[spookthesunset]

> COVID matters as we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.

Don't agree at all. Especially when the very same public health "experts" proved themselves entirely incompetent fools who don't understand their own data.

What these "experts" did was absolutely insane. It blows my mind so many people went along with it with nary a hint of intellectual curiosity and still to this day defend it.

[Guvante]

Yes mistakes were made. The mask kerfuffle was a black eye on the CDC 100%.

But calling it overall insane and pretending everyone was ignorant at the time only makes sense if you are ignoring everything that wasn't eventually confirmed true.

[Gibbon1]

Felt to me the CDC wanted to appear competent and authoritative while being caught flat footed[1] with something they hadn't dealt with before.

Me I tried to figure out what mitigations were needed and decided it wasn't knowable so did them all until the picture became clearer.

[1] CDC thought the next big pandemic was going to be influenza. And then got hit with something different. But then executed as if it was. Bonus for about 50 years they didn't fund any research on how influenza and other respiratory viruses spread either.