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Can we talk Covid? What we did right and wrong
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Anonymous
| Remember when everyone went on walks in the early days, and would cross the street when another person came near? It’s kind of funny, but like someone else said hindsight is 20/20. |
Anonymous
Not true about school districts. In VA, northern VA public school districts were more conservative than state recommendations. Mistakes: Not treating teachers like essential workers. Ignoring mental health impacts of policies Mask harder and longer becoming a reactionary D virtue signaling position Not properly communicating what the vaccine would accomplish and what its purpose was. The vaccines did their job and it’s tragic some people still don’t get that. And no, I’m not a republican. Just capable of critical thinking where “my team” is not just automatically right all the time. |
Anonymous
+1 More support should be available to younger people who continue to struggle after the loss of education and formative experiences. Instead, we are all left to figure it out on our own. |
Anonymous
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This is going to be an exercise in futility because we had a President using the bully pulpit to argue against everything the doctors and scientists were recommending.
We could have had a much better response if we were unified and on the same page. It never should have been a political issue, but alas. |
Anonymous
I know it is easy to make this political and as a proud Republican, I think the last president botched this…but We are a nation of 50 states with 50 governors. People who slammed GA and FL for early reopening saying it would kill millions were proven incorrect. |
Anonymous
They were protected by everyone else isolating in the early days. They also don’t regularly interact with the outside population, do they? |
Anonymous
A lot of people saw this coming. |
Anonymous
There’s not a clear distinction between airborne viruses and viruses that spread via droplets. Even now we still don’t know how much transmission is from droplets versus aerosolized droplets. I'm a little surprised there wasn't more existing research on mask efficacy before the pandemic, but it's pretty heard to do a meaningful study. We weren't in a situation where people were wearing high-quality masks for limited periods of time while exposed to a harmful agent. Untrained people were wearing face coverings with very different quality levels, and were often being told to wear them for much longer periods of time than was practical. So even if the masks themselves worked, actual efficacy in real-life situations would be much lower. And now that we have some limited controlled trials, it looks like they don't do much. I doubt that's because masks are inherently ineffective- it's because consistent, long-term masking is unrealistic, particularly with good masks. |
Anonymous
Or, maybe you should have supported your kids more. My kids did just fine except for the dumbed-down curriculum demanded by parents. |
Anonymous
Most people were not isolating and that was part of the problem. |
Anonymous
And, don't those folks deserve to be protected? Or, they only deserve to be protected if they are people you love. Do you realize how many kids lost their parents in the United States to covid? Have you stopped to consider the impact on them? Many healthy people died too. The vaccines helped some, but now equal numbers of vaccinated and unvaccinated are dying. |
Anonymous
They caught it practically on purpose meeting in close contact with sick relatives. They gained herd immunity intentionally. The fatality rates were no higher than the hysterical mask/shutdown/isolation/ jab dummies. It’s totally embarrassing. |
Anonymous
Absolutely. I always thought the playground closures were ridiculous. I thought they’d last a couple weeks before experts would explain they were an unnecessary, knee-jerk reaction. The fact that they lasted much longer than that was the first major signal that we public health experts couldn’t be trusted to think rationally about risk. And there were so many more examples as the pandemic went on. I remember Sanjay Gupta demonstrating how to clean groceries, with just a brief aside that there was no evidence it was necessary or effective. And the outdoor mask mandate in MoCo that can along late enough in the pandemic that we knew it was ridiculous. And, of course, what happened to kids was horrible. Closing daycares and preschools for months. Closing schools for a year or more, with some kids (like those in MoCo) not consistently back in the classroom for 18 months. Daycares never should have been ordered to close. And schools should have fully reopened in fall 2020. |
Anonymous
Well in hindsight, someone who is capable of critical thinking, would look back in the early days and realize in retrospect, that Trump’s under reaction and lack of hysteria prevented a lot of possible mass hysteria that could have led to physical altercations. People have forgot how scary the beginning was and part of the fear was believing you were never going to have access to basic necessities again. And if you don’t believe anything could have happened - look at Jan 6. Trump is a jerk and does a lot of dumb stuff but I actually look back and give him credit for the low key messaging at the start. The country and corresponding state and local governments and medical facilities were equipped to deal with full onslaught if panicked people believing the world was ending. What we got wrong - 1 - not stopping flights from countries with high infection rates. Trump tried and then people freaked out. He was right. Making health decisions for a country based on hating one guy is dumb and causes harm. Thinking had to be used instead of emotion. 2 - making basic precautions in the early days political and later on as a virtual signal 3 - failing to make development of tests a priority and underestimating how difficult FDA approval would be 4 - Federal agencies and local governments and schools and businesses slacking off on their business disaster plans and testing and sometimes abandoning it. The plans existed after 2001 but over time people became comfortable and didn’t think it was worth the effort 6 - before the pandemic ever happened, schools not requiring all teachers to use the schools online platform all the time to post lessons; the schools IT department for failing to test and evaluate the platforms annually to understand how they work and limitations as well as have poor help desk operations. 7. - Messaging for the unvaccinated - urging people to get vaccinated was great but given they knew the stats of how many people didn’t, they should have had equal messaging telling people who were unvaccinated to immediately seek medical attention if they developed symptoms and not shamed them or blamed them. 8 - sensationalize or politicize non working treatments will compel people to use them - instead stick with simple messaging - this medication is not useful for covid seek advice go a doctor before taking - and leave it at that - that’s enough. 9 - elevating a spokesperson to hero status or taking everything one guy says as the absolute truth 10. - Accept and understand that the media uses shock and awe to get you to click bc that’s how they get paid and they will exaggerate and out right lie if needed. So be critical of what you read in a mass media articles. 11 - Twitter is a place to get science and medical info. Don’t get your medical or science knowledge from twitter. insta. tik tok, etc Its easy to claim to be anyone and say anything. 12 - Remote work is not impossible and would have a bigger effect on the climate than almost anything else we try and do. Hybrid vehicles are a drop in the bucket compared to removing millions of cars from the road. 13 - work means leaving the house -remote work and even influencer is a legit job. 14 - not understanding the big issue was raw materials and supply chain 15 - Despite what kids say, they do need to go to school each day. The structure, the social interaction, etc 16 - the CDC knows what it is doing - nope. It’s a mess internally and in a crisis forget it. And most people have very little understanding of the CDC and its link to pharmaceutical company funding. That should be made more obvious and better messages to the public. |
Anonymous
You realize the segment of the population that is most at risk of dying of Covid has many, many more vaccinated people than unvaccinated, right? The fact that the numbers are as close as they are is a sign of just how effective the vaccines are. But of course the per capita rates of the vaccinated/unvaccinated will grow closer now that nearly everyone has already gotten Covid. |