Our long era of unrest in the late 2010s/early 2020s really did break some people. I know a few myself. They got so alienated by wokies and/or extreme COVID hawks that they just kept drifting further into crazyland.
My suggestion to them: get offline more. Spend more time with real people in the real world. Find things to do that are apolitical, or at least close to it. It'll help. It really will.
Our long era of unrest in the late 2010s/early 2020s really did break some people. I know a few myself. They got so alienated by wokies and/or extreme COVID hawks that they just kept drifting further into crazyland.
My suggestion to them: get offline more. Spend more time with real people in the real world. Find things to do that are apolitical, or at least close to it. It'll help. It really will.
RE: getting offline and spending more time with real people in the real world, finding things to do that are apolitical.
I would argue that said COVID hawks carry a lot of blame here for turning the simple act of spending time with real people itself into a political act that might brand you as MAGA-adjacent (with the one exception of mass BLM protests). And forcing all our kids out of each other's company and into the Internet, even while kids all over Europe were attending school.
Honestly, I never saw precautions against gathering in numbers as a threat to my freedom. I didn't want to catch COVID-19 and I didn't. I took a charitable view of the public health establishment's pronouncements and motives. It was a major health crisis, for heaven's sake.
I'm not talking about the initial public health pronouncements, even including hard lockdown, a policy which in the beginning, in the absence of data, probably made some sense.
I'm talking about the politicization of people voluntarily choosing to assess their own risk tolerance, *after data was available* which would make risk estimation possible (IFR estimates, home testing).
The politicization of having contrary opinions about the right balance of lockdown harms on mental and physical health.
All such opinions became coded as "right-wing", even though for example Sweden (no bastion of right wing thought) came down more on the side of letting people use their brains, and ended up with one of lowest total excess mortality rates in Europe for the entire pandemic period.
Parents who questioned the unwavering stance of teachers unions that schools must remain closed indefinitely - despite, again, governments throughout Europe making the opposite determination that education was too important, and the 0.0003% infection fatality rate in school age children too low (not to mention the low transmission rate in this cohort), to warrant sacrificing years of kids' lives for. People in the US lost left-leaning friends for making these arguments. Professionals were ostracized and coded as "fringe" - such as Stanford's own Jay Bhattacharya who was blacklisted on Twitter at the direct behest of the Whitehouse for expressing disfavorable but well-reasoned views about the net harms that lockdown would likely yield.
I largely agree, but in defense of teachers' unions: their mission is to advocate for their membership, it is not to advocate for the community that their membership serves. And if I was a teacher, I'd want some protections before being sent into a smallish room with 30 virus spreaders. I know a 35-yr-old woman, formerly fit and active, who is now crippled by long covid. The risks were and are real, and go beyond death as the only bad outcome.
Yep, raised two kids to happy adulthoods. And yep, when they were little, they absolutely were virus spreaders! I had way more colds and flus in those years.
Alright well I'm glad they made it to adulthood without killing you. I don't wanna be a prick about it but I do want people to contemplate what it must've been like to be a kid during this madness, the kind of messages you might have internalized during this important period of identity formation with adults all around you expressing fear at your existence in their presence. I know my kid is not psychologically the same after it.
I was talking solely about ordering teachers back into closed stuffy classrooms filled with kids who are (how shall I put this without upsetting you?) *not the very best at following directions for best cleanliness practices* during an epidemic of an airborne pathogen whose longterm effects were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) unknown. I don't think that would have been remotely just or fair. Fix the classrooms (ventilation, CO monitoring, UV light), or double their pay, or SOMETHING. Don't just send them back in.
I don't think all teachers should have been "ordered" back into classrooms. If you are elderly, or have a medical condition that puts you at significant risk, fine, teach from home. But a healthy 25-50 year old teacher was at very low risk, especially once vaccines were available. They were actually safer than service industry workers because, as any public health researcher worth their salt knew pretty early on, transmission rates in children were extremely low. The statistics just don't bear out the idea that children posed some special risk, historical anecdotes about snot nosed kids aside. Health authorities in Europe weighed these numbers against the huge social cost of extended periods out of school and made the right decision, while the US, gripped by the madness of political signaling, dragged out the suffering for another year or more, long past the availability of vaccines and effective treatments.
A significant explanatory variable of the US situation is the political affiliations of teachers. It is well known that teachers vote Democratic at a very high rate relative to other professions [1]. It is also now known from polling data that Democratic voters were systematically misinformed about the risk that COVID-19 posed to them - with a full *41%* of them estimating their risk of hospitalization from COVID at *50% or higher*, at least a 50x overestimate even in in the time of the original strain circulating [2].
Politics and unreason explain the whole thing. A well-cited analysis by Vinay Prasad reaching this conclusion and also indciting the uniquely American pastime of masking little kids against WHO recommendation can be found at [3].
I think itтАЩs that *none* of the precautions were evidence based. 6 feet? Made up. Masks? DonтАЩt work. Isolation? Almost everyone caught the virus anyway. It was literally *years* of power hungry bureaucrats making decisions that didnтАЩt make any sense and also caused a massive amount of damage.
Of course, I canтАЩt discern the motives are bureaucrats. They may have simply been totally incompetent. Either way, the rules were ridiculous and harmful. Also, you probably *have* had Covid and just didnтАЩt realize it.
The point of these measures is to slow transmission so health systems don't get overwhelmed. Almost everyone got Covid eventually, but there's a big difference between that happening over the course of a few months and overwhelming hospitals and that happening over the course of years with a vaccine available to reduce the risk of severe illness.
The evidence available to make decisions is necessarily limited, but a basic understanding of physical reality is all that's needed to tell you that making people stand further apart and wear masks designed to filter aerosols will reduce transmission rates. Is there evidence that 6 feet is optimal compared to 5 feet or 7 feet? No, but the point is to minimise people breathing near each other.
The main failing was that communication didn't distinguish between cloth or surgical masks (which probably don't do much) compared to N95s designed to stop aerosols. Once those were in adequate supply they should have been emphasised more.
Our long era of unrest in the late 2010s/early 2020s really did break some people. I know a few myself. They got so alienated by wokies and/or extreme COVID hawks that they just kept drifting further into crazyland.
My suggestion to them: get offline more. Spend more time with real people in the real world. Find things to do that are apolitical, or at least close to it. It'll help. It really will.
RE: getting offline and spending more time with real people in the real world, finding things to do that are apolitical.
I would argue that said COVID hawks carry a lot of blame here for turning the simple act of spending time with real people itself into a political act that might brand you as MAGA-adjacent (with the one exception of mass BLM protests). And forcing all our kids out of each other's company and into the Internet, even while kids all over Europe were attending school.
Honestly, I never saw precautions against gathering in numbers as a threat to my freedom. I didn't want to catch COVID-19 and I didn't. I took a charitable view of the public health establishment's pronouncements and motives. It was a major health crisis, for heaven's sake.
I'm not talking about the initial public health pronouncements, even including hard lockdown, a policy which in the beginning, in the absence of data, probably made some sense.
I'm talking about the politicization of people voluntarily choosing to assess their own risk tolerance, *after data was available* which would make risk estimation possible (IFR estimates, home testing).
The politicization of having contrary opinions about the right balance of lockdown harms on mental and physical health.
All such opinions became coded as "right-wing", even though for example Sweden (no bastion of right wing thought) came down more on the side of letting people use their brains, and ended up with one of lowest total excess mortality rates in Europe for the entire pandemic period.
Parents who questioned the unwavering stance of teachers unions that schools must remain closed indefinitely - despite, again, governments throughout Europe making the opposite determination that education was too important, and the 0.0003% infection fatality rate in school age children too low (not to mention the low transmission rate in this cohort), to warrant sacrificing years of kids' lives for. People in the US lost left-leaning friends for making these arguments. Professionals were ostracized and coded as "fringe" - such as Stanford's own Jay Bhattacharya who was blacklisted on Twitter at the direct behest of the Whitehouse for expressing disfavorable but well-reasoned views about the net harms that lockdown would likely yield.
I largely agree, but in defense of teachers' unions: their mission is to advocate for their membership, it is not to advocate for the community that their membership serves. And if I was a teacher, I'd want some protections before being sent into a smallish room with 30 virus spreaders. I know a 35-yr-old woman, formerly fit and active, who is now crippled by long covid. The risks were and are real, and go beyond death as the only bad outcome.
Referring casually to children as "virus spreaders" is dehumanizing. Do you have any children of your own? I'm sorry to hear about your friend.
Yep, raised two kids to happy adulthoods. And yep, when they were little, they absolutely were virus spreaders! I had way more colds and flus in those years.
Alright well I'm glad they made it to adulthood without killing you. I don't wanna be a prick about it but I do want people to contemplate what it must've been like to be a kid during this madness, the kind of messages you might have internalized during this important period of identity formation with adults all around you expressing fear at your existence in their presence. I know my kid is not psychologically the same after it.
I was talking solely about ordering teachers back into closed stuffy classrooms filled with kids who are (how shall I put this without upsetting you?) *not the very best at following directions for best cleanliness practices* during an epidemic of an airborne pathogen whose longterm effects were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) unknown. I don't think that would have been remotely just or fair. Fix the classrooms (ventilation, CO monitoring, UV light), or double their pay, or SOMETHING. Don't just send them back in.
I don't think all teachers should have been "ordered" back into classrooms. If you are elderly, or have a medical condition that puts you at significant risk, fine, teach from home. But a healthy 25-50 year old teacher was at very low risk, especially once vaccines were available. They were actually safer than service industry workers because, as any public health researcher worth their salt knew pretty early on, transmission rates in children were extremely low. The statistics just don't bear out the idea that children posed some special risk, historical anecdotes about snot nosed kids aside. Health authorities in Europe weighed these numbers against the huge social cost of extended periods out of school and made the right decision, while the US, gripped by the madness of political signaling, dragged out the suffering for another year or more, long past the availability of vaccines and effective treatments.
A significant explanatory variable of the US situation is the political affiliations of teachers. It is well known that teachers vote Democratic at a very high rate relative to other professions [1]. It is also now known from polling data that Democratic voters were systematically misinformed about the risk that COVID-19 posed to them - with a full *41%* of them estimating their risk of hospitalization from COVID at *50% or higher*, at least a 50x overestimate even in in the time of the original strain circulating [2].
Politics and unreason explain the whole thing. A well-cited analysis by Vinay Prasad reaching this conclusion and also indciting the uniquely American pastime of masking little kids against WHO recommendation can be found at [3].
[1] https://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/index.html
[2] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx
[3] https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/the-pandemic-policies-that-hurt-children
TL;DR kids were kept out of school for over a year in the US purely on the basis of a religious superstition unsupported by science.
Thank you for the clarification.
I think itтАЩs that *none* of the precautions were evidence based. 6 feet? Made up. Masks? DonтАЩt work. Isolation? Almost everyone caught the virus anyway. It was literally *years* of power hungry bureaucrats making decisions that didnтАЩt make any sense and also caused a massive amount of damage.
Yeah. Not buying that, especially the part about power hungry bureaucrats. That's an ideology looking for a cause to exploit.
Of course, I canтАЩt discern the motives are bureaucrats. They may have simply been totally incompetent. Either way, the rules were ridiculous and harmful. Also, you probably *have* had Covid and just didnтАЩt realize it.
The point of these measures is to slow transmission so health systems don't get overwhelmed. Almost everyone got Covid eventually, but there's a big difference between that happening over the course of a few months and overwhelming hospitals and that happening over the course of years with a vaccine available to reduce the risk of severe illness.
The evidence available to make decisions is necessarily limited, but a basic understanding of physical reality is all that's needed to tell you that making people stand further apart and wear masks designed to filter aerosols will reduce transmission rates. Is there evidence that 6 feet is optimal compared to 5 feet or 7 feet? No, but the point is to minimise people breathing near each other.
The main failing was that communication didn't distinguish between cloth or surgical masks (which probably don't do much) compared to N95s designed to stop aerosols. Once those were in adequate supply they should have been emphasised more.
True. That was definitely a dynamic at play. And it sucked. But that's over now. The pandemic is done.
Indeed, let's hang out with real people again.
Honestly, that is the advice that everyone should follow, regardless of beliefs.