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The vaccines were widely available by early to mid 2021, and yet hysteria continued in most western countries until everyone actually got Covid in January 2022 thanks to Omicron.
I don't doubt that vaccines saved lives in 2021, but they didn't stop the spread or end the pandemic.
Omicron ended the pandemic.
While I agree that Omicron as an event, i.e. the infection wave around January 2022, was the end of any real mainstream concern about COVID, there's pretty good reason to believe the apparent increased transmissibility of Omicron was an illusion: there's no significant differences in transmissibility between COVID variants (the technical term in that paper is "SAR" for "Secondary Attack Rate").
In other words, we would have seen a much smaller wave in the winter of 2021-2022 if everyone acted like they did in the winter of 2020-2021 (when vaccines were new enough that only the highest priority/luckiest had gotten them), but they didn't. Probably due to people worrying less about being careful due to vaccines, although probably also a good amount of people feeling like they had had enough of isolating after several months.
Interesting and probably true. If we just "let it rip" it's likely we would have ended with fewer overall deaths as the disease would have quickly exhausted itself. The Omicron event would have happened in March 2020 instead of January 2022.
Obviously, in this counterfactual, the acute phase would have been awful. Hospitals would have been overrun, but it's unclear how much lifesaving care was happening anyway. Irresponsible use of ventilators definitely killed lots of people who would have survived otherwise.
In nearly every country, the damage caused by the Covid response was worse than the disease itself. China gets an F. Australia gets a D-. Sweden did it best, but I think that's only because there wasn't a "Super Sweden" that simply ignored the disease completely. (Maybe some African countries fit that bill due to lack of state capacity).
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I can only relate my experience of what happened in the UK, as that's where I was living at the time, but fwiw this isn't really how things played out there. Once we reached mid-2021 all restrictions were lifted and people broadly went back to living their lives normally. There was some debate about whether to shut things down again due to Omicron, but this ended up not happening.
Didn't the UK have some sort of "Freedom Day" and then totally renege on it?
Yep, that's what people were colloquially (and maybe even officially, I don't remember) calling the day all restrictions were set to be lifted. I don't recall any limitations being re-imposed after that. I admit that for a while if you tested positive for covid you were still required to self-isolate for 10-14 days, but I wouldn't call that hysteria.
Prominent health officials were arguing for re-establishing some level of restrictions around the time of the Omicron variant but Boris Johnson overrode them on that.
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It depends on how you define hysteria. Most left-leaning people in my neck of the woods were pretty much done worrying about COVID as soon as they were fully vaccinated. There was still some residual level of concern, which I will agree largely ended with Omicron, but by Memorial Day 2021 very few people were doing anything beyond possibly masking up in busy areas.
I see outdoor maskies every day, and they almost always have leftist signifiers.
Mask requirements for businesses didn't end in my city until...well, I got so frustrated that I left for six months in January 2022. When I came back in 2023, they were finally gone.
I had predicted this at the beginning of the pandemic; people don't generally understand that even the yearly flu vaccine is ~70% effective. By the time they get a vaccine, they'll be so wound up and terrified that it won't be good enough; like a neurotic, there is no threshold of proof that will make the anxiety go away.
I remember the day the CDC officially ended the pandemic, a customer at work said it wasn't over for him. Gay. Corpo Tech job.
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Truckers (very memorably) were (newly!) banned from crossing the Canada-US border in early 2022 without proof of vaccination -- whether this was hysterical or not is I suppose something we could discuss, but I don't see how it could be because of a thing that was not 'a going concern'?
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I live in a blue state in the US. My kid graduated from high school in 2021. There was still a ton of covid hysteria during that time and we were supposed to be thankful the school allowed an outdoor graduation ceremony. (No prom. No other activities. Just junior and senior year in her room. No surprise that southern colleges were popular among her cohort and remain so now. Or that her cohort might be even more distrustful of authority than their gen x parents.) Her classmates that went to North Eastern colleges spent their freshman year (21-22) still masking, some still with predominantly virtual schooling. This year, my employer still wanted people with covid to report it to their hotline, even if we were full time working from home. A lot of people are still giving every appearance of still worrying a great deal about covid.
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Mask mandates remained in place. Mask mandates are hysteria.
I don’t know why people want to retcon what happened. Many doctoral theses should be written on this phenomenon
Because academia doesn't want to accept that they were the ones mostly responsible for going full Nazi.
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It’s amazing how only two years later people are re writing history.
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