Reply to Meta analysis of Covid Lockdowns

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The idea that the initial reaction was "wrong" is silly because people were responding in real time to a global crisis causing millions of people to die. If we "overreacted" to that, so be it. It is preferable to the alternative.

I also think it's ghoulish to basically say the lives saved were not "worth it" because of later impacts. Consider that when an able-bodied adult with children dies unexpectedly of something like Covid, there are massive impacts on that person's family and community that reverberate for decades. That's not being factored in.

Having said that, I do actually think it's very worthwhile to discuss what we did well and what we didn't do well, and I to me it's obvious that after the initial crisis, we made some errors in judgment that likely had minimal to no benefit in terms of lives saved while having high social costs. Thinking about the length of school closures in some areas, including the DMV (even after vaccines were available and after schools in other parts of the world demonstrated ways to reopen safely). I also think a major mistake we made in the US was linking public health measures like masking and social distancing with morality, instead of simply linking them to health. We made wearing a mask a way of signaling your political positions, which almost certainly made it harder to get people to mask.

Compare this with the approach in many other countries where public health decisions are made fairly separate from political activity and people are simply told "do this to keep yourself and others more healthy" and you see less conflict over simple precautions like wearing a mask, washing hands, etc. You also see that some people in those countries don't comply for whatever reason, and there's more tolerance/understanding that you're probably never going to get 100% compliance with anything and that's life because people are not automatons.

[b]There are valuable conversations to be had. Whether the shutdowns in March/April 2020 were justified is probably one of the more fruitless conversations. It was a massive crisis and mistakes were inevitable[/b].[/quote]

I agree that we can and should look back and evaluate responses.  But this study seems to be using some monkey math to get the results they want.  So I'll wait for another, better analysis.  [/quote]

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