[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.

[twoodfin]

This is, incidentally, why experts are important.

Agree, but we don't live in a technocracy—or at least we usually don't.

If the government had widely publicized the (imperfect, of course) thinking of experts and allowed informed citizens to make their own tradeoffs, I don't think anyone would have complained. That's how our system works, even when there are negative externalities to some "undesirable" behaviors. And if those externalities are so undesirable (second-hand smoke, say) as to restrict them, our democratic representatives pass laws to do so.

Covid wasn't like that. Suddenly every governor & city manager had near-dictatorial "emergency" powers to implement whatever restrictions fit with the risk/reward tradeoffs of whatever experts happened to have their ear. Some of these experts were right, some of them were wrong.

I guess the question is whether Covid was so terrible a threat as to demand that kind of subjugation to authority. I'm not an expert, but I am a voter, and I am fine looking back and saying with hindsight, "No, the use of those powers was in excess of what was reasonable, even given what was known (or not) at the time"—and voting accordingly.

[ceejayoz]

> If the government had widely publicized the (imperfect, of course) thinking of experts and allowed informed citizens to make their own tradeoffs, I don't think anyone would have complained.

They did that, widely. The alcohol withdrawal thing was all over; that's how I know about it. (Googling it finds articles all over, in both national and local news outlets. ChatGPT will also happily explain it.) They can't force people to listen, though, let alone comprehend.

> I guess the question is whether Covid was so terrible a threat as to demand that kind of subjugation to authority.

One must be careful not to inject too much hindsight into that assessment.