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There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.
If you are making a causal claim, at the very least you need to 1) demonstrate that the phenomenon that you are purporting to explain is actually happening; and 2) there is a plausible mechanism whereby the factor you propose caused said phenomenon would have a causal effect. But you don't seem to do a great job at either.
First, you say that "novel bad things are happening," but of the three you mention, one of them (tech layoffs) is hardly novel, and re another (increased serious illness) you present no actual evidence that it is actually occurring.
Re the causal mechanisms, it is not obvious how lockdowns that ended a year ago would cause tech layoffs now, nor why other areas of the economy would be experiencing labor shortages, rather than imposing layoffs. Re serious illness, again, it is not at all obvious why lockdowns would cause increased serious illness.
Even re inflation, you don't even make the effort to show that areas which did not impose lockdowns, or imposed only brief or minor ones, are experiencing low inflation. For example, Sweden isn't
I think you'd have to be living under a rock to not be have been hit in the face constantly with evidence of either of these things over the past month. Google it if you haven't.
f3zinker does a great job of explaining it in his reply.
That seems like the most obvious thing of all. People were sheltered from all illnesses for years. I know I couldn't talk with any pro-lockdown people without them telling me how great it was that they never get sick anymore over the past few years. Now that society's basically fully opened again, their immune systems are getting walloped by common sicknesses.
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