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The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide. Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other. Unfortunately, that bifurcation closely corresponds to our political parties. It also didn’t help that the public health administration is seemingly tightly aligned with the Democratic Party. Covid functioned more like a mass shooting in the realm of the Culture War.
Accountability literally anywhere in government would be great…
There is no particular reason to think that urban policies worked in urban areas either.
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I agree that it was urban vs rural. But the biggest difference was in the effects of pretty standard policies. It was painfully obvious that most of the CDC had no idea how the rural economy works. Shutting down an office and going remote is no big deal. Those office workers didn’t lose their jobs, the owners of those companies were in no danger of losing their businesses. It frankly mattered so little that most office workers are fighting tooth and nail to not go back to the office. In rural areas, the exact same restrictions were absolutely devastating. If you worked in a factory, a small business store, a restaurant, a construction company, you got a layoff. If you owned those kinds of businesses, you had bills pilling up at a time when it was illegal to do business. At the same time, big businesses doing the same thing could often poach your customers by simply being allowed to do business. If you needed something, you went to Amazon or Walmart or Target, nobody else was open for business. And the cruelest part was that the owners of those businesses were basically forced to watch and forced to let it happen.
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No, the problem with our Covid response was that it was damn stupid and full of lies, not in the sense of being mistaken but in the sense of being knowably false and told for political purposes.
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Problem with our COVID response is it was dumb and weaponized for politics and self-satisfaction. I would say it was just politics but I also think a lot of people thought they were the “good” people for being safe. It wasn’t just a rural/urban divide.
Things like 6 boosters for 20 something’s was dumb regardless of side. And over 50 being completely anti-vaxx regardless of side was dumb. Or students masking at Stanford while riding a bike was just dumb.
There were probably some policies that made more sense in urban areas like less in-person during waves to protect hospitals but the vast majority of the issues seem to me like one side was just being dumb regardless of density of their community.
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Agreed. But the problem is that, as identified by Max Weber, a hallmark of modernity is rationalization, and the resulting bureaucratization, which serves incredibly well to diffusion of responsibility and a "rule of no one" in which nobody in government is ever accountable.
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