Another common response is that we are living on hindsight bias because "it was the best science at the time". But plenty of experts were correct from the beginning, only to be silenced by Dr. Fauci.
The US had less stringent lockdowns than most countries, but we are definitely the biggest crybabies...
Once you know enough people who died or got severely ill, most people will start taking precautions with no government mandates required. But our healthcare system would crash before we got there, and the voting public (which includes a good number of people over 60) would not stand for that.
Much has been said about the successes and failures of our government's handling of COVID, but I don't think anyone was expecting the latest hearings to shed any light on anything...
One common criticism of the poor US response is that it shows how unprepared we are if we ever had a "real" pandemic, like Black Death with 30% IFR. But I don't think that's a fair comparison. People who are skeptical of lockdowns etc are actually being quite reasonable if they don't personally know anyone who dies; but even skeptics become believers when they see death firsthand.
Yes, and I think we saw that happening in places that were hit hard during COVID. The problem is that with a sufficiently high R value, by the time everyone personally knows someone who died, it's probably too late...
I know of one person from my HS class who died in 2021 from it, but he was 57. If you look at the number of deaths per year in the US, there was a dramatic increase in 2020. Rather than increase by a few tens of thousands per year, as had been the case in recent history, deaths increased a whopping 500,000 in 2020, from the vicinity of 2.8 million to the vicinity of 3.3 million. Not much question it was from COVID, though, the official COVID death toll for the year was only about 350,000.
Children were largely immune to most direct effects, but there was considerable indirect harm from not being able to attend school in person. Grandparents and such at home were protected by these measures, as well as older or unhealthy teachers and school staff. I was against many of the actions taken by liberal politicians and administrators, but that doesn't necessarily mean I was right.
Yeah, and it's sad how easy is it to predict a person's political identity based purely on their interpretation of facts that are empirically provable.
Another common response is that we are living on hindsight bias because "it was the best science at the time". But plenty of experts were correct from the beginning, only to be silenced by Dr. Fauci.
The US had less stringent lockdowns than most countries, but we are definitely the biggest crybabies...
Once you know enough people who died or got severely ill, most people will start taking precautions with no government mandates required. But our healthcare system would crash before we got there, and the voting public (which includes a good number of people over 60) would not stand for that.
Much has been said about the successes and failures of our government's handling of COVID, but I don't think anyone was expecting the latest hearings to shed any light on anything...
One common criticism of the poor US response is that it shows how unprepared we are if we ever had a "real" pandemic, like Black Death with 30% IFR. But I don't think that's a fair comparison. People who are skeptical of lockdowns etc are actually being quite reasonable if they don't personally know anyone who dies; but even skeptics become believers when they see death firsthand.
Yes, and I think we saw that happening in places that were hit hard during COVID. The problem is that with a sufficiently high R value, by the time everyone personally knows someone who died, it's probably too late...
I know of one person from my HS class who died in 2021 from it, but he was 57. If you look at the number of deaths per year in the US, there was a dramatic increase in 2020. Rather than increase by a few tens of thousands per year, as had been the case in recent history, deaths increased a whopping 500,000 in 2020, from the vicinity of 2.8 million to the vicinity of 3.3 million. Not much question it was from COVID, though, the official COVID death toll for the year was only about 350,000.
Children were largely immune to most direct effects, but there was considerable indirect harm from not being able to attend school in person. Grandparents and such at home were protected by these measures, as well as older or unhealthy teachers and school staff. I was against many of the actions taken by liberal politicians and administrators, but that doesn't necessarily mean I was right.
Yeah, and it's sad how easy is it to predict a person's political identity based purely on their interpretation of facts that are empirically provable.