It's bizarre that there should be "sides" for how to deal with a public health issue. I can understand differing approaches, but it's the extreme polarisation that flabbergasts me.
There's a lot of criticism of places that kept schools closed for longer than was necessary, in retrospect. But we really didn't know whether it would always be the case that the risks to children were low. The virus could have mutated in a way that brought more risk. Or there could have been chronic effects that could only be seen after the passage of time. Given the infectiousness of the virus, it could have been so much worse.
I get the vaccine hesitancy. But I think a lot of people were not willing to accept that vaccination is not just about their own safety, but a collective safety issue.
And the next time this happens (which it probably will given the statistics), the US will probably handle it much better and the lock down will be less severe. I'm Korean American, and something like 10 years before covid, Korea had gone through an earlier pandemic (swine flu?), so when covid hit, it wasn't that big a deal. They already all knew what to do and the lock down wasn't as severe.
Yeah, our lockdown was overkill in many instances, but it was all so new to us. There's a good chance it'll be a lot better managed the next time.
So public policy should have reflected that, instead of going into counterproductive authoritarian clampdown mode. In my country the authorities literally switched overnight from threatening to jail parents who took their kids out of school to announcing mandatory school closures.
It's a political issue no matter how you look at it, and it was a very political issue at that, considering what the state (throughout the Western world and elsewhere too) proposed doing.
To paint it as merely a "public health issue" is doing people who don't agree a tremendous disservice, and it is very much part of the othering that has led us here. Please stop it.
Interesting phrase. "Engineer the pathogen".
Why do you believe a pandemic has sides?
Public health is not a technocratic field where there's always clearly one right answer. It presents itself as deciding on things that may hurt individuals but help the collective, and so it naturally attracts collectivists. In other words it's a political field, not a medical one. That then takes them into the realm of sides.
Certain methods of dealing with public health issues have historically been shown to be incredibly effective (e.g. vaccination, milk pasteurisation etc), so it's disconcerning when there's a political movement that pushes an agenda that is clearly based on fear and not rational evaluation of the issues. It seems to me that there's a push to make the poorest sections of society become less healthy and more vulnerable.
What’s sad today is how much of “sides” today is based on emotion not fact.
Very few facts in life are absolute.
In general, law enforcement is used to prevent harmful behaviour that disrupts society, so preventing theft is typically high up on the list. I think the people decrying shop lifters being targetted are highlighting the hypocrisy of societies that celebrate people who can steal huge amounts of money (e.g. not paying for work/services provided due to them being a large organisation) and yet demonise people who are struggling to survive and end up stealing food.
I was somewhat on the fence about mask mandates (I'm in the UK by the way) as I didn't think the evidence for masks being effective was particularly strong, but I had no issue with wearing a mask in public as it seemed like a sensible precaution that wouldn't cause me any harm. Then, we had social distancing laws introduced which were fairly draconian, but most people tried to observe them. The real kicker was when Boris Johnson and his cronies were caught not following the laws that he himself had introduced.
It was simple. People without ethical limits seen their opening to weaponize fear and discomfort ... and succeeded.
weaponize fear and discomfort = get close to others (masked) in public and breathe in front of them
I don't think that applies if one of the sides is using rational arguments and statistics
That's rich. People who want raw milk are sociopaths? Etc? Once again we have name-calling as a way to shut down debate. Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you, and I bet you have done just that. These false equivalences and exaggerations are in fact incitements to violence. You and all who do this should be ashamed of yourselves.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-...
So yeah, I do see your point in the lockdowns were probably unnecessary, but as others have mentioned, pandemics were new to the US at the time, and we didn't have the knowledge and procedures on how to best deal with it. Yeah, we did probably go overboard, but what happened is understandable given how deadly Covid was.
We know now that social distancing and masks (for those that are willing) would probably have been enough, as other countries used to pandemics already know, like South Korea.
2. Divided attitudes with regard to the locus of issues around Covid-19, and public policies, are far from exclusive to the USA.
I can understand people wanting raw milk and that's fair enough as it goes, but selling it or providing it to others is risking their health to some degree - this is shown by the relatively high level of people falling seriously ill from drinking raw milk - this is due to the high level of bacteria that is often found in it. If someone does care about the health of others, but believes that raw milk is safe to consume, then it's more a case of ignorance than sociopathy.
> Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you
You're out of order with that comment.
I agree - stats are a tool to try to figure out non-obvious links and trends to figure out what is actually happening. They can certainly be distorted (see mainstream media), but we shouldn't allow bad actors to prevent us making use of probably the best way to investigate population level effects.