The assessment of the responses to the the pandemic will be the focus of healthcare and public health research for decades. I am certain there is a lot more to be learned about what worked and what didn’t, and what the short and long term costs really were.

But one thing is for certain. The next pandemic will not follow the rules of COVID.

There will likely be lessons we learned from this experience that will help us address the challenges of the next. However, the next pandemic may present, spread, and affect the population in ways very different than COVID and it could easily be the case that the best, or perhaps only, defense we would have as a population is severe widespread quarantine.

Those in charge in the future may be dealing with as uncertain and unclear challenges as those who were leading us in 2020 and 2021. Hopefully what we have learned with COVID will help. But ruling out the use of quarantines and lock downs could prove disastrous.

Is that something much worse will come along, authorities will try to stop it with quarantines/masks/lockdowns, and a subset of the population will say "fuck you, I'm going out."

The good news, I guess, is that viruses tend to be self-limiting. Sars-Cov2 was the sweet spot of infectiousness vs. mortality. Anything that kills more quickly (MERS?) doesn't last.

If COVID popped up in India and had a 5% mortality rate with a similar age distribution we'd get a similar picture in terms of catching it a month or two too late.

MERS and SARS didn't blow up primarily due to how they spread (at peak symptoms for both and MERS just doesn't spread well).

If SARS 1 spread like SARS COV 2 you might have seen societal breakdown/basic services shutting down. Scary stuff.

Let’s be extremely clear and precise on that.

If a new variant of covid is 10x - 30x deadlier than any of the prior versions, should we skip lockdowns again? Should we take into consideration the facts and circumstances of the situation at hand, or should we fight the last war?

I am not wasting time relitigating my conclusion. Simply put, the response was awful. That doesn’t mean the response would be appropriate give a different set of facts. The mask mandate ended in Chicago in February of 2022. Allowing local despots to abuse emergency powers and treat citizens worse than criminals is something that should only be tolerated in the most extreme of circumstances.

Old people dying a couple of years early because they have metabolic disease isn’t a valid justification for such outcomes. Holding out anecdotes about a few people who didn’t fit that profile doesn’t change the data. Further, there is no evidence any of these measures did anything. We knew early that COVID hit in waves and whom it impacted most.

Whatever.

With a hard (not soft) lockdown two weeks (two weeks!) earlier. Was that worth it? I guess it depends on whether or not it was one of your parents.

Whatever.

You really need to be less emotional about the issue.

Anger management and tranquilizers would definitely help.

Were under 65. That's an expected death curve for any pandemic with modern medicine at least until the health care system breaks down.

You say that as if the ridiculous measures that were enacted and remained in place through 2022 had any ameliorative impact or reduced that harm.

They did not. Through June of 2020 carte Blanche was warranted. After that measured skepticism was healthy. After the vaccine was released every ridiculous measure should have been subjected to strict scrutiny. They were not. They persisted and now the government will be viewed with heavy skepticism the next time there is an emergency.

Such skepticism will be warranted.

The first vaccine was approved in December. You have no fucking idea, and don't pretend that you do. I know that you are ignoring me, so I don't expect you to reply. Don't really care, actually--you are the world expert on everything, so I am probably wrong.

Like Fauci, Birx and the CDC. They put out guidelines for reopening safely. Trump countered with wanting everything open without help. You then got polarized responses. Included in that were idiots closing beaches, masking 2 yeas old etc.

I will say that once you got to school aged kids their ability to mask paralleled their parents attitude towards it. Among ny coworkers the kids were better about wearing masks than we were.

Attached is a thread that follows my thought process.

• Click here for link at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1740780365692723533.html

make his points without being a douchebag about it. Unfortunately, the ability to do so seems to be a thing of the past.

Edit to add - "he" in this context is the author of the thread that you linked.