[josephg]

Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds?

If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine.

But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that.

If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.

[lukan]

"Does it kill the old or the young?"

We figured out very quickly, that mainly old people were at danger.

The lockdowns happened, when this was known for sure.

"If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense."

And no one even claimed back then, that a unhospitalised 10% death rate was expected.

In my understanding as a parent - the old in charge freaked out and locked everyone in, to protect mainly themself - yet the young generation suffered the most of it, despite not being at danger from the disease as well. So trying to prevent the collapse of the hospitals did made sense - but not the way it was done, at the expense of the younger generation.

[simianparrot]

Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight.

Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.

[josephg]

> Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020.

This is only "obvious" with the benefit of hindsight. There was a mountain of rushed studies early on reporting all sorts of conflicting "facts" about covid. Of course using what we know now, you can look back and cherrypick a lot of great stuff from the pile of early results. But that doesn't mean you could have done the same thing in early 2020. How could you tell which studies to believe? Everything was rushed, had small sample sizes and nothing had been replicated yet.

At the start of 2020 it wasn't clear how long viral particles stayed airborne, and whether you could even contact covid from breathing it in, or if you needed physical contact of some sort. I remember one scare where people were worried you could catch covid from the cardboard used for amazon packages - before we realised covid dries out and dies if it lands on materials like that. Thats not true of all viruses.

Government policy, science and software share something in common: They can happen fast or happen well. You can only pick one. Rushed science gets small things wrong. Rushed software is buggy and brittle, and rushed government policy makes mistakes.

Its easy to forget, but the start of 2020 was a madhouse.

[GuB-42]

In the early 2020s, studies have shown everything and their opposite, so you can cherry pick anything that supports your view. I find it was a particularly interesting time because it showed how "messy" science really is. In normal times, you typically don't see scientific results before you have at least some amount of certainty. Some research get through the cracks (ex: LK-99), but not to the extent of what happened in the early days of the pandemic.

Also covid and other diseases spread well in open air summer festivals where UV is at its peak. And for covid specifically, we had peaks in the summer, where, again, people tend to get out and UV is high.

[empath75]

IMO we should have had more draconian lockdowns much sooner, when it would have slowed the spread more effectively, and we should have opened up much more quickly once the initial wave went through and it was clear that it had already spread every where. Especially the schools, once it was clear that kids weren't especially badly affected by it.

There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:

1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)

2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.

3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home

4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)

---

They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.

Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.