[SalmonSnarker]

you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a couple months with world war two rations.

we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.

[Cthulhu_]

I'm no sociologist but WW2 was different in that they had one (or more) common enemies, same with post-9/11; if Americans have a common enemy, they can tolerate a lot of shit.

But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.

[umanwizard]

> there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away

People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.

[watwut]

I think that it is completely unfair to try to pretend that there was good faith political intention beyond these. It was pure cynic "if I spread the bullshit I get more cake for myself and can harm enemies" decision making in the process.

[umanwizard]

Well I'm someone who thinks the lockdowns were a bad idea because they genuinely made the world worse off, and I'm making that argument in good faith. Certainly not trying to harm anyone. What makes you think there's no good-faith argument to be made?

[xattt]

It wouldn’t have been framed as liberty-quashing if it wasn’t for said propaganda circles. Most people can’t form an opinion better than a stool without simple “[VERB] the [NOUN]” talking points, and these were readily available in low-quality yellow-on-black text JPEGs.

Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?

[umanwizard]

> Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.

Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.

> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?

Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?

---

EDIT to explain further:

Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:

OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.

OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.

In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.

Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.

If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).

[xattt]

Incarceration happens because of a willful act. A pandemic, like seasons or natural disasters, are events beyond the control of individuals except for preventative measures that mitigate risk.

You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.

This Kantian mindset has to go.

[Izkata]

That's kind of the point: There was a pandemic in 2009 that everyone seems to have forgotten about because we didn't have such an extreme response with things like masks and lockdowns, and the world didn't collapse. Neither did it this time in the areas that didn't have such an extreme response. It was unnecessary, and a lot of people realized this early on. Some of the pushback is from that group. Most of the rest is from people who just want to decide the risk for themselves instead of having it forced on them.

[acka]

I believe there are several important points missing from this discussion.

Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.

Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.

Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.

Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.

All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.

In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.

[umanwizard]

This is completely unrelated to the point I was making. Come on, going to prison was just an example of something bad that decreases quality of life. Can you please try to engage with the actual argument?

[potato3732842]

>What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?

How much runway do you think the average service industry business has?

How much runway do you think the people it employs has?

My favorite Chinese buffet is now an armed forces recruiting center. The adjacent movie theater is unoccupied. I can go on.

I'm not saying it should have been business as usual but to ignore that many parties lost big because of what was done is to be misleading at best.

[crossroadsguy]

> we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.

Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.

Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.

On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.

Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.

I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!

[veunes]

The way people reacted to even small-scale inconveniences in recent years highlights just how much has shifted since the 1940s

[lupusreal]

The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers.

A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.

[umanwizard]

Old people weren’t the ones asking for more pandemic restrictions. They were most strongly supported by politically progressive city-dwelling Millennials.

[lupusreal]

Oh yes they were. "You're killing grandma!" was the battle cry of the isolationists.

[umanwizard]

The lockdowns were justified in the name of old people, yes. That doesn't mean old people were the ones calling for them.

[lupusreal]

Appeals to grandma weren't targetted at baby boomers; their grandmas are long dead already. The baby boomers are the grandmas the rhetoric referenced.

[umanwizard]

I understand that. Regardless of who the rhetoric referenced, it was not propagated primarily by old people.

Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.

[chasd00]

> If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.

From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.

[Damogran6]

Hindsight being 20/20 and all that. This is clearly something you feel strongly about. I don't like people dying and societally, don't mind doing things that help other people not die.

Success was quite the moving target back then and to be cranky that two weeks lead to two years drastically underestimates the difficulty of the problem. Paxlovid, Boosters, knowledge on how to treat AND THE FACT that the ones that were susceptible are DEAD... (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...)

Your take on it is tone deaf and lacking in empathy.

[umanwizard]

Everyone dies, no matter what you or anyone else does or doesn't do.

[Damogran6]

Yes, but. It’s the time in-between that people generally want to maximize…and if they’re the kind of person I want to hang out with, they want to help other people maximize their short time as well.

[umanwizard]

Maximizing the quality of one's time on earth is not only done by maximizing its duration. Nobody, including the people you want to hang out with, optimizes for 100% longevity without caring about any other variable.

[lupusreal]

Tone deaf and lacking empathy is a good way to describe people in their 70s who want society shut down, children locked out of schools even, because they're terrified of their own mortality.

[Damogran6]

You’re not up on pandemic math, are you?

There’s emergent behavior that came out of well known scientific behavior in trying to contain a global phenomenon that we didn’t fully understand when it hit.