[black_puppydog]

I don't know the folks behind this, but to me the take-away to "in hindsight of course we can do pretty well" is that really, the whole pandemic should have been addressed with (a lot of) hindsight.

The idea that viruses spread like this isn't new. It happened before. Africa had seen it. Asia had seen it. When Europe went crazy with "they're taking away our freedoms" a lot of my Chinese friends hopped on a plane to China, away from the "plague enthusiastic" westerners.

A lot of what happened over the last year was pure crazy, and entirely foreseeable. It wasn't clear when or where such a spillover event would occur, but what would happen (or not) after that, as a function of actions taken (or not) was painted out and experienced before, by epidemiologists and entire countries. And it was promptly ignored by policy-makers, journalists, and the general population.

I lost a lot of faith in (western) humanity over the last year. I have little hope left that we'll learn anything from it. In fact we're already seeing that some of the obvious promises made with easily verifiable binary outcomes, like better income or security for frontline workers, are being dropped.

I recently watched a youtube video from May 2020, and in the end the person on screen hears noise, goes to the balcony and starts clapping with everyone to celebrate "our heroes".

That didn't fucking age well.

</rant>

[zupa-hu]

That's not what I meant. You can err on either side and both directions have their costs, which are much clearer in hindsight. There is a reason why the game doesn't predict the future. Because we don't know it.

I specifically meant erring on the other side.