I’ve thought about why I was on-board with what were very disruptive government measures, and I think it boils down to this:
Personal responsibility is great. Until you can’t assign blame to what happens next from your actions. Do you feel like you can assure me, hey, that cold you got wasn’t my germs? Nah, not really possible, at least in a cost-effective way. Now, what if we aren’t sure how dangerous this really is, but BTW, tons of old people are dying and some other folks too. Oh, and since the hospitals are so full, don’t bother having something we could save you from before this stuff hit the fan.
Too much of a reaction? Maybe, but erring on the wrong side had worse consequences. Take a look at the results here vs elsewhere. Scholarly papers can be written, examining the differences in results compared with the differences in conditions. It is worth examining in a critical, scientific manner. But what you heard was “I can’t wear a mask, I can’t breathe”. If I had $100 for every ICE officer wearing a mask today who said this during COVID, I’d bet I could retire.
Here is why i disagree with you (and them). I am not going to try to justify why i think these points are true.
One: Covid was very dangerous. Therefore was in the public interest to protect the public health.
Two: the actions taken were primarily dominated by predictions based in science, that is oriented as much as possible to be concordant with facts. While willful political objectives were certainly involved too, I think they mostly reflected everyone’s values.
I think a lot of people particularly disagree with my point (2). They tend to emphasize the role of willful political objectives. Once you think that, then it also tends to undermine point (1), that is the danger of covid.
It’s difficult to gauge the proper reactions to both 9/11 and COVID. Same with all the prior attacks/wars/pandemics throughout our history. Decisions are made while the graves are still fresh. Some see it as an opportunity, others are responding genuinely. And there’s no objective balance between safe/secure/alive vs free anyway.
It’s a good conversation to have. Maybe not the same as “should we declare war on California or Greenland? Can we cancel all US elections? Is it legal to torture immigrants? Can you take money from people who don’t vote for you? Can anyone prosecute feds? Etc. etc.”
I wonder if people will remember the 1/6th failed Coup as COVID backsliding. It wasn’t (Trump shared his plans years beforehand) but they’re so close to each other that it feels like they were.
Neither party really promoted a sensible policy that protected those highest at risk while enabling the broader economy to move on. Each side just selected the bits of science that they wanted to push their opposing positions.
I do not really agree with this, at least if the “science” is medical science. My recollection and experience was that the mainstream response embodied in Fauci sometimes got the science wrong, which was inevitable, but always used the science competently, and certainly not corruptly (with regard to scientific practice.) On the other hand, i specifically remember some of the science used in the conservative response being either incompetent, or corrupt, or both. To use (and agree with) your masking example, I remember seeing writers argue that a study found masks did not work, when in fact it simply could not show that masks did work due to statistical limitations.
I’m not saying it was fully symmetrical, but the media did a poor job of things like explaining how truly at risk your average healthy 40 year old was. They just pointed to the number of deaths in total and point out every death under 40.
I fully supported policies that erred on the side of caution but feel like the media mostly presented the “everyone is going to die” angle.
Imo, media is first and foremost a consumer product, and if it bleeds it leads. “Attractive young woman/child dead in surprising way” is always going to sell.
(Admittedly I didn’t actually watch any COVID media.)
I think the problem is that for many people, this gives them plausible deniability. You can’t prove that it was my fault grandpa died after I went over to his place while I was sick with Covid. He probably caught it from someone else. Also, he was old anyways.
It’s interesting hearing the dynamics of this work out where I’m listening to the Alison Rosen podcast. Her mom had some form of cancer and was immune compromised. Alison’s sister’s family visited their mom over Christmas last year while several family members were sick with the flu. Their mom caught the flu, became septic and ended up dying unexpectedly. Since then there’s been a lot of unhappy family dynamics where Alison is blaming her sister for their mom’s death and the sister is denying responsibility. I’d argue the sister’s got a point where her mom could have caught it somewhere else, but odds are, it was her family that infected her.
I agree with you, but I think many don’t as they confuse tvs and movies with reality and therefore a disease is only dangerous if 50+% of people die of a disease.
I know that in Canada a lot of the initial model forecasts that were based on academic models performed pretty poorly. From my understanding, they pulled in some fisheries (and others, but they aren’t as important ;)) scientists to help with developing the operational forecast models and they got substantially better in their forecasts.
Being immuno-compromised makes things that are considered normal risk have such bad consequences. Visiting family is a great thing. You may even feel like “I’d hate for this to be Mom’s last Christmas and us not visit” but then your visit causes it to be Mom’s last Christmas. Tough spot. When my kids were little, we were both on the receiving and giving end of rota virus in separate incidents. Fortunately, no one had serious consequences, just a big mess.
A lot of the covid discussion focused around death rates but didn’t address the fact that there were risks of other serious consequences in non-fatal cases that most diseases don’t carry. (Likewise, part of the threat of measles is what it can do to your entire immune system even if you live.) I have zero interest in long covid, hence get the vaccine even though not at significant risk of death.
Anyway, the COVID policy decisions mostly followed the translation of media reporting into popular opinion at the local/state/federal level. That does not seem “authoritarian” in the same way that the Trump administration straight up overrides congressional authority in every area it feels is necessary.
We went through exactly this. On the MAGA in-laws side, it might be Grandma’s last Christmas in 2020, so my sister-in-law was guilted into coming to Christmas “with a cold”.
Texted us the day after that she tested positive for COVID. As did I shortly after.
The family maintains to this day that Grandma didn’t die “of COVID”, she died “with COVID” and the doctors intentionally misdiagnosed her and treated her incorrectly in order to get that sweet government COVID money.
Guess that’s somewhat off-topic here, but it’s an interesting truth that they’ll never again bring up.
I also think that a lot of people underestimate how common it is to be immunocompromised. NIH estimates it as 6.6% of the US population have some flavor of immunosuppression.
The person I’m dating is currently immunocompromised but slowly getting back to normal, and we are trying to figure out how to handle things when I am sick. It’s annoying but important.