Interesting. Not in my experience (thankfully), but, okay I can see that. I have encountered that for specific, contagious patients in special rooms, but not facility-wide in your basic hospital.
That’s not how I remember it. I don’t recall anyone (seriously) thinking that COVID could be meaningfully contained. Instead, the goal was “flattening the curve”. It was not possible to keep the infection rate from going up. But maybe the time-constant of the exponential could be expanded a bit so as to not overload medical resources, and maybe delay some of those infections past the point where the vaccine would be available.
A valid goal and it probably worked to an extent. But it seems that people forgot about that as a goal and extended lockdowns past the point where they were actually useful.
The academic medical community now considers covid to be in the endemic phase; a constant presence rather than a disruptive outbreak. So says Harvard School of Public Health.
Certainly “people” in Aus thought that – and probably NZ as well. It was perhaps a “stupid” thought, but it was encouraged by actions of my state government.
Every man is the centre of their own world, and I know people who thought that COVID could be “contained”, and still think that it should have been.
I was certainly speaking from a US (or North American) perspective. Island nations like New Zealand had some hope of containment. Australia seems a bit borderline but I can certainly believe people thought it could be contained.
I’m still not particularly happy that “flattening the curve” got memory-holed. The extended lockdowns, especially in schools, caused more harm than good.
I don’t know that those are the same things? “flattening the curve” was certainly a good idea – Italy and China, and parts of the USA, showed what happened when the curve got ahead of the hospital capacity.
Extended lockdown of the schools was certainly a mistake, but where was it ever associated specifically with “flattening the curve”, rather than morality* or mindless panic?
*In my state, school lockdowns were partly the outcome of the collectivist political orientation of the government
The corollary to “flattening the curve” is that you let up as soon as the hospital situation improves. But that largely didn’t happen here. It was not strictly related to the schools except in that school lockdowns were part of the extended set of lockdowns which were put into place to flatten the curve. But once the hospital situation was under control, everything else should have been reevaluated, starting with the least-at-risk populations (and types of gathering). Europe mostly did this; the US didn’t.
One of many problems with political polarization is that it makes it impossible to make tradeoffs. Maximum caution is just as stupid as maximum incaution; between the two I suppose I’d pick caution, but it is nevertheless actively harmful compared to something in the middle.
Just to be clear, it’s not flattening the curve that bothers me. It’s that if you perform some action X based on circumstances Y, but then there is a change such that Y no longer holds, then you should not blindly continue doing X. You should, at the least, reevaluate to see if there are other (still valid) circumstances that justify X. Better would be to abandon X and start from scratch. It’s likely that there is some new action, different from X, that would be a better fit to the new circumstances. Also, the burden of proof should be on the one asking for the non-default action. They’re the ones obligated to show that X is still justified. We should revert to not-X unless a high standard of argument is reached.
I have a friend, in the US, who said, “that was when I thought that if we all stayed home for 6 weeks it would die out”. Do yes, there were people in the US who thought it would be contained.
I guess there must be a few people out there that believed it. But I have a reasonably diverse set of acquaintances and can’t think of anyone that thought it would just be nipped in the bud. Though this does depend on exactly when we’re talking about. Early on, say Jan-Feb 2020, it just wasn’t clear whether this would be a limited outbreak like SARS or something else. Our company sent everyone home in March. Maybe then, a very optimistic person could think this would be a limited outbreak. But a month or two after that, it seems like it would be hard to believe.
Why are we taking it as a given that extended remote schooling was such a bad idea? Those places are germ factories and while kids are resilient they would’ve certainly lead to a greater spread towards adults. Yes, I’m sure it had some downsides as far as education, kid socialization, and mental health, but the measures we took to slow it down probably saved millions of lives across the world.
Pandemic control measures became the default when it was decided that not taking sufficient methods could potentially lead to an out of control pandemic like we saw in China, Italy, NY, etc early on during the pandemic. At that point it makes sense to use the precautionary principle until such time that the scientific understanding and/or reality of the situation changed enough to let it up. If we’re doing things that are working like masking, social distancing, etc. how often are you proposing we start from scratch? Do we need to start from scratch every day? Every week? Just go back to “okay, don’t do anything, we haven’t got the data in this week yet so everyone go to coughing parties like you normally would”?
Europe opened their schools and didn’t suffer millions of excess deaths. And it wasn’t “some downsides” to education. Students lost about half a year of their education. More for the least-advantaged students.
“The measures” are not some unified thing. There were some good measures and some dumb measures. The extended school closures were one of the dumber ones. Very high cost with very little benefit.
You’re just spouting nonsense. I never said anything along those lines.
The US could have observed other countries and reevaluated the situation month-by-month. Luxembourg and Israel reopened schools in May 2020. But only about half of US schools were even open in May 2021. It wasn’t until Fall 2021 that the majority of schools were reopened. There wasn’t a great disaster in the early opening countries. The US didn’t have to be the leader in this respect but we could have seen what worked elsewhere and lagged them by a few months.
OK, sorry. Basically, nearly every U.S. state has seen an increase in Covid cases, and not a single state has had a decline as of Aug-5 (which is about two weeks ago.)
It’s a logical argument, but false. It turns out that kids don’t spread covid to adults. I guess that seems unlikely, even to me, but the counting is done, and the numbers are in: those “outbreaks” and other traced spreads didn’t come through kids. Kids aren’t just worse spreaders: it turned out that they are very very bad at spreading COVID-19, even in schools.
However, given what we knew at the time, there came a point, even then, when gradual relaxation of school closures would have been rational. My own government was unable to do ‘gradual’, which I respect as a political principle, but some of it was a bridge too far, even for me.
Well, he obviously thought that when we were fewer than 6 weeks into the lockdown.
It was good for some kids, and neutral for others. But it was really bad for most.
I interviewed an autistic kid for college who loved remote high school. He could stim without bothering anyone, or attracting unwanted attention. He could conveniently review lessons more than once. He could hold his dog during lectures.
Most of the high school kids in my upper-middle-class town did fine. They had a private bedroom and their own computer got lessons, and they were academically motivated and able to keep up.
And it was mixed for the working class high school kids I’d been tutoring. (I continued over zoom.) Some essentially dropped out. Others had the freedom to start working earlier than they otherwise could have, and still continue in school. I tutored one girl who saw me in the staff area of a department store during her breaks. Of course, all of them lost a couple of months while the school scrambled to get them devices to use at home. Part of the deficit among poorer kids was a one-time start-up cost.
But it was a nightmare for the little kids and their parents. Zoom kindergarten just isn’t.