Any organization that showed caution in the face of uncertainty is going to get knocked in hindsight, even though the caution was absolutely warranted. Want to know why things were still not back to normal into 2022? Because the peak of COVID deaths and hospitalizations was *in* 2022.
I'm not going to bother looking into more context, but a charitable reading of Schatz post is that the COVID response was spotty and inconsistent because it wasn't based on science it was based on which businesses could lobby the best.
Any good policy response should be asking questions about how to improve. I would rather not let that process be fully captured by the worst people on earth
It’s wild to me how conventional wisdom for a wide swath of the population including center and left is “we overreacted to Covid.” 1.2M people in the US died. Were there some dumb things amid the uncertainty? Sure. Should schools have been open in spring 2020? No.
Plus people are memory holing, as you said, the worst of deaths and hospitalizations were basically Jan 21 and winter 21-22. There were a TON of things incl schools that were like “ok we’re opening back up!!” that weeks later had to scramble to dial back because the numbers were so bad
If you told someone that some people are *obsessed* with having a "reckoning" over how the pandemic was handled, they might assume "Oh, to see how we could have saved more lives??" And we'd have to sigh and answer, "No - because some elitist crybabies were confused and inconvenienced a little bit"
These dopes want some Chernobyl series finale show trial to get "ANSWERS" about shit that's been available for *literally years*. Because they don't want actual answers or new data, they want #science itself to tongue kiss them a big wet apology. Shut up you dopes. www.npr.org/sections/goa...
I also really, really don't want the Democratic Party's takeaway from COVID to be "we should be less cautious", because I remember what April and May of 2020 were like in NYC, the epicenter of the outbreak. It was worse than anyone else in America could understand.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these people's completely ahistorical takes.
The way ppl have rewritten history they've lived through is insane. PA only closed schools during the last few months of the 2019-20 year, any further closures were up to locals. Even had a normal fall 2020 football season. Ppl believe to this day that schools were closed for years.
I was in Manhattan Hotel March 12 '20. Epicenter New Rochelle then everywhere. Hotel was empty. Elevator came to my floor and went to lobby, up and down. Gave me top floor corner room. I knew then that It was bad because everyone had cancelled but me. Maid had tray of chemicals. Made it out in time.
You realize many people were so annoyed they couldn’t go to places that they have suppressed the memory or outright ignored it and still think nothing should have been shutdown. They want to tell you that shutting things down lead to more problems then all the deaths.
PA reopened restaurants, bars, everything by early July 2020. People are still bitching today that they couldn't eat at Chili's for a few months five years ago. It's wild.
They wanted to open the schools again before teachers got their vaccinations. It would’ve led to a lot of deaths
I also think there’s an unfortunate angle to this where the Dems get pinned with whatever too-cautious thing any organization did, like what happens with activist policy positions, while everyone looks at the GOP turning into the anti-vaccine-and-horse-paste party and shrugs
They're very selective in what data they use to justify their claims, leaning on the outrage and ignoring basic science because facts interfere with their dopamine thrill of being perpetual victims.
Yep. Survivor bias is a hell of a drug.
They're so inconsistent because Trump and others will actually point out how many died in 2022 when they want to claim Joe Biden messed up Covid. Disingenuous at every turn
also part of the reason that rules seemed arbitrary or inconsistent was because every state and local government had to operate independently of the federal government! people were dying and officials had to throw a lot of spaghetti at a lot of walls without any unified strategy from the feds
the only covid reckoning we need is all the "government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem" puds acknowledging that their ideology left us with a hollowed out public health infrastructure that let over a million people die