[XTXinverseXTY]

Friedman's thermostat

Analyst visits his lumberjack cousin one Christmas at his cabin. Notices the cousin puts an amount of fire in the fireplace, which is correlated with the outside temperature, while the inside temperature remains constant (uncorrelated with firewood or outdoor temperature). Analyst wonders what his cousin is wasting all his wood for.

http://bactra.org/weblog/1178.html

[roenxi]

The thing is if we quiz Friedman's cousin he can justify his actions, we can test his beliefs and then deduce that he is acting in a reasonable way.

Whereas with COVID we don't have that. Particularly since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily so the compulsory aspects are quite hard to justify. Eg, if a fellow want to live as a hermit they can just do that. The government doesn't need to shut down big chunks of the economy for them to go into seclusion.

And then there were all those vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers. Turns out they didn't. Without that, the justification for a mandate is flimsy even assuming that there is good medical evidence.

The medical establishment should have been championing against these measures and, charitably assuming they were, they really weren't visible enough in their opposition. I can imagine a lot of voters in the US would be asking "why do we fund these people?".

[jltsiren]

There is a similar justified mechanical model with vaccinations. A toy version is that vaccinated people are X% less likely to get infected and Y% less effective at spreading the disease if they get infected. If compliance with vaccination policies and other mitigation measures is at least Z%, then the outbreak will be contained before most people get infected.

With novel diseases, it's usually impossible to have accurate enough estimates of the numerical parameters in advance to determine if lockdowns and vaccine mandates are going to work. And the compliance rate is fundamentally political. A few key individuals, such as politicians and judges, can have an outsized effect on it. Containment that would have worked otherwise may fail due to the actions of those individuals.

[JumpCrisscross]

> since the controls in place were almost all things that people could have done voluntarily

The useful part of quarantines was to protect hospital capacity. We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances. (I think we should. Particularly with vaccines. Modelled off the Arizona stupid motorist law.)

> vaccine mandates where people were just spreading plain misinformation that they would have an impact on transmission numbers

Do you have a medical source that claimed this? It seemed to mostly be right wingers who didn’t understand the polio vaccine was also non-sterilising. (In some forms, negatively so.)

[roenxi]

> Do you have a medical source that claimed this?

No, I just observed that everyone I know got vaccinated, then got COVID.

But if you want me to throw a PDF at you, "the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people" & "Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Which matches pretty closely what I see in real life. Before vaccinations, everyone was going to get COVID. After vaccinations, everyone ... got COVID. No change in transmission profile.

> We don’t have a form one can sign that says you get to take risks but are put at the back of the line for healthcare access under certain circumstances.

Yes, people should be able to take responsibility for their own health rather than have the economy burned down around their ears. Maybe the CDC should have been pointing that out? Something COVID-like is going to happen in the future, it isn't that unusual an event. A respiratory pandemic is probably a 1:50, 1:20 year style event given how interconnected the world is now.

[triceratops]

If it's worth anything, my family and I got vaccinated and boosted and none of us got Covid.

Or at least, we never tested positive, and had no mysterious flu-like ailments that struck us down for days or weeks. Either we were exceptionally lucky, or the vaccine worked.

[JumpCrisscross]

As you seem to imply, Covid is a new class signifier. The socioeconomic divide in this incidence is my point. (Years ago we saw the same with football concussions. Everyone wanted a college-football intern. Less so someone on the full-time cost roll.)