If people weren't so resistant to government policy we might have seen something close to zero covid rolled out in the US and, instead of the US being the locus of disease for a number of years, we might have actually ended this pandemic with a decisive but painful quarantine - instead we'll continue in this state of psuedo quarantine for who knows how many years... how we comport ourselves today might just be the new social standard.
China's decision to continue on the zero-covid route seems extremely unwise once it was clear that breakouts were happening across the globe and containment was no longer an option - but initially pursuing containment was an extremely wise policy.
Most people in the 21st century want to believe we have forever conquered such things. Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.
I hope we remember the utter failure of "Zero COVID", especially in places like China, for a very long time. Humility is a virtue.
The actual correct alternative would have been to not freak out about COVID. I can understand the first 3-6 months of restrictions. The rest was a total own-goal. A politicized circus. At least we didn't own ourselves for almost 3 years like China.
That's exactly the thing- it is almost always going to be a judgement call, so the worst thing in the USA was for it to become politicized. In China, a monolithic 'zero COVID' policy was easily arguably better than the USA's fragmented efforts and conflicts 1-2 years ago, but now?
The evolutionary path of COVID seems more likely to follow that of the Spanish flu than to become more and more deadly. What happens if the next strain is even more contagious but also correspondingly less dangerous (especially as natural and vaccination immunity continues to rise)? Yes, people still die but there are trade offs with all policies, that's why we don't have flu lockdowns.
That's my theory - "zero covid" had good success, but has resulted in very little herd immunity. And by all reports their homegrown vaccine program hasn't had fantastic results.
I think if & when they end "zero covid" they're in for a world of shock. Without a good plan, a good vaccine, and a good vaccination program - it's going to be opening the floodgates.
I don't think they're sticking with "zero covid" out of choice, but because they're not ready for what comes next. It's going to reveal that total lockdowns weren't a stop-gap measure, they were the primary measure - and there's no good plan to follow.
That outcome seems unlikely in the US in the near term, given how neatly people's opinions on COVID restrictions lined up with their existing politics. The lesson that seems to be sticking is that it feels great to have the full weight of public institutions on your side of the culture war, so win at all costs.
Not to mention, the US by and large collectively avoided worst case outcomes (hospital system too overloaded to provide treatment to majority of cases) because enough people did take COVID seriously.
And that's before getting into how hindsight is 20/20 (in addition to being rosy). the neo-Black Death will be really happy, if, a month into the next pandemic the going line is, "well, the last one probably wasn't as bad as the worst case scenario, so let's assume this one will be fine and do nothing."
When Coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, I tended to the opinion that it would self-limiting in one fashion or another or that is would not be worse than the flu. Only people arguing with me and me investigating the facts changed that. And, yeah, changing your opinion is hard and imagining a force that will upend the world is hard so it's easy to imagine how people stay in their positions.
That said, we have a representative government with the aim of electing people who will think ahead and protect from purely reflex based views. And clearly that control has failed.
Coronavirus has convinced me that most of the world (and the USA in particular) totally lack the ability and will to act boldly and collectively in response to an emergency. The Climate Change folks were making this exact point for years but I only started believing it after seeing government after government fail to control the pandemic. Most governments were either too slow or too cowardly to make and enforce major societal behavior changes for the good of everyone.
We should consider ourselves lucky that it was “only” a moderately-deadly disease, and not something worse. I can imagine government’s reaction to a space alien invasion: Day 100, after most cities are destroyed, government is still weighing the pros and cons of taking action, and debating whether or not to write a resolution condemning the alien attack.
Honestly, yes, COVID is now ineradicable, if there even was any chance of eradicating it. Let's pull our heads out of the sand and be rational about it. We just have to accept the consequences of having it around forever and deal with the likelihood of catching it throughout our lives as best we can:
- accept reduced life expectancy for people who are elderly or overweight
- spacing and strong ventilation in public indoor places by default
- reduce our reliance on IRL entertainment and socializing
- spread out our cities to build less dense housing and more suburbs
- on trips outside the home, avoid public transit and prefer personal vehicles
- reduce our reliance on mass public education in overcrowded schools
This is an equal or more radical stance than even the article takes on most things.
There’s hardly been any reckoning about what went wrong during COVID, it’s a bit of a stretch of project a decade from now there will be a serious anti-government backlash. It’s just as likely the same organizations which implemented these policies will close ranks and still be staffed by much of the same people and not much will change. Besides some think pieces and political narratives.
Just look at the rhetorical blowback following the Iraq wars for example. That was 10x louder and more politically acceptable than critiquing vaccine mandates and masks and it still took 1.5 decades to end the actual wars, little real change in Patriot act or intelligence agencies in practice, and any real long term anti-intervention stance is mostly just circumstance of it being mostly peaceful.
I doubt there will be anything much more significant comparatively in the health agencies and politically if another pandemic happens in the next decade. The narrative is very much in their favour, there’s no bloodbath coming for their jobs, let’s be honest.
To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later, hoping the vaccines will save us, and everyone is still out horsing around, spreading the disease everywhere.
I think that the reaction we've seen was inevitable. It's less about covid in particular and more that (and I don't know a diplomatic way to say it) there was a risk averse, authoritarian, nanny-state, "we need to save people from themselves" advocate group waiting in the wings that just needed their cue to for the balance of power to shift and their views to be prioritized.
To be clear, I don't mean some coordinated cabal, I just mean that society's views have drifted that way, we haven't had anything bad happen for years, the significance of individual freedom has been forgotten, we're well into turning on ourselves anyway. And so now with a push, there is a new majority, and we're seeing politicians take advantage of strong views and fall in line to represent them, disregarding safeguards and norms that we previously had in place but were not updated to contemplate something like this.
And now viewpoints that would have been intolerant and completely out of line with western democracy, and ridiculed as some mid 20th century authoritarianism are suddenly applauded all over social media.
As disappointed as I am with much of the response in the US, it could still be a lot worse.
The potential for this kind of pandemic is something that the government was aware of and at least somewhat prepared for. It can be hard to imagine, but if all we had were the concerns of joe-everyman this would have caught us significantly more off-guard than it has.
Where I think we've faltered is in rapidly the hard decisions to trade-off short term economic impact vs long term health and economic impact. But there is still time to do a lot of good, and the level of our response seems to now-- finally-- be increasing exponentially along with the infection.
Prior to this year, shutting down the world economy for months was an anathema. Even saving the planet stuff could not achieve that. Leverage points and priorities.
Prior to this year, the US society devolving into a third-world developing one was unthinkable.
When I ask my kid to do something he doesn't want, he pouts and jokingly says "Never ever".
What this pandemic has taught me is to never say never ever.
The US become isolationist, losing it's military supremacy in the next decade ? The rest of the world going it's own way and not caring enough about what the US thinks ? A world war with US against the RoW ?
There's something to be said that we literally lost the war on covid and just kinda pretended that it ended, but I'm not sure what other option there was. If democrats pushed to keep fighting covid with gusto, it would not have been popular and would easily lead to Republicans running everything in the next decade.
History books will hopefully acknowledge just how terribly the entire world handled it.
There is the whole thing about how society starts to break down once norms get ignored. Normally this gets brought up in relation to some right wing populist thing, but it applies equally to the way governments all around the world have thrown away any notion of personal freedom over the last two years. Covid hystericism is not going to be without consequence.
0 covid policy was great thing after that. For years they used to wrong method not weeks or short term. Then suddenly they gave up. It's like there is no intelligent
China's decision to continue on the zero-covid route seems extremely unwise once it was clear that breakouts were happening across the globe and containment was no longer an option - but initially pursuing containment was an extremely wise policy.
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