We should be having this conversation. It’s so damned politicized - typically, if you know a person’s politics, you know how they’ll react to this oped. Shouldn’t be that way - we have a few health pros on this forum who have first hand experiences and knowledge of communicable disease, but most of us are lay people on pandemic management. It’s counterproductive to have politics closing our minds.

I can’t know how they arrive at between 4k and 16k saved by shutdowns, but I have trouble believing that number wasn’t higher just in nyc in the early pandemic days. Just the nature of nyc - are we really to believe, that as deaths started literally piling up in early March of ‘20, that there’d only have been 16k more Covid deaths, city-wide, if people simply continued cramming into subways, buses, and elevators like sardines? I have trouble with that.

Seems to me it should be more about 1 size not fitting all. I’m not sure the entire country needed to do what nyc did, with its unique sardine-can vibe. I agree closing schools for months on end did more harm than good in all likelihood. In fact I was excited about the Swedish approach, but recall at the time learning that they’d almost criminally screwed up in elderly care facilities, increasing death rates beyond what this article indicated.

Mostly, I can’t stand the last line, which basically encourages the public to withhold trust if officials don’t see things the authors’ way. Destroying trust in the institutions we rely on is a new national pastime, and it’s the path to autocracy. We should not be using fairly natural disagreements in managing a once per century pandemic as an excuse to destroy democracy. I think too many take democracy for granted, like with flippant calls to “withhold trust”.

When repubs and dems are a little less predictable in how they view all this, then I think we could maybe see a constructive after-action review. But that seems like a pipe dream. But anyway, I do think this is an honest conversation we need to have, with an eye towards learning, more than retribution. I agree with the transparency this pieces wants.


[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 03/20/2024 08:56AM]