What I'm saying is that they should have demanded and received more assistance. Of course they were going to be hit harder because of the way they were situated. That's what conservatives used to call responsibility for one's own choices. In fact, the sudden outrage on behalf of the poor seems as much a once-in-a-lifetime event as the pandemic itself.Robert Wilson said:You must be kidding. They were forced to bear the cost because of how various people were naturally situated. They were in the positions that bore the brunt. The white collar (like me) skated because of where we sit in society, the fact that we could work from home, run our businesses remotely, easily benefit from PPP loans in spots, etc. Middle aged and older people by and large didn't miss much sitting in nice houses ordering takeout and from amazon. Younger people got screwed out of all kinds of experiences, and the working class took it on the nose because their jobs and small businesses require person to person contact. It had nothing to do with who believed what. That's preposterous, disingenuous, and frankly borderline mean spirited. The policymakers did what they did, and the chips fell where they fell. As it sits, the stats do not that hardcore lockdown areas on the whole fared better than areas that did not follow that path. It was panic-based heavy handed government intervention. It was not based on good science. It was based on seat-of-your-pants panic. Classic case study in iatrogenics.Sam Lowry said:I'm inherently quite distrustful of heavy state action. It's why I never vote Democratic, and only occasionally Republican. I'm just not under any illusion that libertarian sentiments are an all-purpose fix for every problem.Robert Wilson said:You've bitten off on both an inherent trust in heavy state action (supported by #science which requires about as much faith as watching your old local shaman throw down his rain dance) and the justification that all the damage wrought by the state action is sufficiently balmed by some welfare. None of this has been more than a fear-driven hail mary. But the chattering classes were all about it because they were largely shielded from the costs, which fell heavily on working classes and the young. That does remind you of war, doesn't it?Sam Lowry said:That's debatable, but it's better than the statism argument. Certainly some wars do more harm than good. That doesn't mean the expenditure of public funds or the loss of freedom through conscription and rationing are inherently statist. The same holds true for quarantines and other methods of fighting a pandemic. Both are national security situations requiring unusual, and temporary, measures. The basic disagreement is whether such a situation now exists.Robert Wilson said:You brought up the war analogy - not me. It's not on all fours - no analogies are. But the interventionism (here, lockdowns of all people, including healthy young people and shutting down businesses) creating more damage than it does positives holds, as it does in many large scale government interventions.Sam Lowry said:That's the problem with your take on the analogy. You're conflating the origin of a war with the manner of its prosecution.Robert Wilson said:You're being intentionally obtuse now. You know that wasn't the interventionism.Sam Lowry said:It's hard to call it interventionism when the enemy hits your home shores.Robert Wilson said:I of course did not say that the respiratory illness doesn't exist. But, similar to some of our recent wars, our overreaching state interventionism caused more problems than it solved. Good analogy. This could be the beginning of a treatise on iatrogenics.Sam Lowry said:It's no more statist than funding a war. The difference is that wars play better on TV than respiratory illnesses, so it's a lot easier to convince people they exist.Robert Wilson said:Anything cloaked as science is the new social religion, and on many fronts they are of the same value as shaman, except they can do more damage than a rain dance when we hand them the reins to an entire society.Sam Lowry said:It's no surprise if scientists and shamans command roughly equal respect here.Robert Wilson said:Sam Lowry said:The working class will remember it that way because that's what they chose to make it. Instead of accepting reasonable public health measures and demanding the economic assistance they deserved, they wallowed in self-pitying fantasies and made believe we could all libertarian our way out of this if the evil scientists would just go away. And when a worse pandemic comes along we'll be less prepared as a result.Robert Wilson said:This falls under the category of "no ****, Sherlock."Jacques Strap said:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/18/science.abd6165?utm_campaign=fr_sci_2020-09-21&et_rid=687438071&et_cid=3488864
COVID-19 in children and young people
Children have a low risk of COVID-19 and are disproportionately harmed by precautionsQuote:
The role of children in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear; however, existing evidence points to educational settings playing only a limited role in transmission when mitigation measures are in place, in marked contrast to other respiratory viruses. In the event of seemingly inevitable future waves of COVID-19, there is likely to be further pressures to close schools. There is now an evidence base on which to make decisions, and school closure should be undertaken with trepidation given the indirect harms that they incur. Pandemic mitigation measures that affect children's wellbeing should only happen if evidence exists that they help because there is plenty of evidence that they do harm.
This pandemic mitigation strategy of wholesale lockdowns will be looked back upon as not only unnecessary economic seppuku and a shocking violation of basic civil rights but also an utterly selfish maneuver of upper middle class and upper class middle aged and folks against the young and the working class.
How are your rain dancers doing? Making you feel better at least?
I'm particularly amused by your notion that handing out big welfare checks is an offset to taking away peoples' freedom and livelihoods. Congrats on swallowing statism hook line and sinker.
We didn't go looking for this, but we should be in it to win it.
Which again goes back to the science.
Every group of people is foolish in its own way. That includes the chatterers. A particular fault of the working class is its knee-jerk hostility to knowledge, and in this case it served them very poorly. They shouldn't have been made to bear so much of the cost. Unfortunately they couldn't do anything about it because they were too busy arguing that the earth is flat and the flu kills more people.
The science has been debated as much as it can be. Few people understand why the lockdowns happened or what they were meant to accomplish. They were never expected to control the outbreak in the long term. They were only buying time for preparation, which for the most part wasn't done. We're starting to see the results now with things like shortages of testing reagents. At this point it's probably too late to track cases timely and accurately through the fall, which I suppose is good news for Trump and his crew.
