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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetime, it became even worse in multiple directions.

Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.

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Gen Z today are becoming increasingly more isolated; the long-term effects of this are yet to be known and could be serious. But it angers me that this is often an issue that's overlooked, especially when it's such a prevalent one.

It's truly disturbing to think of the little regard there is for the mental health of young people, especially in an age fraught with enough social isolation as it is. Gen Z will be forever known as The Lonely Generation if something won't be done to help.

Recently, RTE News in Ireland did a segment covering short films that young people made about their experiences in lockdown (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ), and it was truly harrowing to hear what they had to say and the short films that resulted.

I'm mainly thinking about whether we can get the pendulum to swing the other way now, after ~50 years of increasing isolation.

Terrifyingly, this isolation makes it easier to manipulate and polarize the population. Paired with capitalistic engagement-hungry algorithms, I see a dark future.

If social isolation were a real concern for people they would get off their damn phones and drastically reduce their access to social media. Blaming this entirely on the pandemic is sorely misplaced and not a solution.

And do what instead, meet in person?

Be a damn parent and limit your child's access to screens generally and social media specifically.

And therefore, all social interaction that's left.

That’s not real social interaction so I don’t see your point.

I agree, it isn't. But since real social interaction is currently not available in too many cases, limiting children's access to the closest substitute is not a good idea.

My greatest fear in this whole thing is precedent. It's easy to sell a new "Once-In-A-Century Event" every couple of years. If we burnt the whole world's goodwill on this disease, and a more devastating one comes along, what are we going to do?

How about here in Australia? I think our outcomes look pretty good. We went hard and early, locked down, and now we basically have no restrictions internally (apart from not being able to travel internationally except to New Zealand (travel bubble should be starting in two or three weeks), and having to quarantine on entry coming from anywhere but NZ for two weeks and with two negative tests on I think the 10th and 13th days).

We have cinemas, sporting events, music concerts, etc. all open, you don't have to wear masks, you don't have to sit with empty seats between you and others. Schools have been mostly normal this year (save for a 3 day lockdown in QLD and a one week lockdown in Victoria and Western Australia). Lots of people are still choosing to work from home but offices are back to normal, domestic travel has been back on all this year an a decent part of last year... All with basically zero community transmission.

All this with about an eight week lockdown where I live (unfortunately Victoria had another outbreak so had to have another three months later on but got that back down to zero community transmission). So the lesson should be that it actually was perfectly possible to eliminate the virus locally and open up again fairly quickly. We could have done it even quicker if our incompetent Federal Government had acted more quickly, but luckily for us the State Governments all did mostly all the right things apart from a few issues (letting in a cruise ship with dozens of infected people with no quarantine or testing early on in New South Wales being a big one, and some issues with hotel quarantine later on).

To be fair, it's a lot easier to isolate an island than multiple international hubs for many different types of people (LA, SF, NYC).

Also having leadership which denies anything is bad until a major sports league (NBA) takes action doesn't help.

It helped that states in Australia could close their borders internally. The US justification for having different legal systems in each state, experimentation, doesn't apply when states basically aren't allowed to close their borders.

This sentiment is trying to say the US doesn’t have effective border control. When it completely does.

If the US wanted an international lockdown, it could have had one.

No, we don't have effective border control: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/18/us-mexico-im...

... Does trump propaganda still persist?

How’s much Covid was spread via Mexican border crossings as oppose to international flights?

I do recall talk about "overkill" at the beginning - that if we were doing enough, it would look like overkill by the time it was done. Likewise, if it did not look like overkill, we could have done better and saved more lives.

And, yet, were there significant differences in behavior in Europe overall?

By "leadership class" you mean the professional front group that serves the ruling class.

> The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill.

No, the biggest problem was the vast underkill at the start. After that, everybody was screwed.

For starters, a whole bunch of things needed funding. Mask manufacturers should have been given contracts so they would switch to 24/7 production--didn't happen. Unemployment needed to be funded so people could stay home when states burned through their funds--didn't happen. Schools needed money for A/V equipment, training, and internet connections for students--didn't happen.

Things needed to shut down fast at the beginning. Mardi Gras happened because the feds buried information. SXSW went down to the wire before being cancelled. International flights took forever before even they were finally cancelled.

I can go on and on and on ... this ain't what "overkill" looks like. This is what "malicious incompetence" looks like, and I won't let you rewrite that history.

Before delving into accusations of maliciousness, might I suggest you first review the annual budgets of the relevant public health agencies? At least a hundred billion dollars have been spent by my government during my lifetime on public health. Some of this spending was overseen by the very same officials you see on TV condemning others for their poor performance. The budgets they were given feel to me like more than enough money to be prepared for a foreseeable respiratory pandemic.

Foreseeable, eh? Are there any other foreseeable pandemics we need to know about and prepare for?

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