> [...] a virus that was nowhere near a risk to children.
People continuously forget about (or maliciously omit) even a single step beyond someone's infection. One infected person can spread it to others. Even if the individual's risk may be low, soon, you start spreading it to people that are more at risk. Schools can thus become superspreader locations that put their parents and teachers and whatnot at risk. Whether or not everything we did with schools is right, not doing anything would've led to millions of more people dead.
> [...] our hysterical reaction to Covid, [...]
Everyone certainly did some wrong things and arguably are continuing to do so, but "hysterical" is not how I would put it. We were facing a [relatively] unknown virus with poorly-understood effects to this day. We still can't predict who will be affected how by it.
I think this rhetoric is dangerous and some points of it are [to me] blindingly obviously wrong.
Way more people forget about (or aren't even aware of) isanother step beyond someone's infection - the externialities of covid measures. With the trillions of dollars lost, depression, suicide, businesses closed, undiagnosed and untreated illnesses, family feuds over the politicization of covid, delay in children's education and development, and countless other facets, it's not a stretch to say that the damage done by the policies is often worse than the disease. Public officials only care about the single tunnel vision metric of body count even if the cumulative damage of their policies is far worse, and ends in more non-covid deaths and the decimation of countless lives and livelihoods.
It's very true that things like depression, poverty, closing businesses, hunger, children's development being negatively affected, etc. are also externalities of COVID measures. Very true. Probably also true that we're not putting enough thought into them. Hence why I tries to be very careful to not say "everything we did is right". They're probably not. Hindsight is 20/20.
> it's not a stretch to say that the damage done by the policies is often worse than the disease.
I wouldn't be willing to quantify it as "often", but I would definitely agree that "sometimes" it can be worse.
Often enough that two of my family members died due to untreated non-covid ilness (kidney failure and diabetes), an uncle attempted suicide, and a cousin spiraled into depression and was hospitalized. I know dozens who have caught covid, and none were hospitalized. I doubt that I'm that much of an anomaly.
People continuously forget about (or maliciously omit) even a single step beyond someone's infection. One infected person can spread it to others. Even if the individual's risk may be low, soon, you start spreading it to people that are more at risk. Schools can thus become superspreader locations that put their parents and teachers and whatnot at risk. Whether or not everything we did with schools is right, not doing anything would've led to millions of more people dead.
> [...] our hysterical reaction to Covid, [...]
Everyone certainly did some wrong things and arguably are continuing to do so, but "hysterical" is not how I would put it. We were facing a [relatively] unknown virus with poorly-understood effects to this day. We still can't predict who will be affected how by it.
I think this rhetoric is dangerous and some points of it are [to me] blindingly obviously wrong.