We’re at risk of learning the wrong lesson from the last three years

"But if a virus were like Ebola with high transmissibility, THEN all these interventions would be justified."

Consider this little exchange below, and remember that Musk is mostly friendly to Team Reality.

This is exactly the wrong moral to glean from the last three years.

Let’s walk through this…

(1) Lockdowns weren’t recommended prior to COVID. They were explicitly recommended against, and were obviously ridiculous. (Long thread.)

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

Lockdowns were NOT common sense measures. They were hysterical reactions out of fear. Here are 15 of just some of the reasons why it was not common sense. (I’m not including all the reasons we have NOW to see they were a bad idea.)

(2) We did lockdowns anyhow.

(3) Places like Sweden that didn’t lock down fared… well!

(4) Lockdown stringency level does not correlate with pandemic severity. (Long thread.)

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

🚨 BREAKING: Another study finds no benefits from lockdowns 🚨 “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.“ frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

frontiersin.orgCovid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of AdaptationContext: The human development territories have been severely constrained under the Covid-19 pandemic. A common dynamics has been observed, but its propagation has not been homogeneous over each continent. We aimed at characterizing the non-viral parameters that were most associated with death rate.…

(5) Lockdowns had the massive harms anyone with common sense knew they would…

(5a) Economic:

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

——LOCKDOWNS CRUSH—— Low wage Leisure & hospitality workers hit industry devastated hardest, flattened at 50%. not recovered.

(5b) Developing world set back:

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

“Two out of every five adults interviewed between May and June reported that their household had lost its main source of income since the lockdown started. This has had devastating consequences for household food security and hunger.”

theconversation.comSouth Africa faces mass hunger if efforts to offset impact of COVID-19 are easedSouth Africans have experienced significant shocks to their livelihoods, and the threat of hunger presents a major concern for health, political and social stability.

(5c) Excess deaths due to the interventions themselves:

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

<thread> 🔥 SHORT, MEDIUM, & LONG TERM 🔥 🔥 HYSTERIA DEATHS 🔥 We will be unpacking the health damage from the Covid mass delusion for decades.

So…

No, Elon Musk and Andrew Lilico, if there was another pandemic with a super scary virus, the interventions would NOT then be justified.

We now know this even MORE than we did before.

Furthermore, it was THIS pandemic, with an IFR < 0.1 for almost everyone, that the general populace mistakenly thought WAS the big super-duper dangerous one.

• the avg respondent believed that 9% of all Americans had already died of Covid by summer 2020

  Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

  New poll shows Americans think 9% of people have died of COVID19, more than 200 time higher than actual. That’s one of the dangers of social contagion via social networks.

  

  

  

  Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

  The moral of coronavirus19 will be that social contagion via social networks is more dangerous than biological contagion.

• the avg Australian thought the infection fatality rate was 38%.

  Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

  Remember last summer’s polls that folks thought they had a 9% chance of dying if infected by Covid? In Australia, folks now rate their “chances of dying if infected with the Delta variant…as an astonishing 38%.” Actual average IFR nearer to 0.2%. amp.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/cor…

They believed it because THAT’s the meme that got spread, and is exactly what should be expected in panics: risks radically get exaggerated, and never the other way around.

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What they must remember is that civil liberties violations ARE our greatest emergency.

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For those interested in jumping into the comments of the thread at the top…

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

@elonmusk @andrew_lilico @DavidDeutschOxf Those scary pandemic conditions would DEFINITELY NOT justify lockdowns. (1) Lockdowns didn’t work, and that’s why they were universally advised against in 2019. They were never common sense, as I discussed in this thread from April 2020. (2) Lockdowns… https://t.co/GQLCikuStI

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

Lockdowns were NOT common sense measures. They were hysterical reactions out of fear. Here are 15 of just some of the reasons why it was not common sense. (I’m not including all the reasons we have NOW to see they were a bad idea.)