zlacker

Hmm, the number found online is that Covid killed 1.2 million in the US, so guessing the shutdown and vaccines probably saved millions. But your take is different. Guessing you disagree with the the 1.2m deaths figure? (not trying to be pushy, just curious on your take)

>>comput+(OP)
The 1.2m number is what’s reported, but whether shutdowns and mandates prevented multiples of that is something we can’t actually prove. What we do know is that shutting the country down caused deep economic, educational, and mental-health damage that will take decades to unwind.

>>firest+p
We had no idea what we were dealing with. It was unprecedented. People were doing the best they could. All the anger didn't help.

>>Grapho+J2
I’m not sure it’s right to say we didn’t know what to do. Beaches and playgrounds were closed even though the risk of outdoor spread on surfaces was minimal. Those kinds of choices made the shutdown damage worse without clear public health benefit. We had the science to tell us that viruses don’t survive on beach surfaces for example

>>firest+p
Would you, personally, be willing to die to save the economy? Or is your expectation that others would die to save the economy for you? The opposite end of completely unrestrained COVID spread could've been the Spanish Flu, which decimated and destroyed entire areas.

>>fzeror+n4
It’s not about letting people die. The issue is that broad shutdowns caused massive long-term harm, and targeted protection would have been a better balance.

>>firest+f3
It was frustrating to have some of the outdoor ban stuff at a point when it was pretty clear that things were safe in highly ventilated environments. But in my opinion, that was relatively harmless compared to the backlash against common sense precautions, like properly fit N95 masks when sharing enclosed space.

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.

>>firest+p
I don't disagree with you, but the Spanish Flu killed 50 million. That's twice as much as died in WWI. Seems like it was, overall, a reasonable trade off, to save possibly tens of millions, the world went into a protective state.

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.

>>firest+p
You can vaguely understand it by looking at hospitals overwhelmed by mass casualty events and then imagine it happening over the course of a year.

>>Grapho+J2
> We had no idea what we were dealing with. It was unprecedented. People were doing the best they could.

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.

>>comput+(OP)
Some would argue that the deaths by covid are the same as every year deaths by other pulmonary infectious diseases. I've read a ton of books and analysis done by statisticians. So I doubt we should have went crazy like we did.

>>engint+FQ
Interesting. Just looked into it and it seems like there are some researchers who estimate the lockdowns saved a lot of lives, but the economic toll and subsequent deaths from this toll may not have been worth it (as you mentioned). But they also said that now, "we have more tools to battle the virus. Vaccines and therapeutics are available, as are other mitigation measures." Implying we wouldn't have to do lockdowns in future pandemics.

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.