We do a lot of risk/reward balancing in life. Maybe we can discuss specific cases, if you like, but "I want to whine about public health restrictions" and "someone got murdered by the state" perhaps have different risk/reward profiles.
We know ventilation matters. Public health officials flubbed this one pretty reliably; schools and doctors' offices should've had HEPA filters in every room instead of clorox wiping everything obsessively. Outdoor protests, in hindsight (and of either kind), were a nothingburger for COVID spread.
As suspected, no such ban. You were able to work in your garden at will. And as the article notes, almost immediately reversed.
A note about this:
> Curiously, the state’s list of “not necessary” items doesn’t include lottery tickets and liquor, which stores can continue to sell.
Alcohol withdrawal is deadly. No one needed a bunch of extra ICU cases. (I can’t speak to the lottery. I wonder if there’s a legal issue there, though.)
"For severe alcohol-withdrawal cases, hospitals often respond with heavy sedation, sometimes to the extent that the patient has to breathe through a tube on a ventilator."
Surely you can see how "more patients in ICU needing vents" would've been a problem?
(This is, incidentally, why experts are important. Liquor stores being essential businesses doesn't make sense to laypeople. Here, for example, is an article from April 2020 attempting to explain it; this info was out there! https://www.allrecipes.com/article/why-are-liquor-stores-con... But people prefer the uninformed dunk.)
> Boy at the time they seemed panicky and capricious. Wrong?
As Donald Rumsfeld once got mocked for saying, there are known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. There were a lot of unknown-unknowns at the start of COVID. Sometimes they absolutely missed the mark. I'm still mad about them not prioritizing ventilation and better masks than cloth. But it was a period of mayhem.
Agree, but we don't live in a technocracy—or at least we usually don't.
If the government had widely publicized the (imperfect, of course) thinking of experts and allowed informed citizens to make their own tradeoffs, I don't think anyone would have complained. That's how our system works, even when there are negative externalities to some "undesirable" behaviors. And if those externalities are so undesirable (second-hand smoke, say) as to restrict them, our democratic representatives pass laws to do so.
Covid wasn't like that. Suddenly every governor & city manager had near-dictatorial "emergency" powers to implement whatever restrictions fit with the risk/reward tradeoffs of whatever experts happened to have their ear. Some of these experts were right, some of them were wrong.
I guess the question is whether Covid was so terrible a threat as to demand that kind of subjugation to authority. I'm not an expert, but I am a voter, and I am fine looking back and saying with hindsight, "No, the use of those powers was in excess of what was reasonable, even given what was known (or not) at the time"—and voting accordingly.
> If the government had widely publicized the (imperfect, of course) thinking of experts and allowed informed citizens to make their own tradeoffs, I don't think anyone would have complained.
They did that, widely. The alcohol withdrawal thing was all over; that's how I know about it. (Googling it finds articles all over, in both national and local news outlets. ChatGPT will also happily explain it.) They can't force people to listen, though, let alone comprehend.
> I guess the question is whether Covid was so terrible a threat as to demand that kind of subjugation to authority.
One must be careful not to inject too much hindsight into that assessment.
Yup yup yup! The lack of investment in air purifiers/ literally moving classes outside in warm areas continues to show me that most of America is painfully stupid about air quality.
To this day, Americans hatred of air purification is so strong that they will actively spread FUD about how “stronger filters in your furnace filter are bad cus it’s not supposed to filter air and it’ll make your machine work harder”. As it turns out, an enormous amount of poor air quality comes from all kinds of heaters.
Americans deserved to reap what they sowed here. I lost a whole lot of my sympathy/empathy for my countryman due to this. I regret that I didn’t switch to one-way masks as a way to further revel in the low trust of my society.
Notice how people that complained about this never ever quoted any stats? That's because its absurdly rare in practice. But the DFP policies did have a measurable impact. In Oakland alone, an extra (as in above the average for Oakland) 2500 or so murders have occured since DFP policies went into practice. So as someone who lived in Oakland, I want to you hear this. You are responsible for killing thousands because you didn't bother to look at the stats for violent crime. I literally saw people die on the street for the first time in my life because of you. 1000s, just in Oakland. That's you...you are responsible for that. I want you to know that.
"But as Trump was making these comments, Oakland was in the midst of a historic drop in homicides. The Bay Area city ended 2025 with 67 people killed, according to data from the Oakland police department, half of its 2021 high of 134."
We know ventilation matters. Public health officials flubbed this one pretty reliably; schools and doctors' offices should've had HEPA filters in every room instead of clorox wiping everything obsessively. Outdoor protests, in hindsight (and of either kind), were a nothingburger for COVID spread.