[another_story]

I would not call things fine. It's a mess of nonstop testing and ridiculous rules being enforced by people who are not trained for it. You've got old people who can hardly walk being asked to leave to get tested multiple times a month and millions who are quickly going broke for lack of work.

[ARandomerDude]

^ This is exactly why I was against lockdowns in America circa June of 2000. Somehow back then if you took this position you were labelled anti-science, a racist, basically a serial killer, etc. I hope next time there is a major event people will stop and think "Maybe this person just disagrees with my conclusion."

[devonkim]

I was only “against” lockdowns more recently on the principle that the reactance to it combined with an inappropriate infrastructure and system makes it not terribly effective and would hurt the efficacy of it as a policy vs the sound, rational theory from a purely epidemiology standpoint. If anything, I was hoping at least people would accept masking to the N95 standard but I don’t know what it’ll take before people are willing to slightly inconvenience themselves for public health reasons, and it’s not clear what possible collective actions can be done as a species if any at all besides our self destruction. Heck, I’m disappointed we didn’t have a wave of HVAC filtration and retrofitting work given it has great benefits regardless of COVID or not. People getting sick is bad for the bottom line regardless of political ideology, but America with its cultural masculinity issues somehow equates every topic in health with physical strength or something else as asinine from our middle to the right.

There are different sciences and to me lock-downs are sound science from one branch while from sociology and psychology they were doomed to not work or be even counter-productive to the end goal. We already saw how lockdown and masking attempts from the Spanish Flu didn’t really work and I was hoping we would have learned from then. Evidently our most learned experts sometimes don’t learn the right lessons

[scarface74]

There was absolutely no case for lockdowns or mask mandates after vaccines were widely available. Getting Covid is not that risky if you are vaccinated. For those who aren’t by choice, who cares?

[spookthesunset]

The thing they some people forget is everybody bad problems and for many Covid is not the highest. All these mitigations are asking everybody to prioritize Covid over basically everything else. Many (most?) people don’t care about Covid as much as they care about other things. And you know what? That is okay.

The myopic obsession on one singular disease to the exclusion of literally everything else was not healthy. Covid myopia is far more scary than Covid.

[devonkim]

Our media has a huge part to play into what people do care about and given conservative people in other countries were absolutely worried about COVID and its economic impacts holistically most Western countries devolved into unproductive antagonistic antisocial dialogue that drives up ratings and clicks. I don’t know anyone that stopped caring about other things when it comes to the pandemic - it’s an issue that touched all our lives though and exposed bare how unstable we are as a system in every aspect imaginable.

It’s true that COVID wasn’t everyone’s top concern necessarily especially compared to simply surviving when so many people were losing jobs and the entire US healthcare system was about to collapse, but mostly people everywhere together did want one thing for sure - for the whole ordeal to be over. Our inability to try to focus upon ending things faster so we can go back to normal with our media system amplifying our worst selves while the administration was hampered / self sabotaged didn’t help then.

When it came to the first SARS outbreak the talk about lockdowns was barely mentioned except by the overly-online folks. We had earlier detection and better intervention that managed to save many, many lives in the US and nothing had to happen - that’s the same feature as infrastructure or management that works well (it’s not really noticed when it does a good job). The disease vectors for that were also different and better contained earlier across the world governments.

Look at the differences between the South Park episodes about the recent SARCOV2 pandemic v the one way back about SARSCOV1 - it’s absolutely staggering how the themes and implications all changed.

Regardless, caricaturizing opposing viewpoints into some strawman doesn’t make one’s own opinions any stronger regardless of position. I’m guessing that’s the reason for your downvotes and not your opinion in itself (I’m not much of a voting participant one way or the other FWIW).