I think it's important to distinguish between Covid and the absolutely irrational public policy response to Covid, because the latter is what really threw downtowns off. Pandemics will happen again; lockdowns don't need to, if we learn.
We won't learn. On the contrary, we have actually become stupider about handling disease: Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic, and anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream.
If we get hit with another major pandemic in the relatively near future, we will be even less prepared for it now than we were with Covid, and I predict our lockdowns will be even worse because of it.
If people behaved rationally and with empathy we wouldn't need to lock down. But because we have a bunch of selfish pricks we'll always need lock downs. People cannot be trusted to do what it is good for the whole if it even slightly inconveniences the individual. In western culture(The United States in particular), I don't see that changing any time soon.
Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.
To be clear, it was never to hide out or wait for COVID to leave. It was mostly to slow the spread, limit demand on our medical resources, and to ramp up time to ensure we tackled it with robust medical science. Unfortunately, most states in the country don't actually "believe" in science because Yahweh bro.
> The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.
If another disease like the first COVID wave comes along I'll damn well vote out any politician who doesn't support lockdowns.
When there is a super virulent disease spreading rapidly that we don't know the long term effects of (and we still don't years later!) a lockdown is the logical response until we have some idea wtf is going on.
The thing is, we relied on the novelty of something like covid to enforce lockdowns in the first place. Without that overblown fear, voluntary compliance simply won’t be there.
And any government that wants to impose lockdowns will be forced to implement a military response, akin to what China did during covid. That kind of response + hindsight to how useless it is won’t go well.
> Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic
BLS doesn't agree with you[0]. After a big drop with Covid, when a bunch of older hospital workers decided it would be a good time to retire, the employment number matched pre-Covid figures by late 2022, and exceeds it now.
> anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream
Rates of typical childhood vaccination (like MMR, DTaP, etc.) dipped only a little, from 95% pre-pandemic to 93% in 2023[1], so there's no evidence to suggest that anti-vaccine hysteria is "mainstream". And I would wager that the 2% difference can be largely attributed to, again, the poor public health policy choices surrounding Covid.
> > Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic
> BLS doesn't agree with you[0]. After a big drop with Covid, when a bunch of older hospital workers decided it would be a good time to retire, the employment number matched pre-Covid figures by late 2022, and exceeds it now.
If demand is higher for care, they could have more total employment and still be more understaffed.