Re: COVID-19 - On the Ground
Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2023 11:19 am
Let’s talk about this, avoiding buzzword bingo as much as possible.JKLivin wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 9:21 amWe all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your home until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.RainbowsandUnicorns wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 7:41 amI 100% agree in regards to taking measures to protect YOURSELF. Problem is/was there were/are way too may YOUS who didn't/don't give a fuck about others and because of it, WE suffered.
I didn't expect a single person to do anything JUST for ME. The "shutdown/s" were not for ME. They were for US.
Right or wrong of me, I did (and continue to) expect people to do SOME things out of common sense and dignity for others. Covid related or not.
I don't believe there will be another "shutdown" unless we see something worse than 1 million Americans dying. If God forbid that happens, then I will reluctantly (but still will) be on board. I fully understand many others will not be.
Put simply, the plan itself was (at a high level) scientifically sound. If you stop person-to-person transmission, the virus will die out.
The plan failed for several reasons, all ultimately social/practical (and not fundamentally scientific/medical).
The single biggest reason, in my view, is that the success of the plan required collective will that was never realistic to expect. And why was that collective will never realistic to expect? In my opinion it starts at the top - the president, perhaps the only person in the world who had the practical ability to turn MAGAs into plan adopters, instead chose denialism and blame-shifting for personal reasons.
MAGAs followed his lead, and so the usual pattern resulted: (1) render government incapable of functioning, and then (2) declare government incapable of functioning. The plan failed. By design? Not exactly I guess. But certainly failure was an easy-to-spot inevitability; the math just doesn’t check out if buy-in is split along party lines.
The secondary failure of the plan is a little murkier to unpack. Essentially, the public health authorities did not anticipate, and then failed to timely grasp that, confusingly to them, plan buy-in would be split along party lines. This failure was compounded by the executive branch’s delinquency to develop and roll out adequate surveillance functions. Testing and tracing.
This matters because a Plan B that had a good chance to work would have been to modulate the restrictions (the pain) on a targeted basis. But because of the fog of war resulting from a materially non-existent surveillance function, we burned everyone’s reserve for collective sacrifice out before - and this CANNOT be emphasized enough - the sacrifice even mattered. Kansas City did NOT need to lock down when New York did. And Garden City did NOT need to lock down when Kansas City did.
But - and this is another thing that CANNOT be emphasized enough - this less restrictive sort of plan never had a chance to work, because our surveillance failure meant we would never have the data to do anything on a targeted, smaller-scale basis. So blunt measures - measures that drove wedges in deeper, and that could not work anyway because adoption was split along party lines - were all we had.
So in hindsight (especially knowing what we know now, but didn’t then, about the virus itself), the better plan would have been something less ambitious but more practicable. Universal masking indoors around people, but no shutdowns.
But that was never on the table because, from the top of leadership and from the outset of the problem, our first interest was in denialism and blame-shifting. And then our second interest was in adoption of partisan totems as opposed to practicable, actionable plans that had a chance of working.
We failed for social and practical reasons, not scientific and medical ones.
