Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

Closing specific borders because you don't like the people who come through that border is racist. Closing them all probably wouldn't have done enough anyway since it would have to be combined with mandatory and strictly enforced total lockdown to also prevent the spread internally.

We were able to affect the curve. Maybe it would have been flat or even inverted if people actually stayed home for 2 weeks.

They said not to use masks because hospitals needed them. They weren't sure at the time if the masks were effective enough for others to wear them anyway. Later we both got our supplies in order and determined that even cloth masks limit the spread by significantly reducing the radius around you that is dangerous. We said masks weren't needed for the vaccinated because there was solid safety against the original strain. A few months later, the delta strain became a problem because people didn't do enough to stop the virus from spreading, so we had to go back to masks since the vaccine only partially protects against delta.

Protest crowds were certainly dangerous when it came to spreading the virus. However those people were also far more likely to be wearing masks than people at Trump rallies. Also there's a difference between pushing back against people getting murdered by police and people all gathering to hear a politician that they were already going to vote for tell them all the things they wanted to hear.

I don't want to put any more time into this comment, but I think I've made my point that the changes have been logical.

"Death / infection" is a meaningless number unless you accurately measure the number of infections. Which is what the Infection Fatality Rate attempts to estimate. Which is why the CDC posts that estimate that I linked to, which is 90,000 deaths / 1M infections, or 9%. Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say.

If you're going to be this arrogant then you need to get your facts straight. Yes, 9% is nothing to sneeze at, the difference between 9% and 20% is quite material.

You're displaying signs of Dunning-Kruger - by saying things like "1 death per 5 infections" I'm not wholly convinced that you understand what an IFR is. Tone it down.

My point is that the argument can't be made more convincing if the argument isn't allowed. Even if the information all points in one direction, and at this point it more or less does, I see it being presented in a way where any questioning or dissent is actively ridiculed or repressed. This naturally causes suspicion.

Instead of presenting the vaccine information as a flood of not to be questioned, yet well meaning, propaganda I'd prefer an open and honest dialogue that meets an individual where they're at.

> I'm not making a statement that the lockdowns should not all have happened. That is what you're inferring from what I've said.

Feel free to insert the words when they did into my original statement. What I am actually inferring from your statements that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened [when it did] due to inability to build herd immunity is that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened when it did because it reduced the ability to build some theoretical degree of herd immunity. I simply noted it was extraordinary that having suggested building this herd immunity for the coming winter was sufficiently important to warrant allowing more days/weeks of exponential spread of a then poorly-understood virus, you followup by saying herd immunity isn't a very well defined concept anyway!

(use any definition of herd immunity you like: when we're we're recording more new infections than this time last year, this ain't it!)

> The statement that more people needed to catch varient-OmegaEpsilon over variant-X to reach immunity is just daft and an argument for the sake of it.

Luckily, I didn't make that statement. I'm not sure quite how you missed the link between vaccinations and COVID being less deadly now (especially having made it yourself in the comment I replied to!) but for the avoidance of doubt I am arguing that the disease is less dangerous now, because the majority of people are vaccinated. But it is also still spreading despite it being 18 months later, many people having had the disease in the intervening time, and nearly all adults having received a vaccination which ceteris paribus greatly reduces their likelihood of transmitting the disease to others [as well as the harm it can do]. Which suggests allowing it to spread earlier last year would have been pretty futile as far as limiting COVID's ability to continue spreading in future months, but would obviously have killed some of the people who are fine catching it now.

Ultimately the extraordinary claim that Lockdown 1 was too early because we did not allow enough people to catch the disease to build up immunity but Lockdown 2 was too late (even though delaying it allowed more people to build up full immunity!) needs more justification than pointing out the lockdowns were not identical. Especially when you've already conceded the initially slower infection rate you observed in areas which had spikes earlier in the year doesn't persist as "other factors" come to dominate (i.e. there wasn't enough natural immunity on a population level to prevent mass infections). And probably still isn't, although the big advantage of being infected this winter rather than last winter or last summer is that you're a lot less likely to die.

Ultimately if you want to convince people your analysis vs the government's epidemiologists' is Galileo vs the geocentrics, you'll have to find a more persuasive evidence for your theory than telling people you've built models and they should read textbooks...

The virus isn't going away. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but it only has a limited and temporary effect on reducing transmission.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

You can't seriously expect people to continue wearing masks and social distancing forever. That would be absurd.