[bsaul]

People completely stopped vaccinating in france, and ICUs aren’t overloaded at all anymore. What changed isn’t the vaccination rates but the nature of the virus itself. Omicron completely changed the nature of the epidemic (that plus the fact that after 2 years and with super-contagious variant like omicron, almost 100% of the population have been in contact with the virus, either symptomatic or not).

EDIT : as for lockdowns, they were understandable in 202O when the virus was new. But locking down 20 yo students in 2021 made absolutely no sense, and all the evidence pointed to that. Note that in france at least, the most serious measures against non vaccinated people were taken in early 2022 (aka: not even allowed to take the train), despite omicron being the only variant remaining, and casualties becoming super super low.

[digital-cygnet]

I agree that this time will be keeping public policy academics and epidemiologists busy for decades to come, and that it's a very interesting question what the right calls were in retrospect.

However, I want to point out that you've moved the goalposts in your arguments. You started with

> everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response

But you're now saying that because of the mutation to Omicron and the prior exposure of "almost 100% of the population", just living with it is the appropriate policy move. Neither of these were true throughout 2020 or most of 2021, so cannot be useful in determining what the correct course was in the early pandemic.

Furthermore, I think you are vastly discounting the value of a single vaccination. Just because few people have taken the bivalent shot does not negate the value that their original shots in 2021 still provide against serious/spreading cases today.

For the record, my own low-confidence prediction is that future historians will bear out the early (first two months, say) phase of lockdown, and will agree with the utility of many of the later policies but take issue with the hubris of states thinking they could impose them on an unwilling population with no blowback. There will also be an endless list of easy-to-condemn overreactions to the virus or silly policies continuing way too late (e.g. a large park near where I used to live was shut down until late 2021, well after vaccination and after we were very confident that it basically didn't spread outdoors)