorer country than its economic numbers suggest due to the nature of its mining wealth and extreme plutocratic capture. You do feel the difference clearly just being there vs being in other countries with supposedly similar gdp/ppp per capita.

I do remember that the lockdown started about the same days as in most of Europe and it was really harsh in theory. No travel between cities/provinces or abroad. Every store not selling food closed. Constant police harassment on the street. Double masking mandatory basically everywhere etc. But I was watching Peruvian TV at the time and I also remember convoys of thousands of desperate people walking 100s kms to go back to their home villages as they were destitute in the cities without work. And every other store reopened in a week and started selling some sort of foodstuff to be allowed to operate. Many locals were secretly still doing their professions. The amount of misery around was really palpable and sad. I believe a lot of lower middle class people survived because the government allowed dipping into your mandatory pension contributions, which of course will have consequences later on..

Also at the time I assumed the corona death numbers there had some relation to the general dirtiness/dustiness/dryness and high altitude of almost the entire country. Your lungs take a real beating just being outside for while, I cannot imagine living in a Peruvian city my entire life. My nose starts bleeding regularly everytime I spend some time on the street.

Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread,

The evidence of a full lockdowns is extremely obvious, virus particles are not magic and there must be some level of barrier that if consistently maintained would prevent their spread.

The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.

starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.

Which is the entire point being made in my comment, there are some things where half measures don't work. Non full lockdowns are a bucket with a hole at the bottom of it, maybe if you have enough bucket bottom you can slow the leak but all the water will get out eventually. So if you want to carry a bunch of water with you (prevent the spread in this analogy), you need the full bucket (full secure uber authoritarian lockdown).

Yes, if we sealed everyone in their own pharoah's tomb the virus would die out pretty quickly. Not least because everybody would die, mostly from other things. We kinda need other people to live. The question is 'can we stop viral spread at a level that's realistic to maintain', to which the answer is 'no'.

We kinda need other people to live.

Randall Munroe (xkcd) touched on this in 2014, in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, responding to Sarah Ewart's question "If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn’t the common cold be wiped out?".

The conclusion was that it would cause trillions of dollars in economic damage, and wouldn't be effective due to people with compromised immune systems acting as reservoirs.

The evidence of a full lockdowns is extremely obvious, virus particles are not magic and there must be some level of barrier that if consistently maintained would prevent their spread.

That's a hypothesis, not evidence...

The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.

And that's why. If you can't test something how can you possibly claim to have evidence of what it would do?

I think it is a fair baseline that COVID must follow the laws of physics and therefore spreads through some kind of physical means. And thus if that physical means wasn't possible (either through blocking it enough, distance, or other factors), it would not be able to spread.

That a full lockdown is impractical, comes with severe downsides, and isn't worth the costs doesn't change that.

There are plenty of ways a disease can spread without human contact without breaking physics.

  1. The pathogen could already be everywhere and humans only develop disease when some condition causes them to become susceptible.
  2. The pathogen could be in the environment outside of humans so human contact isn't required.
  3. The pathogen could have an incubation period long enough that even those in isolation can appear to catch it.

I am not suggesting that any of these specifically apply to covid. Only that you shouldn't assume diseases follow such a trivial model as you outlined. And the empirical failure of modelling which assumes as you do to predict what happens should be a clue that maybe there's a missing piece of the puzzle here.

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