[ceejayoz]

We do a lot of risk/reward balancing in life. Maybe we can discuss specific cases, if you like, but "I want to whine about public health restrictions" and "someone got murdered by the state" perhaps have different risk/reward profiles.

We know ventilation matters. Public health officials flubbed this one pretty reliably; schools and doctors' offices should've had HEPA filters in every room instead of clorox wiping everything obsessively. Outdoor protests, in hindsight (and of either kind), were a nothingburger for COVID spread.

[twoodfin]

“I want my father to have a proper funeral with his family.”

“I want to visit my aunt in her nursing home.”

“I’d like to do some gardening in my Michigan backyard.”

The issue wasn’t risk/reward tradeoffs, it was who was allowed to make them and who was not.

[ceejayoz]

> I want my father to have a proper funeral with his family.”

Large indoor gathering.

> “I want to visit my aunt in her nursing home.”

Indoors and high risk population.

> “I’d like to do some gardening in my Michigan backyard.”

When was this banned?

[twoodfin]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2020/04/16/michigan...

It’s nice that you have all the answers when it comes to risk/reward tradeoffs. Trust the Science!

[ceejayoz]

As suspected, no such ban. You were able to work in your garden at will. And as the article notes, almost immediately reversed.

A note about this:

> Curiously, the state’s list of “not necessary” items doesn’t include lottery tickets and liquor, which stores can continue to sell.

Alcohol withdrawal is deadly. No one needed a bunch of extra ICU cases. (I can’t speak to the lottery. I wonder if there’s a legal issue there, though.)

[twoodfin]

How in the world are you able to “just so” all this stuff? What are the principles or theories behind how these decisions were made?

Boy at the time they seemed panicky and capricious. Wrong?

[ceejayoz]

> How in the world are you able to “just so” all this stuff?

I have a memory. (And my wife used to be an ICU nurse, in this particular case.)

https://www.uchealth.org/today/alcohol-withdrawal-in-hospita...

"For severe alcohol-withdrawal cases, hospitals often respond with heavy sedation, sometimes to the extent that the patient has to breathe through a tube on a ventilator."

Surely you can see how "more patients in ICU needing vents" would've been a problem?

(This is, incidentally, why experts are important. Liquor stores being essential businesses doesn't make sense to laypeople. Here, for example, is an article from April 2020 attempting to explain it; this info was out there! https://www.allrecipes.com/article/why-are-liquor-stores-con... But people prefer the uninformed dunk.)

> Boy at the time they seemed panicky and capricious. Wrong?

As Donald Rumsfeld once got mocked for saying, there are known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. There were a lot of unknown-unknowns at the start of COVID. Sometimes they absolutely missed the mark. I'm still mad about them not prioritizing ventilation and better masks than cloth. But it was a period of mayhem.

[Der_Einzige]

Yup yup yup! The lack of investment in air purifiers/ literally moving classes outside in warm areas continues to show me that most of America is painfully stupid about air quality.

To this day, Americans hatred of air purification is so strong that they will actively spread FUD about how “stronger filters in your furnace filter are bad cus it’s not supposed to filter air and it’ll make your machine work harder”. As it turns out, an enormous amount of poor air quality comes from all kinds of heaters.

Americans deserved to reap what they sowed here. I lost a whole lot of my sympathy/empathy for my countryman due to this. I regret that I didn’t switch to one-way masks as a way to further revel in the low trust of my society.

[hunterpayne]

"someone got murdered by the state"

Notice how people that complained about this never ever quoted any stats? That's because its absurdly rare in practice. But the DFP policies did have a measurable impact. In Oakland alone, an extra (as in above the average for Oakland) 2500 or so murders have occured since DFP policies went into practice. So as someone who lived in Oakland, I want to you hear this. You are responsible for killing thousands because you didn't bother to look at the stats for violent crime. I literally saw people die on the street for the first time in my life because of you. 1000s, just in Oakland. That's you...you are responsible for that. I want you to know that.

[ceejayoz]

> That's you...you are responsible for that. I want you to know that.

Nah.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/16/oakland-homi...

"But as Trump was making these comments, Oakland was in the midst of a historic drop in homicides. The Bay Area city ended 2025 with 67 people killed, according to data from the Oakland police department, half of its 2021 high of 134."

Where is this 2500 murders thing coming from?

Can you point to it on the 1960-2025 chart? https://imgur.com/a/qCwbU9z