Please tell me the way in which a virus that swept the globe and killed nearly 6 million people (and those are just the deaths we counted) in 2 years is ‘minor in the scheme of things.’
If we're faced with a situation in which we can collectively give up 1% of our lives to save 5%, I'd say that's worth mandating.
1% for 2%, I'd grit my teeth and say we need pretty solid data on that 2%.
1% for 1%, nah.
I don't think coronavirus was even close to that, if you just look at the full lockdown and the reduced ones (e.in the UK and ignore all of the associated mitigations, that was ~1% of our collective lifespan given up. Did it save 1% of people?
I don't think it was even close. And that's not even taking into account opportunity cost. Most of the 'savings' here comes from the fact that by locking down you're also barricading the vulnerable away.
On the outset I think the ability for it to spread and cause general mayhem in the population was good enough reason to shut things down. The main cause for concern was overwhelming emergency systems. We need to remember that death is only one statistic. You would still visit the hospital as an alive, infected individual and put a strain on that system even when you fully recover and go home.
Or to put it another way, even if the virus was not deadly at all, but it could take people out for a few weeks at a time, that would be reason enough to impose mask mandates, get a vaccine rolled out, tell people to work from home for awhile. Especially if people needed hospital services.
Offering people a vaccine is an obvious win. The only way in which it could not be is if the virus were so mild that the R&D and distribution cost weren't worth it. That's obviously not the case for coronavirus.
The other things are just authoritarian desires that you're not able to even quantify.
The fact that you'd delete my career and social bonds for the sake of a theoretical virus that might just put people in bed for a while means this discussion is over, I don't engage with terrorists, good luck.
This is the main issue I have had with the response to the pandemic. Covid is not the first time in modern history we have had a contagious virus that kills people regularly (see: flu). So pre-Covid, everyone was gambling that their non-social distancing behaviors would kill someone through spreading a contagious disease. The risk was very small but clearly non-zero, and members of the public clearly decided en masse that going about their normal lives was more valuable than that increased risk of killing someone with the flu.
Now comes covid and people who happily accepted the risk of flu exposure/spread pretend that value judgement has never been made before and it is gauche to even talk about it. At some point it is a reasonable possibility that the threat of covid in terms of death and disease will be equal to or less than the threat of flu. It's difficult to predict exactly what that number is but it is at least theoretically quantifiable number. What's the point of maintaining restrictions at that point when the known value system of the public accepts that level of risk?
That number should be talked about, and people should stop pretending that weighting convenience and other factors against numbers of deaths is a sociopathic thing to do. Everyone has been doing it long before covid.
We are constantly gambling all of the time that we might have some external effect on the world, it's the human condition.
Generally we distinguish between overtly dangerous behaviours that could have easily been mitigated (e.g. drinking ten pints and going out for a drive), and behaviours that happen to be kind of a little bit dangerous but aren't explicitly malicious (e.g. just driving under normal circumstances).
The difference here with coronavirus is that for whatever reason, some people decided to apply a completely unreasonable standard of assuming that anything anyone did ever was a malicious act, which is completely incompatible with civilization. If we didn't have all of the exceptions for the proles (sorry, "essential workers"), society would have completely fallen apart.
The arbitrary exceptions are pretty nice. In an industry I am aware of, people absolutely have to be onsite and also need to eat lunch. When lunch is being eaten in the cafeteria, you got a bunch of maskless people in the same room spread out at least six feet. It's been long established that the virus, particularly the omicron variant, easily spreads at distance.
But those six feet, when blessed by corporate, make all the difference.
ETA
I do take the virus seriously, am vaxxed, and actually do a good job of social distancing, unlike many of my peers who preach the seriousness of the disease and yet engage in behaviors that are high risk in terms of transmission. Level of concern about the virus and belief in public health authority narrative are orthogonal dimensions.
Personally I'm warming up to where we assume COVID is endemic and we resume most of our older tendencies. Face masks probably become more normal on public transit. But I do agree there's a number where the virus remains but we're comfortable with it.
The whole idea originally was that the virus could be more or less deadly than we knew and would lock up hospital services. Even with this less deadly variant, the hospital bed shortage is a reality for many communities, which has downstream effects.
That valuation framework has also existed historically in terms of the periodic low-key freakouts about bird flu, swine flu, etc. Also the periodic filling of hospitals during flu season (though, it has been stated here and elsewhere that hospitals filling up is frequently just a feature of how the healthcare system is run).
I think there would be a lot more useful debate if 1) people admitted that there is nothing truly unique in kind about the current situation (just degree) and 2) the "return to normal number," however that number is defined, is a real thing. The folks more concerned about the virus could advocate for more stringent constraints on reopening and vice versa. But people would at least be using a common framework that's grounded in the reality that people are willing to live with a certain amount of risk without doing much about it.
I think we'd have a lot more rationality in politics if we didn't have this "fear" that basically some people just want to see the world change forever.
I'm forced to push harder than I actually want to in order to counteract the contingent of oddball "but 2019 was bad, I had to go outside, never go back pls" people.
I have heard this argument so many times now. It’s so easy for someone to say stuff like this in hindsight.
But on day zero, no one knew what this “flu” really was and what it was capable of. What we knew at the time was the infection rate was accelerating globally.
You didn’t have any evidence to weight until now. The response that we took was right given limited information.
