We had no idea what we were dealing with. It was unprecedented. People were doing the best they could. All the anger didn't help.

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firesteelrain 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I’m not sure it’s right to say we didn’t know what to do. Beaches and playgrounds were closed even though the risk of outdoor spread on surfaces was minimal. Those kinds of choices made the shutdown damage worse without clear public health benefit. We had the science to tell us that viruses don’t survive on beach surfaces for example

	▲	acjohnson55 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It was frustrating to have some of the outdoor ban stuff at a point when it was pretty clear that things were safe in highly ventilated environments. But in my opinion, that was relatively harmless compared to the backlash against common sense precautions, like properly fit N95 masks when sharing enclosed space. There's a lot of criticism of places that kept schools closed for longer than was necessary, in retrospect. But we really didn't know whether it would always be the case that the risks to children were low. The virus could have mutated in a way that brought more risk. Or there could have been chronic effects that could only be seen after the passage of time. Given the infectiousness of the virus, it could have been so much worse. I get the vaccine hesitancy. But I think a lot of people were not willing to accept that vaccination is not just about their own safety, but a collective safety issue.

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lmm 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> We had no idea what we were dealing with. It was unprecedented. People were doing the best they could.

So public policy should have reflected that, instead of going into counterproductive authoritarian clampdown mode. In my country the authorities literally switched overnight from threatening to jail parents who took their kids out of school to announcing mandatory school closures.