Conversely, another chunk of the population wears them as a statement of values/identity. I’ll grant you, there’s no harm in that, unlike the other group.
When it came to “lockdowns” we took a single-buttocked approach that had virtually all of the economic dislocation with almost none of the mitigation benefits. It was the worst of both worlds and I blame Democratic timidity almost as much as Republican recalcitrance. If another pandemic (which potentially would be worse than COVID) we are well and truly screwed as the battle line are already drawn and the facts won’t matter.
I live in a Dem city. They kept the schools virtual for too long, over a year. That was a mistake. Call it timidity, whatever, it was a mistake. Now maybe we have one thing less available in the toolbox in the short to medium term because of that mistake.
We tried a nationwide soft shutdown. In March 2020 there were shutdowns in counties with zero cases. Maybe not the best use of our resources there either.
I said at the beginning of all of this that our resources were limited. There are only so many restrictions that people will put up with, and so much time that they will put up with them. I didn’t and don’t like restrictions that have limited to no impact because it takes away from something else we can do that would have more impact. There were a lot of mistakes made there.
Also, I don’t know if it’s internet culture or whatever, but there are plenty of poorly informed people on the left side of the political spectrum as well. That doesn’t help our society.
True. Ultimately that’s a response to the initial resistance though- a way of saying “I’m NOT part of that side.” And like you say, at least it’s not harmful, even if it’s a bit absurd at this stage.
I think one thing that they need to learn from is not to try and chase the science quite so closely- it both damaged (wrongfully) the reputation of the scientific community as not knowing what they’re doing, and it led to a certain… fatigue and frustration with the changing directions from TPTB. No masks, masks, N95 masks, social distancing, no gatherings, and lots of combinations in there.
Nobody was ever quite sure what the reasonably safe course of action was, and the answers were all qualified by what the case counts were. Simplified guidelines would have been very welcome, with maybe one or two revisions over time, and unified guidelines from all levels of government and all agencies. None of this county says one thing, state says another, and the Feds say a third bullshit.
To me it always felt like nobody ever really knew what the right course of action was, or how well protected we were if we were following the guidelines, because we got multiple confused messages from different levels of government. We still see this today- our county is at “Yellow” status, the CDC says “Green”, and the state government basically declared the pandemic was over in about mid-2021 before Delta came about.
There won’t be another lockdown because the government no longer has the financial capacity to pay people to stay home, and because supply chains are already strained and people will rightfully worry about a complete breakdown which would be disastrous.
Though as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there’s a strong temptation on my part to think, “who cares if the stupid people don’t like it when millions of lives are at stake? Just put your foot down and make them do it. They’ll fall in line with the right punishments, and it’s the right thing to do.”
Of course, I also realize that actual successful execution is 9/10 of the battle, so what do I know?
But the relative lack of concern was actually rational, because Ebola is only mildly contagious.
No it isn’t. It isn’t the right thing to do.
That’s dictatorship. Furthermore, I have indeed seen bias and fact challenged opinions from both sides of the political spectrum. And far less than a trillion to one ratio. How much bias and fact challenged people exist on the left? More than enough. I’ve even seen well meaning people whose policy choices don’t match up with the facts on the ground. Let alone encouraging the loudest and most interested in punishing others. Your proposal is very wrong.
I don’t think substantive financial, social, and possibly criminal penalties for refusing to wear a mask or get vaccinated or for unnecessary risk-taking during a lockdown period are necessarily out of line. Businesses and state governments are more the key anyway; target them with federal power, and compliance would be much easier to get out of the average citizen.
All the changes and adjustments that had to be made to deal with Remote Learning in schools is done and in place! We are totally prepared if this happens again. We know exactly what to do and how to do it, and we have all the necessary hardware and software in place. I’m assuming that most corporations can say the same.
My concern is the small businesses and restaurants that took a terrible beating. I’m not seeing how that isn’t going to happen again in similar pandemic circumstances.
In the end, “was it worth it” depends on how much we value human life.
This is even more true of remote working (for jobs conducive thereto), aided by the fact that there are good reasons to keep it going at least part-time for unrelated reasons (e.g. avoiding the time and money costs of commuting) and the fact that it’s easy to push back on employer resistance as hidebound nostalgia.
OMG no for schools. Wow. Changes and adjustments? What was done other than give kids Chromebooks with Zoom installed? Remote learning was a complete disaster for elementary education. Because it involves people, kids, and yes kids need to be babysat, personally instructed and managed, not just plopped in front of a screen. We were remote for over a year, and the situation was in free fall by the time it ended. Particularly for poor kids who don’t have a parent available to help them, they need the schools and they got absolutely nothing out of remote. No No No No No.
I’ll be voting people who share these views out of office personally.
I completely acknowledge you are not alone in this, and that it’s a real and substantive obstacle to what I think could be a reasonable procedure. Like I said, I can’t help but wonder where to draw lines with it. I mean, we don’t listen to flat earthers on NASA funding or Christian Scientists to help set national health policy. How do we separate your opinion from the opinions of people who just don’t care about anyone else enough to wear a mask or think vaccines contain 4G chips?
Right. My point was that I live more or less at ground zero for where that Ebola guy ended up, and while there was a lot of apprehension, there wasn’t anything remotely like panic. Yet the article implied that elsewhere in the country there was a lot more freakouts than there were here.
A large part of that is because our local county judge (basically the county executive, not a “judge” in a judicial sense) took hold of the situation early and handled it fantastically. Beyond that, I think the lack of actual spread in the community outside of that guy and those two nurses basically calmed everyone down after a week or two.
In an interesting note, that same distrust of science/cynical discrediting of science from the Right was present back then, but it just didn’t have the traction that it had in 2020. Nor did it get the outrage it should have received. And the article is surprisingly chilling in that it essentially predicts the Right’s response and the stupidity in 2020 surrounding COVID.
Google Classroom is a lot more comprehensive and effective than a Zoom meeting, but I do get what your saying. No one wants a repeat, that’s for sure, but it was a whole lot better than nothing.
I guess I’m speaking from a tech point of view. We did everything that needed to be done to make it work, which is what we were expected to do. It’s educational effectiveness is, fortunately, not something we are responsible for in my department.
All of the technical kinks were worked out by September 2020. That was fine. People tried hard for a few months, then came the free fall when there was a recognition that it wasn’t working, and the delay between that and when schools were finally opened again.
It’s like having a boss that should be fired, but there’s some delay and a long lame duck period while they are still in place and people are just waiting. A lot of damage can happen during those periods, people leaving or checking out etc.
The schools were more or less forced open by April 2021 for political reasons. They could not afford to go the whole academic year virtual. The trust would be completely broken at that point that they would ever reopen in a timely manner, and you’d get too many people going private and subsequently wanting to gut the budget of the publics. So they opened, and the people that wanted to stay virtual did so.
So now we have a situation where even if it made more sense to close schools that it really ever did with Covid, the loss of trust in the way liberal schools districts handled Covid is going to make things more difficult.
The rationale for vaccine mandates was reasonable when the vaccines prevented spread. Then you could argue that going unvaccinated put others at risk, and therefore the government had a right to act.
The vaccines no longer prevent spread, or not very much. They may help keep the symptoms more mild. But going unvaccinated no longer puts others at greater risk of harm, and therefore the government has no business mandating them. There’s your line to draw - are you risking the health of others? If not, it’s your body, your choice.
General lockdowns were never a good idea. We should have focused on protecting the most at-risk people and making sure they were vaccinated and isolated. Other people should have been free to isolate or not based on their personal risk-reward.
But like I said before, the lockdown ship has sailed. In a time of high inflation, if you take steps to print more money while restricting supply, the reaction from markets and the economy will be swift. Governments just don’t have the capacity to pay the population for another lockdown, and without it you’d never get compliance.
Another thing - supply chains are still broken, and some of them are getting worse. Capitalism is fault tolerant to a point, but if you push to hard things can collapse suddenly. It’s an existential risk. How would you like to see the food production and delivery supply chain completely fail in Europe this winter? Or more likely, massive food shortages in the poorest countries?
Absent a general mandate, for most of us it would not be our choice, but instead our employer’s assessment of THEIR risk-reward. (Not showing up for work as scheduled tends to leave one ineligible for unemployment.)
If there is a major pandemic with high levels of death, the economy is going to crash regardless of whether there’s a lockdown.
This is the factor I think a lot of the anti-lockdown people seem to miss. Even if there’d never been any government order to shut down small businesses like restaurants, they still would have seen massive declines in revenue as about 50% of their customers decided to stay home all on their own. We’re constantly told about how hard it is to make a profit as a small business, so how many of them would have collapsed anyways after losing half their income?
This us a very good question, but not one you need to engage with if your political messaging about the pandemic is basically Kid Rock’s “Don’t You Tell Me How To Live” music video rather than a nuanced take on the issues at hand.