There is a backlash against COVID actions that is happening now, is because people are terrible at math and worse at assessing risk. The idea that COVID was not a valid emergency is pure historical revisionism with no base in fact or data.
Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
Yup. Like orders and orders of magnitude off. People thought they’d have like a 10% of dying if they caught Covid when it was closer to 0.2% (and much less when you stratify by risk conditions).
Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
Your numbers can be true but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers, nor were they ethical or moral. Humans can’t stop a respiratory virus like that—it was wishful thinking at best and peak human arrogance at worst.
And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse.
There are literally billions of other problems in society beyond “reducing covid transmission”. Lockdowns forced a myopic focus on exactly one problem to the exclusion of virtually all other problems.
Why was “reducing transmission” so much more important than providing children a sanctuary from abusers at home by way of open schools? Why was “reducing transmission” a greater problem to solve for than “elderly dying alone in an assisted living facility”.
Your study is a perfect example of the extremely myopic focus on COVID. It was as if absolutely nothing else was allowed to be a priority.
Also I’m curious, if this paper is true why did Florida or Sweden not have dead bodies lining the streets? They either ended their lockdowns earlier than most or didn’t have them at all? Did Florida feed them all to the gators? Was there a hidden “mass death” in Sweden I wasn’t aware of?
Or perhaps is “reduced transmission” not a good metric?
What was the upshot/benefit of this "reduced transmission" which was purchased at enormous cost? Everyone eventually got COVID anyway. How many deaths were actually prevented rather than delayed?
There will be no answer to that. These experts played fast and loose with the data and honestly I don’t trust any of it.
And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really.
I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.
Nope. It would have been much easier to “fall in line” and “take covid serious” than to dare tread into non-dogmatic thinking like I did. Then I wouldn’t have pissed off my friends and family. Then I’d still have a good career and good network. My life would have been very much easier to fall in line like the good little west coast liberal caste I was set into.
But you know what? Fuck those people. They are wrong. And so are you. None of our response to Covid made any sense at all. The math never made sense. And it never will. All your “science” and “data” amount to nothing but a pile of appeals to authority. And even then it was the layer of tribal politics that really sealed in the multi-year mass hysteria.
Pull your head out of your ass and it’s clear as day. None of it adds up. Sorry. You are quite simply, wrong. Wake up dude. You got tricked. You are wrong.
By the time most people in Canada got COVID, they were already vaccinated. That was the whole point of limiting transmission. The let it rippers were saying that the old people should just stay in their retirement homes, not understanding that most people at high risk live with others who are working or are working themselves.
I ran my personal risk profile through qcovid.org and it spat out a 1 in 80,000 chance of death and 1 in 3,000 chance of hospitalization. Any notion of taking a rush-to-market vaccine went out the window at that point. And before someone says "well what about your obligations to others?", my obligation was to my kids, to stay healthy and able to earn a living.
Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
Right? Like these people forgot their own mortality or something.
I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense.
…and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
> I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit.
This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
Honestly I think it was a massive, classic engineering disaster. It was multiple failures happening all at once that lead to the disaster that was humans response to Covid.
Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
100s of thousands hospitalised. 60k dead. And that is with lockdowns.
Seems like an emergency to me.