noxiousdog wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 8:32 am
Humans have lived with death and disease since humans were humans, and our brains are not equipped to evaluate probability. It isn't surprising to me that we are giving up.
Indeed.
Ben Thompson's
piece this am over at Stratechery is interesting, if turn-over-the-table frustrating. Ben's pieces are generally focused more directly on tech, but this one's an interesting comparison between the current free speech/Sec 230 'debate' and COVID policy.
I'm sure this will calm Smoove down a lot. I can't really summarize the thing with a few pull quotes, but I'll try--focusing on the COVID side. I would definitely read the full piece before responding, though.
One of the common responses to China’s draconian efforts to control COVID’s spread (which, notably, do not include forced vaccination, or the use of Western vaccines), is that it doesn’t work: SARS-CoV-2, particularly the Omicron variant, is simply too viral. It’s worth pointing out that this response is incorrect: China not only eventually controlled the Wuhan outbreak, and not only kept SARS-CoV-2 out for most of 2021, but also ultimately controlled the Shanghai outbreak as well. The fact there were only 5 community cases over the weekend is proof that China’s approach works!
What I think people saying this mean is something different: either they believe the trade-offs entailed in this effort are not worth it, or they simply can’t imagine a government locking people in their homes for months, hauling citizens off to centralized quarantine, separating parents and children, entering and spraying their homes, and killing their pets. I suspect the latter is more common, at least amongst most Westerners: people are so used to a baseline of individual freedom and autonomy that the very possibility of the reality of COVID in China simply does not compute.
...
I am being, as best as I can, impartial about the choices here: the important takeaway is not simply that China’s approach did in fact work to arrest the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but also that it was the only approach that worked; even Taiwan’s approach, which was far more stringent than any Western country would tolerate, eventually failed. Of course there were benefits, particularly in terms of getting time to administer vaccines, but it’s certainly worth wondering if it was all worth it.
The opposite side of the spectrum were areas of America that, after enduring a few months of (very) soft lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, were mostly open from the summer of 2020 on; I have friends in parts of Wisconsin, for example, whose kids have been in school since the fall of 2020. The price of this approach was far more deaths, particularly amongst the elderly who have always been at far higher risk: over 1 million Americans have died of COVID.
This isn’t the complete COVID story, though, and not simply because there can be no honest accounting of the pandemic until it finally sweeps China; the most effective vaccines in the world were developed in the West, and the U.S. produced and distributed the largest number of them. How many lives were saved, and how much economic upheaval — which isn’t about simply dollars and cents, but people’s livelihoods, sense of worth, and even sanity — was avoided or reduced because of vaccines? That must be recorded in the ledger as well, and in this accounting the West comes out looking far stronger.
...
To further expand on this point: if people in the West would not accept truly strict lockdowns, then they certainly wouldn’t accept centralized quarantine (which didn’t work), which means they absolutely wouldn’t accept forced testing and the inability to leave your house for months. Ergo, people in the West would never accept the reality of zero-COVID, which is why it makes sense to go in the opposite direction: open up, and forgo the massive costs of zero-COVID as well. Don’t get stuck in the middle, enduring the worst outcomes of both.
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COVID, alas, seems to have been a worst case scenario in terms of both points: we suffered the aforementioned economic, socio-political, and development damage associated with strict control, while controlling nothing; meanwhile private platforms went overboard in controlling information, and ended up only deepening the suspicion of skeptics about COVID and its vaccines, leading to many more deaths, but also increased skepticism about vaccines generally.
A bit too much black/white for me (was buying time to roll out vaccines worth it? Of course it was!), but the end point hits hard--
since we are not going to succeed in any significant way at containing COVID on a population level here in the US from this point onward, why advocate for restrictions at this point? What is the cost/benefit analysis that leads one to recommend instituting a requirement that will bring a social/economic cost when it is guaranteed that it will not be implemented well enough to succeed at its stated goal? In other words, what is the rationale that leads to folks advocating for anything but a jab and move on with normal life approach?
For me, that can't happen until we've had the under-5 vaccine available long enough for folks to reach fully-vaxxed status. But after that? I admit that as frustrating as it is for me to admit, I don't think I can make the case for trying (on a pop level; I'll still N95 my ass in crowded areas for the foreseeable future, thankyouverymuch).
RunningMn9 wrote: Sun Jun 12, 2022 1:09 pmWhatever is going to happen is going to happen. There’s nothing we are going to do to stop it. You don’t have to like it or accept it, but it’s what’s happening.
LawBeefaroni wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 10:06 am
Had to help my parents move over the weekend. I can tell you that South Bend/Indiana is not giving any fucks at all. I saw zero masks the entire time I was there. Huge graduation parties were happening everywhere and indoor venues were packed.
Precisely this--we can continue telling people to do things that they won't do well enough to make a significant difference. In the process, we'll continue to erode public trust in and will to follow institutions developing this guidance. Or we can accept reality as it is rather than as we'd like it to be, and perhaps let some of that trust and willpower regenerate in time for the next public health crisis.
(Which sounds nuts to me on multiple levels--clearly this crisis is nowhere near over, and clearly a significant chunk of the population will never again put public health over private convenience. Maybe we're just fucked.)
