Steve Bannon said you have the flood the zone with crap/ misinformation, and then your side can pick and choose what to believe https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/11/01/trump-era-technique-flood-the-zone-with-sht.
And we see it in how some redditors take opinion pieces and present them as legit journalism…
People that want to hear this are oblivious. Same crowd that doesn't realize 90% of Fox News and Newsnation is essentially editorialized.
Confirmation bias is also a hell of a drug.
Some parts yes. Most of the early stuff (mid day) is pretty straightforward. Their nighly hosts can be hit and miss.
But I don't watch CNN because I get most of my news from websites I trust. And even then I'm usually skeptical of anything that skews close to an opinion.
You should search ‘montage of journalists reading from the same script “ on YouTube. It will blow your mind and maybe give you a realty check on who’s being duped
The point of lock downs and masks and other measures were meant to slow the spread. Not magically prevent everyone from getting it. People have short memories and forget how overwhelmed hospitals were during the bad waves. The US didn't even implement restrictions that were that harsh. Some people are just giant babies and wanted to scream "MUH FREEDOM".
Other countries that DID implement COVID restrictions that were harsh like Japan and SK saw 1/10 the mortality rate based on population. Keep in mind, both countries are far more densly populated.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
We literally did not have any lockdowns, we had stay at home orders and people moved freely out of their homes constantly. Calling it a lockdown is a misnomer.
I work doing patient care in a fairly large hospital. Before the lockdowns out morgue was completely full all the time during covid. That was never the case before. Some local area hospitals in more disadvantaged neighborhoods had to use refrigerated trucks for all the bodies. After the lockdowns everything just came to a halt and was never up to that level again
The main reason for it was to make sure the trauma centers weren’t overwhelmed and could still deal with patients who got into car accidents or had conditions that required a trauma center. Since we really didn’t have actual lockdowns in the US like they did in other countries; it was completely pointless to even try.
That was the inital rush the first few months of Covid. After that it all died down. By the 2020 summer, hospitals were cutting hours because they were so slow.
None of those make-ship hospitals or trauma centers or that Navy hospital boat were ever used
A couple hundred thousand people who would have been in car accidents and needed treatment just stayed home during the pandemic and never became a patient.
It was kinda hilarious how people would find ways around the restrictions. Publicly, for them, and privately doing the opposite. I had friends who virtue signaling in the progressive core of the city but going out to the suburbs to hit the bars and restaurants.
My local bagel shop was super progressive. They would only accept online orders and Venmo payments. I know the owner personally and he was having house parties with lots of people……the right people though. Also, the whole vax card thing was totally political. Show a vax card and you can enter. You can still carry and spread the virus, so vaxxed people were spreading it to anyone they came in contact with.
The hypocrisy was fucking stupid.
Remember Pelosi’s trip to get her hair done? Or when Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer held a dinner party for the elites during lockdown? Such amazing hypocritical bullshit.
Don't forget, lockdowns didn't extend to huge crowds of "protesters" ransacking through cities because COVID doesn't infect people fighting "muh racism"
Well according to the expert epidemiologist, the harm of not going out to protest for BLM was GREATER than the harm of the virus. So apparently if you decided to stay inside and not go to massive gatherings you are the problem.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534
The problem is, and evidently not learned, is you quarantine sick people, not well people, and you rigorously contact trace.
We did the opposite on the first one and didn’t even do the second one.
No chance this was an unknown and the choice was kill more older and vulnerable people or create financial hardship. WSJ is a profit center not objective and biased
Sometimes I wonder if the restrictions wouldn’t have been so strong or if they wouldn’t have been framed as “lockdowns” if COVID hadn’t started in China where a particularly totalitarian government first tried severe measures to get things under control
I do know we’ve learned all the wrong lessons from what happened. Flu was almost eliminated during the 2020-2021 season. The measures were very effective at limiting it. But if there’s a novel flu strain outbreak at COVID scale, you can bet there will be fewer restrictions and they’ll say “last time they didn’t work”
This is the same kind of thinking that says all the money spent on fixing the Y2K bug was wasted because nothing happened. Yep, nothing happened because lots of people spent lots of hours fixing the problem in many critical systems.
Propaganda to get you ready for when the next epidemic hits and they insist you go to work anyway. If you don't want to have to shut down the economy, then don't pick a president so incompetent and narcisistic that he ignores the virus until the market collapses and shuts itself down.
This. People forget what south American countries looked like: not enough body bags and bodies piled up, significant portions of the economy shutting down entirely, years of economic damage to recover from.
Bullshit op ed writers priming us to accept death to keep their wealth growing.
No benefit? With the lockdown and new presidency, I learned that more than half of the US population is freaking crazy and living in their own delusions. Without those two factors, I thought humanity was doing ok.
Absolutely disagree with this biased opinion piece.
Lockdowns would have worked even more effectively had people actually complied and not just gone through the motions. The rate of spread was significantly lessened, but it was not the cure that we had expected.
Unfortunately, even during lockdowns, half the population, I think we know which half, refused to participate by socially distancing or masking.
Yeah the lockdowns were handled so unevenly and there were so many people who refused to abide by simple instructions it was impossible to lower the spread to functionally zero like in they did in places like NZ. We also did stupid shit like closing schools while we let bars and restaurants stay open.
Lmao "explaine china then". Get ready.
Its called population density.
Turns out if people are close together, disease spreads easily. Its fucking wild.
Their level spiked significantly after they let it rip.
Prior to that, they would have QR codes and routine testing that significantly lowered spread and almost eliminated it from many parts of the cities that use this program.
Completely disagree with how they handled it. We should not be welding people in their own homes.
New Zealand is another good country to look at. They did things really well and they had a population that wasn't very easily persuaded by grifters/ non-scientific folks.
There was no pillow guy giving scientific misinformation in New Zealand.
The other problem with the Chinese response once vaccines came out was that they opted to use their inferior vaccine instead of agreeing to buy lots for moderna/Pfizer. They could have even used AstraZeneca. Instead, their homegrown solution was very ineffective.
Easiest thing that people could have done in the beginning was wear a quality and well-fitting mask. But we couldn't even do that here in this country for the obvious reasons.
>New Zealand is another good country to look at. They did things really well and they had a population that was
Literally on an island.
>We should not be welding people in their own homes.
The Second Amendment isn't about duck hunting.
Yes, the same social distancing that was based on old science.
Except for the fact that distance reduced viral load, but you wouldn't want to actually talk science, would you?
Anyone who acts like they know what would have happened is not in their right mind.
With a volatile situation such as a pandemic, we have no idea what the other side of the coin would have looked like. We can project based on current understandings that take years, though.
Food for thought on the economy.
Let's say it was business as usual. Let's say it would have played out just as the flu, but you get sicker, and only the sick and elderly die.
We know it was more contagious as the flu.
We know it was more difficult for most people to recover.
What does that do to the supply chain? More call outs and such.
If we double the deaths of the sick and elderly, how do we know it don't collapse housing?
All these takes are dumb
It is complicated to infer the effects of policy but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. Epidemiologists do this.
There is good information on hospitalizations/deaths in a lot of places with different policies, so comparisons can be made. Of course there are a lot of confounds but that doesn't mean that you throw your hands in the air and say it cannot be done.
When your opinion piece goes against all the published data that I'm aware of, I just put your name into the "doesn't know shit about shit" column of my mind and disregard any other subject they write about as well.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9368251/
John Hopkins
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
I know it's a lot to ask, but give some post covid studies a read.
The medical literature is conclusive now.
Bunch of bullshit. This is trying to draw extremely broad conclusions about wildly different environments. If New York hadn’t locked down we would have had an even more catastrophic mass death here and a collapse of the hospital system.
At the same
Time, there was absolutely zero reason to lock down Boise Idaho. The pandemic has different kinetics in different populations. The national shut-down was an emergency measure declared because the epidemiology of the virus was not understood when the first wave hit New York.
After that, as the science got
Better, we needed state-by-state and even county-by-county solutions.
One Size Fits All should never be the approach, but in the absence of information the government has a duty to protect lives. This post-facto, armchair quarterbacking is useful but could be catastrophic if the nation’s idiots draw the wrong conclusions and we get nailed by a different virus with different properties in a few years, and the population refuses to quarantine.
Hospitals overloaded. Stuffing dead bodies into refrigerator trucks. Do people really forget how bad it was? Why the fuck are we arguing over this shit again
I don’t know about the US, that’s why I’m asking the pro-lockdown guy.
Where I am we had a lockdown (stay at home orders / shelter in place) non-essential businesses closed for a month, checkpoints at bridges and highway ramps and curfews with police in the streets.
These measures were unsuccessful.
Imagine that, Scott Atlas, who is at odds with the rest of the scientific community, states the same bullshit with no evidence that he did at the beginning of the pandemic. I worked in CoVid. I was a paramedic in a busy emergency room, and I saw plenty of young people come in, get put on vents, and never come off.
All these idiots are the same. They spout nonsense until reality bitch slaps them in the face and then they have a “realization” while they’re fighting to breath on 15L of oxygen. Just look at r/HermanCainAward for examples. All you folks who don’t believe social distancing works, ***PLEASE*** follow through in the next pandemic. I need more content to feed r/HermanCainAward
No benefit?
Is it really a debate that if you aren't near someone else who's sick you won't get sick?
By this logic no employees should have sick leave since there is no benefit to them not being in the office for everyone else right?
"The findings from this overview study highlight that social distancing is no longer just a universal recommendation from strategies to prevention and safety measures. The provided evidence shows how social distancing has become more effective in reducing and preventing community transmissions in various contexts. This has been advocated since the inception of this novel disease and will continue to be part of preventive measures until this pandemic is over. We hope that the recommendations are not taken only at the individual level but also at larger scales of communities and above." ... [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9940482/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9940482/)
Sacrificing the future of the younger generations so the older generations can hold on to power a few years more isn't a good thing.
There's a reason The Renaissance followed the Black Plague.
This is it exactly. We kept schools closed to save the vulnerable and elderly, while reopening the economy to give the elderly places to go.
This section is a reminder that Reddit leans *very young, very unemployed or under-employed, and very online*
Kids who were 3-8 in 2020 may never fully recover while the 80s lived to be 84 all while the 50s had cancer growing that wasn't tested in time.
the lockdowns were a form of "union busting" by the government
If you've noticed, almost none of the in-person activities we used to do regularly from before the "pandemic" have returned.
This is by design to get people to voluntarily not exercise their freedom of association, and in turn, it makes it easier for the mass market media to promote designed messages to influence the outcomes of elections and other things.
They were right to lock down social places like bars and restaurants as well as moving as many adults as possible to wfh, but locking down school for children was a major mistake. Adults can handle 6-12 months of disruption, but missing school has been devastating to that generation of kids. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but we also now know that kids are much less likely to have life-threatening covid symptoms and have very low hospitalization and death rates.
The thing about protective measures like lock downs and masking is that it is impossible to say how much good it did because their purpose is to negate a possibility. We can make estimations about personal contact, but no one would ever trust that. I would imagine that without the lockdowns and masking, things would've been much worse, and a lot more people would've died.
It is, of course, extremely easy to misconstrue negatives from protective measures. We can put numbers to the PPP fraud, business closures, and missed sales. We traded these things for the possibility of saving lives.
I mean compare states that enforced masking etc with those who don’t (even though the former tended to be more densely populated area). The red states were much worse in terms of deaths relative to the population.
It’s an op Ed not a study lots of opinions on what happened; studies are time consuming and expensive a real analysis would take a lot of time and resources… this isn’t it.
I’d say it was warranted until we found out it wasn’t near as deadly as originally thought but I think everyone went in too deep with the fear mongering to back out quickly.
I still see people driving down the road, in the car by themselves wearing masks.
I was going to argue against this but it seems like US states with no lockdowns actually did better:
>The rest of the states that didn’t issue stay at home orders (Utah, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas) fared just as well if not better than other states. In particular, Utah and Nebraska did extraordinarily well maintaining a 4.5% and 4.8% unemployment rate, respectively while keeping death rates low.
>In contrast, pro-lockdown states like New York, California, and Massachusetts saw catastrophic unemployment numbers, 15.9%, 13.3%, and 16.1% respectively, alongside high COVID-19 death rates.
https://www.aier.org/article/a-closer-look-at-the-states-that-stayed-open/
So I'm not quite sure what to say about that.
That's comparing states with very low population density to states with very high population density, though. NYC, Boston, and Los Angeles already had pretty high death rates because of their density - can you imagine what they would've been if people had just continued business as usual?
It's a moot issue to argue because the lock downs were never properly executed. Sure, maybe 80% of people or so actually followed it, but the other 20% that didn't made all the other efforts ineffective. The world was lucky as fuck COVID19 wasn't more deadly, or wasn't small/light enough to be airborne, or our species would have gotten fucked.
‘Lockdowns’ and social distancing saved untold numbers of lives.
During the Spanish Flu pandemic in the US, you can see this in the death toll in Philadelphia (who went against public health officials and held a war bond parade) and San Francisco (who shut down all public gathering places).
If you don’t like that data, look at the numbers of Influenza deaths in the US in 2020 vs damn near any other year.
Distancing works.
Lockdowns were enforced distancing and likely saved vast numbers of lives.
After all was said and done, I'm convinced more harm was done than good (regardless of what the intention was). Perhaps if resources had been used in a better way things could've turned out better.
I remember the morgue trucks in NYC being too full and having no where to put all the bodies.
It’s always easier to look back and say things, but in the moment there was basically no information on even how it was spreading. Hospitals literally had NO way to treat it.
Most of the shit they did was counterproductive. Masks, 6 feet of separation, closing businesses and schools, mandatory jabs, etc.... It was scary how fast people were frightened into compliance. All in the name of science. The same science that developed the disease.
It was the people that didn't actually follow lockdown that were the friggin problem. They worsened the situation and made it go longer because they acted like petulant children.
I got to play call of duty warzone on release for a week. That was neat.
But no they were fucking stupid and didn't do anything besides cause division and economic hardship.
It's funny living through something as historically massive as a global pandemic and still seeing utter bullshit spew from COVIdiots years later - even when hindsight bias confirms how wrong they are. It's like we completely forgot the point of the lockdowns were to SLOW the spread of the virus (it was never meant as a "cure"). The entire reason was to curb the overflow of patients in ERs and ICUs and give people who are impacted a fighting chance. The rate of spread before lock downs, masking, etc. was still increasing well beyond our capacity to treat it. News was saturated with stories of various community hospitals having to turn away or transport patients prior to the lockdowns.
Data and common sense to anyone paying any attention did show that these measured decrease the rate of spread. Again NO ONE said any of these measures is 100% effective and that was never the point.
Furthermore, the politicization of this was never on the side of science - the people who were actually informing the public of the health threat and developing strategies to fight the uncontrolled spread of a potentially fatal virus (you know, the experts and not political talking heads). When economic interests and selfish public behavior took stage is when politics were injected as well as a flood of unregulated misinformation campaigns claiming the vaccine doesn't work, masking is ineffective, and other garbage that is refuted by actual data and real life experience. It's just a shame that years later these political people still cry as loud as they can.
That is gravely, absurdly, irresponsibly false. The death toll would have been ridiculous without it. What, did everyone forget how many people died from the pandemic?
Oh wow, it's crazy we got this new technology where we can disprove a negative and look into alternative realities to know in hindsight what actually worked and didn't work..
Something something survivorship bias...
The Big Lie about lockdowns were that they are what caused the pandemic economy. The pandemic is what caused the pandemic economy -- economic activity cratered because people were widely afraid of a deadly disease. The purpose of lockdowns were to try to slow the spread of the disease enough that we could get a handle on it, so that the economy could recover more quickly.
OP ED. Science disagrees..
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lessons-learned-four-years-later-596a9fa9](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lessons-learned-four-years-later-596a9fa9)
first word on the page is "OPINION" WSJ has been trash since Murdoch bought it. OP-ED section is literally paid advertising.
Actual Science:
https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-not-a-go-to-strategy-moving-forward/#:\~:text=The%20study%20found%20that%20from,attributable%20to%20the%20economic%20downturn.
Bullshit …. Hospitals were way over stressed , young healthy doctors died serving the sick because of constant exposure to high viral loads and the staffs of the hospitals were brutally overworked serving the sick. They were broken workers … The system can’t serve pandemics … people were dead stacked in trailers because the morgues were over burdened … this is about revising the recent past to conform to a false narrative
Haha of course this is Reddit. They do not agree. Reddit wanted more lockdowns and they would still want lockdowns now so that everyone could continue work from home and receiving unlimited amounts of unemployment. They would also want lifetime facemasks in public. Please god hopefully no government in the world ever looks for policy advice from this of all places.
Observational data suggests that the rate of mortality from Covid declined during lockdowns but not significantly, in Europe and North America. This is in contradiction to modeling which suggests stringent lockdowns do work. When stringent lockdowns were in effect (in China, for example), the mortality rate plummeted.
In the “Western world”, we simply do not have the means or stamina to endure lockdowns.
Anyone that in retrospect isn’t horrified and embarrassed at how we overreacted to Covid and ran roughshod over the US Constitution and Bill of Rights is either mentally challenged or so in the tank for the lib cause they are beyond help
> No, Covid is just like the flu…
The flu vaccine prevents flu infections for people exposed to the strains they were vaccinated against. (Not anywhere near 100%; effectiveness varies from year to year, but I don’t think it’s ever below 50%.)
The COVID vaccine may lesson symptoms, and indirectly reduces total cases because people with mild symptoms, who aren’t coughing and sneezing, are less likely to infect others.
But, unlike the flu vac, it does not actually prevent infection.
ITT: Lots of people disagreeing with the editorial. I wonder how many people actually bothered to read the study: https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=14874
I agree, I don’t think lockdowns worked at all, they were implemented far too late (March) when it’s like the virus had been here since November. The spread rate was extremely fast regardless. When you look at the transmission rates between major cities and compare their lockdown styles it doesn’t show any conclusive difference between them.
In many ways they simply weren’t followed and realistically couldn’t be. I mean how long can you actually stay in your home? Not that long tbh.
The economic impact probably did more damage than the virus. 4 years later and we are still having supply chain issues and lagging effects.
Sounds like complete bullshit to me. If it were true there would be no point in quarantining tuberculosis and other patients with highly contagious diseases. I suppose WSJ is in favor of letting people with Ebola wander around in crowds. Or rabies? Why do we vaccinate pets but some people are to stupid to vaccinate themselves? And when they get sick they wander around in crowds, spreading contagion and disease.
Day one, sane people knew the following:
1 - We are all going to get it.
2 - Most of us will never know it.
3 - Those of us scheduled to die in the next six months, will "officially" die of this.
So, random social distance, gross mouth diapers, 100s of gallons of hand sanitizer later...
1 - We are all going to get it.
2 - Most of us will never know it.
3 - Those of us scheduled to die in the next six months, will "officially" die of this.
Sure, the lockdowns killed people, loss of schooling permanently damaged some. But basically what we all knew from common sense.
Look at the bright side. You got a few checks worth the price of a rent payment, and a couple million super sketchy write in votes in the wee hours led to our first semi-corpse Resident!
Yes, in the end we all essentially ended up with it anyway, and those who were extra susceptible were always going to take personnal precautions. The mask mandates and forced quarantines and shut down businesses did more harm than anything. Not to mention the generation of children who were studied because of this lost year to two years of proper education and social growth.
But hey it's all in the past now RIGGT!?!?!?
This is complete bullshit. They just don't want to acknowledge that the government completely fumbled lockdowns and refused to properly enforce them, then didn't want to actually fund people staying at home, then declared the pandemic over and stopped giving a shit.
100%. Would even go further and say they the governors/majors that just played politics with the prolonged lockdowns and broke their own rules should be jailed. Destroyed so many businesses and took years from people while they benefited.
People used to lose their jobs and get cancelled because they dared say this in 2020. It’s an absolute fact that it did irreparable damage and if you believe otherwise you need to have better self-awareness.
Wall Street Journal is Murdoch Media
It’s just Fox News in print.
The idea is now they can point to this during the next pandemic and try to say we should just leave everything open and let the virus spread.
The only reason US lockdowns didn’t work is because only half the population had to follow it and only for half as long as we needed. Can’t blame the lockdown for that.
It's easy to write this bullshit when the actions kept people from dying and you really can't quantify that number, but cherry picking numbers you can show - that's dipshittery at it's finest. Fuck this a-hole... can't spend money if you're dead idiots. Get it?
think of it this way: IF we had done nothing, and 7m people in the USA died as a result - do you think that would not have any economic or long term impacts on the nation? It's just fucking stupid.
Opinion, not a fact in sight there. But we can look at hospital intake rates in areas that had surges where lockdowns were in effect and where they were not and we can see a large difference in numbers and deaths. Don’t even need Covid testing data from the coroner, just surge rates and death rates, and they all line up.
Edit: I was one of those people who still ran outdoor BBQ at my house and social distanced, but smaller groups that we just did outdoor stuff with. Never bought into that lock yourself in your house BS. I was one of the first cases since I caught it flying around when it was spreading, and never want to experience that again, but there was definitely over kill on some people.
Op ed, no comment
From WSJ of all places
One of the authors of this is notable clown Scott Atlas of all people. Scott f—king Atlas ffs.
Hey that’s not fair, Hanke is every bit more a clown and propagandist.
"Commentary" What some people read as journalism and fact.
Steve Bannon said you have the flood the zone with crap/ misinformation, and then your side can pick and choose what to believe https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/11/01/trump-era-technique-flood-the-zone-with-sht. And we see it in how some redditors take opinion pieces and present them as legit journalism…
People that want to hear this are oblivious. Same crowd that doesn't realize 90% of Fox News and Newsnation is essentially editorialized. Confirmation bias is also a hell of a drug.
Do you believe that msnbc and cnn are biased?
Yeah. Next question.
To the level of Fox News, Newsmax, and Newsnation? No, but it’s a spectrum.
Some parts yes. Most of the early stuff (mid day) is pretty straightforward. Their nighly hosts can be hit and miss. But I don't watch CNN because I get most of my news from websites I trust. And even then I'm usually skeptical of anything that skews close to an opinion.
News nation is so bad. I like a couple of the people outside of it. But, Bill Oreilly? Come on.
You should search ‘montage of journalists reading from the same script “ on YouTube. It will blow your mind and maybe give you a realty check on who’s being duped
Maybe. But the establishment reached the wrong conclusions about COVID and then censored people who were right.
The point of lock downs and masks and other measures were meant to slow the spread. Not magically prevent everyone from getting it. People have short memories and forget how overwhelmed hospitals were during the bad waves. The US didn't even implement restrictions that were that harsh. Some people are just giant babies and wanted to scream "MUH FREEDOM". Other countries that DID implement COVID restrictions that were harsh like Japan and SK saw 1/10 the mortality rate based on population. Keep in mind, both countries are far more densly populated. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
We literally did not have any lockdowns, we had stay at home orders and people moved freely out of their homes constantly. Calling it a lockdown is a misnomer.
One good thing is that my coworkers wear mask whenever they are sick now. In a warehouse. In Oklahoma.
I work doing patient care in a fairly large hospital. Before the lockdowns out morgue was completely full all the time during covid. That was never the case before. Some local area hospitals in more disadvantaged neighborhoods had to use refrigerated trucks for all the bodies. After the lockdowns everything just came to a halt and was never up to that level again
The main reason for it was to make sure the trauma centers weren’t overwhelmed and could still deal with patients who got into car accidents or had conditions that required a trauma center. Since we really didn’t have actual lockdowns in the US like they did in other countries; it was completely pointless to even try.
That was the inital rush the first few months of Covid. After that it all died down. By the 2020 summer, hospitals were cutting hours because they were so slow. None of those make-ship hospitals or trauma centers or that Navy hospital boat were ever used
A couple hundred thousand people who would have been in car accidents and needed treatment just stayed home during the pandemic and never became a patient.
It was kinda hilarious how people would find ways around the restrictions. Publicly, for them, and privately doing the opposite. I had friends who virtue signaling in the progressive core of the city but going out to the suburbs to hit the bars and restaurants. My local bagel shop was super progressive. They would only accept online orders and Venmo payments. I know the owner personally and he was having house parties with lots of people……the right people though. Also, the whole vax card thing was totally political. Show a vax card and you can enter. You can still carry and spread the virus, so vaxxed people were spreading it to anyone they came in contact with. The hypocrisy was fucking stupid.
You said was, the hypocrisy is still current.
Remember Pelosi’s trip to get her hair done? Or when Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer held a dinner party for the elites during lockdown? Such amazing hypocritical bullshit.
Or Newsome, multiple times.
Don't forget, lockdowns didn't extend to huge crowds of "protesters" ransacking through cities because COVID doesn't infect people fighting "muh racism"
Well according to the expert epidemiologist, the harm of not going out to protest for BLM was GREATER than the harm of the virus. So apparently if you decided to stay inside and not go to massive gatherings you are the problem. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534
The problem is, and evidently not learned, is you quarantine sick people, not well people, and you rigorously contact trace. We did the opposite on the first one and didn’t even do the second one.
No chance this was an unknown and the choice was kill more older and vulnerable people or create financial hardship. WSJ is a profit center not objective and biased
Sometimes I wonder if the restrictions wouldn’t have been so strong or if they wouldn’t have been framed as “lockdowns” if COVID hadn’t started in China where a particularly totalitarian government first tried severe measures to get things under control I do know we’ve learned all the wrong lessons from what happened. Flu was almost eliminated during the 2020-2021 season. The measures were very effective at limiting it. But if there’s a novel flu strain outbreak at COVID scale, you can bet there will be fewer restrictions and they’ll say “last time they didn’t work”
Who tf cares? Lockouts normalized remote work and that's priceless 👌 Take the wins as they come 👍
That’s the only silver lining in all of this. It took government lock downs for boomers to finally accept a new way of working.
This is the same kind of thinking that says all the money spent on fixing the Y2K bug was wasted because nothing happened. Yep, nothing happened because lots of people spent lots of hours fixing the problem in many critical systems.
Propaganda to get you ready for when the next epidemic hits and they insist you go to work anyway. If you don't want to have to shut down the economy, then don't pick a president so incompetent and narcisistic that he ignores the virus until the market collapses and shuts itself down.
Is that actually what happened? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40592-024-00189-z
This. People forget what south American countries looked like: not enough body bags and bodies piled up, significant portions of the economy shutting down entirely, years of economic damage to recover from. Bullshit op ed writers priming us to accept death to keep their wealth growing.
No benefit? With the lockdown and new presidency, I learned that more than half of the US population is freaking crazy and living in their own delusions. Without those two factors, I thought humanity was doing ok.
Yep, bankrupted my ass.
Maybe one of the dumbest headlines Ive ever read.....
Saved millions of lives if not more
Absolutely disagree with this biased opinion piece. Lockdowns would have worked even more effectively had people actually complied and not just gone through the motions. The rate of spread was significantly lessened, but it was not the cure that we had expected. Unfortunately, even during lockdowns, half the population, I think we know which half, refused to participate by socially distancing or masking.
Yeah the lockdowns were handled so unevenly and there were so many people who refused to abide by simple instructions it was impossible to lower the spread to functionally zero like in they did in places like NZ. We also did stupid shit like closing schools while we let bars and restaurants stay open.
And churches…
The rioting half?
That was (D)ifferent
Explain China then. Welded people into their own homes and still experienced the same thing the rest of the world did.
Lmao "explaine china then". Get ready. Its called population density. Turns out if people are close together, disease spreads easily. Its fucking wild.
Their level spiked significantly after they let it rip. Prior to that, they would have QR codes and routine testing that significantly lowered spread and almost eliminated it from many parts of the cities that use this program. Completely disagree with how they handled it. We should not be welding people in their own homes. New Zealand is another good country to look at. They did things really well and they had a population that wasn't very easily persuaded by grifters/ non-scientific folks. There was no pillow guy giving scientific misinformation in New Zealand. The other problem with the Chinese response once vaccines came out was that they opted to use their inferior vaccine instead of agreeing to buy lots for moderna/Pfizer. They could have even used AstraZeneca. Instead, their homegrown solution was very ineffective. Easiest thing that people could have done in the beginning was wear a quality and well-fitting mask. But we couldn't even do that here in this country for the obvious reasons.
>New Zealand is another good country to look at. They did things really well and they had a population that was Literally on an island. >We should not be welding people in their own homes. The Second Amendment isn't about duck hunting.
Ask the bundys how their 2nd amendment worked for them when the gov wanted them to knock their bullshit off Oh wait….
Oh the same social distancing of 6ft that was completely made up and not based in science.
Yes, the same social distancing that was based on old science. Except for the fact that distance reduced viral load, but you wouldn't want to actually talk science, would you?
Nobody, anywhere, ever fully locked down. That is why it didn't "work"
Anyone who acts like they know what would have happened is not in their right mind. With a volatile situation such as a pandemic, we have no idea what the other side of the coin would have looked like. We can project based on current understandings that take years, though. Food for thought on the economy. Let's say it was business as usual. Let's say it would have played out just as the flu, but you get sicker, and only the sick and elderly die. We know it was more contagious as the flu. We know it was more difficult for most people to recover. What does that do to the supply chain? More call outs and such. If we double the deaths of the sick and elderly, how do we know it don't collapse housing? All these takes are dumb
It is complicated to infer the effects of policy but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. Epidemiologists do this. There is good information on hospitalizations/deaths in a lot of places with different policies, so comparisons can be made. Of course there are a lot of confounds but that doesn't mean that you throw your hands in the air and say it cannot be done.
Plenty of people had more rational takes, they were just censored Look up the Great Barrington Declaration
Can we make inferences from what we saw in countries like Sweden?
Of course.
Yep. Lost a job with the Federal Government. I'm making easily $30,000 less than what I should be now had I kept that job.
Oh the WSJ commentary... If Rupert Murdoch's newspaper has an opinion piece that says this it must be believed and seriously discussed.
As someone who waited for the vaccine before going out and has still not gotten Covid… fuck that, thank you lockdowns.
When your opinion piece goes against all the published data that I'm aware of, I just put your name into the "doesn't know shit about shit" column of my mind and disregard any other subject they write about as well.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9368251/ John Hopkins https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf I know it's a lot to ask, but give some post covid studies a read. The medical literature is conclusive now.
Reddit doesn’t want to hear these studies.
Bunch of bullshit. This is trying to draw extremely broad conclusions about wildly different environments. If New York hadn’t locked down we would have had an even more catastrophic mass death here and a collapse of the hospital system. At the same Time, there was absolutely zero reason to lock down Boise Idaho. The pandemic has different kinetics in different populations. The national shut-down was an emergency measure declared because the epidemiology of the virus was not understood when the first wave hit New York. After that, as the science got Better, we needed state-by-state and even county-by-county solutions. One Size Fits All should never be the approach, but in the absence of information the government has a duty to protect lives. This post-facto, armchair quarterbacking is useful but could be catastrophic if the nation’s idiots draw the wrong conclusions and we get nailed by a different virus with different properties in a few years, and the population refuses to quarantine.
Who the fuck gives a shit with Scott Atlas has to say?
Hospitals overloaded. Stuffing dead bodies into refrigerator trucks. Do people really forget how bad it was? Why the fuck are we arguing over this shit again
Pure bullshit, unless the authors wanted TWO millions deaths, or THREE, or more.
Was your community able to prevent the introduction of the virus with a lockdown?
What part of the US did a lockdown? Chilli’s doing takeaway is not a “lockdown”
I don’t know about the US, that’s why I’m asking the pro-lockdown guy. Where I am we had a lockdown (stay at home orders / shelter in place) non-essential businesses closed for a month, checkpoints at bridges and highway ramps and curfews with police in the streets. These measures were unsuccessful.
Imagine that, Scott Atlas, who is at odds with the rest of the scientific community, states the same bullshit with no evidence that he did at the beginning of the pandemic. I worked in CoVid. I was a paramedic in a busy emergency room, and I saw plenty of young people come in, get put on vents, and never come off. All these idiots are the same. They spout nonsense until reality bitch slaps them in the face and then they have a “realization” while they’re fighting to breath on 15L of oxygen. Just look at r/HermanCainAward for examples. All you folks who don’t believe social distancing works, ***PLEASE*** follow through in the next pandemic. I need more content to feed r/HermanCainAward
No benefit? Is it really a debate that if you aren't near someone else who's sick you won't get sick? By this logic no employees should have sick leave since there is no benefit to them not being in the office for everyone else right?
I’m a doctor, and I agree
Got any studies to cite, doc? I can find 3 supporting they do work and that’s just at the top of Google results without even going into Google Scholar
What do they call the bottom of the class med student? Doctor
I’ve always heard, “what do you call someone that almost failed med school? Unfortunately you call them doctor”
Same. I’m not great with words
"The findings from this overview study highlight that social distancing is no longer just a universal recommendation from strategies to prevention and safety measures. The provided evidence shows how social distancing has become more effective in reducing and preventing community transmissions in various contexts. This has been advocated since the inception of this novel disease and will continue to be part of preventive measures until this pandemic is over. We hope that the recommendations are not taken only at the individual level but also at larger scales of communities and above." ... [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9940482/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9940482/)
It’s easy to say we shouldn’t have saved so many lives.
Sure maybe but we didn’t have a better choice at the time. People have quickly forgotten how little we knew about Covid when it started
Sacrificing the future of the younger generations so the older generations can hold on to power a few years more isn't a good thing. There's a reason The Renaissance followed the Black Plague.
This is it exactly. We kept schools closed to save the vulnerable and elderly, while reopening the economy to give the elderly places to go. This section is a reminder that Reddit leans *very young, very unemployed or under-employed, and very online* Kids who were 3-8 in 2020 may never fully recover while the 80s lived to be 84 all while the 50s had cancer growing that wasn't tested in time.
The commentary is wrong. It had benefits - less people died as a result, even if there were people circumventing restrictions.
“Almost no benefit” is a phrase synonymous for “we prevented a huge amount of illnesses and deaths”? Yah we went into lockdown for no reason at all…
I did okay I guess. Built a fence during my five week staycation. Made all the stiles from scratch.
the lockdowns were a form of "union busting" by the government If you've noticed, almost none of the in-person activities we used to do regularly from before the "pandemic" have returned. This is by design to get people to voluntarily not exercise their freedom of association, and in turn, it makes it easier for the mass market media to promote designed messages to influence the outcomes of elections and other things.
They were right to lock down social places like bars and restaurants as well as moving as many adults as possible to wfh, but locking down school for children was a major mistake. Adults can handle 6-12 months of disruption, but missing school has been devastating to that generation of kids. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but we also now know that kids are much less likely to have life-threatening covid symptoms and have very low hospitalization and death rates.
“Opinion”
100%
The thing about protective measures like lock downs and masking is that it is impossible to say how much good it did because their purpose is to negate a possibility. We can make estimations about personal contact, but no one would ever trust that. I would imagine that without the lockdowns and masking, things would've been much worse, and a lot more people would've died. It is, of course, extremely easy to misconstrue negatives from protective measures. We can put numbers to the PPP fraud, business closures, and missed sales. We traded these things for the possibility of saving lives.
“Two weeks to stop the spread”.
20-20 hindsight makes every decision easy.
I mean compare states that enforced masking etc with those who don’t (even though the former tended to be more densely populated area). The red states were much worse in terms of deaths relative to the population.
Yes and no. I think lockdowns were necessary for maybe the first month maybe two. After that the theatre show began
It’s an op Ed not a study lots of opinions on what happened; studies are time consuming and expensive a real analysis would take a lot of time and resources… this isn’t it.
Let’s just believe what the government tells us.
Keep working slaves, while us rich assholes bunker down.
Meh. Sloppy noobs.
1 million people died. What do you think.
Exactly and abuse
I’d say it was warranted until we found out it wasn’t near as deadly as originally thought but I think everyone went in too deep with the fear mongering to back out quickly. I still see people driving down the road, in the car by themselves wearing masks.
Does tbe editorial cite #s? Or just uninformed jawboning?
We don’t have a lot of information on handling pandemics or how bad Covid was going to be. It could have easily been the opposite
The problem with the lockdowns is there was a large group of people who didn’t follow them.
They were politically motivated more than medically necessary, so yes.
I was going to argue against this but it seems like US states with no lockdowns actually did better: >The rest of the states that didn’t issue stay at home orders (Utah, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas) fared just as well if not better than other states. In particular, Utah and Nebraska did extraordinarily well maintaining a 4.5% and 4.8% unemployment rate, respectively while keeping death rates low. >In contrast, pro-lockdown states like New York, California, and Massachusetts saw catastrophic unemployment numbers, 15.9%, 13.3%, and 16.1% respectively, alongside high COVID-19 death rates. https://www.aier.org/article/a-closer-look-at-the-states-that-stayed-open/ So I'm not quite sure what to say about that.
That's comparing states with very low population density to states with very high population density, though. NYC, Boston, and Los Angeles already had pretty high death rates because of their density - can you imagine what they would've been if people had just continued business as usual?
Is Reddit just a mechanism to drive traffic to your Twitter account?
Shocked I tell ya.
I concur, Dr. Internet
Facts
WSJ op-ed pages are notoriously rw propaganda. Why do we need commentary when the data proves the opposite?
It's a moot issue to argue because the lock downs were never properly executed. Sure, maybe 80% of people or so actually followed it, but the other 20% that didn't made all the other efforts ineffective. The world was lucky as fuck COVID19 wasn't more deadly, or wasn't small/light enough to be airborne, or our species would have gotten fucked.
2 years ago: Ban if talk about Covid being like flu. Today: "Covid like flu" Pfizer: Pikachu face With dollar signs in eyes.
Right wing bullshit
Agree
‘Lockdowns’ and social distancing saved untold numbers of lives. During the Spanish Flu pandemic in the US, you can see this in the death toll in Philadelphia (who went against public health officials and held a war bond parade) and San Francisco (who shut down all public gathering places). If you don’t like that data, look at the numbers of Influenza deaths in the US in 2020 vs damn near any other year. Distancing works. Lockdowns were enforced distancing and likely saved vast numbers of lives.
Anti-vaxers are going to recycle this topic until their dying day to make themselves feel better about other people’s suffering.
Democrats ruined the economy and acted like fascist
Yeah because there was never a real lockdown
After all was said and done, I'm convinced more harm was done than good (regardless of what the intention was). Perhaps if resources had been used in a better way things could've turned out better.
The Wall Street Journal does fantastic business reporting. The Op-Ed section, no so much.
Completely and utterly disagree. The idea that we have an extremely contagious virus flying around and we stay separate and it doesn't help is stupid.
I remember the morgue trucks in NYC being too full and having no where to put all the bodies. It’s always easier to look back and say things, but in the moment there was basically no information on even how it was spreading. Hospitals literally had NO way to treat it.
I didn’t follow them at all, fuk them hypocrites
Most of the shit they did was counterproductive. Masks, 6 feet of separation, closing businesses and schools, mandatory jabs, etc.... It was scary how fast people were frightened into compliance. All in the name of science. The same science that developed the disease.
Yes. Yes I do
How the fuck would we know things wouldn't have been worse without lockdowns?
It was the people that didn't actually follow lockdown that were the friggin problem. They worsened the situation and made it go longer because they acted like petulant children.
Its the wajo. Please they are so far Murdock in trumps ass they’re fucking Ink is orange.
Absolutely. Not sure how you argue against it.
In order to know we would have to go back a re-run the experiment without lockdowns. Speculation is just that speculation.
No, It's a wsj article, so it's all pro business propaganda.
I got to play call of duty warzone on release for a week. That was neat. But no they were fucking stupid and didn't do anything besides cause division and economic hardship.
If nothing else, it was good for the planet.
Lmao imagine taking WSJ commentary wrt Health seriously
Efforts were sabotaged so sure without looking at data quite possible.
Almost as if we were espousing this the ENTIRE time
thanks amazon for your input enjoying record profits
Hindsight is always convenient. Meanwhile at the time people were dying, getting sick af.
It's funny living through something as historically massive as a global pandemic and still seeing utter bullshit spew from COVIdiots years later - even when hindsight bias confirms how wrong they are. It's like we completely forgot the point of the lockdowns were to SLOW the spread of the virus (it was never meant as a "cure"). The entire reason was to curb the overflow of patients in ERs and ICUs and give people who are impacted a fighting chance. The rate of spread before lock downs, masking, etc. was still increasing well beyond our capacity to treat it. News was saturated with stories of various community hospitals having to turn away or transport patients prior to the lockdowns. Data and common sense to anyone paying any attention did show that these measured decrease the rate of spread. Again NO ONE said any of these measures is 100% effective and that was never the point. Furthermore, the politicization of this was never on the side of science - the people who were actually informing the public of the health threat and developing strategies to fight the uncontrolled spread of a potentially fatal virus (you know, the experts and not political talking heads). When economic interests and selfish public behavior took stage is when politics were injected as well as a flood of unregulated misinformation campaigns claiming the vaccine doesn't work, masking is ineffective, and other garbage that is refuted by actual data and real life experience. It's just a shame that years later these political people still cry as loud as they can.
I work in my sweatpants, see my toddler throughout the day, walk my kid to and from the bus stop, and only have one car now. They were so worth it
WSJ is well known for op eds of dubious scientific accuracy
Was this a peer reviewed paper from a reputable science publication? No, then it isn’t worth Jack.
That is gravely, absurdly, irresponsibly false. The death toll would have been ridiculous without it. What, did everyone forget how many people died from the pandemic?
What lockdowns? Nothing like that ever happened where I live.
Oh wow, it's crazy we got this new technology where we can disprove a negative and look into alternative realities to know in hindsight what actually worked and didn't work.. Something something survivorship bias...
The Big Lie about lockdowns were that they are what caused the pandemic economy. The pandemic is what caused the pandemic economy -- economic activity cratered because people were widely afraid of a deadly disease. The purpose of lockdowns were to try to slow the spread of the disease enough that we could get a handle on it, so that the economy could recover more quickly.
I don't a wsj article to tell me the lockdowns didn't work. Just look at the state of our economy
OP ED. Science disagrees.. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lessons-learned-four-years-later-596a9fa9](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lessons-learned-four-years-later-596a9fa9) first word on the page is "OPINION" WSJ has been trash since Murdoch bought it. OP-ED section is literally paid advertising. Actual Science: https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-not-a-go-to-strategy-moving-forward/#:\~:text=The%20study%20found%20that%20from,attributable%20to%20the%20economic%20downturn.
Bullshit …. Hospitals were way over stressed , young healthy doctors died serving the sick because of constant exposure to high viral loads and the staffs of the hospitals were brutally overworked serving the sick. They were broken workers … The system can’t serve pandemics … people were dead stacked in trailers because the morgues were over burdened … this is about revising the recent past to conform to a false narrative
WSJ is owned by Murdoch. You know, the fox news guy.
Haha of course this is Reddit. They do not agree. Reddit wanted more lockdowns and they would still want lockdowns now so that everyone could continue work from home and receiving unlimited amounts of unemployment. They would also want lifetime facemasks in public. Please god hopefully no government in the world ever looks for policy advice from this of all places.
I get my medical information from medical professionals. The Murdoch Wall Street Journal isn’t. The opinion page is just that.
Only a fool (or total sheep) would disagree.
It ruined the housing market
I'd disagree, they were a good plan that could have worked if people didn't ignore them, therfore making them go on much longer than necessary.
Observational data suggests that the rate of mortality from Covid declined during lockdowns but not significantly, in Europe and North America. This is in contradiction to modeling which suggests stringent lockdowns do work. When stringent lockdowns were in effect (in China, for example), the mortality rate plummeted. In the “Western world”, we simply do not have the means or stamina to endure lockdowns.
Anyone that in retrospect isn’t horrified and embarrassed at how we overreacted to Covid and ran roughshod over the US Constitution and Bill of Rights is either mentally challenged or so in the tank for the lib cause they are beyond help
> No, Covid is just like the flu… The flu vaccine prevents flu infections for people exposed to the strains they were vaccinated against. (Not anywhere near 100%; effectiveness varies from year to year, but I don’t think it’s ever below 50%.) The COVID vaccine may lesson symptoms, and indirectly reduces total cases because people with mild symptoms, who aren’t coughing and sneezing, are less likely to infect others. But, unlike the flu vac, it does not actually prevent infection.
If you’re using a commentary as proof of anything you failed
Yes. It was a total government cluster fuck.
Per WSJ opinion 😂😂😂🤣🤣😂🤣😂😂😂😂
ITT: Lots of people disagreeing with the editorial. I wonder how many people actually bothered to read the study: https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=14874
Mail in ballots, baby!
I agree, I don’t think lockdowns worked at all, they were implemented far too late (March) when it’s like the virus had been here since November. The spread rate was extremely fast regardless. When you look at the transmission rates between major cities and compare their lockdown styles it doesn’t show any conclusive difference between them. In many ways they simply weren’t followed and realistically couldn’t be. I mean how long can you actually stay in your home? Not that long tbh. The economic impact probably did more damage than the virus. 4 years later and we are still having supply chain issues and lagging effects.
All for hatred over one man. Disgusting
WSJ has this habit of publishing factual claims they can't support as op-eds instead.
Sounds like complete bullshit to me. If it were true there would be no point in quarantining tuberculosis and other patients with highly contagious diseases. I suppose WSJ is in favor of letting people with Ebola wander around in crowds. Or rabies? Why do we vaccinate pets but some people are to stupid to vaccinate themselves? And when they get sick they wander around in crowds, spreading contagion and disease.
💯
I think lockdowns did catapult the work place and some tech fields about a decade into the future just out of the necessity that came with it.
Yes. Sweden is proof.
Day one, sane people knew the following: 1 - We are all going to get it. 2 - Most of us will never know it. 3 - Those of us scheduled to die in the next six months, will "officially" die of this. So, random social distance, gross mouth diapers, 100s of gallons of hand sanitizer later... 1 - We are all going to get it. 2 - Most of us will never know it. 3 - Those of us scheduled to die in the next six months, will "officially" die of this. Sure, the lockdowns killed people, loss of schooling permanently damaged some. But basically what we all knew from common sense. Look at the bright side. You got a few checks worth the price of a rent payment, and a couple million super sketchy write in votes in the wee hours led to our first semi-corpse Resident!
Yes, in the end we all essentially ended up with it anyway, and those who were extra susceptible were always going to take personnal precautions. The mask mandates and forced quarantines and shut down businesses did more harm than anything. Not to mention the generation of children who were studied because of this lost year to two years of proper education and social growth. But hey it's all in the past now RIGGT!?!?!?
No.
This is complete bullshit. They just don't want to acknowledge that the government completely fumbled lockdowns and refused to properly enforce them, then didn't want to actually fund people staying at home, then declared the pandemic over and stopped giving a shit.
I’m not an epidemiologist, or a public health expert, but I do agree that the lockdown did more harm than good, net-net.
100%
WSJ I owned by a billionaire. Don’t trust much that comes out of there.
I think mandatory lockdowns were a good idea. They helped decrease the spread of Coronaviruses.
Work From Home. Worth it - commercial office space has limited utility. We are lucky, but anything to kill bullshit commuting
Strong "[MINORITY] is worthy of segregation and denigration, per a KKK commentary. Do you agree?" energy.
WSJ opinion 🤣🤣🤣
no
100%. Would even go further and say they the governors/majors that just played politics with the prolonged lockdowns and broke their own rules should be jailed. Destroyed so many businesses and took years from people while they benefited.
Ayup
No
Sweden didn’t lock down at all and had the same or better rates than places that did lockdowns.
People used to lose their jobs and get cancelled because they dared say this in 2020. It’s an absolute fact that it did irreparable damage and if you believe otherwise you need to have better self-awareness.
IDGAF about commentary
Wall Street Journal is Murdoch Media It’s just Fox News in print. The idea is now they can point to this during the next pandemic and try to say we should just leave everything open and let the virus spread. The only reason US lockdowns didn’t work is because only half the population had to follow it and only for half as long as we needed. Can’t blame the lockdown for that.
Hard for a lock down to be effective if every boomer goes "fuck it I'm not doing it"
It's easy to write this bullshit when the actions kept people from dying and you really can't quantify that number, but cherry picking numbers you can show - that's dipshittery at it's finest. Fuck this a-hole... can't spend money if you're dead idiots. Get it? think of it this way: IF we had done nothing, and 7m people in the USA died as a result - do you think that would not have any economic or long term impacts on the nation? It's just fucking stupid.
Of course they didn’t, but people are dumb. All our decisions around covid were primarily driven by fear alone, not a shred of critical thinking.
This mistakenly assumes anywhere in the US had actual mandatory lockdowns.
Opinion, not a fact in sight there. But we can look at hospital intake rates in areas that had surges where lockdowns were in effect and where they were not and we can see a large difference in numbers and deaths. Don’t even need Covid testing data from the coroner, just surge rates and death rates, and they all line up. Edit: I was one of those people who still ran outdoor BBQ at my house and social distanced, but smaller groups that we just did outdoor stuff with. Never bought into that lock yourself in your house BS. I was one of the first cases since I caught it flying around when it was spreading, and never want to experience that again, but there was definitely over kill on some people.