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Very different types of lectures. Small chunks of info, lots of graphical representations, etc. These are very different that the type of lectures I had in school.

> We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts”

No, you were told to out aside your opinions and allow people educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation. It turns out the there were too many people with a chip on their shoulder to make the policy recommendations effective.

> if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.

Pointless hyperbole.

> no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing

Such as?

> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.

Reading between the lines it seems like you have many baked in assumptions that distort your perception of the event.

> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.

History will look on this the same way as it did on Spanish Flu:

Barely at all, even when it has valuable lessons for the next pandemic.

The former told me that people would stop wearing masks very very quickly.

I meant more so from an individual point of view. Any health authority literally did need to use forms of manipulation to get desirable results, but it’s clear from where I was looking that they did it with the express intent of saving lives at first. Eventually they had to work in a strange grey area where protecting lives and the economy was essential, and it often looked dubious because they didn’t clearly comply with their initial missions. At least in the US and Canada, it seems.

I was more disturbed by how individual people handled the situation, even with people they were close with. It was remarkable how rapidly relationships fell apart over covid. And slightly beyond that as well, into the “crowd” category, but like you say… That’s arguably more predictable.

Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight.

Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.

"Does it kill the old or the young?"

We figured out very quickly, that mainly old people were at danger.

The lockdowns happened, when this was known for sure.

"If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense."

And no one even claimed back then, that a unhospitalised 10% death rate was expected.

In my understanding as a parent - the old in charge freaked out and locked everyone in, to protect mainly themself - yet the young generation suffered the most of it, despite not being at danger from the disease as well. So trying to prevent the collapse of the hospitals did made sense - but not the way it was done, at the expense of the younger generation.

IMO we should have had more draconian lockdowns much sooner, when it would have slowed the spread more effectively, and we should have opened up much more quickly once the initial wave went through and it was clear that it had already spread every where. Especially the schools, once it was clear that kids weren't especially badly affected by it.

There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:

1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)

2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.

3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home

4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)

---

They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.

Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.

Good point.

I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.

There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context.

And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted.

Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard.

They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard.

Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else.

> even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.

I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.

Do you also not wear seatbelts?

People deal with grief differently and that's ok, but for me it meant cutting out people who made fun of things that would've kept more of my family alive (I also stopped laughing at covidiot memes). If everyone masked & vaxxed, we could've done so much better. But when public figures turn it into a "thing", it doesn't help anyone. I won't be able to find the video but I do remember AvE making very toxic masculinity comments about masks. Just wasn't what I needed at the time. I'm sure if I hadn't seen that specific part I would still be watching him.

Duly noted.

- Individual subs like /r/programming are larger.

- HN is ~100x smaller than twitter which is itself not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...

I'm not super active on social media, and I find that all the big/main aggregator sites (like HN and Reddit and others) have become victims of their own success and good stories just fall off the front page very quickly, and so you miss a ton of stuff unless you're checking all the time, and I don't have that kind of time.

Link aggregators aren't good at "long tail"... So your good stories are only really discoverable when they're hot, and get progressively harder to discover over time.

Google search just sucks now, it's all shopping links and SEO trash, even if you search for fairly specific subjects.. You can still find what you want but you have to wade through so much garbage...

Plus there's no discovery. Like pretty much all search engines you can typically only find what you're searching for as opposed to finding new unknown things that are within your topics of interest.

For better or worse I find that YouTube is one of my best resources for surfacing new and interesting things pretty often, and quite regularly from channels big and small that I've never watched before. YT is great at long tail..

So it has become a major source of discovery for me, in many of my areas of interest (which aren't all tech).

Of course some content I don't like consuming as video, so I do sometimes find videos that cover interesting subject matter, which I'll then go search for articles or text-based content on instead.