Just to elaborate a bit, there are still a lot of people who never understood the idea of “flattening the curve”. That the calls for wearing masks, social distancing, and lockdowns, were all done to protect those most vulnerable and to lighten the burden on the healthcare system so it could continue to function and treat those that nevertheless got infected.
Anything done in the service of those goals were always given the most negative possible spin. Wearing masks were seen as an attempt to stifle speech (so NOT an at tempt to flatten the curve), and political grifters attempted to exploit the appearance of (what was always going to be merely temporary) government mask mandates as examples of government overreach and a slippery slope towards totalitarianism. And that resisting them were a form of rebellion against tyranny.
The way the right wing reacted to this whole thing became obscene and ridiculous. It broke some people’s brains.
Yes, that cannot be emphasized enough. People have short memories, so I will remind folks of the decisions we were potentially facing. A 30 year old single auto mechanic and a 45 year old school teacher with two kids arrive at the ER in need of an ICU bed. Which one is of more value to society and gets the bed while the other is left to die on the sidewalk? Or should it just be left to a lottery or first-come-first-serve system? In some parts of Canada, at least, we were on the verge of having to make such decisions, and it was only thru mitigation efforts such as lockdowns, social distancing, masks and, eventually, vaccines that we avoided it, but only just.
The public health officials who prevented this were heroes. But, instead of recognition, they receive vilification and death threats. It’s insane.
The usual response to this very valid argument is that the same goal could have been achieved by shielding the elderly and vulnerable and let ‘the rest of us’ get on with our lives.
It is never explained exactly how this shielding is supposed to work, when caring for elderly and vulnerable invariably means that younger and healthy people spend a lot of time in close contact with them. People who have lives outside their care work, lives that include going out for shopping and social activities, having a family with partners who go out to work and children who attend schools. So do we then also need to shield the carers? Or is it ok if they pick up the virus outside work and go to the care homes carrying it with them?
I’ve never seen a sensible answer to this obvious point.
Or how we identify who exactly counts as healthy enough to survive the disease, much less get through it without long-term effects.
There were still plenty of people who by all appearances seemed both young and healthy that nevertheless died, or got very ill with lasting effects.
What’s really strange about this whole thing is that many of the people against the masks, lockdowns, etc. seem to be basically advocating a sort of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. To just let the disease run relatively rampant and let God sort them out afterwards. Many of these people are religious evangelicals who simultaneously rail against the evils of Darwinism. And yet they’re basically advocating for it’s implementation as a health-care policy during a pandemic.
One of the main reason given for vaccinating UK children was to reduce the chances of them passing the disease on to their parents and grandparents who could be much more susceptible.
None of the people I’ve seen advocating for not giving the vaccine to children because children are far less likely to be badly affected by COVID has ever understood this.
I’m not sure if this is so much a conscious preference for social Darwinism so much as a toxic form of individualism – wanting the maximal freedom for themselves, and being unwilling to acknowledge the negative externalities this has on others. I see the same thing with the very maximalist (and ahistorical) emphasis on gun rights – ‘my’ right to buy, own and carry any sort of gun whenever should always trump society’s right to minimise gun violence and other individuals’ right to be free from violence and intimidation.
Of course they’re not advocating for it explicitly (and I would expect them to deny this is what they’re doing), but my point is that seems to nevertheless be the effect of their desired pandemic policies. I think there is value in bringing this up and forcing them to consider what they actually believe about how society should be run and how pandemic should be handled.
If, as they claim, they are against social Darwinism, why do they advocate health care policies that are a de facto implementation of it?
Are they against social Darwinism, or simply uncomfortable with the label?
There would seem to be quite a bit of overlap between what I’ve seen described as the “Protestant work ethic” and social Darwinism, especially when the former (not uncommonly) leads people to view those in poverty as ‘lazy’ and morally inferior.
A not-too-dissimilar view is that of the Prosperity gospel, which is also influential in the US.
I would also suggest that the American health system, political system (with its emphasis on fundraising), and gun culture are also implicitly socially-Darwinist.
I think the simplest explanation is, there is no single measure that can be sufficiently effective, which is why multiple measures are needed. Each measure taken helps to slow the spread, and with enough measures that should prevent truly disastrous outcomes. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. It did help to prevent the worst case scenarios, and we should be glad of that.
A disease like SARS-COVID had long been anticipated by epidemiologists, that’s the reason why the CDC exists. For all the flaws in the response, we still managed to avoid another Spanish Flu scenario. It might have been so much worse, and it still could be worse when the next epidemic happens.
Not IF, but WHEN. Nothing can stop it from happening again. We’ve done pretty well in controlling disease outbreaks - so well that many people have forgotten the how many people were killed or maimed by diseases like Polio, Rabies, Smallpox, Whooping Cough, Malaria, Ebola, Measles, and many more. Consider if you can (because it’s really hard to imaging), the consequences if one of these old diseases were to recur with total immunity to current treatments. In the modern world that could easily be hundreds of millions killed or maimed, or even a billion people if it were equivalent to the Spanish Flu.
We cannot stop the next pandemic in it’s entirety, but we can try to slow down to where it does less damage the next time.
I don’t disagree with what you say here, but I don’t understand in what way it is a response to my point (which was that ‘shielding the vulnerable’ is an empty slogan because it is never explained how it would work).
… there is no single measure that can be sufficiently effective, which is why multiple measures are needed. Each measure taken helps to slow the spread, and with enough measures that should prevent truly disastrous outcomes.
Maybe “prevent” is the wrong word … delay and reduce might be more accurate.
I think the trouble is that some people (not necessarily you) do not understand just how lucky we were. ONLY ~1 million people died of COVID in the US during the pandemic. MOST hospitals were not overwhelmed, or not overwhelmed for too long, and so the sickest people USUALLY got the care they needed.
Early in the pandemic (end of March, 2019 IIRC) there were estimates that the “doubling time” for new infections was 3 days. To put this in perspective, that means that for every one person infected, after 30 days 1024 more people will be infected. It would be wrong to apply that to the whole US population - it’s not that simple - the point is that without any measure to reduce the spread, everyone in the country would have quickly been exposed, and the number of cases would have maxed out. The hospitals would have been overwhelmed, people who needed critical care couldn’t get it, and many millions more would have died, and not just those most vulnerable. THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
It’s true that a lot of people were displaced from work, and that hurt the economy temporarily. Imagine instead that an equal number of people were displaced from life, causing permanent loss to the economy. Again, that didn’t happen, but we came perilously close to disaster - and then people would be asking why more wasn’t done to stop the virus. instead of complaining about the inconvenience they had to endure.
Somehow we are talking past each other because I still don’t understand why you think you are responding to my original point. Perhaps you want to read that again?
And what many people forget is that China shut down. Given that just-in-time manufacturing requires tightly coordinated pipelines for parts, manufacturers that needed parts from China were screwed. The US couldn’t go back to regular production even if they wanted. And no, Sweden didn’t do better than its peers. Covid ripped through nursing homes but hospitals weren’t overwhelmed because they opted to ration critical care, eg. Hospice and morphine for the elderly rather instead of critical care beds in hospitals. Economically, Sweden faced the same supply chain disruptions as everyone else.
I’m pretty sure you and @faded_Glory are saying the same thing, just talking past each other by accident. @faded_Glory was arguing against the view that COVID-19 could have been stopped by just shielding the elderly.
OK, but I don’t understand what you think you are missing.
Obviously we need to shield the care givers. If they get sick that makes it even hard to care for those who are ill, leading toward a real crisis.
We also don’t know ahead of time exactly who may be vulnerable - even otherwise healthy people might end up in the ICU, or dead, or they may suffer long term effects. COVID was full of these nasty surprises. (There is no reason to think the next pandemic will be any different in this respect.)
(which was that ‘shielding the vulnerable’ is an empty slogan because it is never explained how it would work)
Not empty - it is full of consequences - and this might be the point you are missing.
Have you seen the movie Contagion? This presents a possible worst-case scenario, but it is not science fiction. This is exactly the sort of outbreak that epidemiologists have been worried about for more than 70 years prior to the film.