The “lockdowns” had a major mental health affect on people that I think we are still seeing the reverberations of.
I was absolutely miserable and wanted to punch people through the computer screen on reddit saying they were enjoying the lockdowns because they were so “introverted”.
Public health discourse will take a generation to recover from this.
Pi-Graph on
I remember my friends and I constantly repeating the “follow the experts” line, and then watching in confusion as they argued schools needed to stay locked down after those same experts we listened to before said it was good to reopen them.
Also, that part in the article about the government telling social media cites what to censor, I only vaguely remember for Twitter, but didn’t the Twitter Files show that they didn’t? They made recommendations but never outright said to censor stuff. The convos from Twitter employees showed that it was largely their own decisions, they thought it through, and they often didn’t do what the government asked or recommended.
Alterus_UA on
Based.
Vaccines saved lives and were crucial. Restrictions, on the other hand, created more problems than they solved. The global economy would have been much healthier if the world was more risk-tolerant in 2020-22, and with that, one of the current reasons for popularity of the radical parties in the West would have been diminished.
That’s before accounting for the more direct effects of COVID restrictions in the rise of right-wing populists. Turns out if the state pushes controversial limits on your life, and debating those limits becomes impossible in mainstream media, mainstream politics, and gets you bullied in mainstream social media spaces, more people would get attracted to parties hating the mainstream. Who’d have thunk.
throwawayzxkjvct on
Are we really endorsing the idea that there was a conspiracy from NIH to cover up a lab leak now? Come on.
PrideMonthRaytheon on
accidentally adopted a zero covid policy without the means to deliver it or the buy-in or compulsion power necessary to sustain it imo
ashsolomon1 on
Our governor in Connecticut has a very high approval rating, that pretty much started during Covid when he was very common sense for a democratic governor. While Cuomo next door kept things shut down and had restrictions for months longer than necessary our governor pretty much said “I trust you to use your best judgement please just wear a mask that’s all I ask” and opened everything up.
RedRoboYT on
They should’ve open up earlier when it was more safe to go out
jclarks074 on
A lot of the public health establishment assumed an authority far beyond their actual expertise. They were suddenly not just experts in epidemiology, they were also experts in everything tangentially related to the pandemic and the response, like mental health, education, economics, etc., and they were responsible for weighing each of these competing concerns. They made a lot of tactical errors within their own realm of expertise, too, like the 12d chess regarding masking early on to prevent a shortage, or the refusal to discuss low-but-not-zero-risk behaviors for fear of lending any credence to the anti-lockdown crowd. I remember a lot of self-styled “experts” during Covid who couldn’t give a straight answer about whether it was safe to be outdoors at all, but then wholeheartedly endorsed participation in the BLM protests because “racism is a public health crisis.”
teddyone on
The only reason to ever have mandatory lockdowns. Was hospitals being out of capacity.
Particular-Court-619 on
I’m of the ‘laptop class’ – or was of the ‘no kids, furloughed, with an underpaying job that meant I made more money during the pandemic than usual with UI’ class.
I also have had anosmia and nearly killed myself due to the anhedonia it caused, but recovered.
I’m happy with the way things went for me personally because the OG strain of the virus caused anosmia, often-enough long-term, and I would rather live in a room the rest of my life than go through that again, and I did not expose myself to any other humans until I got vaxxed.
I wonder what the excess deaths are from anosmia-induced suicide and cardiac events due to ‘vid.
Indoor things should’ve been mostly closed until the vax was out, and then once the vax was out, should’ve been mostly re-opened.
Outdoor spaces should have been mostly unaffected, though packed concerts etc. could’ve been restricted.
High quality masks should’ve been readily available and shared and the societal expectation in indoor spaces, especially before Vax but then after that too.
VENTILATION VENTILATION VENTILATION VENTILATION.
We should have actually learned our lesson re: aerosols vs. fomite wrt respiratory virus transmission, but we’re still kinda repeating the same wrong old-fashioned ideas, as if we didn’t learn that All aerosol-minimizing had been wrong for all respiratory diseases, not just the ‘vid.
The part about living in a messy democracy is that decisions are made by who has the power, and that’s not uniform across our government. Teacher’s unions had the power over schools. Restaurant and bar owners have some power over restaurants. So those sometimes were opened faster than schools.
I’m not sure I buy this article’s description of what the ‘experts’ said. Who’re these health experts who were advocating for school closures post-vax? Were alll experts doing so? If someone wants to pay me to use the magic of google search with custom date filters, I bet you’d see that this writer’s been more affected by rightwing rewriting of history than he realizes.
ednamode23 on
I do give grace for most restrictions pre-vaccine, especially from March-May 2020 as COVID was brand new then but there definitely were some things that stuck out as feeling weird or wrong. BLM protests being ok but an outdoor masked gathering for anything else being banned came across as very hypocritical and I had no good argument for the conservatives in my life about it when we discussed restrictions. Also it felt like some states imposed random restrictions that really didn’t seem backed up by the science.
But what really grinded my gears was those who wouldn’t let go after vaccines came out. I never disobeyed them but I was pretty bummed when the CDC flipped flopped on mask mandates after vaccines were out and outright annoyed about how discussion about an off-ramp for masks in late 2021 and early 2022 was lumped in to alt-right crazy talk and being “selfish”. Facial communication is valuable and while I support anyone’s right to wear a mask and believe outright bans are wrong, the insistence online so many had that you were a horrible person if you didn’t want to keep masking indefinitely nearly drove me mad.
Finally, while I support the idea of vaccine mandates, the implementation needs to be reworked for future pandemics. Cities, counties, and states that decided to do government mandated vaccine checks should provide police manpower to private businesses to verify whatever proof is used as I imagine it created uncomfortable and possible dangerous situations for customer service employees. We also should followed the lead of doing IDs or a passport similar to European counties instead of the CDC cards that could easily be faked.
14 Comments
Archive link: [https://archive.md/UU1sW](https://archive.md/UU1sW)
Kids learning from home was a big fucking mistake
Kids learning from home was a big fucking mistake
The “lockdowns” had a major mental health affect on people that I think we are still seeing the reverberations of.
I was absolutely miserable and wanted to punch people through the computer screen on reddit saying they were enjoying the lockdowns because they were so “introverted”.
Public health discourse will take a generation to recover from this.
I remember my friends and I constantly repeating the “follow the experts” line, and then watching in confusion as they argued schools needed to stay locked down after those same experts we listened to before said it was good to reopen them.
Also, that part in the article about the government telling social media cites what to censor, I only vaguely remember for Twitter, but didn’t the Twitter Files show that they didn’t? They made recommendations but never outright said to censor stuff. The convos from Twitter employees showed that it was largely their own decisions, they thought it through, and they often didn’t do what the government asked or recommended.
Based.
Vaccines saved lives and were crucial. Restrictions, on the other hand, created more problems than they solved. The global economy would have been much healthier if the world was more risk-tolerant in 2020-22, and with that, one of the current reasons for popularity of the radical parties in the West would have been diminished.
That’s before accounting for the more direct effects of COVID restrictions in the rise of right-wing populists. Turns out if the state pushes controversial limits on your life, and debating those limits becomes impossible in mainstream media, mainstream politics, and gets you bullied in mainstream social media spaces, more people would get attracted to parties hating the mainstream. Who’d have thunk.
Are we really endorsing the idea that there was a conspiracy from NIH to cover up a lab leak now? Come on.
accidentally adopted a zero covid policy without the means to deliver it or the buy-in or compulsion power necessary to sustain it imo
Our governor in Connecticut has a very high approval rating, that pretty much started during Covid when he was very common sense for a democratic governor. While Cuomo next door kept things shut down and had restrictions for months longer than necessary our governor pretty much said “I trust you to use your best judgement please just wear a mask that’s all I ask” and opened everything up.
They should’ve open up earlier when it was more safe to go out
A lot of the public health establishment assumed an authority far beyond their actual expertise. They were suddenly not just experts in epidemiology, they were also experts in everything tangentially related to the pandemic and the response, like mental health, education, economics, etc., and they were responsible for weighing each of these competing concerns. They made a lot of tactical errors within their own realm of expertise, too, like the 12d chess regarding masking early on to prevent a shortage, or the refusal to discuss low-but-not-zero-risk behaviors for fear of lending any credence to the anti-lockdown crowd. I remember a lot of self-styled “experts” during Covid who couldn’t give a straight answer about whether it was safe to be outdoors at all, but then wholeheartedly endorsed participation in the BLM protests because “racism is a public health crisis.”
The only reason to ever have mandatory lockdowns. Was hospitals being out of capacity.
I’m of the ‘laptop class’ – or was of the ‘no kids, furloughed, with an underpaying job that meant I made more money during the pandemic than usual with UI’ class.
I also have had anosmia and nearly killed myself due to the anhedonia it caused, but recovered.
I’m happy with the way things went for me personally because the OG strain of the virus caused anosmia, often-enough long-term, and I would rather live in a room the rest of my life than go through that again, and I did not expose myself to any other humans until I got vaxxed.
I wonder what the excess deaths are from anosmia-induced suicide and cardiac events due to ‘vid.
Indoor things should’ve been mostly closed until the vax was out, and then once the vax was out, should’ve been mostly re-opened.
Outdoor spaces should have been mostly unaffected, though packed concerts etc. could’ve been restricted.
High quality masks should’ve been readily available and shared and the societal expectation in indoor spaces, especially before Vax but then after that too.
VENTILATION VENTILATION VENTILATION VENTILATION.
We should have actually learned our lesson re: aerosols vs. fomite wrt respiratory virus transmission, but we’re still kinda repeating the same wrong old-fashioned ideas, as if we didn’t learn that All aerosol-minimizing had been wrong for all respiratory diseases, not just the ‘vid.
The part about living in a messy democracy is that decisions are made by who has the power, and that’s not uniform across our government. Teacher’s unions had the power over schools. Restaurant and bar owners have some power over restaurants. So those sometimes were opened faster than schools.
I’m not sure I buy this article’s description of what the ‘experts’ said. Who’re these health experts who were advocating for school closures post-vax? Were alll experts doing so? If someone wants to pay me to use the magic of google search with custom date filters, I bet you’d see that this writer’s been more affected by rightwing rewriting of history than he realizes.
I do give grace for most restrictions pre-vaccine, especially from March-May 2020 as COVID was brand new then but there definitely were some things that stuck out as feeling weird or wrong. BLM protests being ok but an outdoor masked gathering for anything else being banned came across as very hypocritical and I had no good argument for the conservatives in my life about it when we discussed restrictions. Also it felt like some states imposed random restrictions that really didn’t seem backed up by the science.
But what really grinded my gears was those who wouldn’t let go after vaccines came out. I never disobeyed them but I was pretty bummed when the CDC flipped flopped on mask mandates after vaccines were out and outright annoyed about how discussion about an off-ramp for masks in late 2021 and early 2022 was lumped in to alt-right crazy talk and being “selfish”. Facial communication is valuable and while I support anyone’s right to wear a mask and believe outright bans are wrong, the insistence online so many had that you were a horrible person if you didn’t want to keep masking indefinitely nearly drove me mad.
Finally, while I support the idea of vaccine mandates, the implementation needs to be reworked for future pandemics. Cities, counties, and states that decided to do government mandated vaccine checks should provide police manpower to private businesses to verify whatever proof is used as I imagine it created uncomfortable and possible dangerous situations for customer service employees. We also should followed the lead of doing IDs or a passport similar to European counties instead of the CDC cards that could easily be faked.