Politicians are (by and large) people who spend a lot of time talking to other politicians, who are sensitive to other people’s expectations, who go with the flow and follow conventional wisdom. They don’t break ranks and do anything radical or innovative alone.
The politician who does otherwise is an unsuccessful politician.
When a government makes a plan to solve some problem, it tends to be the same as his neighbour’s solution.
China was the first territory to react to Covid, and it reacted brutally, with what we now call lock-downs. Total suppression of human movement and interaction and activity, covering an entire city.
This was not the only option nor the most effective one, though the people who copied this solution now claim that it was.
And that’s just it, most of the world copied this approach, because politicians instinctively copy each other.
But if covid had started somewhere else, if the first government to react had been portuguese or venezualan or dutch, the template solution would certainly have been very different. It would have been a less brutal and more effective one. The world might be a very different place today.
The thing is, the only thing people have been talking about for two years is lockdowns and vaccines. So it’s easy to imagine the there are very few options - another government/territory might have had slightly less vicious lockdown or slightly more competent vaccine rollouut, but no big difference.
That’s just because people only talk about that, and they don’t think much about the majorly different options that are (are were) available.
What China came up with was a creative and radical solution. That never happened again - every other solution was a variant of China’s. But a different much of people would have come up with a different creative radical solution.
What options though? You keep saying other options but don’t list any.
100s of years ago we dealt with other pandemics in the same way
You’re asking the right questions. Most people dismiss new ideas without even thinking about them.
People talk a lot about what governments (or some of them) did too much of or did wrong, like mask mandates and lockdowns. But for me the more interesting thing is what they failed to do.
I’ll keep it short, but each of these points really deserves a long explanation. If you haven’t already read much about this stuff, you might answer “everyone is already doing that” or “it would never be as effective as vaccines”. But on all these points, most governments have been failing to act effectively and act soon enough, instead betting everything on vaccines.
Thorough granular research into disease spread.
Studying the effectiveness of different types of lockdowns.
Ventillation! Categorising public space by its toxicity. Signage. HEPA filters. Ventillation is really the backbone of respiratory disease control. They is so much here that’s lacking. Think about how toxic most metros are, and how much reform has happened in the past two years.
Novel ideas like disinfecting air using ozone.
Things that I haven’t heard about, because I’m not even an epidemiologist. It’s not my job to be finding and implementing solutions at all.
None of this is 20-20 hindsight. Epidemiology is an old science. Educated people have known for decades how to deal with epidemics, and many lay people (like me) learnt all about it in early 2020. So it’s unforgivable that governments (and govt advisory experts) are still struggling with these ideas today.
If some of these were done at the beginning, many lives would have been saved. It’s hard to state whether there would still have been a need for lockdowns, mainly because there is no good data on lockdown effectiveness at all.
TBH I don’t think this is true. I think people historically have had much more effective responses to airborn disease epidemics. They focused much more on things like ventillation, keeping healthy using diet sunlight excercise, isolating the sick, etc. Can you give an example?
Those options sound a lot like what epidemiologists have already thought through and also sound a lot like variations of what China’s doing. So where are your new ideas?
That’s exactly it. Epidemiologists know all about this stuff, and have done for decades. I haven’t said anything new or radical. It’s all old ideas that I’ve read up on.
But even today the politicians with the most power (and even a lot of normal intelligent people) are ignorant of this stuff.
Most people can see now that even if vaccination rate is 100%, that is not enough to stop covid.
But still governments (and even intelligent people) are obsessing over increasing the vaccination rate. They are not focusing on the other (more important) stands of disease control. And that’s (according to my argument) because the way China initially reacted was so influential, making people focus on the totalitarian solutions only. So they (lockdowns and forced vaccination) have become the norm globally.