That’s still applying hindsight logic, though. At the start of the pandemic we didn’t know enough about the virus to know what was and was not necessary. Your family applied their skepticism of government to speculate that the lockdown would be a long one. That speculation would turn out to be correct but unless you’re in a family of epidemiologists they weren’t correct because they understood the virus better than anyone else.
Let’s say we flip a coin. I call heads. You tails. It’s heads. So I was correct. But at the moment I made my prediction I wasn't correct, I was just speculating. There was no way to know for sure.
Imagine you have a car problem and take it to a mechanic. Mechanic says: "You have to rebuild the engine ASAP, otherwise the engine is going to explode and you lose the whole car". You pay for the engine rebuild, the car is still broken and the mechanic says: "Oh, I did not know what is wrong with your car, don't hindsight me."
What would you do in such a case:
a) agree that you are over the line with your complaints and keep listening to the same mechanic
b) go to someone else with your mechanical issues and sue the mechanic for the engine rebuild
Not exactly a fair comparison, though. In order for it to be fair you'd have to have to be bringing in a completely unknown type of engine and asking the mechanic to figure it out. And I imagine any sensible mechanic would say "sorry, not my area of expertise". Which is not a choice in the real world scenario.
The comparison is not about the type of engine but about advising with authority without knowledge. A sensible mechanic or anyone who values own reputation would indeed say "I didn't know", this is not what happened with the COVID response though.
I'm not sure I agree. Yes we didn't know much about it (why not, it had been going on in China for almost three months)
But the original idea was 2 weeks to show the spread. It was too save the hospitals. But somehow that morphed into zero covid.
The reality is, a bunch of stuff was thrown at the wall, and the only thing that really worked was lockdowns, which won't work long term. But why didn't we do anything to figure out if any of the things were working
We should have immediately spent resources into determining how effective some of the strategies were, and called of the ones that didn't work. Instead many of those strategies are still in place. Like six feet, sanitizing everything, cloth masks.
Instead of putting money into research (other than the vaccine) a bunch of money was spent on things that didn't have much to do with covid.
Then the correct response should have been for experts to say they didn’t know, instead of saying the lockdowns were the solution. And then shouting for months that any failures were due to noncompliance.
And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ahead, here’s some protections. Don’t want to lock down? Your body your choice.
> Then the correct response should have been for experts to say they didn’t know, instead of saying the lockdowns were the solution.
That kind of is why they said: that lockdowns were about the only reliable tool until we understood more, built out testing infrastructure, track and trace etc… it’s just that the government then didn’t do any of that.
> And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ahead, here’s some protections. Don’t want to lock down? Your body your choice.
Even a cursory look towards labor rights in the US would make it very clear it wouldn’t be “your body your choice”, it would be “want to keep your job? Turn up to work or you’re fired”.
I’m can understand that, but here’s the thing that still grids my gears.
There were people and even doctors back then saying they didn’t know it was a good idea.
There were people back then worried about how it would affect education, suicide attempts (this article!), and businesses, and whether the cure was worse than the problem.
These people were not allowed to speak, in policies or on television. If they spoke on social media, say they want people to die and they are heartless. Once the vaccine comes out, lump them in with the anti-vaxxers.
The cure was worse than the problem. Except we got screwed and the problem remains.
> These people were not allowed to speak, in policies or on television.
That’s just flat out untrue, though. These views were widely aired at the time. It’s revisionist history to say they were censored. The government made a choice they didn’t agree with but that doesn’t mean they were silenced.
A lot of them were silenced. A lot of scientists were also afraid to speak out against the status quo.
If you disagreed with the government you are called anti science (despite the policies having nothing to do with science) it belittled for wanting to kill grandma. Shoot people are still saying that.
I see this perspective a lot and it baffles me. If you say something and in return are called "anti-science" you are not being "silenced". You are hearing the reaction to the words that you spoke. We're well on the path towards "censorship" being a word that means absolutely nothing.
Yes, you are being silenced, because what does "anti-science" imply?
Science is a process about learning from the world. These people (who are scientists themselves!) have disagreements about how scientists are doing science, and they are called "anti-scientific" as a result of disagreeing with their interpretation of science.
It stops being "your body" when you're walking around being a vector. I have to get groceries. At my last job, I had to go into the office. Regardless of my risk model, there are reasons I cannot stay home. You are making the decision for everyone around you, and whenever I see someone indoors exercising their freedom to not wear a mask, I wish they could see the cost of that "freedom".
The compromise would have been to actually enforce the lockdown so it can end in 3 weeks. Having a couple of weeks where people still went to bars and ordered takeout was not a lockdown. At least not in the sense that a virus would care about. Plenty of countries did a hard lockdown and enjoyed normal activities afterwards but no, because the "land of the free" can't do a public health (or allow poor people in other countries to get vaccines) we globally got to have multiple waves. You're saying it's not about compliance, but in the countries where people complied they are enjoying a freedom we still are not.
It's better in science to have a false positive than a false negative. Had we not even done that half-assed few months of quasi-confinement (no indoor dining, curbside pickup, no movies, work remotely, otherwise go wild!) the deaths would have been much higher. Remember, we only went into that soft lockdown once cases had started to spike. The federal government knew about it earlier. You don't have to know jack shit about a virus to know that it's probably a good idea to minimize person-person contact until you know jack shit about it? I don't know, I guess that's "radical" in the US, the idea that you might have to make some sacrifices for your neighbors or community or city or state or country.
"At the start of the pandemic we didn’t know enough about the virus to know what was and was not necessary."
We did actually. Many things were known and anti-lockdown activists were pointing these things out from the start. In hindsight they were all right and the "experts" were wrong.
Things these people were pointing out right back in March/April 2020:
1. SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory coronavirus. We have lots of experience with those: they're normally mild, seasonal and spread quickly. All these things have turned out to be true (yes COVID is a mild disease compared with most others).
2. The Diamond Princess cruise ship had an outbreak at the start of February 2020. This immediately made it clear that (a) IFR was low even amongst very elderly people and (b) many people didn't catch it at all, even when quarantined on a plague ship.
3. Modelling was ignoring all the above by assuming a way higher IFR than the Diamond Princess data supported, that the virus was entirely non-seasonal, and that the entire population would get infected in a single massive wave. None of these assumptions were supported by evidence and virtually no epidemiologists cared when this was pointed out. In fact the opposite, they went on the attack.
4. The WHO actually had a plan for pandemic respiratory viruses. It said very clearly not to do lockdowns, close borders or do contact tracing. This plan was ignored.
Let’s say we flip a coin. I call heads. You tails. It’s heads. So I was correct. But at the moment I made my prediction I wasn't correct, I was just speculating. There was no way to know for sure.