531–540 of 695 posts
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Tell that to the small businesses that were destroyed because of “two weeks to slow the spread” and the families that relied on them. They passionately hate these leaders.
Nobody guarantees small businesses the right to exist. Sure nobody can plan for a pandemic but the government’s responsibility is to society at large, not the plight of small business owners.
This pandemic is very strange mental-wise, all my doctors note that. The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor, but in my country it's called "an advisory self-isolation" and everyone basically lives their life like before, except wearing masks in public places and mandatory vaccination to visit a mall or a restaurant (also "manageable"). I'm not a social person (age almost 40), an…
>> The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor The US never really locked down after maybe the first two or three week period. The “lockdowns” we had were mostly performative and not really enforced. This is in huge contrast to some cities in Australia for example, where lockdowns were both prolonged (lasting months) and those violating them were smacked down consistently.
Absolute bullshit. Everything in NYC was closed for three months; bars, restaurants, and schools were closed for much longer than that.
This reporting doesn't make clear that the increase was almost entirely among girls. There was little change for boys. > There was a 22.3 percent spike in ER trips for potential suicides by children aged 12 to 17 in summer 2020 compared to 2019. > The data was particularly alarming among among girls aged 12 to 17. Between Feb. 21 and March 20 this year, emergency department visits for potential suicide attempts were…
I suspect one reason are online games. Boys are more likely to play them and in lockdown, they were the one of few socialization available. It does not matter what are reasons for disparity. But, the boys were more likely to continue some unchanged socialization ad they had before. They already had established groups to play with and so on.
I promise you kids have been forming groups and have had feelings of exclusion that existed well before online games. The root cause here wouldn’t be online games in of themselves.
The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be. The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There has been little or no consideration of their impact on physical health, mental health, education, business, employment, worship. It has been as if COVID was the only risk and the only negative, and any other matter was necessarily secondary. To even mention these…
> The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be. As with many things, the US response combined all the worst parts of the left's reaction to the pandemic with all the worst aspects of the right's. We had ham-fisted lockdowns (of dubious effectiveness) that destroyed small business and harmed mental health while simultaneously we had a right-wing crackpot antivaccination movement…
It is easy to blame antivaxxers. Could you however name a few countries where vaccine herd immunity was achieved?
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Then the correct response should have been for experts to say they didn’t know, instead of saying the lockdowns were the solution. And then shouting for months that any failures were due to noncompliance. And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ahead, here’s some protections. Don’t want to lock down? Your body your choice.
> Then the correct response should have been for experts to say they didn’t know, instead of saying the lockdowns were the solution. That kind of is why they said: that lockdowns were about the only reliable tool until we understood more, built out testing infrastructure, track and trace etc… it’s just that the government then didn’t do any of that. > And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ah…
There were people and even doctors back then saying they didn’t know it was a good idea.
There were people back then worried about how it would affect education, suicide attempts (this article!), and businesses, and whether the cure was worse than the problem.
These people were not allowed to speak, in policies or on television. If they spoke on social media, say they want people to die and they are heartless. Once the vaccine comes out, lump them in with the anti-vaxxers.
The cure was worse than the problem. Except we got screwed and the problem remains.
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Australia has successfully navigated to my no-go list by their insanity. The lack of habeous corpus is very alarming as a tourist. The lack of rule of law it terribly frightening when that is all you can rely on if shit goes sideways on a trip. Australia has shown they are the same level as the Middle East, e.g. Iran and Afghanistan.
Yeah it is basically the same as Afghanistan over here mate, you wouldn't like it.
As long as your warlord likes you, your good.
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That’s still applying hindsight logic, though. At the start of the pandemic we didn’t know enough about the virus to know what was and was not necessary. Your family applied their skepticism of government to speculate that the lockdown would be a long one. That speculation would turn out to be correct but unless you’re in a family of epidemiologists they weren’t correct because they understood the virus better than a…
Then the correct response should have been for experts to say they didn’t know, instead of saying the lockdowns were the solution. And then shouting for months that any failures were due to noncompliance. And maybe offer a split deal. Anyone who wants to lock down, go ahead, here’s some protections. Don’t want to lock down? Your body your choice.
The compromise would have been to actually enforce the lockdown so it can end in 3 weeks. Having a couple of weeks where people still went to bars and ordered takeout was not a lockdown. At least not in the sense that a virus would care about. Plenty of countries did a hard lockdown and enjoyed normal activities afterwards but no, because the "land of the free" can't do a public health (or allow poor people in other countries to get vaccines) we globally got to have multiple waves. You're saying it's not about compliance, but in the countries where people complied they are enjoying a freedom we still are not.
It's better in science to have a false positive than a false negative. Had we not even done that half-assed few months of quasi-confinement (no indoor dining, curbside pickup, no movies, work remotely, otherwise go wild!) the deaths would have been much higher. Remember, we only went into that soft lockdown once cases had started to spike. The federal government knew about it earlier. You don't have to know jack shit about a virus to know that it's probably a good idea to minimize person-person contact until you know jack shit about it? I don't know, I guess that's "radical" in the US, the idea that you might have to make some sacrifices for your neighbors or community or city or state or country.
The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be. The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There has been little or no consideration of their impact on physical health, mental health, education, business, employment, worship. It has been as if COVID was the only risk and the only negative, and any other matter was necessarily secondary. To even mention these…
I’m gonna defend a bit here. Early on, nobody knew what covid was gonna look like. It had the potential for millions dead with a very high rate of spread. So we panicked. It seems forgotten that nobody remembers how awful, unknown, and strange the early pandemic was back in March 2020. What’s pathetic is how almost two years later, when we know oodles more about this disease, our solutions are identical. Where is the…
1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation.
2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place.
3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up.
When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down.
No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?
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Where are vaccines being denied? I haven't seen this as a thing even in the reddest states.
I think you're thinking of a very literal "I'm here for my vaccine" ""No, denied due to skin color" when I'm thinking of "We should spend some money and put some collective effort in to ensure everyone has quick and easy access to the vaccine, especially the poor and the vulnerable" "No, we’ll follow the same general plan as for voting, long lines at a few awkward places where lots of black people live, lots of locat…
Nevertheless, in New York blacks are under-vaccinated.
The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be. The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There has been little or no consideration of their impact on physical health, mental health, education, business, employment, worship. It has been as if COVID was the only risk and the only negative, and any other matter was necessarily secondary. To even mention these…