Imagine the egg on @AroundTheWorld 's face! I bet we won't be seeing him post here for months ... until most people forget this sh*t thread.
You could be right. But ... If there is another variant wave, mask mandates could return. We could very well keep cycling through mask mandates, until all of the unvaccinated shuffle off this mortal coil.
That’s fine, but we make decisions with the information we have, not with what will come to pass years down the road. It’s not clear to me that what has come to pass proves their approach would have been better, but even if so that doesn’t mean that the decision made back then with information available back then was the wrong one.
It really just comes down to what people view as an acceptable level of risk and loss of life, and an acceptable level of economic loss / freedoms. The initial lockdown was needed even in hindsight imo, when there was no vaccine available, we were staring at a very likely total collapse of our healthcare system and an untold amount of deaths, not to mention there was no data or procedures surrounding testing, research, treatments, etc. At this point any future decisions should be to protect the stability of our healthcare system versus COVID deaths. I also don't think its fair to judge all of this in hindsight, even in hindsight the original lockdown until a vaccine program was available was the right choice. Mask mandates and social distancing rules were the best we could do until we had enough vaccinated people. Omicron was a miracle.
The virus mutating into a more dangerous variant (which is what eventually happened in India in early 2021 when people there figured it was no longer a serious threat) was also a major concern. Would this strategy have yielded even more deadly variants?
I could agree with this declaration if it was made this past month but certainly in October 2020 things were very different when the vaccines didn't yet exist. Also this argument that history will prove them right is almost impossible to claim. Because so much changed even 2 months after the declaration regarding vaccines coming on line. In regard to the argument about Sweden that keeps on coming up. Yes Sweden's death numbers are much better than the US but their numbers compared to their neighbors were worse and their economy took a hit. So yes having a healthy population with universal healthcare did help fight COVID but it still shows that having some level of restrictions that those helped too.
100%. It was very difficult. The vast majority of policy makers honestly tried their best and in hindsight, some of them look bad, some look good, mistakes were made. What I will judge though are the lies and intentional disinformation. That has been and continues to be extremely destructive.
I agree a pandemic from a novel disease is one of the hardest things for government to deal with. It involves things that especially in the US we aren't good at. Understanding science, concern about society as a whole, personal self-discipline and patience. It's very understandable that mistakes were made by many people. What I can't agree though is with politicians like DeSantis and Abbott who themselves took the vaccines, wore masks and on more than one occasion touted the benefits of those measures. Then later when it appeared that their base was against those things started saying the opposite. Or in the case of DeSantis not even being able to admit publicly he got boosted. And before people start saying "They wanted to give people the freedom to decide for themselves" when you pass a law that blocks even a private business from doing what it thinks is best for it's employees and patrons to fight the disease that is the opposite of giving people the freedom to decide for the themselves.
Sweden's response sucked compared to their neighbors. They got somewhere but at a much higher cost in lives than their neighbors.
But they did have much greater restrictions than Sweden. You seem very fixated on masks but there are many other measures that were taken to combat this disease.
If we want to hold a low population density country with a lot of "socialist" policies as the benchmark of how American should handle health policy, I bet a lot of people would jump on that bandwagon. But then of course there's also this: https://chicagopolicyreview.org/202...ntional-approach-to-covid-19-what-went-wrong/
In the United States health policies are managed by the states not the federal gov't - this is something people forget when they cry about Fauci. The CDC can only make recommendations. The feds can control things such as rules for federal employees as well international commerce - ports and who gains entry into the country, but they don't have control over schools. Looking at the states, most states have lifted covid restrictions, or have greatly ease them with lifting in the near horizon. https://www.usatoday.com/storytelling/coronavirus-reopening-america-map/#restrictions So what exactly is this guy complaining about gain? Does he want the whole world to adopt one policy to improve communication - or is he saying every country sucks at it? Seems like he is just complaining to tap into people's frustration.
