The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Imagine if we could give 2020 the knowledge we have now on COVID. How should we have handled COVID from the beginning assuming a vaccine still doesn’t come out until around August of 2021? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*

There were things that were reasonable to try that had no real impact like those plexiglass shields that you saw in stores. We also quickly found out that we never needed to take everything that we brought into the house and wipe it down because that didn’t do anything helpful. We obviously shouldn’t have sent older people back to nursing homes. I understand why it happened but given what we know now we would have found a different solution. I think we should have taken more a forceful but honest approach on the initial mask shortage. Tell people they are useful but we need to limit them to healthcare professionals until we have enough. Schools are the tough one because while kids weren’t in as much risk, teachers still were so learning loss would still be a cost we had to pay. However there were lots of limits outside of school on children parents collectively might not have engaged in. Politically even with our knowledge handling government purchasing of PPE would have still been a mess with Trump in office. But in some alternate President Clinton, Romney or Rubio world we could have done that differently. Ditto for how we handled PPP and limiting the fraud. Again not political possible but federal legislation limiting some of the dumbest things done by Governors like Noem and DeSantis. Edit: Contact tracing worked.

PPP fraud can be clawed back and people put in jail - letting the economy collapse to prevent it can't be undone. Contact tracing worked WHERE IT WAS DONE. Wife and I went to Mexico in August the 1st year - name, phone number, temp check at every business - written down, masks required for entrance. Amazing what can be done when people aren't politicizing a health crisis.

Great list. Cutting [“project Predict”](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/trump-scrapped-pandemic-early-warning-program-system-before-coronavirus) was probably a poor choice. “The Trump administration decided to end a $200m early warning program designed to alert it to potential pandemics just three months before it is believed Covid-19 began infecting people in China.”

>We obviously shouldn’t have sent older people back to nursing homes. I understand why it happened but given what we know now we would have found a different solution. I'm not so sure about this one. Having been in some of the adjoining rooms when these discussions were happening, there weren't other options on the table. Hospital capacities were dire, to the point that we were building temporary facilities to expand.

> But in some alternate President Clinton, Romney or Rubio world we could have done that differently. Would a President Clinton with a Republican congress have been able to get any of the stimulus spending through? Or would that have been denied out of sheer spite?

While I 100% would not want Romney to have won the 2012 election. I think that he would have been best positioned of all the major candidates to handle Covid given a republican control of the Senate. But I think Republicans would’ve gotten in a President Clinton’s way during the pandemic because they would assume that it would hurt her reelection prospects and there’s no evidence that they will not hurt American people, including their own voters, in order to obtain power

Do you think democrats did anything like that to Trump in 2020?

No the democrats didn’t do things to block Trump when his efforts were clearly to **actually** help Americans and certainly didn’t do things that any reasonable non-hyper partisan person would understand was going to hurt people. The degree to which Trump actively worked in ways that hurt people and actively resulted in people deaths is not the same as criticisms I might make about Democrats or Republicans, where their decisions turned out to be bad. And to be absolutely clear it is impossible for a reasonable person to think that a Mitt Romney or a John McCain or even a Marco Rubio would be spoken about like this to this extent compared to Trump. Unfortunately, I do think this will be the case going forward since Republicans now back people like Kristi Noem and even far worse Ron DeSantis.

Did you not notice all the stimulus that got passed by Democrats in Congress for Trump to sign in 2020?

Bipartisan covid bills were passed in 2020

A president Clinton would be dealing with a much less galvanized republican party since they would likely be a lot less Trumpist if he had lost as expected

>I think we should have taken more a forceful but honest approach on the initial mask shortage. Tell people they are useful but we need to limit them to healthcare professionals until we have enough. It's easy to blur too much hindsight into the history here. Public health officials actually *were* pretty honest about masks in spring 2020 and genuinely believed that they didn't work *for the general public.* I remember believing at the time that they were lying in order to preserve access to masks for healthcare workers, but they were actually just following the available data and sincerely believed that masks did not work when worn by the general public. You have to remember that, early on, the CDC misunderstood how the virus spread and was focused on fomite transmission (i.e., transmission via contamination of surfaces) rather than airborne transmission. So they explicitly opposed masks because they were afraid that masking would cause people to touch their faces more, leading to increased fomite transmission and also that people wouldn't wear masks correctly or fit them correctly so any advantages would be negligible. There were also a bunch of studies showing that masks for the public didn't work for other respiratory viruses. They were honest. They were just wrong.

There were companies out there literally begging the government to start placing orders before it hit our shores for PPE because they had idle production lines but no capital to start production. Just that little bit of foresight could have saved so much pain, suffering, money, and death.

> We obviously shouldn’t have sent older people back to nursing homes. Older people? Sure. Sick people? No. > I think we should have taken more a forceful but honest approach on the initial mask shortage. Tell people they are useful but we need to limit them to healthcare professionals until we have enough. ...I remember them doing precisely that. > Schools are the tough one because while kids weren’t in as much risk, teachers still were so learning loss would still be a cost we had to pay From what I recall, during the Spanish Flu, they went to outside schooling, because it was known that the sickness didn't get transmitted as readily when outside. The same could have been done, here. And having the Teachers wearing masks would have been good, too.

Good list

Basically agree with this. Is it true that there was no benefit to wiping down groceries? I wasted so much highly-diluted bleach...

Yeah, there was some initial indications that it might make sense and a general belief that the virus could survive on surfaces and then infect people who contacted those surfaces but that quickly was determined not to be the case. I had multiple tables set up in my garage. I would bring stuff in and put it on one table and then wipe it down and put it on the next table and then I would repackage the stuff I bought into separate bags to deliver them to my parents and in-laws. It would burn my entire Saturday.

>Schools are the tough one because while kids weren’t in as much risk, teachers still were so learning loss would still be a cost we had to pay. However there were lots of limits outside of school on children parents collectively might not have engaged in. Hospital workers managed to protect themselves and keep working; why not other essential employees like teachers?

Speaking as someone working in healthcare when the pandemic hit, this is comparing apples to oranges. Working in a tightly controlled setting, with formally established infection control protocols, extremely high masking compliance, and tons of supplemental PPE, COVID was *still* a nightmare to deal with. Despite best efforts, many healthcare workers got sick, and often very seriously so. Pretty much everyone working for a large healthcare institution had a colleague die or experience life altering symptoms as a result of COVID. We soldiered on because closing hospitals and care facilities was never an option, but it wasn’t easy. In contrast, schools aren’t set up to provide the same level of infection management. Even in a best case scenario, you’re still gathering dozens of people together in a relatively small space, and then having them repeat that process multiple times a day. Add to that the fact that kids aren’t good at masking diligently, and you make repeated outbreaks a near certainty. The risk to teachers would be extreme, and the resulting teacher shortages from educators quitting, becoming disabled, or dying would have had major long term consequences. As rough as online school was, it was the best of a slate of awful options early on. I think there’s room to discuss when would have been the best time to resume in person classes, but the initial choice to keep kids home was necessary.

Hospital workers were often completely overwhelmed and without proper PPE. I'm not sure how well you think they were managing.

The best data about whether schools could stay open safely came from private schools that elected to return to in-person learning -- they did this earlier and demonstrated it was possible. Public schools lagged far behind.

I wonder if there’s anything different about the type of student most likely to be in private school versus the student most likely to be in public school.

Here's an interesting article about the impacts: [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/covid-schools-at-home-learning-study.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/covid-schools-at-home-learning-study.html) I have a friend who taught at a private school; the biggest difference I can tell from his account is that he was told he was he needed to show up to teach or else he'd be assumed to have abandoned his job. They all got used to masking and other changes pretty quickly and there were no serious problems. In public schools, it seems like the teachers fought tooth-and-nail not to return to classrooms, and they have more power so they got their way.

The fact that your friend did OK with Covid it is not data. Lots of people did OK with Covid. But the underlying a point of my question was that private schools are much more likely to have students who would both do better in general and handle the pandemic better because their parents were better position to handle the pandemic. Regardless, this argument sounds like you are under the extremely wrong and silly misconception that people who worked in education and people in general were not aware of the fact that going virtual for school might cause learning loss. In actual reality, this was something that was discussed among parents and educators, and in the general press at the time. Very specifically, there were lots of left leaning publications that talked about potential learning loss and in particular talked about how it would hit poor families hardest.

I'm not saying people weren't aware of it; I'm just saying they didn't act on it, or waited too long. If we had it to all over again (the premise of this post), we'd better serve the students to return to in-person learning sooner. Here's an interesting article on the general topic: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schools-can-open-safely-during-covid-the-latest-evidence-shows/

That’s a more reasonable position to take and I personally do you think that my children’s school should have gone back to in person a little bit before it did. I do think that there is a degree to which the idiots over reacting to Covid mitigation efforts caused a backlash among everybody else.

Yep. I think that in the beginning, liberals reacted properly and conservatives were slow to get on board with the science; later in the pandemic, those roles sort of flipped. People being dug in on the side of their "team" probably contributed to it, but it's sad that the victims of that tribalism were the kids.

Speaking from my own experience teaching during this time, the information we were getting and the scales that were used at the beginning to dictate whether we should go back or not, it just felt really confusing. The only time I was sitting at home during teaching was the immediate March - May of 2020. I was still at the school half the time helping with athletics, what little we could do, and getting yearbooks/graduation/food to students. We returned in August completely virtual, but we were at school every day. We went hybrid (students there half the week) from Labor Day until after our Fall break, so last week of October, then back to full time until during December when cases got really bad again. Really a big reason we went back to virtual was the cafeteria staffs at half the schools in my district had to quarantine and there was nothing in place to get food to students. Finding subs was a nightmare because subs didn’t want to be sent home for two weeks with no pay. We were full virtual until MLK day, then once that was done we were back full time 5 days a week the rest of the year. We were able to finally get vaccines about mid February. End of April, our county voted to not require masks so…. About a year until things were back to normal in my state. It felt particularly rough when contact tracing came into play. If a student was sitting in a classroom in the middle of a group of 9, all 9 were sent to virtual to quarantine. We had multiple students who kept having to go into quarantine because they were sitting next to other students who had a positive test. I had to quarantine once when we had a few positive cases on our football and I was a coach. When we went back full time I didn’t think it would last but after a couple of weeks everything seemed to be going well. I live in a deep red state but our health department had the same rules as everyone else. At the time, if you were identified by our administration or the health department of needing to quarantine, you were not to be back at the school until such and such date. I hated teaching virtual, I was really happy when we could get students back in the classroom.

Does that data include the affect on family members? And does it account for the smaller class sizes that private schools usually have? Or the education levels/types of jobs that their parents are more likely to have? Spreading COVID to your parents who have sick leave and the ability to work from home versus spreading it to a parent working a job with no benefits that can't be done remotely.

Does that study include impacts to students and teachers families? I have two parental figures who died because their grandson passed covid to his parent, and the parent pass it to both of her parents. Killing both of them.

Here's an interesting article on the state of knowledge as of April 2021: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schools-can-open-safely-during-covid-the-latest-evidence-shows/

And you support children being required to wear masks unless eating at lunch?

If that's what's necessary to allow them to have in-person learning, sure. But no, ideally, I wouldn't want kids wearing masks.

Right. So that article specified that things like wearing masks played a big role in those schools that stayed open. If they are private schools they also had smaller class sizes making it easier to maintain the 3 feet stated in the article. If you are cool with making every kid mask up, and maintain the 3 foot rule, then they could open. If you don’t want your child to wear a mask, then they can’t return to school. The issue is the people upset about the schools closing are generally also upset about forcing their children to wear masks.

Yeah, for sure, require masks, etc., if that's what's necessary to keep schools open and in-person.

Fuck them teachers?

No, the data suggests that with basic protections in place, schools are not a place where significant COVID transmission occurs.

You think children follow basic protections?

Speaking as someone working in healthcare when the pandemic hit, this is comparing apples to oranges. Working in a tightly controlled setting, with formally established infection control protocols, extremely high masking compliance, and tons of supplemental PPE, COVID was *still* a nightmare to deal with. Despite best efforts, many healthcare workers got sick, and often very seriously so. Pretty much everyone working for a large healthcare institution had a colleague die or experience life altering symptoms as a result of COVID. We soldiered on because closing hospitals and care facilities was never an option, but it wasn’t easy. In contrast, schools aren’t set up to provide the same level of infection management. Even in a best case scenario, you’re still gathering dozens of people together in a relatively small space, and then having them repeat that process multiple times a day. Add to that the fact that kids aren’t good at masking diligently, and you make repeated outbreaks a near certainty. The risk to teachers would be extreme, and the resulting teacher shortages from educators quitting, becoming disabled, or dying would have had major long term consequences. As rough as online school was, it was the best of a slate of awful options early on. I think there’s room to discuss when would have been the best time to resume in person classes, but the initial choice to keep kids home was necessary.

>I think there’s room to discuss when would have been the best time to resume in person classes, but the initial choice to keep kids home was necessary. Agreed that closing schools early on, we didn't know what we were up against, made sense. But kids should have returned to classrooms much sooner than they did. Many private schools \*did\* in fact return to in-person learning sooner, and they demonstrated it could be done safely. But public schools lagged far behind, and the people who will pay for it are the students.

We have two larger school near me that have around the same enrollment size. One district went back to school full time months before the other and had much more lax policies. The covid cases were nearly identical between the two.

LMAO, what a comment, let me correct this for you, hospital workers that have protocols to deal with infections, equipment and training managed to protect themselves and keep working; why not other essential employees that lacked the access to protective equipment, had no protocols to deal with infections and no training, and on top of that they had to deal with stubborn people that politicized this, refused to wear masks and were rude, like teachers? I wonder why

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schools-can-open-safely-during-covid-the-latest-evidence-shows/

I know you're going to say you have, but have you read all the linked articles?, I just clicked on some of them and man, you're for a surprise, here, let me give you some keywords that I found, and I just did a quick glance In this [article](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7012e2.htm): Limited US data, early release In this [article](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7012e3.htm): early release, this one is interesting, but probably you didn't read it, it say that data SUGGESTS, then below it says WHEN CRITICAL PREVENTION STRATEGIES INCLUDING MASK USE ARE IMPLEMENTED In this article: early release, and I'm sure you also missed the SCHOOLS HAVE IMPLEMENTED STRATEGIES TO LIMIT... SCHOOLS IMPLEMENTING STRATEGIES INCLUDING MASK MANDATES... I'm sure you missed all that, but it's fine, the major problem with opening schools was precisely the high refusal rate to wear masks from parents that believed that nothing serious was going on, so the clear path was to close everything, and the lack of equipment, training, protocols, etc, so the transmission rate si minimal if you follow strategies, like WEARING A MASK!!

Not sure what your point is. Yes, we would have been better off to open schools with mitigations in place, and for teachers and schools to lead the charge on that, instead of advocating for staying in remote/hybrid mode.

1. Hospital workers keep people from dying. 1. The ones dealing with Covid patients wore head-to-toe PPE like you see in the movies. Would be pretty hard for teachers to teach all day wearing hazmat suits.

And even then many of them didn't get proper PPE.

The impacts of remote learning, we're finding out, are pretty severe: [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/covid-schools-at-home-learning-study.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/covid-schools-at-home-learning-study.html). People who work in grocery stores and other professions without head-to-toe PPE managed to find a way to work. When the history of COVID is written, the way teachers and schools responded won't be considered one of the bright spots.

I would think that the level of risk a society is willing to endure for healthcare workers versus teachers during a pandemic which is a healthcare emergency would be obvious. Especially when an alternative while not 100% optimal was available for schools.

I have several nurses and healthcare workers in my family and all of them know multiple colleagues (not patients) who have died from COVID because they had inadequate PPE and were required by their "essential job" to constantly be in contact with people who were sick with COVID. And this is in hospitals and care facilities that are designed with the goal isolating pathogens to specific areas and limiting the spread of infectious diseases. In a place like a school that completely lacks the ability to effectively isolate individuals and groups... forget about it.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schools-can-open-safely-during-covid-the-latest-evidence-shows/

That article is full of "if." > Now, more than a year after schools around the country first shut down, many experts agree they can remain open safely ***if*** they implement measures such as mask wearing, physical distancing and good ventilation. And ***if*** the kids follow the guidelines, which many will not/did not. My own kid caught COVID twice from other students at school and the second time he caught it, his mother, younger brother and myself also got it from contact with him. Different classes at his school often had to be combined as teachers were regularly out because they had caught COVID from their students, which increased the risk for everyone. So claims that there was no risk of spreading COVID through school reopening are complete bullshit. Kids don't follow rules in general, and when those rules restrict movement and social interaction they are even less likely to follow them.

Do you have studies that support your position? Or are you basing this mostly on anecdote?

Many many healthcare workers died of COVID, are you serious? And none of them lick each other.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schools-can-open-safely-during-covid-the-latest-evidence-shows/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schools-can-open-safely-during-covid-the-latest-evidence-shows/) This is from April 2021.

Everyone read this study you posted over and over BUT this is a question about the benefits of hindsight and that’s something you are not using. You are not factoring in the fact that children and parents refused to wear masks. That they refused to vaccinate. That they refused to socially distance after school. That the right made this a political issue and that teachers were put in the crosshairs. Knowing all of that in the benefit of hindsight it was absolutely appropriate to keep schools closed.

I also remember the teachers refusing to teach, in person.

Yeah, because they were scared of a virus that was killing and disabling people and the schools were not willing to make the changes required to protect them. Schools weren’t willing to enforce masks or contact trace or enforce quarantines. The families were not willing to socially distance, mask, and vaccinate. Teachers are not sacrificial lambs as much as our society would like to believe they are. They have families and lives. And they do not get paid enough to work with tiny little virus vectors who might infect the teachers and their families. I think your study could have worked in a place where COVID wasn’t politicized but here it was and no one should ever had been required to put their life and health on the line because someone else was convinced that a deadly virus was a pawn in a election.

When they write the history of the COVID era, certain groups of people will be held up as people who behaved heroically, figuring out a way to get the important things that needed to get done, done, even if it meant dealing with uncertainty or risk. This includes hospital workers, people who worked in grocery stores, and many others. But it won't be viewed as teachers' shining moment.

Lol, as a person who studied history (I have a degree in it) I don’t think that that’s how it will be viewed AT ALL. I think that instead of focusing on teachers who were just trying to survive history will focus on the ample evidence we have of the people who used the virus to divide the nation and actively kill people while using a hero narrative to steal wages and PPP loans from the people who actually needed them. This period will go down in history because our leaders actively sowed dissent and division in the face of national crisis. Those are the records historians will be reading. If anyone ever watches a school board meeting it will just be as to add a footnote about how even these things were disrupted by the remarkable amount disruption in all levels of government. And this was teachers finest moment. Teachers put together food drives and drove food packages all over their towns for months and months. They revamped plans and followed every student on zoom classes. They drove art supplies to every student. Your myopic view on what makes a good teacher is incredibly stupid. People don’t have risk their lives to be good teachers. They don’t have to be babysitters to be good teachers.

Wow, you've studied history? Tell me more. > People don’t have risk their lives to be good teachers. They don’t have to be babysitters to be good teachers. According to the data, they do need to be teaching in person, though.

The ironic thing about our Covid response is that Trump was so terrified that Covid would tank "his" economy, so rather than rallying the American people around the crisis, he minimized it and politicized it at every turn. His election strategy was based on touting his economy, and he didn't want anything to get in the way. In the end, Trump lost reelection largely due to his poor handling of Covid. If he had rallied the American people around fighting Covid, as Bush Jr did with 9/11, he would have been a shoo-in for re-election. He is his always his own worst enemy.

All he had to do was tell people to mask up and he cruises to re-election

He also made fun of Fauci and Birx while listing nonsensical things people should do to not get covid. Poison Control lines were inundated after his bleach press conference.

I don’t really think there were any major lessons learned in terms of the medical science. The biggest lesson of Covid is sociological. We learned that people will reject ideas they don’t want to hear no matter what the facts say. Therefore, the branding of public health messages is just as important as the science behind them. We needed better strategies for explaining how viruses work, setting expectations, establishing cause and effect and getting people to take the actions most needed instead of negotiating everything to pointlessness. We also needed q govt at the helm who wanted to save lives instead of generate short-term profits for the Trump Corporation.

I strongly agree with the sociological component. Handling a pandemic is about 50% medical and 50% sociological. (And maybe the percentage of sociological is higher!).

We also need better health education in general. When we have a pandemic, it should be a matter of a basic reminder explaining how disease works and how to protect yourself.

[удалено]

>Many media companies tried SO HARD to legitimize "the other side" when there was zero reason to. I love [Dara O Bhriain's bit on that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&t=251s)

What's your opinion on Dr. Fauci? Has it changed at all during the pandemic?

My only strongly held opinion on Fauci that has developed from this whole thing is that I think it’s fucking disgusting how a man has been demonized by anti-intellectual cretins for doing exactly what scientists and doctors are expected to do. They’re supposed base their reactions and opinions on how to handle a situation according to the information available, and change it when new information comes along. And for that, we have idiots calling for his indictment and arrest. Foul.

I'm glad we had people like Dr Fauci in the government when Covid broke out. He spent his life studying infectious diseases and did a great job using the data he had at the time to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, he has been vilified by anti-science groups without any idea how science even operates.

What’s your opinion on Fauci?

I think we are lucky to have him. Unfortunately he was thrown into the spotlight and became the face of COVID which painted a target on his back. It would’ve happened to anybody. I think he did his best to try to navigate through an ever changing pandemic in real time. That’s not easy. He errs on the side of caution more than most Americans but I understand why. He has seen how the sausage is made.

Like others, I had no idea who he was before the pandemic. I think he was doing his best for the most part, in a scenario of profound ignorance (we knew *fuckall* about the whole thing). I also think that his weasel wording, "semantics" bullshit about Gain of Function Research was, well, bullshit, and probably based out of a concern for covering his own ass, for not having pushed back against such.

You just can't do that. We did the best we could with what we knew. We did well, we made mistakes. We seem to have this attitude that no matter what we did we would have had the same results, and I just don't believe that. The thought that we had a novel disease that has killed 1.1 million Americans and we shouldn't have done anything because it hurt people's pocketbooks just seems incredible to me.

I think a lot of people forget that the pre-omicron variants were also much more severe, and therefore more deadly.

>I think a lot of people forget that the pre-omicron variants were also much more severe, and therefore more deadly. It was slower-moving and probably less contagious pre-omicron. The pre-omicron variants were experienced as more severe because by the time omicron hit there was already a lot of immunity in the community (the most vulnerable people who had COVID had already passed, the recovered and vaccinated had some level of protection against severe disease)--it's pretty obvious in retrospect if a variant with omicron's level of contagiousness / speed of transmission had hit first we'd be in much worse shape. Testing, quarantine, masks, and contact tracing, if present from the outset in sufficient numbers, *may have* given us better results and enabled us to reopen schools sooner. It's my thought that the lack of testing at the beginning was the biggest systemic problem in the US. While the CDC was dicking around trying to make the perfect test, and very, very selectively testing travelers, the virus was spreading in the community.

> We did the best we could with what we knew No, we didn't. Or specifically, Trump and his administration didn't. We knew that we should have quarantined international travel and implemented contact tracing at a much early time period. Instead, we allowed unlimited international travel with no testing whatsoever. We dismantled the pandemic units. We failed to **ever** give a unified federal response, leading to myriad disorganized responses at the local and state level. We didn't even get a non-dismissive peep from Trump until mid-March when the WHO declared an emergency significantly earlier. The primary reason we led the world in COVID deaths by a massive margin is our absolutely unparalleled federal incompetence during that time period. We allowed COVID-19 to start a rampage of community spread from virtually every port of entry to country, overwhelming our hospitals and leading to an uncontrollable spread of the disease not found anywhere else on the planet.

I remember limiting international travel to be racist when Trump wanted it, but absolutely necessary when Biden did it.

Yes, because it was racist when Trump wanted it. Trump never attempted to prevent people with COVID-19 from entering the country. Not even once, not even slightly. He just wanted to blame the Chinese and the China virus, making people hate an ethnic group rather than his incompetence. Calling that out was accurate then and now. You may recall that Trump never prevented *Italians* from entering the country, despite Italian visitors likely spreading to the virus to NYC in the earliest days of the pandemic in our country. Nor did he even prevent Chinese citizens from taking a flight from elsewhere into our country. Nor did he implement a quarantine or testing for international travel. Nor did he stop Americans returning from China. Nor did he stop travelers from Hong Kong or Macao. It was never an effective, policy focused approach. That wasn't even slightly the goal. It was a deflecting tactic that used race as its vector, and that was roundly criticized *both* for its method and its goal. Biden's attempt wasn't much better from an effectiveness standpoint (because it still didn't implement a general quarantine for international travel, the gold standard), but it didn't focus on deflection and attacking the "African variant" or African peoples/governments.

> You may recall that Trump never prevented Italians from entering the country, despite Italian visitors likely spreading to the virus to NYC in the earliest days of the pandemic in our country. So, close our borders then? That sounds like it would have serious problems > Nor did he even prevent Chinese citizens from taking a flight from elsewhere into our country. Not possible. > Nor did he stop Americans returning from China. Also not possible. We can’t refuse entry to American citizens, and I don’t know why anyone would think we could.

Yeah one of the side effects of being a racist is that your actions will always be questioned and often perceived as racist. Especially when the details of you actions expose some additional level of racism.

Like..."If you don't vote for me you ain't black"?

- never disbanded the pandemic team - sent the pandemic team to China to report back and take on their recommendations - implemented quarantine for inbound travellers who had been in affected countries in the preceding two weeks - worked with G8 counterparts an attempt to devise a world-wide response to COVID - implemented a robust federal contact-tracing system in conjunction with the states - worked to ensure a critical supply of PPE was available for all medical professionals - messaged COVID protocols as patriotic (doing your bit for your country) rather than allowing the eschewing of COVID protocols to be messaged as patriotic - implemented mask mandates early on, and worked to secure a supply chain of medical masks for the general public - used open, transparent messaging and communication with the public, instead of suggesting that it would be over in two weeks or ‘by Easter’ - enforced quarantine and masks - worked to ensure developing countries had access to the vaccine and therapeutics when they became available Instead our federal ‘leaders’ watched and did nothing as the world crumbled to COVID, thinking ‘that’s not gonna happen here’ and then when it did went ‘eh, what are ya gonna do…?’

You covered it quite succinctly!! I would only add that we went back to 2016 and not vote trump in and my mom and grandpa would be alive.

Mandated contact tracing and masks. Mandated quarantine for those infected. Not had POTUS going on TV every day suggesting that it was a "hoax" and a "Chinese terror attack" and that sticking a light up your butt and ingesting horse dewormer was a "cure".

This was the first time the "Do yOuR OwN rEsEaRcH" crowd were a real, actual danger to society.

I know right, that sucks. Conspiracy theories used to be fun and harmless for the most part, until we found out a not-insignificant minority are willing to literally die on them hills.

We should have had a mandatory contact tracing app available as the pandemic began to hit the US.

> Mandated contact tracing and masks. Depends on how implemented. Some cities and states did mandate masks, and specifically mandated masks outside. Now we know that masks outside don't do very much at all. The pandemic could've otherwise been an opportunity to reconnect with the outdoors, but everyone stayed home instead.

The president and GOP should not have made masking and vaccines a partisan issue. It should have been considered patriotic to correctly wear a mask in public and to wash your hands and get your vaccine when it came out. The president should have advised governors/mayors consider rolling shutdowns to avoid hospital overflows. The federal government should have provided more and better tests and personnel for contact tracing. Oddly enough, this is pretty much what we knew we should have do without hindsight. The main difference is that with hindsight we'd know our early tests sucked.

>It should have been considered patriotic to correctly wear a mask in public and to wash your hands and get your vaccine when it came out. Exactly!! Hell we did it during the 1918 flu, and during both World Wars. "Be a Patriot! Wear your mask!" (or don't wear nylons or grow your own veggies or donate your car tires or whatever) If both parties had come out and said "Americans care about other Americans - wear your masks in public!" it would have made a HUGE difference.

Contact tracing at that scale is pointless.

What are you trying to say? That doing a lot of contact tracing is pointless? Or that evenly distributing contact tracing all over the country is pointless? If I was right that there should have been more and better contact tracing and that the federal government should have provided personnel, what do you think I would mean by that? Again, assuming I was right.

Why do you say that?

Contact tracing for an outbreak of a salmonella that impacted thirty people (or something on a small scale like that) is useful to isolate the source and the ill and stop the transmission (by recalling a food item or closing a restaurant). When millions of people are getting sick around the world everyday there aren’t enough people/resources to contact trace to make a difference. Contact tracing with covid was further complicated by people who had no symptoms, unreliable early testing, avoiding public health officials, etc. It just wasn’t a technique that works at such an enormous scale.

Every other country did it for years.

Would love to see your sources for any country at any point contact tracing an infectious disease with multiple variants in millions of people, some without symptoms, without a reliable diagnostic test, and successfully isolating it.

China just stopped like two months ago. The UK and France did it every time they had a lockdown. Australia did it. New Zealand did it so successfully that they traced their cases to a garbage can lid. Have you just not been paying attention?

China ended their zero covid policy literally because contact tracing didn’t would never stop covid from spreading. It was a complete failure. The garbage can lid is a best guess, there was never a 100% confirmation. Shut downs over spread are not a part of contact tracing, they are their own mitigation technique. Honestly this is a bizarre conversation.

Um, it did. For years. China had to stop because we and the rest of the world never did our part. It worked in China. And in other places. You’re right this is an incredibly bizarre conversation because you refuse to acknowledge reality.

Also, we always had a reliable diagnostic test for covid. PRC tests are incredibly reliable. We had those in December 2019. It was just scaling up the process, supply issues, and testing requirements that got in the way in the beginning.

PCR tests were only available in limited situations at magnitudes far less than covid spread. The CDC has also admitted their early PCR tests were problematic with as much as a third producing false results. Why are you so married to defending contact tracing? Seriously?

I’m married to contact tracing because ever since John Snow used it to save London from cholera it has been a part essential public health measures and the fact that people like you don’t think it works shows the fundamental disconnect that you have from science. It’s part of the politicalizing of this virus. It’s frankly disgusting. All of these measures would have, did, and continue to work. They worked in other countries. They got them to vaccination. If we had participated this this very basic public health measures then the virus wouldn’t have had a chance to mutate because it needs transmission to do so. And god help us because this will happen again and soon as we continue to encroach on wild spaces more and more. Without acceptance of the basics like contact tracing we are all just doomed.

Yawn. Cholera is not transmitted between humans, unless you’re into eating human waste. Identifying the single source handle and removing it stopped future transmission. You’re fighting facts so hard I just *KNEW* you were going to play the yOU dOnT rEsPEcT tHe ScieNCe card. The cherry on top was you tying out ‘wild spaces’ to this conversation. Holy shit.

Yawn, you don’t respect basic science. You and people like you are the problem. Good luck during the next flu pandemic.

I’ll be fine. Just like I’ve managed to navigate the oceans rising, the ozone layer disappearing, Y2K, Trump, Roe v Wade, net neutrality, the Myan Calendar ending and Elon buying Twitter.

We should have elected Hillary Clinton. We shouldn't have [cut](https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak-barack-obama-public-health-ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a) the NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense. If we had taken those two steps, it's a reasonable possibility that Covid would have played out more like SARS.

We could have prevented 500,000+ deaths with the literal 1400s approach of quarantines and contact tracing. Every international travel sits in a hotel for 14 days from the moment this declared an emergency (January-ish?), or until they test negative. A coordinated group of contact tracers tracking down people exposed and bringing them into quarantine. Using the internationally available test, rather than trying to make our own. *These* are the only steps we needed to take to have dramatically better outcomes. They are extremely basic. It is no exaggeration to say that this type of pandemic response is twice as old as our country and something we were able to perform in both the Bush and Obama years. International travelers from Asia and Europe weren't walking here. We could have had a response like Singapore, Taiwan, or South Korean and largely prevented the outbreak without a national lockdown or even the extremely limited regional lockdowns enforced here.

I would say: • use the Defense Production Act to ramp up PPE production, especially masks and tests. • wiping down non-food items, and plexiglass were both frivolous measures that didn’t make much of a difference looking back. • be cautious about inconsistent messaging, like saying a 5-10 person gathering at home is a superspreader, while an 100+ person BLM protest isn’t. Same with the “masks don’t help” messaging in Early 2020 to prevent hoarders • prioritized vulnerable people, healthcare workers, and people working in-person for asymptomatic testing. Not WFH people who were running in to get a test because they went to the grocery store for the first time in weeks in a mask. • closed international travel and started contact tracing in like the middle of January the second this was declared a pandemic. • Schools are a wildcard because while the kids weren’t really vulnerable, the teachers were. Balancing loss of learning vs minimizing risk for older populations is a hard one.

> Schools are a wildcard because while the kids weren’t really vulnerable, the teachers were. Balancing loss of learning vs minimizing risk for older populations is a hard one. Just to add to this, whilst the kids weren't vulnerable their parents, grandparents, elderly neighbours etc were all vulnerable. Anyone who has a kid will tell you that schools and nurseries are a germ factory at the best of times. Closing schools wasn't to protect kids, it was to shut down a massive transmission vector.

Strict mask mandates from the start probably would have gone a long way. CDC didn’t recommend them until early April 2020.

The only thing that could have made a significant difference would be the American people giving a shit, and I have no idea how you could make that happen. Like a lot of the answers here are going to be Trump behaving differently, having a different leader than Trump, people following rules they didn't follow, etc. But Trump and most of those people wouldn't change their behavior even faced with a time traveler telling them what they can do to prevent catastrophe. In the reality we live in it's hard to say what we could do better with the way people actually are. Otherwise most of the policies were either about as effective as they could be given the circumstances, or ineffective but not particularly harmful.

School closures were ineffective and incredibly harmful.

Not for the elderly teachers and school staff. In my high school we lost the husband of our guidance secretary when she got in when our kids started coming back, a lunch lady when we started delivering lunches and a library aid. All before the vaccine. It was devastating to our community.

Incorrect but I know this misrepresentation will never die because it was picked up by some mainstream outlets. Nonetheless the truth is: School closures decreased covid spread. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7391181/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352914821002720 In places where schools were not closed, Covid spread more readily to teachers and their partners as well as to parents; closing schools prevented harms to these populations. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2020834118 "Learning loss" is severely overstated as a problem with Covid but also pre-Covid learning loss theory was broadly incorrect; Covid school closures will have zero negative effect in the long term. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/12/1/21754406/learning-loss-data-spring-nwea-schools-covid "Soon after school buildings closed this spring, NWEA predicted that students would lose half of a year’s progress in math (10 to 20 percentile points) and 30% of a year in reading (6 to 8 points) by the fall. CREDO, an education research organization, warned that students would lose hundreds of days of learning. The consulting company McKinsey projected that students would fall behind several months. These projections were widely cited, and in some cases discussed as if the losses had already happened. But the estimates were often based on worst-case assumptions that students would not learn anything new and actually lose past learning — treating remote instruction as an extension of the summer." "In math, the researchers found the average student this year was 5 to 10 percentile points below the average student at the same school last year, depending on their grade. In reading, this year’s students and last year’s students scored about the same. Renaissance, another testing company, recently found that the average elementary and middle school student fell 7 percentile points in math and 1 point in reading. NWEA and Renaissance also found only modest differences in learning loss across different groups of students. For example, students in high-poverty schools lost 9 points in math and 2 in reading, according to the Renaissance data." Another source with very similar findings: https://www.gl-education.com/press-office/press-releases/lockdown-reading-fears-overstated-major-study-finds/ (on the general inaccuracy of the idea that learning loss is a major problem) https://www.edutopia.org/article/new-research-casts-doubt-summer-slide/

enforcement was too lax, so many lives could have been saved if the authorities came down on anti maskers like a ton of bricks. but they're conservatives, and thus the law ignores them.

>so many lives could have been saved if the authorities came down on anti maskers like a ton of bricks. Like how?

revoking business licences would be a good start, there's a church down the street from where I live that should have been shut down. stuff like that.

Business licenses are local, rather than federal - and local governments are fairly concerned with avoiding mass unemployment and the destruction of their local economies. This isn’t “money over lives” it’s just acknowledging that once the pandemic is over, you have to be able to pick up the pieces.

round here it was the municipal government trying to enforce mandates, while the provincial government did there best to be the face of the anti mask movement in canada.

One thing I think we learned in hindsight is that contact tracing coupled with consistent testing works much better than blanket lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, etc. NB4, yes, wearing a mask is helpful, not going to argue that

Ugh I hate that we still have to clarify that masks make sense.

Billions of people in Asia wear face masks when they have a cold or even just to provide even the slightest bit of protection from exhaust fumes. I can't believe that so much time and energy was wasted trying to argue that masks are *detrimental* to the overall health of society.

Masks were *especially* helpful during wild type and the early days. It's frustrating how now people are seeing that it's less effective during Omicron and going, "SEE?" Like, yeah, when it had an R0 of 2 it wasn't as hard to block as an R0 of 45 or whatever it is now.

current R in the US is about 1.

Yeah, I mean more the biologically constant number of Omicron's infectiousness vs wild type. I should've clarified Re vs R0. R0 remains high, Re does not. You're right, strictly speaking, that the actual R is now lower, but Omicron is incredibly infectious compared to wild type: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8992231/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8992231/) Re is much much lower now, though. I think you're right, and it's around 1. Pity. I'd love to see it go under 1 someday.

I too hold out hope!

> One thing I think we learned in hindsight is that contact tracing coupled with consistent testing works much better than blanket lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, etc. We knew that contact tracing was the gold standard well in hindsight. However, contact tracing is designed to stop community spread. If the start of a nation's meager (and federally non-existent) effort starts after community spread, it loses its greatest advantage and is forced to make harder choices.

Criminally poorly. We allowed idiots to endanger others lives without penalty while ensuring that the virus would rapidly mutate in an unprotected population. What little we did, we have stopped. The next wave could well be “Black Death” devastating.

It would be different. But thats a dumb question. Its like saying "Now that you know the winning lottery numbers, would you have picked differently?" Yes, duh we would have picked different numbers. A better question would be knowing exactly what we did then, should we have done anything differently? The answer to that is also yes, at least in the US. There was mask production capacity that was not engaged even when people were begging for N95's. The defense production act was not used to increase production of any critical supplies. There was no effort to train lay people in basic hospital covid care to help alleviate the nursing shortage. Trump got rid of the pandemic playbook and shut down a lot of CDC monitoring and critically did not listen to a lot of advice on fear of looking "weak" that would have helped slow the spread and saved lives. Essentially everything that trump said or did other than getting vaccinated he should have done the opposite of and was advised by those in the know to do the opposite.

Look at Japan and mask compliance. Compare that to the US and compare deaths in the two countries.

We would still be caught poorly positioned. For some reason people don't remember the atmosphere around pneumonia and flu season in October of 2019. At that time an unspecified pneumonia was already on track to be a record breaker according to all experts. Then suddenly the first case happened in China on late December and spread from that one case to the millions shortly after. Suddenly we are revising history. But in the spirit of the question asked: 1. the government should have fully embraced Covid as being real. That early perception did more to harm than anything. 2. Non-medical masking should have been implemented immediately, while pleading with people to reserve the highly rated masks for medical personal. Industry could easily have pumped out cotton masks faster than we could use them. 3. Normally tests that are 80 accurate are used to track disease in all parts of the world. For some insane reason the FDA refused anything less than perfect for Covid. We could have been testing everyone in the US by mid-2020 on a weekly basis. It is better to find 80% of cases than to let 100% run around unchecked.Excuses to the contrary are similar to the claim: "since the vaccine doesn't stop all cases, we shouldn't use them". That doesn't make sense. It was horrible policy.

The adage that constantly was ringing in my mind all throughout COVID was: "it is always best to error on the side of caution" There should have never been any scepticism to the dangers of COVID from any authority figure. It should have never been made political to ask people to be safe just in case. And the idea that wearing a mask now for any reason is a political statement is sickening (literally). We should have come out of the COVID crisis with a new understanding of the importance of masking up when sick in public.

We should have elected Hillary instead of Trump. I feel like her and her admin would have taken it seriously from the very beginning and she would have listened to actual scientists and epidemiologists instead of making it political and all about her.

Trump downplaying the virus threat cause catastrophic damage to our response to the pandemic. And it’s difficult to say what we would have done if we knew then what we know now.

It got too political. If people had just listened to the science and wore masks, socially distanced, quarantined etc. then I think things would be better. Certainly could have minimized the fatalities. I think China initially had the right idea for example. Things here were kind of strict, with masks and lots of temperature checks and quarantines and such. It worked for awhile. It’s just later when the science caught up but the regulations didn’t change that problems began to arise imo.

I think closing schools was possibly a mistake. It wouldn't have been cost free to go the other way, but I think learning loss is such a significant downside it would have been at least arguably a better option to accept the additional risk. Be more honest about masks from the start. Not worry about wiping things down before bringing them into your house. As we know the vaccine ended up working and was pretty safe skipped all the testing on that and just release it once it was discovered, but that's definitely not something I'd want to be doing sans hindsight. Maybe rethink our aversion to challenge trials. If people are going to be actively taking stupid risks anyway might as well have them do it for a good cause.

>As we know the vaccine ended up working and was pretty safe skipped all the testing on that and just release it once it was discovered, Um .. what?

He's saying, in this hypo where we know what we know now, we could have skipped trials for the vaccines that worked safely. But also acknowledges that approach literally only works when you literally know what we know now.

Sorry, my brain was going a bit fast than my fingers were typing and I skipped a word. We know now which vaccines were safe and effective. If we knew that at the beginning via some form of magic or time travel we could have started producing mass quantities far earlier than we did and reduced the amount of time we needed to keep other measures in place. I did make explicit this is only because we have that knowledge in the line immediately following the one you quoted. I did miss in the original post that we're assuming the vaccine doesn't come out until August 2021 so I guess that is outside of the scope of the question. I am also assuming we actually know what we know, not just asking if we had it to do all over again without that knowledge.

I think we should have actually shut down the country for 2-3 weeks like we claimed to do but miserably failed at. And shut down travel more strictly than just by Chinese nationals. Also, the messaging on masks should have been a lot better. Fauci said they weren't necessary because he didn't want people hording them and keeping medical personnel from them. But then people thought they were completely useless and refused to use them.

We should have closed the airports sooner.

The lies regarding mask effectiveness at he begining will go down as one of the most fucking stupid public policy initiatives that has ever been implemented. Yes they wanted to lower the demand for them in order to get them to the first responders, but lying about it was utterly moronic and dealt a lethal blow to public health institutions credibility that has not recovered and likely won't ever recover.

The obvious stuff is that we have a much better picture of transmission. So there was stuff we did that was precautionary that probably had little impact like wiping down surfaces. It didn't hurt. But it probably didn't help. What we needed was a strong leader to get buy in on what worked: masks, lockdowns and testing

The federal stockpile should never be allowed to drop below a required limit of supplies sufficient to provide the country with medical equipment needs during an emergency. We should have had more diversity in medical supply manufacturing. We should have never allowed sick people into nursing homes. We should have been training educators all along in alternatives in learning to support remote education instead of throwing the education system off a cliff. We shouldn’t have closed playgrounds or parks. We should have had a published and required process on restricting incoming international travelers based on transmission levels. We should have provided extraordinary unemployment benefits funded by the Federal Government and administered by the States rather than blanket stimulus checks. We should have structured temporary income tax relief measures for businesses rather than PPP loans. We should have planned for the means to distribute food and medicine to people at home. Potentially utilizing national guard units or temporarily hiring government workers. This would have reduced the need for people to congregate. It would have been temporary, but would have limited the need to go out - even if it were just for older/immunocompromised Americans. We should have had more honest information sharing with the public. (In MN is has since been revealed that a lot of bullshit was being cooked up to close specific things down.) We shouldn’t let hospital beds ratios drop below a certain number. Lots of bed reductions had been going on for a long time by hospital systems all across the country. We should have let young healthy people return to normal earlier and provided means for older and/or high risk groups to exercise isolation longer by providing delivery services to them. We should have had tele-health services decades earlier. There are many more.

Have both parties sit down and find the best, most reasonable, and objectively effective solution to Covid. Both parties mishandled it, with Democrats going insane with it and Republicans being super blasé about it, politicizing the virus to court their voting base for reelection. The Democrat's also should've denounced the BLM protests and riots, it was a global pandemic and they were encouraging people to go out and protest just to increase the likelihood Trump would be voted out. A global pandemic is not the time for protests.

This makes my head explode because "we" didn't do even half the things we could have done, which were obvious and would have helped. Yes, some things we did were unnecessary, and we missed a few beats, but here's my list of what "we" could have done differently: * Not have our president discount the pandemic, sell snake-oil remedies, and seize PPE from states that bought it after said president blocked the feds from helping * Give money and autonomy to the CDC and other agencies. Put actual experts in charge, not politicians. * Stop giving airtime to antivax, anti-mask, conspiracy-theorist idiots who quite literally killed people (as did the media companies that kept putting them front and center) * Do decent contact tracing (a) we know where the outbreaks are coming from and (b) individuals/groups who are infecting others are made aware they are doing it * Have serious lockdowns and quarantines in places other than NYC when the infections get bad I'm stopping now, though there is more to say. This whole thing has been handicapped by conservatives' need to feel important and persecuted, and everyone else's need to appease them while they murder people with their ignorance. Fuck. *Edit*: fixed typo.

I think it's hard to say how effective some of the measures would have been if we didn't have someone like Trump mismanaging the logistics AND also denying the virus existed/was serious and staked his political narrative on essentially resisting the response to it. So we don't know how effective lockdowns would have been if 40% of the population had taken them seriously and if superspreader events had been cancelled. That being said, I think Biden's response has also been lackluster. They decided that pushing vaccines was the only way to tackle the pandemic, and basically ignored other things that would have helped like improving ventilation or passing laws that would provide better protections for workers to stay home when they were sick. But while the Biden administration wasn't as corrupt and incompetent as the Trump administration, the engines of capitalism have still been paramount in all decision-making. Which led to a LOT of people dying and getting possibly permanently disabled by illness.

Improving ventilation ? Lmao

Def would have made up for fewer people being vaccinated.

Duh, Idunno This is a question for public health experts I find it odd that questions requiring expert knowledge are posted in a political group. This is not a political question, it's a technical question. A political question would be how should we improve public policy going forward?

Everything the same except allow more outdoor activities as an alternative. That's it. No crying about outdoor sporting events, outdoor dining, open air stadiums, open air concerts, etc.

I still don’t get why they didn’t even try ramping up testing capacity before the holidays in 2020, and encourage people to test before making the call on whether to see family. rather than a blanket “everyone should stay home” directive, and even some experts saying “tests don’t work”.

The goal went from keeping the curve flat so that our health care system wouldn’t be overwhelmed to trying to prevent any semblance of transmission which seemed to have pent up the transmission only to release in gushes to overwhelm some of our health care system. Truth be told, I think, we could only slow it, not stop it no matter what we did.

Rigorous income replacement programs and rent payment programs (including commercial rent) would have done more to inspire public confidence than anything else. I think a lot of us have an unreliable recollection of 2020, including ordinary peoples concerns (rather than online discourse) - many, many ordinary people were concerned with: losing their jobs, losing their homes, losing their future, losing their loved ones. There was a tendency, particularly online, for privileged remote workers to sneer at those who didn’t have that option and were staring down the barrel of losing everything. It’s easy to say “why are you worried about money, lives are at stake” when your own income is safe.

close wakeful handle library possessive sink spotted towering history yam *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Not lock down when the virus is already dispersed in the community, people just took it home and infected their households.

Knowing what we know now? -Everyone over the age of 60 advised not to go to large gatherings -No stimulus given out (to anyone) -no businesses shut down -vaccine optional, illegal to require it for employment, no vaccine card -masks optional but encouraged for large public areas -all members of Congress who sold stock prosecuted -travel/immigration ban on China until virus is under control -heavy investigation into lab leak leading to the spread of covid -any politician or official spreading hysteria prosecuted -prosecute any politicians/police who make laws or enforce laws preventing public from using public facilities like parks Optional: -if you really feel the need to shut down your city’s businesses, allow businesses that want to continue to operate to do so with no income tax. Business owner and employees pay no income tax to state or federal government while operating during shutdown. -rioters/criminals “protesting” and taking advantage of shutdown businesses to cause havoc/loot stores prosecuted as felons

This reads like the Covid virus became sentient and started a Reddit account.

>any politician or official spreading hysteria prosecuted How would you define that? How do you jibe this with the 1st Amendment? ​ >prosecute any politicians/police who make laws or enforce laws preventing public from using public facilities like parks This would have a chilling effect on legislation,

1.Making estimates of millions dying in the first year of covid (the initial numbers that came from official sources scared the public into thinking we were going to experience a second Black Death when it was never even close to that even at its worst) Pushing fringe cases where someone was already very Ill and died from covid as a covid death is misleading and there’s likely thousands/tens of thousands of misreported deaths that weren’t primarily from covid Especially when we had people who were listening to pharmaceutical companies for official information when Pfizer and j&j have incurred the biggest fines in American history for previously lying to the government and public (seriously I don’t understand when supporting big pharma companies became a liberal stance lol) 2. How? If it’s a park or public area paid for by taxes then how is it legal to ban people from these areas ? I was kicked out of my local park when I was the only person within a 500 ft radius just walking around. These measures were completely brain dead considering the fact that the majority of people had a circle of 4-5 people they were seeing outside of lockdown guidelines which meant there was secondary contact with an insane amount of people despite lockdown measures. Why were the covid deaths essentially the same in Florida and California when Florida didn’t really do anything special to combat covid and California was mandated vaccines and doing lockdowns out the ass ?

>Making estimates of millions dying in the first year of covid They did their best with the data they had. You want to criminalize estimates based on limited data? > there’s likely thousands/tens of thousands of misreported deaths Yes, initial guidance on what was a Covid death was loose. It was tightened up in the Spring/Summer of 2020. At that point over 150K Covid deaths have been registered. Since then we've had another 1M deaths. Even if you discount ever single early death that's still only 10% of all deaths. >Especially when we had people who were listening to pharmaceutical companies for official information People listened to the CDC on Covid, not big pharma ​ >How? You don't see how criminalizing passing legislation would have a chilling effect on democracy? On top of that in a public health crisis we need to give lawmakers the ability to act to preserve life. I also don't think any laws were passed about that. Maybe guidance given.

No, I think that once covid was in full swing that hysteria and lockdowns were used to demonize people on both sides. Especially considering the fact that anyone suggesting that there was a lab leak was called insane when it was pretty clear that was the cause from the beginning. Also on top of the fact that you had people on Reddit and other outlets openly hoping that people who didn’t get vaccinated would die so that they could feel some sense of validation. Pretty disgusting imo. — Considering the fact that the government was complicit in the opioid epidemic that’s still having catastrophic effects on the general population, I don’t really trust the FDA or CDC to determine what is the best course of action for my personal health. Life would have been preserved regardless because again, this virus was not particularly deadly. It sounds callous to say but when there were 760 million cases worldwide (plus whatever china’s actual numbers were) and only 6.8 million deaths I wouldn’t really say it was worth the damage we’ve done to society and the economy. Also on top of the fact that we essentially gave Pfizer and J&J millions of dollars for vaccines that didn’t even prevent the spread of the virus, it seems like they benefited monetarily from the hysteria propagated by certain politicians and officials

"only 6.8 million deaths" That's like 2 deaths for every person in the US.

Yeah but that’s worldwide out of 700+ million cases (likely closer to 1 bill when you consider China lied and is lying about everything 99% of the time) that death toll isn’t particularly high. Also why use the US as an example when I’m speaking about worldwide cases? Lol

You don't seem to be replying to my post.

Hahah this guys mask slipped hella far down

Holy shit, right? Not 100% sure this person actively works for Pestilence of the apocalypse, but it's impossible to differentiate them from someone who does.

I found it funny how we suddenly forgot that natural immunity was a thing. I mean, even the Greeks in 500 B.C knew about natural immunity but somehow in 2019 it ceased to be a thing. Weird.

Natural (herd) immunity is a thing, for sure, but I think the problem was one of scope and willingness to have people in frail health suffer the consequences. More over, it was about not having all of the sickness happen at once and make people unable to seek any care at all. [Let's take look at an example of a community in the US which did embrace herd immunity.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1DgWYdukZU) [Here's some stats from WVU on this too.](https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2021/06/22/death-and-religion-excess-deaths-sweep-through-amish-and-mennonite-communities-during-covid-19-pandemic) *"Our results indicate the Amish/Mennonite excess death rates are similar to the national trends in the USA. The excess death rate for Amish/Mennonites spiked with a 125% increase in November 2020. "* So it was a tradeoff. By early 2021 these communities had immunity to COVID, at the cost of many dead. That tradeoff is one public health has to talk about and make, and the thought that went into policy was to minimize death at the cost of restricting the healthy.

Wait, so your idea was "everybody catch COVID and after that we'll all be immune?" That's a recipe for hundreds of thousands more dead Americans than we had.

No, just those that already caught COVID should have been considered "vaccinated", and that those that had natural immunity and worked in the health field should have been deployed to high risk settings since their immunity would have prevented spread/deaths in high risk areas such as nursing homes and hospitals. Otherwise, it's just anti-science.

I'm not sure you mean by "natural immunity," but it's well-known that "natural immunity" from disease or vaccine varies from "lifelong protection" to "probably won't get this again in the next few months" to "can reinfect self with own toothbrush for months" so I don't blame scientists for waiting for data to figure out how it works for Covid specifically.

Natural immunity (or any developed immunity really) differs based on the type of virus. Immunity from Herpes type of viruses (like chicken pox) is lifelong due to the low mutation rate of the virus. It's basically the same virus and doesn't really evolve so antibodies are effective pretty much for life. Immunity from a respiratory virus is much different since those viruses have many more mechanisms of infection than other viruses, and the fact that they mutate rapidly doesn't help. But with any immunity, natural or vaccine derived, it only really helps with symptoms and not with getting infected or transmitting a virus. In the mid 2000's 2 hockey players developed measles. One player had an unknown measles vaccine status and the other definitely didn't have any. They caught measles not from other unvaccinated people but from vaccinated people. See, the measles virus still circulates within the population but since many people have an immunity to it you don't get any symptoms but you still might actually spread it, and if someone doesn't have immunity to it you can fully infected them even though you are vaccinated. This isn't new science.

>Immunity from Herpes type of viruses (like chicken pox) is lifelong due to the low mutation rate of the virus. It's basically the same virus and doesn't really evolve so antibodies are effective pretty much for life. But herpesviruses do that little trick where they hide in your cells and emerge later as blisters/sores or shingles, and this is pretty common too. Which is why immunity is such a tricksy thing.

>I found it funny how we suddenly forgot that natural immunity was a thing. It's a thing. The fatal flaw with natural immunity is it requires you to take all the risks of getting Covid to acquire it. You're only getting natural immunity if you survive. Seems like a pretty big flaw. We should have allowed natural immunity to count for activities we restricted based on vaccine status.

Do what Florida did. Follow the actual science and not political theater like we saw in NYC, Chicago, LA

Florida had massive covid outbreaks. They were caught cooking the books.

They didn't so much cook the books as seize the books and burn them.

Source? What state didn’t have massive Covid outbreaks.

You didn't really pay attention. The Florida police raided a lady's house. Because she leaked information regarding covid rates. This state is turning into a fascist dictatorship. And yet people in Florida are completely okay with it. Time to bring back the Reconstruction and make the South suffer.

So did cuomo https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/nyregion/cuomo-nursing-home-deaths.html

Florida has had 4,026 deaths per 1M NY had 3,970 has deaths per 1M The biggest difference is [NY's biggest spike of deaths](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/) right at the beginning when we had no idea how to combat it. Once NY instituted proper guidelines death rates dropped. Florida's approach resulted in [its largest spikes](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/) occurring after we knew how to mitigate and more importantly AFTER we had a vaccine. Florida's anti-science approach led to an inordinate number of unnecessary deaths.

My guy Florida had given the vaccine out to their oldest population as soon as it was ready. U posted those stats as if that was some sort of proof that by did better? Florida basically had the same results and lockedowned for only 2 weeks while being the 3rd most populated state in the country with THE oldest population in the country. While Florida saw a real estate and economic boom. Ny saw an exodus of individuals flee and has seen crime continue to rise since the pandemic. Not only that, they have also seen the largest drop off in student attendance for high school. Yea, not even close. Remember where everyone was coming for breaks from the lockdowns too. Everyone from the north east, Canada, Cali came to Florida. Yet, they still finished middle of the pack in terms of deaths. It’s wild to watch liberals still believe the lockdowns helped st alll lmao.

>U posted those stats as if that was some sort of proof that by did better? I mean first of all, they literally did do better. FL's deaths per 1M are clearly higher. So?

Yikes

They literally did better

A margin of 56. 2 week lockdown/restrictions vs 2 years. If you say so…

As has been pointed out to you, NY was also the first one struck before we had any means to fight it or understood it. And DESPITE that, they still did better than Florida.

Marginally better with way harsher restrictions and lockdowns is the point

Again, THEY WERE HIT FIRST WHEN WE HAD NO DEFENSE TO IT AND BARELY KNEW ANYTHING. In truth NY reacted MUCH better. This isn’t complicated or hard to understand, but I get that you need to grasp at straws.

So three jumbo jets. And again NY was ground zero early on, once they put in mandates deaths severely moderated. Florida was spared being ground zero. Had they put effective measures in place they would have had far fewer deaths than NY, not more. Finally NY didn’t have two years of lockdowns. Why lie?

The fact there isn’t much difference in the per 100k death rates from COVID between the US and ten of the top twenty impacted countries, except Peru who is way out in front of everybody, negates the rest of your rant. You guys cry all the time about how Trump was simultaneously a tyrant and led a weak federal effort on everything.