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You know, early on in 2020 I also heard that covid would be very bad for the elderly and, as someone who takes filial piety seriously, I locked myself down tight. Stayed at home for months, didn't see anyone, wore masks and gloves and disinfected everything all the time, was disappointed that the borders weren't closed. In summer, an tiny outdoor family party was organized under the conditions that everyone would maintain maximum security measures. Turns out that a few minutes in everyone reverted to old habits and dropped the masks and distancing, much to my surprise. And a few weeks later parties were cropping up all over the place with nary a thought to the supposedly dangerous disease running rampant, and I was the only one who still stuck to the interpretation that if the disease is as dangerous as we're told, we should behave accordingly. Not even the sick and elderly were noticeably careful anymore, and there I was excusing myself and going home after waving at people from a distance. And I caught covid anyways, so much for masks and disinfectants and distancing and isolation.
And then came the vaccines and everyone rejoiced and got jabbed and continued with life as before. I declined the jab because, as I thought, I'd already had the disease so what's the point. But oh boy, did I ever miss the point! Because from that point on as everyone enjoyed normal social and family life, they sure as hell gave me a wide berth. Uninvited to gatherings, told not to visit, regularly insulted for not getting vaccinated, treated as if I were not even one vector among many but the primary source of the disease. Told in no uncertain terms that only the unvaccinated were to blame for the pandemic in the first place, that it would all be over if not for them. Rejected by polite society, by friends and even by family, for not getting this fantastic vaccine and apparently being at fault for the whole mess. For all of 2021. And then came the long, lean winter of 21/22 in which not only all the previous still held, but the vaccine mandate hung over our heads as absolutely imminent. Politics were certain, media were certain, the public seemed certain, that soon everyone would either be vaxed or imprisoned or fined until they were either of the other two. It took politics a while to get the mandate passed, but in the meantime all kinds of measures against the unvaccinated were discussed and some of them enforced. Not measures against the virus, mind you, but purely against the unvaxed. I don't know what exactly prevented the mandate from coming to pass, but those were fun months, never knowing what the next rule against you would be, what form of social participation would be banned next, or which public and tax-funded institution would no longer admit those monstrous unvaccinateds, or whether they'd go through with forcing employers to fire the unvaccinated. I still don't know what exactly prevented the mandates in the end; I suppose politics got cold feet when it came to ruining the livelihoods of millions of people and/or imprisoning them. Public and media condemned them for not getting the job done, though.
And then everyone, vaxed or not, got covid. And survived with no lasting harm. And quietly shut up about everything in what should have been a very embarrassing silence but instead just turned out to be a giant memory hole.
As you can tell by the wall of text, I am still rather sore about the whole business. We often talk about social trust as in to what a degree can you trust individuals simply because they are of the same society as you. I think there was another kind of social trust, trust that society will not turn on you at the drop of a hat for no good reason, and that one died.
I think I have been much to gentle with my compatriots. I was too happy to be allowed back at the tables. I have neglected to spit bile in their faces and return their insults and make clear to them that in spite of my love for them, I detest them and will never again be able to muster the same kind of trust in them that I took for granted in better times. I shall resolve to do so from now on. My disappointment may not be infinite, but it is a deep dark well and I will draw from it extensively before it runs dry.
Why did I ever just let it slide? This is not to be let slid.
I'm sorry for you, but none of that happened to me. My parents and me have still managed to avoid getting Covid. I haven't, or haven't met anyone who, slagged off on people who weren't gonna get vaccinated. (Aside from "well that's weird.") I've personally always considered "getting infected" to be equivalent or better to vaccination. On the other hand, my workplace forced a coworker with children and asthma (vaccinated, but still) to come in to work (when we're well set up for wfh) when we've had several infections in the company, and also took the absolute minimum of legally required steps. So I have a somewhat different reference class for Covid skeptics.
I went to an ACX meetup while in the middle of Covid. We were all vaccinated, otherwise healthy, and sat outside with good minimum distance. This was also the only time i was around a bunch of people with the Covid Warn app in the wild. I was also at LWCW, we did mandatory Covid tests on arrival and every morning, which seems to have avoided spread at the event. Maybe your social group is just .. not good.
That may well be. We Germans like us a witch hunt every now and then.
How confident are you that
a) lockdowns kept your parents from getting infected and
b) an infection would have been lethal for at least one of them?
Well, as mentioned, there was a 10% in that age group, so combined 20%. Chance of infection is the big one I'm not sure about, because we were looking at an exponential; at early doubling rates, a few weeks delay in imposing a lockdown could make the difference between single-digit percentage and near certainty. It's also unclear though how much of an effect mandated lockdowns would have had, given that some groups of people locked down voluntarily. I don't have a good mental model for spread here that accounts for groups with divergent risk preferences; how many degrees of distance really are there in a population? If Germany is a small-world network on a weekly scale, then assuming nobody locked down at all you'd see total spread in something like five hops. That's not what we saw, but we also don't have a good control for it. On the other hand, my parents are very pre-internet and would definitely not have done daily purchases, food etc., online. (Otherwise I'd have been very blasé about it; they had basically no other in-person social contacts through the early pandemic.) If it got to a point where there was a solid (single-digit per visit) chance of infection when visiting a supermarket, they would almost certainly have got it.
At the current stage I'm resigned to them getting it eventually; lethality is still down and they're multiply-vaccinated, so I just have to accept the diceroll. No reason not to push it out though; our tools for dealing with severe infections only improve over time.
Sidenote: IMO the strongest argument for school lockdowns is that schooling connects lots of otherwise-separate social groups. Same for WFH. I'm imagining a model of "societal layers", where each layer is a class of contact groups. Typical layers are friends/family, schools, and the workplace. Given ingroup isolation, you'd expect an infection to bounce through societal layers of connection to reach otherwise-isolated subgroups. In-person meeting, classroom, family, workplace, in-person meeting, etc. I don't know how much effect cutting one of those layers would have, but I believe cutting all but one of them would slow spread massively. Ie. if you have online schooling and WFH, then in-person meetings alone don't matter much. If you mandate social distancing and shut down schools, you can relax WFH, etc. On the other hand, if you don't do WFH and don't do social distancing, you might as well keep schools open.
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