To your list I would add one more lesson we didn’t learn: Fear is a terrible basis for policy. I think some people are by nature more fearful and anxious, especially about health, and those people were too often the only ones advising our leaders about the restrictions that ought to be imposed.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, the NYTimes ran a poll of epidemiologists, 3 percent of whom said they would never go back to ordinary life--including continuing to quarantine mail and groceries for 24 hours and other measures that now sound insane--again. Never! It seems so clear to me that the biases of the excessively fearful ought to have been at least counterbalanced by advice from experts in other fields.
Another uncomfortable fact, highly under-reported, but an anecdotal consensus from every doc with whom I’ve spoken—the vast majority extremely sick COVID patients (those in ICUs, on vents, etc.) were morbidly obese. Apparently it was considered body-shaming to report this, because it appeared almost nowhere.
I agree that we didn't learn what we needed to learn from Covid, and I say that confidently because we just had a follow-up test: monkeypox. We failed.
Mercifully, monkeypox probably isn't contagious enough to become a giga-infection behemoth like SARS-CoV-2, but that wasn't obvious in the summer, and like the early stages of the Covid pandemic we under-responded: it was hard to get tested, it was hard to get vaccinated, and state authorities mostly limited themselves to the least ambitious, most narrowly targeted, actions and recommendations.
I can't even be 100% sure that monkeypox ISN'T spreading under the radar! Case numbers are dropping but I don't know whether that's because of worsening test coverage. I don't think it's likely, but I can't rule it out, which is pretty worrying!
"There’s still a chance that we could learn from our Covid-era mistakes."
I found myself nodding in agreement up until I read this sentence. If nothing else, the last seven plus years of Trumplandia (and yes, we still live in it, even though he's out of office) have shown that someone could show us a picture of an apple and half the country would look at it and scream shrilly and constantly that it was an orange. So, maybe SOME of us might learn something (your points about school closings, which I admittedly initially supported, are very well-taken), but I suspect that the vast majority of us would learn precisely nothing.
Is this an overly pessimistic take? Yeah, probably, but the events of the last few years are not exactly cause for optimism.
That Covid kills many more people per week than the flu does virtually every week of the year strikes me as reason to continue treating it more seriously than the flu. It’s pretty clear that we’re on course for six figures worth of US Covid deaths every year going forward, versus low five figures for flu.
And while it’s much more dangerous for the elderly (which victims it still, on average, takes a decade or so of remaining life from), so far it’s a top three or four cause of death in most age ranges. It kills fewer young people, but so does everything else.
Vaccination does help a great deal against death and hospitalization. And if that were my only concern I probably wouldn’t be one of those people you criticize at this point.
(Though getting a flulike illness twice a year on average instead of maybe once or twice a decade still doesn’t sound fun. And it would still be worth not treating the immunocompromised as expendable.)
But there’s also long Covid, which vaccination doesn’t help nearly as much. And which includes elevated risks of stroke and heart problems among other serious complications for over a year after a mild case.
If and when I see studies that put the odds of continuing chronic sequelae for the vaccinated much below those of losing Russian Roulette, I’ll think about relaxing my own vigilance and/or stop supporting public health measures.
(For what the latter is worth. Obviously by now it’s mostly as futile as suggesting in 1975 that maybe people should use seat belts, or not smoke inside hospitals.)
One would have hoped that we also might have learned something along the lines of "we're all in it together, we're all dependent on one another, we all need to take care of each other and look out for people we don't know and are nothing like us, and maybe let's minimize some of our more superficial divisions in the name of advancing our shared fortunes as a species."
"the main reason that the Allies won World War II is that Hitler tripped over a pile of frozen Russian corpses on his way to Moscow."
Not untrue, but at least debatable vs "the main reason the Allies won is that even by 1940 the US was the only superpower on the planet at the time, even though nobody had realized it yet".
US economic dominance (in oil, food, industrial equipment, advanced materials, lubricants, etc) was the reason Spain stayed neutral, the reason all of Latin America stayed Allied or neutral, the reason Britain stayed fighting after the fall of France, the means by which the USSR had a mechanized army (and especially a mechanized logistics system, which Germany mostly didn't), and ultimately the reason the war was a (relative) cakewalk by mid-44.
The US was even dominant by mid-war in science, developing most of the best military systems and technology by the war's end (despite the German reputation for this). Germany had the best fighter. Russia arguably had the best tank. But by '45, the US had the best destroyer (and essentially every other warship), the best machine gun, the best bomber, the best truck, the best car, the best cargo ship, the best ammunition, all the best non-tank vehicles, and, with Britain, the best tech (radar, sonar, comms, computers, A-bomb, statistics). And the US designs were specifically built around getting lots and lots of them to Europe (or Japan) and ending the war - ie, they had the most effective organizational government-military-industrial structure that converted national resources into military might.
The Russian role in World War 2 was wrongly minimized for decades through the Cold War, but there's been an overcorrection recently in the other direction. The US and UK would have won a (much longer and more painful) war against Germany and Japan without Russian involvement. Russia *probably* would have won their war against Germany alone without Britain and the US.
Just when I think I’ve seen and read far too many pieces on Covid, one comes around and nails it. Liked it so much I almost hit the upgrade box! Keep me on your dance card. My stocks might recover one day….
I don't know whether news outlets embraced the idea of YPLL, but a lot of net.innumerates did, in the following manner (logic slightly cleaned up from the way it was presented, and elided fallacious steps made explicit):
- some people who catch covid and die were pretty much already on their death beds, and already had a life expectancy of perhaps 1 year.
- these people were mostly old.
- Therefore (all) old people have a YPLL of 1 year or less
- Younger people are, on average, less likely to die of covid.
- I.e. young people rarely or never die of covid.
- In fact healthy 20 year olds have ... chance of dying
- i.e. all non-old people have ... chance of dying
- ... is an acceptable risk
- so we should open up everything, right now, for the good of the economy
Note that this argument was prevalent pre-vaccine.
After reading far too much inept covid coverage, I don't think the average news reporter is numerate enough to see any problem with that logic, except that stating such an inhumane idea is likely to get them fired, or possibly tarred and feathered, and that's far more important than whether or not it is true.
Also, the management of nursing homes, old age facilites, etc. collectively made roughly the same decision. The lives of folks in nursing homes don't matter very much. It's OK to forbid them to have visitors or social contact, since that doesn't cost us anything. But we'll continue to schedule the same staffers at multiple facilities, and pretty well avoid any other measures that might cost us money, however many lives they might save. Also, though generally not the nursing home management's decision (some of this was forced), we'll take people with covid back from whatever hospital they were sent to, while still presumably contagious.
If 'FUN' wins and a mailbag column is forthcoming, will participants be allowed to ask smartass questions in anticipation of your smartass answers, or will they be limited to regular questions?
Are you bound by the results, or will you ignore the will of the majority if it doesn't suit your purpose?
Who's counting the votes? Have they any known association with Hugo Chavez, and do they use Jewish space lasers in their tabulations? And what's been done to ensure the integrity of the vote, since not only is it an absentee vote, but an on-line absentee vote, subject to all kinds of nefarious hacking and cheating.
As a potential 'Fun' voter, how can I be assured in the event that no mailbag column is forthcoming that the 'waste of time' voters didn't just steal the poll?
I don't know if it's been the Covid experience that taught me the lesson of distrusting, well, everyone and everything, or if it might have been something else entirely. No matter. I, as a concerned and patriotic reader, feel duty bound to ask these questions, and I think I have an inalienable right to have them answered, either here or in the nearest friendly court of law that leans toward Fun.
"The media has a responsibility to be scientifically literate"
Big disagree. It's up to you to grasp that the media has no responsibilities and to treat everything they write with hard scepticism. Find *better* media. Stop reading people who add nothing. If they can't in some way analyse data, or have deep knowledge of a subject, they are probably not worth reading. There's a blog out there written by someone who does understand the subject because the subject is in their veins. News parrots are not authorities. It's only that they adopt certain mannerisms that makes you think that, or after you've been told hundreds of times that the New York Times is the "paper of record", you believe it.
An old person’s death is not the same as a young person’s death vs The media has a responsibility to be scientifically literate. The former seems based on some type of "rational"/quantifiable thinking - with the underlying judgment that it is more right than wrong. The latter is purely a judgement call. The media has no inherent responsibility. It exists, not to inform, but to entertain by storytelling and confirming our biases and then making money off of that action. Just what type of literate do you think the media is now- economically, socially, morally, politically.....?
Well, we learned that a lot of people love to snitch on others and are busybodies in general. They would not have been in the ‘resistance’ if they had been alive or lived in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany. They were totally cool with dictatorial governors/ bureaucrats and couldn’t get enough of the restrictions. So, yeah, we learned a lot, but most of it wasn’t good.
Well dang! I just wrote an article on this exact topic (https://open.substack.com/pub/marischindele/p/the-wages-of-fear?r=7fpv6&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post), and yours is much funnier!
To your list I would add one more lesson we didn’t learn: Fear is a terrible basis for policy. I think some people are by nature more fearful and anxious, especially about health, and those people were too often the only ones advising our leaders about the restrictions that ought to be imposed.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, the NYTimes ran a poll of epidemiologists, 3 percent of whom said they would never go back to ordinary life--including continuing to quarantine mail and groceries for 24 hours and other measures that now sound insane--again. Never! It seems so clear to me that the biases of the excessively fearful ought to have been at least counterbalanced by advice from experts in other fields.
> "It would be a classic “learn how to do the right thing by trying all the wrong things first” situation"
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other options." ~~Churchill, maybe.
"Ohh, so you're saying there are other options?" ~~Americans.
Another uncomfortable fact, highly under-reported, but an anecdotal consensus from every doc with whom I’ve spoken—the vast majority extremely sick COVID patients (those in ICUs, on vents, etc.) were morbidly obese. Apparently it was considered body-shaming to report this, because it appeared almost nowhere.
I agree that we didn't learn what we needed to learn from Covid, and I say that confidently because we just had a follow-up test: monkeypox. We failed.
Mercifully, monkeypox probably isn't contagious enough to become a giga-infection behemoth like SARS-CoV-2, but that wasn't obvious in the summer, and like the early stages of the Covid pandemic we under-responded: it was hard to get tested, it was hard to get vaccinated, and state authorities mostly limited themselves to the least ambitious, most narrowly targeted, actions and recommendations.
I can't even be 100% sure that monkeypox ISN'T spreading under the radar! Case numbers are dropping but I don't know whether that's because of worsening test coverage. I don't think it's likely, but I can't rule it out, which is pretty worrying!
"There’s still a chance that we could learn from our Covid-era mistakes."
I found myself nodding in agreement up until I read this sentence. If nothing else, the last seven plus years of Trumplandia (and yes, we still live in it, even though he's out of office) have shown that someone could show us a picture of an apple and half the country would look at it and scream shrilly and constantly that it was an orange. So, maybe SOME of us might learn something (your points about school closings, which I admittedly initially supported, are very well-taken), but I suspect that the vast majority of us would learn precisely nothing.
Is this an overly pessimistic take? Yeah, probably, but the events of the last few years are not exactly cause for optimism.
I like the pragmatic way of looking at the trade-offs here. What about long Covid though -- that's the part that to me is so hard to factor in.
That Covid kills many more people per week than the flu does virtually every week of the year strikes me as reason to continue treating it more seriously than the flu. It’s pretty clear that we’re on course for six figures worth of US Covid deaths every year going forward, versus low five figures for flu.
And while it’s much more dangerous for the elderly (which victims it still, on average, takes a decade or so of remaining life from), so far it’s a top three or four cause of death in most age ranges. It kills fewer young people, but so does everything else.
Vaccination does help a great deal against death and hospitalization. And if that were my only concern I probably wouldn’t be one of those people you criticize at this point.
(Though getting a flulike illness twice a year on average instead of maybe once or twice a decade still doesn’t sound fun. And it would still be worth not treating the immunocompromised as expendable.)
But there’s also long Covid, which vaccination doesn’t help nearly as much. And which includes elevated risks of stroke and heart problems among other serious complications for over a year after a mild case.
If and when I see studies that put the odds of continuing chronic sequelae for the vaccinated much below those of losing Russian Roulette, I’ll think about relaxing my own vigilance and/or stop supporting public health measures.
(For what the latter is worth. Obviously by now it’s mostly as futile as suggesting in 1975 that maybe people should use seat belts, or not smoke inside hospitals.)
One would have hoped that we also might have learned something along the lines of "we're all in it together, we're all dependent on one another, we all need to take care of each other and look out for people we don't know and are nothing like us, and maybe let's minimize some of our more superficial divisions in the name of advancing our shared fortunes as a species."
But of course, no.
Great commentary as usual, I especially love the generational shout out for the Brian's Song reference. Well done sir!
This comment is wildly off-topic: sorry!
"the main reason that the Allies won World War II is that Hitler tripped over a pile of frozen Russian corpses on his way to Moscow."
Not untrue, but at least debatable vs "the main reason the Allies won is that even by 1940 the US was the only superpower on the planet at the time, even though nobody had realized it yet".
US economic dominance (in oil, food, industrial equipment, advanced materials, lubricants, etc) was the reason Spain stayed neutral, the reason all of Latin America stayed Allied or neutral, the reason Britain stayed fighting after the fall of France, the means by which the USSR had a mechanized army (and especially a mechanized logistics system, which Germany mostly didn't), and ultimately the reason the war was a (relative) cakewalk by mid-44.
The US was even dominant by mid-war in science, developing most of the best military systems and technology by the war's end (despite the German reputation for this). Germany had the best fighter. Russia arguably had the best tank. But by '45, the US had the best destroyer (and essentially every other warship), the best machine gun, the best bomber, the best truck, the best car, the best cargo ship, the best ammunition, all the best non-tank vehicles, and, with Britain, the best tech (radar, sonar, comms, computers, A-bomb, statistics). And the US designs were specifically built around getting lots and lots of them to Europe (or Japan) and ending the war - ie, they had the most effective organizational government-military-industrial structure that converted national resources into military might.
The Russian role in World War 2 was wrongly minimized for decades through the Cold War, but there's been an overcorrection recently in the other direction. The US and UK would have won a (much longer and more painful) war against Germany and Japan without Russian involvement. Russia *probably* would have won their war against Germany alone without Britain and the US.
Just when I think I’ve seen and read far too many pieces on Covid, one comes around and nails it. Liked it so much I almost hit the upgrade box! Keep me on your dance card. My stocks might recover one day….
I don't know whether news outlets embraced the idea of YPLL, but a lot of net.innumerates did, in the following manner (logic slightly cleaned up from the way it was presented, and elided fallacious steps made explicit):
- some people who catch covid and die were pretty much already on their death beds, and already had a life expectancy of perhaps 1 year.
- these people were mostly old.
- Therefore (all) old people have a YPLL of 1 year or less
- Younger people are, on average, less likely to die of covid.
- I.e. young people rarely or never die of covid.
- In fact healthy 20 year olds have ... chance of dying
- i.e. all non-old people have ... chance of dying
- ... is an acceptable risk
- so we should open up everything, right now, for the good of the economy
Note that this argument was prevalent pre-vaccine.
After reading far too much inept covid coverage, I don't think the average news reporter is numerate enough to see any problem with that logic, except that stating such an inhumane idea is likely to get them fired, or possibly tarred and feathered, and that's far more important than whether or not it is true.
Also, the management of nursing homes, old age facilites, etc. collectively made roughly the same decision. The lives of folks in nursing homes don't matter very much. It's OK to forbid them to have visitors or social contact, since that doesn't cost us anything. But we'll continue to schedule the same staffers at multiple facilities, and pretty well avoid any other measures that might cost us money, however many lives they might save. Also, though generally not the nursing home management's decision (some of this was forced), we'll take people with covid back from whatever hospital they were sent to, while still presumably contagious.
RE: ***POLL***
I have questions.
If 'FUN' wins and a mailbag column is forthcoming, will participants be allowed to ask smartass questions in anticipation of your smartass answers, or will they be limited to regular questions?
Are you bound by the results, or will you ignore the will of the majority if it doesn't suit your purpose?
Who's counting the votes? Have they any known association with Hugo Chavez, and do they use Jewish space lasers in their tabulations? And what's been done to ensure the integrity of the vote, since not only is it an absentee vote, but an on-line absentee vote, subject to all kinds of nefarious hacking and cheating.
As a potential 'Fun' voter, how can I be assured in the event that no mailbag column is forthcoming that the 'waste of time' voters didn't just steal the poll?
I don't know if it's been the Covid experience that taught me the lesson of distrusting, well, everyone and everything, or if it might have been something else entirely. No matter. I, as a concerned and patriotic reader, feel duty bound to ask these questions, and I think I have an inalienable right to have them answered, either here or in the nearest friendly court of law that leans toward Fun.
"The media has a responsibility to be scientifically literate"
Big disagree. It's up to you to grasp that the media has no responsibilities and to treat everything they write with hard scepticism. Find *better* media. Stop reading people who add nothing. If they can't in some way analyse data, or have deep knowledge of a subject, they are probably not worth reading. There's a blog out there written by someone who does understand the subject because the subject is in their veins. News parrots are not authorities. It's only that they adopt certain mannerisms that makes you think that, or after you've been told hundreds of times that the New York Times is the "paper of record", you believe it.
An old person’s death is not the same as a young person’s death vs The media has a responsibility to be scientifically literate. The former seems based on some type of "rational"/quantifiable thinking - with the underlying judgment that it is more right than wrong. The latter is purely a judgement call. The media has no inherent responsibility. It exists, not to inform, but to entertain by storytelling and confirming our biases and then making money off of that action. Just what type of literate do you think the media is now- economically, socially, morally, politically.....?
Well, we learned that a lot of people love to snitch on others and are busybodies in general. They would not have been in the ‘resistance’ if they had been alive or lived in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany. They were totally cool with dictatorial governors/ bureaucrats and couldn’t get enough of the restrictions. So, yeah, we learned a lot, but most of it wasn’t good.