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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2905 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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COVID lockdowns were a bust, but even if they'd curbed the disease, I'm unsure if it was worth it if it pissed off tens of millions of people in the States to the point that even basic medical knowledge became untrustworthy.

...which was repeatedly stated at the start of the pandemic by people who were later denounced as COVID deniers and largely memory-holed since then.

(I'd love to give references, but for the obvious problem with this.)

I don't necessarily disbelieve you. But the level of justification for lockdowns at Day Zero, 30, 90 and 365 varied significantly.

Remember that in the very early days, we genuinely weren't sure of COVID's CFR, if there's a disease that's spreading like wildfire and you aren't sure it won't kill tens or hundreds of millions, then I think an initial lockdown is sensible. Once it becomes clear that it's nowhere as bad as it was thought, and the primary risk was for old and sick people, then lockdowns should have been lifted. I don't think that this was obvious until several months in, and I was doing my best to stay abreast. There was genuine terror that I and other doctors could catch it, and that it had a very real chance of killing us. I think around 3 months in, I was personally feeling safer, but still worried about spreading it to the elderly members of my family, and still was right up till vaccines became available.

We knew very early from cases like the Diamond Princess what we were likely looking at. Possibly you could argue it was until May 2020, when we had CFR data out of New York that showed kids how severe the age stratification of impact was.

In addition, there was functionally speaking zero support for the kind of lockdowns we saw in Medical Literature. The famous pandemic influenza response paper (written by Donald Henderson - who led parts of the smallpox eradication effort) mentioned how important it was to try to keep life functioning as normally as possible. I still don't understand where the policy came from - it seems like we saw China do it, saw a bunch of people die in NY due to doctors over-ventilating (I think that was a well-intentioned mistake) and Cuomo shoving people back into Nursing homes (honestly, might also have been a well-intentioned mistake), and everybody panicked.

Less charitably, bureaucrats got high on their own supply of people listening to them/convinced themselves they could stop all disease spread (Fauci quite obviously embraced his narcissistic side).

I personally remember my first visit to a new PCP post COVID. Within 10 minutes he was recommending I get a COVID booster, he did not ask if I'd had COVID recently, how my reaction to previous shots had been (heavy acute symptoms after my 2nd shot), or whether the elevated risk as a young male was worth it, it was just "here's the recommendation I will now parrot to you unthinkingly".

I have not been back.

Once it becomes clear that it's nowhere as bad as it was thought, and the primary risk was for old and sick people, then lockdowns should have been lifted

The problem there is that old people (and the sick as a subset of old) are an extremely powerful constituency in the West. They proceeded to [ab]use that power to carve out a bunch of advantages for themselves at everyone else's expense; hence the hysteria continuing until it was clear the people paying for it had had enough of their bullshit.

I don't necessarily disbelieve you.

Sidenote: this comes across as patronizing.

If this is not your intent, I suggest attempting to rephrase to better communicate in future.
If this is indeed your intent, I may as well stop the conversation now, as there can be no additional learnings.

Would you prefer I say that I don't necessarily not believe you? That sounds more awkward to me, but I hope you can see what I meant.

I think an initial plea of "this is looking like it could be a pandemic: please restrict social contact", along with the governmental support to allow people to do so*, would have been a very good idea and would have been sensible in such a case. This is not the same as a government-enforced lockdown, especially one as hamfistedly done as COVID was.

In some ways this is less effective than an outright lockdown; this is far less likely to cause widespread backlash.

Of course, it's now in many ways a moot point. That credibility was burnt; this is close enough that it was caught in the backlash and also wouldn't be feasible now.

[* e.g. government-financed no-questions-asked refunds for travel, decrees that workers must be able to take sick days, vacation, or leave without retaliation for the next X days, that sort of thing. I am overall very much against Big Government, but as long as we're already taking the downsides...]

Once it becomes clear that it's nowhere as bad as it was thought, and the primary risk was for old and sick people, then lockdowns should have been lifted. I don't think that this was obvious until several months in, and I was doing my best to stay abreast.

I think the primary place our calculations here differ is mine includes the time lost in lockdown in the downside. If you lock people up for a hundred man-years to save one person, you haven't actually gained much of anything.

This pushes the tipping point earlier (assuming lockdowns in the first place).

My bigger issue here is that I've heard a growing amount of attempted retroactive changes of the narrative, of the same people who were proclaiming on day 90 that LOCKDOWNS MUST CONTINUE who are now backing off and attempting to say they were saying otherwise on day 90.

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