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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Biden: Pandemic is over

Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.

It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.

I'm something of a "reverse doomer", in the sense that I was pleasantly surprised when my country dropped the vaccine passport and all masking requirements. For much of 2020-2021 I thought the West was speeding at a breakneck pace down a slippery slope into a China-style social credit system, and was relieved to see my country pull back from the brink.

I still argue with pro-lockdowners a lot about the efficacy of lockdowns as a virus suppression method (arguments which tend to get very heated very quickly). At some point in the argument they usually come out with some variation on the following: "What are you still mad about? You got what you wanted, the lockdown's over."

No I did not get what I wanted. The lockdown may be over, but the general consensus in my social circle (and, from what I can tell, among thought-leaders and policymakers) is that lockdowns were a necessary evil without which Covid deaths would have been at least an order of magnitude higher. It will not surprise you to learn that I disagree with this belief absolutely. People have learned the wrong lesson from lockdowns, and they've stubbornly ignored the growing mountain of evidence coming from e.g. Sweden, Florida etc. indicating that it was always entirely possible to manage the pandemic without shutting down the country and destroying one's economy in the process.

Yes, the Covid lockdowns in my country are over and are exceptionally unlikely to be reinstated for this pathogen or any variant thereof.

What I'm worried about is in five years' time when the next pathogen arrives, and everyone thinks "well, lockdowns worked last time, guess we've got to do them again."

I work in the events industry. Over the course of the last four weeks we hosted two conferences.

The first was a medical conference attended primarily by medical professionals who interact with sick, elderly and otherwise Covid-vulnerable people every day.

The second was a tech conference attended primarily by software engineers.

Guess which conference had a mask mandate in place, extending to building staff in addition to conference delegates. The answer may surprise you!

Note that there are no legal masking requirements anywhere in my country: you're not expected to wear one in banks, on public transport etc., and most people don't bother. Likewise, my employer dropped its mask requirement for employees months ago. The mask mandate in the tech conference was imposed at the request of the client. It seems that virtue-signalling hypochondriacs are far more common in the tech industry than in, you know, medicine.

And I'm not really that mad at the client for requesting that delegates and staff wear masks. They can do what they like. I'm a little mad at my employer for acquiescing to this request. It's not simply a case of "the customer is always right", they aren't going to acquiesce to every request. If we were hosting an event for the Saudi embassy, and the ambassador requested that all female staff wear hijabs, I assume my employer would tell them they were out of their minds. It seems that masking requirements still lie within the Overton window, even for people who don't adopt them personally.

It might have something to do with the very observable fact that most software engineers have a much lower self-confidence than doctors. Masking has become at this point the ultimate way of avoiding giving offence to “somebody”. Most software engineer types I know would start sweating cold at the thought of getting called out by someone with more social prowess than themselves (ie almost everyone) so they go really out of their way to avoid any possibility

Biden is a bit slow. Pandemic took a lethal hit when George Floyd died, and ended when the war began; if not for war, it could as well be finished off by climate disasters in Asia or something. There can only be one Current Thing, it seems. As a sort of reverse doomer, I think the pandemic has served its purpose as a long-awaited opportunity for certain updates. We now have a strong rhetorical casus belli against «existential risks» and «irresponsible research» in general, that will fuel EA cluster and be used against independent AI. We have all the infrastructure for another round of lockdownism, if needed. We have unprecedented synchronization of policies and propaganda in developed and even many developing nations, that is further refined with sanctions on Russia and China.

But also, and less conspiratorially, pandemic is over only in the sense that we’ve learned there's not much else to do. What has transpired was more or less the best that institutions of the world could manage.

No widespread seriousness and autonomy for voluntary self-isolation for a few weeks to let it fizzle out.

No shutting off underdeveloped countries plus top-down China-style quarantines to achieve the same result artificially.

No fast vaccine rollout to win time for a more substantial response.

No stockpiles, no robustness in logistics, no nothing.

No will to take it on the chin and go on.

So we all had to deal with some fraction of tyranny, for months in some places and years in others, ravage global economy, and with over six hundred million confirmed cases and who knows how many nobody bothered to count – either get sick with high probability, or tolerate vaccine side effects, or get both the vaccine side effects and sickness. Okay. Best we could do.

It's not clear if it's meaningfully over. The economy is still reeling. Most of the important reasons behind this bizarre failure have not gone anywhere (shutting down virology won't make our logistics not shit itself when the next major disruption happens). We're just mentally exhausted with COVID as a newsworthy topic, and that too may be in part because of its lasting effects on cognition. But... to interpret that as lasting effects of infection would be rash. This stubbornly peddled narrative seems to be almost pure bullshit. Maybe the real cause, inasmuch as the effect is real, is exactly the collective long COVID we all had, 2020-2022. I'm happy to see it go, but consequences may linger.

Speaking as a reverse doomer, (I believe that Covid deaths were exaggerated from the beggining with extremely high threshold PCR tests that give many false positives along with counting people who got hit by a bus but tested positive for Covid 59 days previous as a "Covid death." {With versus from.} Not to mention the flu completely disappearing from 2020, that was weird.)

So, having established my bona fides, speaking as a reverse doomer, I see Biden's statemement as the rankest hypocrisy. The emergency use authorization is still in place. Many places still have mandates for the neovaccines. Biden hasn't broached the subject of excess deaths in highly neovaccinated countries or the concomitant rise in cancers. The new mouse "vaccine" is a case in point. If the pandemic is over, then why are we approving medicine that was only tested on a dozen mice to be used on humans?

So I feel anger. This is a limited hangout.

It's not merely rankest hypocrisy. It's also not a return to normal. Normal is when people who impose e.g. false imprisonment get dragged through the courts and then sentenced for their crimes. Certainly I can't imagine many people in 2019 responding to "what should be done to a leader who -list of restrictions-" with anything less than a few court cases.

This is naive. "Normal" is when disgraced politicians and high-ranking bureacrats golden-parachute their way out of power, like they always have. Sometimes, when a foreign invader or violent revolution dismantles a government, they may hold a few responsible. Sometimes. But in "normal" circumstances, governments do not hold themselves responsible.

If I thought it was the case that this was the only way to return to the pre-2020 consensus that imprisoning the entire population for no reason was unthinkable, then I'd support foreign invasion and/or violent revolution. However, I do not.

Speaking as a reverse doomer, (I believe that Covid deaths were exaggerated from the beggining with extremely high threshold PCR tests that give many false positives along with counting people who got hit by a bus but tested positive for Covid 59 days previous as a "Covid death."

Even without these, you still have the excess mortality curves tracking Covid waves very closely, at least in 2020 and 2021, indicating that Covid was indeed heavily contributing to those excess deaths. And the disappearance of flu wasn't weird at all, the most basic anti-Covid protocols (wash your hands, keep your distance etc.) were exactly ones tailormade to combat flu, and they had very high rates of compliance at first. Of course it was going to take flu out as a side casualty, more effectively than Covid, which turned out to be a different case.

This explanation for the disappearance of flu is extremely naive. It disappeared in plenty of places without much adherence to those “basic protocols”.

The relation between those protocols and flu transmission is something extremely fuzzy, since we pretty much know at this point that this diseases are airborne and don’t really spread by touching some handrails, but by breathing the same air with an infected person. Hence the lack of any evidence of mass transmission in massive open air stadium events, while choirs and karaoke bars kept creating mass spreader events. Hence how social distancing quietly but surely went from literally keeping your distance to avoid a particle landing in your face, to meaning de facto indoor capacity limits.

The theory that regular flu strains disappeared due to being outcompeted by covid, and staged a comeback when enough people got covid and developed immunity, conforms much better to the real world patterns. Flu was gone for a much longer period of time than people actually giving a damn about the “basic protocols”.

So we had the power to cure the flu this whole time and just didn't know it?

/s

If the pandemic is over, then why are we approving medicine that was only tested on a dozen mice to be used on humans?

The relevant graph has an n of 8 (scroll to the last slide), not 12.

That said, it may be a representative graph of a single trial rather than actually being the only trial. Still, just an absolutely bonkers thing to approve for a not-mergency.

The White House has already walked back the President’s statement. (Pause here to reflect on the zen of that.)

Do you have a citation? I see no news stories, and https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/ does not have it although I admit I do not know if it normally would.

On CNN the headline is: White House says Covid-19 policy unchanged despite Biden's comments that the 'pandemic is over'. First sentence: (CNN)The Biden administration is largely downplaying President Joe Biden's comments declaring the coronavirus pandemic "over," suggesting his remarks signal a continuation of the White House's evolving stance toward the pandemic over the past few months.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/19/politics/biden-covid-pandemic-over/index.html

As I said, Biden's remark is a part of a continuing process, and this statement also explicitly frames it that way. The direction of the process is still what's important here.

I couldn't find it either. I mean, "White House clarifies the President's statement" is an expected routine now (and not just for Biden...), but in this case, I tried several keywords on Twitter and found nothing.

I would point you to a specific CNN article, but the paste function seems to be disabled on my iPhone, /u/ZorbaTHut.

the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions

One thing that I think (or at least hope) comes from this is for the people who were more moderate to see that when the anti-lockdown people said "for how long?" and the Covid-cautious replied "as long as it takes", they really meant it. There have been a bunch of sardonic exchanges that opened with something like, "are you going to wear a mask the rest of your life?" and the answer is apparently that this is exactly the plan for people that take continue to take Covid seriously. Their retorts seem to be along the lines of "I also intend to continue wearing bike helmets and seatbelts", which is consistent with this just being something that they think should be a permanent feature of society going forward.

My hope is that this looks crazy enough to the median person that it is effectively politically impossible to mandate masks any time in the foreseeable future. Biden's statement that it's over seems consistent with that, but I tend to think politicians give whatever answer is consistent with the timing of elections rather than generally held principles.

I remain disappointed that so many people have huddled around mask wearing as such a significant political symbol. I was hoping the US would adopt a mask culture similar to what Japan has, where wearing a mask is common for people that have the sniffles but need to go out and get groceries, and its not weird to put a mask on when you are on the train with a bunch of gross randos.

Instead we are getting kindof the opposite, where its mainly hypochondriacs wearing masks in public and sick people wont wear them because they dont wanna look like a pussy. pretty lame all around.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that those same asian countries also got bogged down into a forever masking and forever state intervention loop at this point? China and Hong Kong is obviously the worst examples but most of East Asia seem to be utterly unable to move on. Have you considered that maybe the masks themselves play a big role in this as you turn an abstract threat of an invisible virus into a clothing ritual everyone has to partake every single day or otherwise face social scorn and state sanctions?

Say what you want, when I see a group of American kids who continue their regular life at this point vs a group of Japanese kids wearing a mask most of the day every single day, I know which society is healthier.

"i know which society is healthier" is the type of appeal to common sense i would expect to see on reddit, not here where we can ostensibly say what we really mean. I didn't bring up China because i think their pandemic response was ridiculous and draconian. Their ability to move on is not something that has crossed my mind, as i don't live in an east asian country and "moving on from covid" has literally already happened in every sense that practically matters to me (other than the fact that it still like, exists). Ive been going to concerts and shit since like, october last year.

turn an abstract threat of an invisible virus into a clothing ritual everyone has to partake every single day or otherwise face social scorn and state sanctions?

my guy, my whole comment was about how i wished that stupid people didn't perceive masks as some sort of satanic ritual designed to make their lives worse. Sadly they do and the idea seems to have bled into the fucking water table of social opinions.

my whole comment was about how i wished that stupid people didn't perceive masks as some sort of satanic ritual designed to make their lives worse

If people believe that the masks don't help against the spread of covid, and spent 2 years constantly harassed to put one on, I don't think this is such a weird conclusion to arrive at.

Where I live, the public health authorities stayed very adamant that masks don't work until Fall of 2020. At that point when corona returned the political pressure to do "something" was so great that they had to concede and advise to the cabinet that mask mandates might help, with the side note that "they don't work directly but they might make people obey other rules better". Of course in the end for whatever reason the masks didn't have any visible affect on the numbers and we ended up with a total lockdown and national curfew for months. But that is another story.

What am I supposed to conclude from this episode with the masks? They were quite clearly admitting that the reason I had to go around with a mask on my face 8+ hours a day was that it would make me more obsessive about the virus, and avoid human contact. Now does it make me "stupid" to perceive as some sort of ritual designed to make my life worse?

P.S. I know we aren't on reddit anymore, but I don't think calling people you disagree with stupid is fitting to this place in any case.

What am I supposed to conclude from this episode with the masks?

idunno, probably that public health services are inefficient and worried about appearances more than results. and yeah im sorry for calling my strawman stupid, though i have to wonder why it caused you any offense.

Asian masking is like American circumcision : a widespread cultural practice backed by mythology that is occasionally dressed up as science.

I was hoping the US would adopt a mask culture similar to what Japan has, where wearing a mask is common for people that have the sniffles but need to go out and get groceries, and its not weird to put a mask on when you are on the train with a bunch of gross randos.

This is still performative masking, it's just one-step higher up on the political posturing scale. In the US, you wear a mask to signal that you care in a specifically blue-tribe way. In Japan, you wear a mask to signal that you care (or, sometimes, to disguise your face). Neither actually does any caring, of course, as the solution to not spreading respiratory diseases to others is to stay at home and eat chicken soup or whatever your regional equivalent of this is.

I was inclined to agree circa April 2020, but I think that we've since run massive natural experiments and found out that masks basically don't matter to any meaningful extent, short of wearing tight fitting respirators. Every time I see someone still wearing a cloth mask, I wonder at just how bad their information diet is.

Anecdote. But Dragoncon last year had a mask policy. Pretty much nobody got Covid. This year they tried a mask policy but it failed because the hotels were not under control of the con and didn't also have a mask policy. Lots of people got Covid.

What does this add to the conversation?

It's an example of masks preventing Covid.

I specifically want sick people to wear masks, masks do block particulate matter from coughs and the like. I don't wanna dig up the mask horse but i don't recall reading anything that said "masks don't work, throw em out", just various things about masks middling efficacy at stopping covid. All the masking and social distancing meanwhile basically ended the flu for a few years, i feel like theres something to be gleaned from that and it isn't "fuck masks" imo.

You'd need to look at a country that never saw adoption of masks to confirm that masks were the culprit. Sweden is basically the only country I can think of to avoid mass masking, either cultural or legally enforced. They seem to also report no influenza season: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publikationer-och-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-season-2020-2021/?pub=99545

i shouldn't have used the flu thing to support my point that masks help reduce the spread of diseases from coughs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 this study supports my point, what you got that says masks dont stop the particles from coughs?

wearing a surgical mask or a KN95 respirator significantly reduced the outward number of particles emitted per second of breathing.

note that i never defended cloth masks, and they do seem worthless at best.

Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.

Weird how masks destroyed the flu and yet all the pre-COVID studies showed poor results for masking against influenza. Or how Asian countries with cultures of mask-wearing pre-COVID did not "destroy the flu". I wonder if there were other things going on in 2020 that were not going on in other years.

none of that means that masks are a bad prophylactic for generally slowing down the spread of respiratory infections that spread by coughing.

Even assuming that people actually cough into their well sealed "KN95 respirator" (eww), what proof do we have that those respiratory infections actually spread by coughing and the relatively larger sized particles?

eww? my friend, when someone coughs on the bus its eww for everyone, my point is that the person who is coughing should have as much of the cough localized to them as possible. yes eww, but it's the guy who's coughing thats gross to begin with.

What are you asking for here, studies that show that the particulate from coughs can contain viruses? That you can catch a cold by being coughed on?

im not saying that if we adopted voluntary masking at 100% uptake the cold would be gone, im saying that i bet it would reduce the spread of cough-transmitted sickness.

More comments

See, I can imagine a world where permanent precautions would be a good idea - but this is not that world. People have gotten sick before, after all, and this particular disease is not, taking the broad view, enough of a bump in danger for a permanent change in the human experience (on the scale of "nudity taboo expands to cover the face") following it to be due to a change in level of risk instead of in the level of risk-aversion. If there were some invincible Black Death II: Electric Bubaloo going around without fading, then sure, but this disease is leaving us in an equilibrium that's very similar to the one we were living in before. And if our precautions were good enough for us then, almost certainly they should be good enough going forward.

Honestly it's shocking how sticky some of this stuff is, even if the vast majority of people have just moved on with their lives.

Got asked to take a RAT test to attend a 29th birthday celebration in which nobody is immunocompromised or over 30. Some people just seem to want to live in COVID zero mode forever.

Last year, I brought up a similar situation for a New Year's Eve party and there was some excellent discussion and advice at the old place. Based in part on that advice, I settled on the primacy of friendship over silliness and went along with the rapid test, then proceeded to enjoy the evening. I felt deeply conflicted about this at the time, even though it's a small thing. I think I'm completely done on that front now though. If someone wishes to continue pursuing Covid consciousness, I'll part ways with them until that's no longer important to them.

Oh I'm gonna take the RAT test as a respect to their cultural beliefs but the fact that it's even a conversation is amazing to me.

Do you have any Covid-culture requests that you would decline to honor? For example, insistence on masking in between sips and bites. I ask not be belligerent, I'm genuinely curious where others are going to draw lines going forward.

Anything resembling lockdowns, mask-wearing during any sort of physical activity or absurd location like a restaurant.

This is 1000% dependent on your social context. As a francophone in Montreal I don't expect to have to abide by any peer-requested COVID restriction measures for the rest of my life, that's just not where the meta is. So it means nothing if I say that I would decline any and all requests, since anyone who made that request would just be marking themselves as not worth dealing with.

High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.

the avocado toast people

My sides

My take on this has always been that there'll be some skewering movie that comes out in 5-10 years about this period, and it'll mark the quiet transition of intelligentsia opinion into a 'Iraq WMDs' kind of an issue in which everybody pretends they secretly didn't believe all along.

This just amplifies the important of archiving to prevent intelligentsia memory-holing their past statements. At the very least they should publicly rebuke their past selves, not merely pretend they disagreed all along.

But let's not be magnanimous when it's not warranted.

The sheer extent of social and economic destruction all around the Western world caused by long-term lockdowns will probably remain incalculable for years to come, provided that anyone even dares to calculate it. Will anyone have the courage to hold the feet of avocado toast people to the fire for what they have supported?

The whole point of being high status is power without responsibility; nobody gets to hold their feet to the fire, they get to define where the fire is and whose feet are to be held to it.

The sheer extent of social and economic destruction all around the Western world caused by long-term lockdowns will probably remain incalculable for years to come, provided that anyone even dares to calculate it. Will anyone have the courage to hold the feet of avocado toast people to the fire for what they have supported?

I listen to the BBC's daily news podcast -- which could be the mouthpiece of the World Avocado Toast Forum -- and at some point in the last week or so there was a report about how some third-world region's economy had been devastated "by COVID." It's not the first time I've heard it put like this, and it always makes me vomit in my mouth a little: attributing the mal effects of oppressive lockdown regimes to the disease rather than the politicians/bureaucracies who chose against other options. This is going to be the narrative going forward.

From the old place:

Single-cause fallacy

Media articles are quick to describe negative second-order side effects as having been caused "by the pandemic", when the effects in question clearly have no causal relationship to the Covid-19 virus whatsoever and are exclusively caused by the measures instated in reaction to the virus (including lockdowns). [By way of analogy, it would be very misleading to claim that cancer causes baldness. Chemotherapy causes baldness, and chemotherapy is used in response to cancer, but it is not the cancer itself which causes the baldness.] This is an abdication of responsibility, as it tacitly assumes that governments had no choice but to instate lockdowns, restrictions and other measures in response to the virus - when in fact they did have a choice, and the policy decisions they actually made should be expected to pass a cost-benefit analysis, just the same as every other government policy.

Note that if governments can't be held to account for the negative effects of lockdowns/restrictions because their hands were forced, this obviously implies that they can't take credit for the benefits of these policies either.

Personally, I'd consider "being sure the right lessons are learned" to be more important than "making sure the right people are punished," if I had to choose between them. If we settle into a narrative of "the Bad Thing happened because of the Bad People," and not because of Bad Decisions or Bad Behaviors that really made the difference, we can fall into the trap of believing that, so long as none of the people around bear the marks-of-shame tribal-signifiers of the Bad People, we are incapable of repeating their mistakes. And if any such mistakes are made, why then, it must be because of Secret Bad People who were lurking among us! They must be found and killed!

I do not want to lose sight of the fact that I could be an avocado toast person the next go-round. Hopefully avoiding complacency will help me stay on the right path.

But learning the right lessons implies learning from mistakes and admitting them.

But high status respected people have led. Both implicitly - how often do you see masks worn by people on the telly? - and explicitly, like Biden did just here, or numerous "pandemic influencers" have done in recent months.

I've seen some people lump all mask-wearers, Covid-doomers etc. to some "sheeple" category of people who just do what they're told and follow trends, but the trend-following normies have actually ditched the masks and social distancing a long time ago. This remnant really consists of true believers who don't follow the trends and often actually adopted Covid distancing measures before they became the social norm; in many ways they at least can consider themselves equally headstrong and dissident types as the Covid skeptics do, or have done.

Of course "normie"/"contrarian" is a sliding scale, many of them will probably eventually succumb to the social pressure, just as many Covid skeptics did - but still, it's different than described here.

This remnant really consists of true believers who don't follow the trends and often actually adopted Covid distancing measures before they became the social norm

I strongly doubt that. Nancy Pelosi went hugging people in a Chinatown on Feb. 24, Trump called Covid "a hoax" (not really, but) on Feb. 29 or so and that was when "the social norm" started its rapid 180 turn. Check out this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/worstof/comments/i1x87n/in_which_ramitheasshole_scolds_and_mocks_a_mother/

The maskers I see where I work are only about 5% of everyone. I see them as hardcore redguards. I know that they will likely be among those who interrogate me a few years from now before sending me to the gulag.

The Covid episode is mostly passed for now but the radicalized among us remain like sleeper agents, ready to coerce us into ever more experimental medical treatments at the slightest pretext.

I understand the anger, I feel a lot of it myself. But this is too boo-outgroupy and inflammatory for what is supposed to be a discussion group. This isn't a place to vent, it is a place to discuss, and you should speak as if everyone is reading/listening.

You are assuming “everyone” is just the Americans here. Many places around the world (ranging from most of Asia and Latin America to Germanic/Francophone Europe to former white British colonies) had experiences with covid which very much justify that depiction. Indefinite house(or proper) arrest, and mass firings of people not going along with the hysteria was a reality less than a year ago. There was a very credible possibility that even worse would come, as anyone who saw the news coverage in places like Austria could easily deduct.

Not sure how inflammatory it is compared to just describing reality... Australia had quarantine camps and Canada as well had guarded mandatory "hotels"... wasn't even for confirmed cases, you could test negative but if you met requirements (daring to leave the country while unvaxxed, filling out a form wrong) you actually were physically detained without trial.

Contracts were awarded to build vastly more expansive versions of these COVID prisons, the conspiracists weren't making up the contracts and the preparations... they were just always pork contracts for the politically connected or the governments were forced to back off by the political push-back.

Its incredibly difficult to state just how much true totalitarianism was implemented in the name of COVID restrictions and how many people were demanding that they be expanded to truly horrific extents.

Canada mandated a phone app to leave and reenter the country and for a while pursued regulatory reprisals against those who deleted the app. People were calling for the fines and prison terms to be applied to everyone who tried to reenter the country without downloading the app.

I'm merely describing my lived experience.

Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism? There have always been some germaphobes and neurotics and hypochondriacs etc.

But yes, I agree that most people have moved on. It was first Ukraine but by now it seems to be climate/sustainability (Greta style) again, flight shaming etc. Also tied to the energy crisis in Europe. There's less bandwidth available for boring old stuff like covid with these new things coming up.

Contrarianism is probably the wrong term here, I just used it because I couldn't think of anything better on the spot.

The "zero-covidianism" is more like a honestly held ideology at this point. It's a new ideology, to be sure, still in the process of formation, but every ideology must be new at one point. We'll see how it sticks - the main point was still that it's not just normie "go-with-the-flow" thinking, these people are not going with the flow at the moment, and most likely never conceptualized it like the "flow" was what they were a part of.

For instance, local hardcore zero-covidists have, throughout the crisis, maintained that the Finnish government never truly wanted to fight Covid, that it was willing to let kids get long Covid (since Finland only had school closured for two months in 2020 and never after that), that the local health authorities are in thrall to Great Barrington Declaration, want to copy Sweden, believe in "herd immunity" etc. From that perspective, it would be easy to believe that it's just you and your pals trying your damndest to combat the mainstream ideology, which is "Feh, we'll only combat Covid when we are absolutely pushed to do so and want to return to "normality" as fast as possible", and the anti-maskers and anti-lockdowners are just a particularly loud and unpleasant version of this mainstream ideology.

Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism?

I don't think so. I think this is just the way public health people are. The entire culture of public health is about pushing for marginal improvements in expected longevity across large populations, which often means recommending things that look pretty silly on an individualized basis (e.g. the CDC admonishing against over easy eggs). It seems to me that this culture of pursuing some value of "health" at the population level is chosen by people that have a particularly neurotic bent to begin with and that the localized cultures at these institutions continues to push the internal logic of it, to the point where quite a few people in the profession really will refuse rare beef or feel that sunscreen is a strict requirement for going outside.

Of course, it doesn't escape my notice that quite a few people in the industry are obviously unhealthy at a glance, but the cognitive dissonance of that never seems to bother people all that much.

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