Mauricioduarte t1_is1f008 wrote on October 12, 2022 at 4:32 PM

We actually understood a lot about how viruses are transmitted at the time.

Those countermeasures we now think unnecessary at the time we’re necessary. Ineffective but necessary. Covid was a new disease killing a lot of people. We didn’t have enough knowledge about it so it was safer to overestimate safety measures. Like if we took every countermeasure for every kind of virus, then we know it’s airborne, so we take a step back to only those effective to airborne viruses. We dropped countermeasures as we discovered more about that specific virus behavior, but in general it’s within what we already knew about transmission.

carrotwax t1_is1ku7z wrote on October 12, 2022 at 5:10 PM

I think saying ineffective but necessary is a contradiction, unless you mean it was a political necessity to appear to be doing something. If an action is ineffective by definition it's not necessary.

gnathan87 t1_is1nsr1 wrote on October 12, 2022 at 5:29 PM

Not OP but no, neither of these. It was a moral necessity. If you know there's a killer virus on the loose, and that some of the practical countermeasures {W,X,Y,Z} are likely to prevent a bunch of deaths (but not exactly which), it would surely be negligent if you didn't recommend all of them until you knew more.

HiCanIPetYourCat t1_is2qgd0 wrote on October 12, 2022 at 9:37 PM

No. It was a novel virus, we didn’t know anything about it and it was killing people en masse so taking every possible precaution was the correct reaction.

carrotwax t1_is2ymod wrote on October 12, 2022 at 10:35 PM

I don't want to rehash old discussion too much, but even in April 2020 we knew the prevalence (Ioannidis) and risk by age, along with existing pandemic plans that had been created to deal with pandemics of this magnitude. People forget the precautionary principle is exactly for these occasions: be cautious of all the side effects when making massive society wide changes. Not to do nothing but to be cautious.

Do I agree Covid was serious and that we needed action at that time? Yes, absolutely. Not a denialist. I'm just more a fan of getting clear data and educating to empower.

The problem with overreaction via laws and regulations is that lawmakers rarely get bothered to remove them. For instance, many of the extreme cleaning regulations to stop fomite transmission are still around. To you and me this may not be a big deal, but it is to low wage workers who had this thrown on them on top of overwork. It kills the soul to be doing useless actions over and over - in fact it's a known way of breaking the spirit. In virtual isolation those in power were completely disconnected from the realities of the those struggling, and as a result we're dangerously polarized.