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.)
(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.)
(5) Lockdowns had the massive harms anyone with common sense knew they would…
(5a) Economic:
(5b) Developing world set back:
(5c) Excess deaths due to the interventions themselves:
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
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.The moral of coronavirus19 will be that social contagion via social networks is more dangerous than biological contagion.Mark Changizi @MarkChangizithe avg Australian thought the infection fatality rate was 38%.
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.
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…
If Ebola mated with Measles the general public would make their own decisions on how to behave. Which undoubtedly would include avoiding people if possible. It is not for govts to decide how people should behave! Most people would have simply carried on as normal if their hadn't been scared witless by their own govts! Sadly, they will all do it again if encouraged to.
The root problem is the pandemic of civic impunity, whereby citizens think that their baseless opinions and speculations can rightly be used to govern their fellow citizens' behaviors. This is a far more wide-reaching problem than their crazy pandemic reactions. Until we have a proper rule of law I don't see how anything else can really be fixed.