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America Has Decided It Went Overboard on Covid-19
The idea that pandemic response went too far is no longer confined to the marginshttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/opinion/covid-19-pandemic-masks-china.html
https://archive.is/phiHj
In both the United States and Britain, there is suddenly a front-and-center debate about the very earliest days of the pandemic and how each country responded. Did mitigation measures imposed in the spring of 2020, amid great anxiety and uncertainty, actually work? And considering the costs, were they worth it?
In the United States, that conversation was precipitated by a Department of Energy leak about Covid-19’s origins and by a flood of hearings initiated by the Republican House majority into those origins and the American response: the impacts of shelter-in-place guidance and school closures, vaccine development and mask guidance, and more. In Britain, it was precipitated by a leak of more than 100,000 ready-for-the-tabloids WhatsApp messages between Matt Hancock, the secretary of state for health and social care for the first 15 months of the pandemic, and other senior figures of the British government, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who at one point, misreading the number of decimal places in a fatality-rate estimate, appeared to conclude that Covid was only 1/100th as deadly as it was. “If you are over 65 your risk of dying from Covid is probably as big as your risk of falling down stairs,” Johnson wrote to his team in August 2020. “And we don’t stop older people from using stairs. What do you think?”
It’s telling that the British scandal centers on Hancock, who reached the highest levels of public notoriety when he was caught disobeying his own social-distancing orders to visit his aide with whom he was having an extramarital affair. It’s also telling that the scandal has come about because the ghostwriter Hancock hired to help him cash in on that infamy, herself apparently a lockdown skeptic, eventually turned on him and, shortly after the book’s publication, sent the messages to The Daily Telegraph. That’s because, for much of the pandemic in England, the country’s leaders came under fire for incompetence to some degree but especially for their hypocrisy. (Johnson’s own top adviser Dominic Cummings kept memorably comparing him to an out-of-control shopping cart, but he was forced to ultimately resign over fallout from parties held during periods of social distancing.)
By contrast, to the extent Americans vilified their leaders over the course of the pandemic, it was not primarily for hypocrisy (remember Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry dinner party?) but for harshness. In Britain, the WhatsApp leak has been narrativized by the British press as a cartoon of feckless leadership. In the United States, the equivalent leak was the “Twitter files,” when internal company deliberations over pandemic messaging were examined by contrarian quasi-journalists deputized by Elon Musk shortly after his takeover of the company. The rhetorical emphasis was to hype public health guidance as near-totalitarian, as though those pursuing restrictions regarded severity as something like an ideological end of its own.
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26 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/12/opinion/pandemic-disease-x-simulation.html
https://archive.is/uPRPH
It’s been three years since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and yet many aspects of how to best respond to a novel virus remain unsettled or fiercely debated. The next currently unknown virus that could cause a pandemic — what the World Health Organization calls “Disease X” — may be different from Covid, requiring a different set of tools and a different level of response. As Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, outlines in a guest essay, public health leaders sometimes participate in simulations where they are asked to make decisions based on limited information about Disease X, as they would at the beginning of any pandemic.
We asked a group of experts to take part in a scaled-down Disease X simulation to show readers the diversity in views on how to best respond to pandemic threats — quickly, with little detail, as they would likely have to in a real-world situation. We gave the experts a few parameters, and asked them to briefly address specific questions they may be asked by local leaders if such a virus were to emerge and spread in their communities. As you’ll see, not everyone agrees. We hope to show that experts with policy-making experience and similar goals can come to different conclusions and advise different strategies.
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https://archive.is/uPRPH
It’s been three years since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and yet many aspects of how to best respond to a novel virus remain unsettled or fiercely debated. The next currently unknown virus that could cause a pandemic — what the World Health Organization calls “Disease X” — may be different from Covid, requiring a different set of tools and a different level of response. As Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, outlines in a guest essay, public health leaders sometimes participate in simulations where they are asked to make decisions based on limited information about Disease X, as they would at the beginning of any pandemic.
We asked a group of experts to take part in a scaled-down Disease X simulation to show readers the diversity in views on how to best respond to pandemic threats — quickly, with little detail, as they would likely have to in a real-world situation. We gave the experts a few parameters, and asked them to briefly address specific questions they may be asked by local leaders if such a virus were to emerge and spread in their communities. As you’ll see, not everyone agrees. We hope to show that experts with policy-making experience and similar goals can come to different conclusions and advise different strategies.
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But yeah, attempts to reduce transmission when there were no effective vaccines available yet were the REAL problem. 
People are so fucking stupid.
Great response. 
Damn the dead and full speed ahead. If Granny can't keep up, cut her loose.
God, guns and gummies*; my greed over your need.
Maddening. 
*Gummies, worms-bears-cbd, representing our gluttonous consumption mindsets
