"A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.

[Doctor Phibes]

@George-K said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

Perhaps I'm reading that article wrong. I don't think it diminished or underestimated the severity of the pandemic. The point is the lockdowns made little difference in making it better, and made a lot of difference in making the whole time worse.

That was my take, too.

I'm not one of the people who think that the lockdowns were an attempt at tyranny. I think that for the most part they were governments doing what they thought was best for the general population, and in some cases panicking just as the general population panicked.

The fact that they may not have worked will hopefully help if we face something similar in the future, but to be honest I'm not sure. This was not an easy couple of years for anybody.

[Doctor Phibes]

@Horace said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

I will continue to roll my eyes at the sanctimonious masses leaping at the opportunity to divide people into good vs evil groups.

I tell you one thing I seem to remember. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I recall a number of people who weren't working any more implying that others who were needed to get back to the office for the sake of the economy.

And I have to say it really pissed me off.

[Jon]

@Copper said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

@Jon said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

True but you thought the flu was worse.

I thought that right up until it wasn't, which was, if I remember correctly, several months into the race.

You were saying it well past the time the skeptics were saying it and well into the time where it was just the trolls.

[Horace]

@Doctor-Phibes said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

@Horace said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

I will continue to roll my eyes at the sanctimonious masses leaping at the opportunity to divide people into good vs evil groups.

I tell you one thing I seem to remember. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I recall a number of people who weren't working any more implying that others who were needed to get back to the office for the sake of the economy.

And I have to say it really pissed me off.

There is no end to the reasons you have for dismissing people's opinions.

[Jon]

@LuFins-Dad said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

@Jon said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

Not statewide. Our district was only closed spring of 2020. The city stayed closed for 2020-2021 I believe.

Yes, I seem to recall that N.Y.C. didn’t reopen until September, 2021 and even delayed then, but that’s on the city not on the state.

However, did your schools fully reopen for in-person learning in the fall of 2020? Or was it a hybrid model? Here we had the choice of 2 days in-school/3 days remote or you could choose a full-time remote. It was Luke’s senior year. He was essentially done and most of the important classes were disrupted by the disjointed schedule so we opted for remote, but I would still argue that a part time schedule is still a type of lockdown.

Fair point. We had a hybrid model until spring of 2021.

I think the costs of virtual schooling were pretty immense overall. Emily Oster was making that case early, and rather persuasively.

The thing that pissed me off most about the teachers unions in some cities is they argued to be first in line for vaccines and then STILL wouldn't come in. The only case for giving them early access was to reopen the schools.

[Doctor Phibes]

@Horace said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

There is no end to the reasons you have for dismissing people's opinions.

Well, people not working and telling me I need to get back to the office seemed like a pretty good reason to ignore the assholes, TBH. Particularly since I never stopped working for the entire pandemic.

[Aqua Letifer]

@Copper said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

@Aqua-Letifer said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

@Copper said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

@Jon said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

True but you thought the flu was worse.

I thought that right up until it wasn't, which was, if I remember correctly, several months into the race.

Then apparently you still don't understand the time difference between reported numbers and real-time fatalities.

I understand everything, without exception.

That is why I reported what I reported these many years ago.

You reported your emotions, which turned out to be correct but not until I reported the changing numbers.

You seem to be confusing "emotions" with "understanding statistics."

[Aqua Letifer]

@Doctor-Phibes said in "A policy failure of gigantic proportions”.:

I'm not one of the people who think that the lockdowns were an attempt at tyranny. I think that for the most part they were governments doing what they thought was best for the general population, and in some cases panicking just as the general population panicked.

It's incredible to me that the whole thing is now framed by conservatives as a "panic," and by liberals as a "job well done." As if for the right, the reasonable people could see past the incredibly overtaxed hospital system, the long COVID cases and deaths and see that it was really no big deal and really we shouldn't have been doing anything. And for the left, they made the world a better place by publicly shaming nonconformity.

My father-in-law probably died over the panic. He couldn't stay on top of his oncology visits, they caught a reemergence too late and that was that.

I also know a couple of folks who died directly and unnecessarily from COVID because they didn't take precautions. Good chance they could still be around now if they had waited until getting a vaccine before going to massive public events. Also, a lot of high school seniors got pretty screwed through the myriad consequences of our response to COVID.

I don't understand how you can decide to focus on one set of these or other global events because they fit some uniquely American political bullshit, and consider the problems on the other side irrelevant. Most people tried to do what they thought was best, though their definition of "best" was colored by pre-existing beliefs. And still others were opportunistic about the whole thing. I don't see what's so hard about that.

[Jolly]

Did we learn anything?

1. Viruses gotta virus. Bad ones will most often mutate into something less bad. We forgot that. Not at first, but further into the pandemic. People had gone back to normal daily life, long before most governments said it was ok.
2. Remote learning sucks for most kids. What did seem to work ok, was when schools down here (and other places), went to A & B groups, with one group in school Mondays and Wednesdays, and the other group attending Tuesdays and Thursdays.
3. We are not shutting down houses of worship again. Period. Might have some distancing or masking rules, but no shutdowns.
4. We don't have adequate hospital bed capacity. Something we already knew and it bit us in the butt.
5. Florida got it right. Protect the most vulnerable first.
6. Masks? Yes and no, for a respiratory disease. They do make some difference, but not a lot. The quality of the mask and how it is worn, determines a lot about efficacy.
7. Social distancing. Some serious studies need to be done and we don't need to rely on ancient data.
8. Treatment vs, vaccine. Our mRNA vaccines are not true vaccines. They do have side effects, sometimes in excess of the mortality rate for the this disease in certain cohorts. And I though that we did adjust our treatments, I thought we lacked capacity and distribution for some of the monoclonal antibody treatments.

[Copper]

9. Create some kind of non-political group to manage this sort of event. This might be impossible, but the way the vaccine and mask usage became 99.99% about politics didn't help anyone.

[taiwan_girl]

A lot of good comments in the forum thread!