Do we need a Pandemic Amnesty?

From The Atlantic:

LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

...Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.


The writer, a typical leftist who no doubt took the most extreme positions on Covid, as demonstrated by her opening anecdote, no wants to shrug it off with a "mistakes were made" and never mention how wrong she was again.

My position is, as is true in other circumstances, is no amnesty. I'm not so concerned with dumb writers like her and the blue check squad who made the Branch Covidians a state religion for two years. I'm concerned with the public health officials who got it wrong and inflicted a great deal of harm on the country. Those guys need to be investigated and if incompetent, fired, and if found deliberately lying, should be criminally charged.

 

Absolutely not. What we need is accountability.

Too bad for her, eh?

There will be no forget and forgive for the bottom feeders in the LW MSM who politicized this whole affair...

I'll second that, and I expect the new GOP Congress to start investigating that next year.

As for what I'd like to see. there was way too much power concentrated in way too few hands and the results were predictably disastrous. In the future, We the People and our local officials need to have way more say and control over the responses so the mistakes that were made last time are never repeated again.

 

There clearly needs to be reform of our Public Health. This is the classic "you had one job" and they totally screwed it up; apparently in the pursuit of celebrity. But I don't have much hope of the incoming GOP doing much of anything about it. Maybe they'll surprise me.

 

The bottom line IMO is the argument of using coercion as protection- 'I know better than you, so you have to do what I say.' Thats fundamentally authoritarian and needs to be rejected/resisted by anyone who values self determination, regardless whether those who 'know' better are correct or not. It seems to me the question of 'amnesty' is more of a kenard in that sense- creating a debate about 'who wasn't correct' is at best a mere distraction from the question of whether that sort of authority is legitimate in our society, and more likely its an attempt to further establish the legitimacy of such authority in our society. The question, for example, should not have been whether we shut down the schools, but rather it should have been about whether we allow people to choose to stop showing up or not (which we should have and, I believe, would have allowed).

 

Did you even check on the author?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Oster

She actually advocated for school re-opening early on and did a lot of research on covid spread in the classroom, or the lack thereof. Now, I agree with her (being in a classroom with 100s of students on a regular basis), that the classroom is not the mechanism of how covid spreads. It's the parties. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, an in early 2020 we didn't know whether covid would easily spread in the classroom or not. We knew that it had a 2% mortality rate and that it was highly contagious, with no immunity in the population. So, she is totally correct in her assessment that we didn't know. We learned a lot during the pandemic, and probably would have handled some things differently in hindsight. However, in my view the shutdown was inevitable. If we hadn't shut down in middle March, deaths would have piled up much more quickly, and we would have locked down at the end of March.

Now, I am glad that you had a crystal ball in early 2020, predicting exactly how the pandemic would turn out. Or, was it rather wishful thinking? It's clear that Trump claimed numbers would soon go down to zero, or that the lockdown would be over by Easter, or that HCQ was actually a cure, or that the virus is a Dem hoax, and the list goes on. Now, luckily smarter people prevailed and, through their actions, we had "only" +1 million covid deaths, and not 2 or 3 million. Even with the +1 million deaths, we are the worst in the civilized world, with Brazil not being far behind. That winning, isn't it?

 

I think we knew pretty early on the basic outlines of the virus and knew that children were the least likely to have an issue. That wasn't hindsight, that was something we knew almost from the beginning. Yet a hysteria gripped the country that lead to shutting down schools, even though there was never any medical or scientific justification to it. And in that, we were mostly alone. Few countries shut down their schools, certainly not for as long as the US did.

That was a decision made purely on hysteria, not science, and I think there needs to be some accounting for that.

 

You're rhetoric aside, I'm not sure there's much to learn that we haven't already learned. I mean, no one has denied that schools spread viruses. Ask any parent of children in school. It's known.

I don't think your concerned about those officials, and they mostly got it right. Viruses spread when humans are in close contact. Children spread viruses just like every other human. Just because the virus doesn't harm children as much, though over 1000 till died, doesn't mean they can't spread it to people it can kill, like grandma. To limit the spread, you limit human interaction. School is a six and a half hour human interaction.

The real lesson learned is that remote learning didn't work for everyone, in particular, poorer students. So all we learned is that once again, poverty is a real problem we should be addressing that some in this country refuse to do anything about because, well, so called reasons.

What would you do? Open the schools sooner? The nice thing about that theoretical is you don't have to live with any consequence of being wrong, unlike how you want to enforce consequences to people who actually were part of the real decision making process. Keyboard bravery isn't really a thing.

 

Yeah, we were the worse in the world. The US reported that the US (4% of the global population) has over 24% of all global Covid infections.
My mother who died during surgery for an embolism had Covid stamped on her death certificate.
And amazingly, Trump somehow cured the common cold as the death rate dropped almost to zero?

The numbers reported by the US are fake to include deaths. And I can't wait to see these political criminals held accountable.

 

Were grandma's getting massacred in countries without school shutdowns?

 

Not as much as they were without the remote learning. Obviously, to say that schools are the ONLY source of virus spread is wrong. We can't help it if grandma has to get out to Sturgis or something to really breath in the...fresh air. The point is, what would YOU do? Again, you don't get to change the FACTS that viruses spread in close human contact, and if you've ever been in a school building, it's pretty much close contact all day. So you would have done what that would have met the objectives which is save MORE Lives AND minimize impact to school aged children? I'm open to ideas, but I suspect you don't have any because you're just interested in saying what people you don't agree with did was bad. That's fine, but don't dress it up as anything more.

 

I never would have shut down the schools. There was never any actual evidence that was needed.

 

Except there was. Again, how to viruses spread? See, you're trying to deny a basic fact of how they work and you can't do that and form sound public policy. You know why I have a cold right now? Because my kids caught it at school. And if you tell me I'm wrong or can't possibly know, then tell me how half their class has a cold and how the other half had it last week? The evidence is plentiful, you just don't like what it says. I wasn't a fan of shutting down anything either, but the alternative was worse. Ask Sweeden.

Sweden's Anti-Lockdown Strategy Didn't Work, Led to Higher Death Rate (businessinsider.com)

It did much worse than its neighbors who did lock down. And those neighbors have more simlilar political, healthcare, and population centers which means it removes a lot of variables.

Perhaps schools could have been opened sooner, but why risk it until you have an effective vaccine in place? Then, you have a basis for it, which is what mostly we did, though we even jumped that gun a bit. Either way, I don't think your approach would have met either objective. Students don't learn well when their teachers, an age group with more Covid deaths and more serious illness, can't show up due to illness and you know, death. Bottom line, there really wasn't much of a choice there.

 

Yet, she didn't have Covid.
Next

 

I think your point is that the author's premise is wrong, there doesn't need to be a pandemic amnesty because the authorities did the right thing.

It's a take.

 

Damn dude. two plus years later you still don't understand how serious Covid is? How many millions of people have to die before you can admit it was you who was wrong?

 

Well, OK, I mean, I think what I would actually prefer to say is amnesty isn't needed, but lessons can be learned.

To your point on schools, perhaps we could have found ways to return to schools quicker with different modifications to schedules, spacing, air flow, other solutions that would ensure we aren't sending a bunch of kids to pass around a virus.

I never said what they did was perfect, but I don't see how the answer could have been never shut down schools. I do think we have learned enough that if we did have to shut down schools for a future pandemic, it could be much shorter depending on how the virus impacts kids and what we learned. So yes, plenty to learn, but I don't see the point is legally charging anyone.

 

And of course it couldn't be a mistake...it must be a conspiracy to inflate the numbers?

I'll move on when I'm good and ready, don't worry.

 

If you are one of those followers who believes
360 million people out of over 7 billion have 26% of all Covid infections on the planet,
And the US has 20% of all Covid deaths globally
And has the highest death rate on the planet
you are free to tell us all about it.

 

So you disagree with the writer's premise.

Noted.

 

I agree with the op that no amnisty should be given. "Those guys need to be investigated and if incompetent, fired, and if found deliberately lying, should be criminally charged." that should also include those that promoted untruthfully and imcompetntly the use of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, disinfectant inside the body, ultraviolite light inside the body, and Ivermectin because those were very damaging claims.

 

Anyone who KNOWINGLY lied and spread misinformation should be investigated.

 

No, I would not expect them to do anything, because it would be an admission of guilt, and that's not going to happen after spending 2 years blaming everyone except themselves for what they did.

Besides, what do you want them to do?

We know what happened in Sweden, who you no doubt call "leftist". They took the road you want us to take (in hindsight), and they lost 10 times as many people (dead) as their neighbors Norway and Finland. At least they admit they messed up, but you seem to want people punished for taking precautions. We lost over a million people to that virus, so even in hindsight it sounds like a dumb idea, because if the Swedish model had played out here, we would have lost 10 million.

 

As far as the next Congress is concerned, I think the main thing is just getting everything out into the open where everyone can see it. That alone would be an enormous accomplishment.

 

Again, you are another one who disagrees with the writer of the article in the OP, that there is no amnesty needed because the authorities and experts were right. I'm not sure why Sweden comes up as a cautionary tale (twice now) in this thread. How exactly did they screw up?



From the study:

To compare excess deaths between the U.S. and peer countries, we analyzed the Human Mortality Data for deaths in 2020 over the average deaths in a typical year. Among peer countries, the U.S. had the highest overall excess mortality rate in 2020 with 160 excess deaths per 100,000 people across all ages. Belgium was only slightly behind with 155 excess deaths per 100,000 people across all ages. The U.K. had the third highest excess mortality rate in 2020 with 122 excess deaths per 100,000 people in 2020 across all ages. In one peer country (Australia) that had a low incidence of COVID-19 deaths, the excess mortality rate in 2020 even fell across all ages. The Human Mortality Database did not include data on Japan, but according to other analyses, excess mortality rate also fell in Japan in 2020.

The U.S. had by far the highest excess mortality rate among younger people under age 75 in 2020. Although Belgium was only slightly behind the U.S. in overall excess mortality, most of the excess deaths in Belgium were among the elderly, particularly ages 75 and older. Almost half (48%) of excess deaths in the U.S. were among people younger than 75 years, whereas only 18% of excess deaths in Belgium were among people younger than 75. The excess mortality rate per 100,000 people in the age group was almost 10 times higher among people ages 15-64 in the U.S. than in Belgium and 68% higher among people ages 65-74 in the U.S. than in Belgium.

This is for 2020, they year in which we had no vaccine (from 2021 onwards, we've had vaccines which changes the situation a bit). The US and Belgium leads in excess deaths, and Sweden is way down the list, so I don't know where you get that Sweden lost 10 times as the US.

But again, you still support everything that was done so I'm not sure if you have a point unless you have a specific disagreement with the article you've not yet expressed.