Biden talked about opening up by July 4th 2021. By May that seemed plausible. 2 things happened: - Delta variant - about a third of the country refused to get vaccinated. The Delta wave was pretty brutal, in sheer numbers worse than the initial wave. I don’t think it was necessarily obvious everything should be wide open, but I certainly think the schools should have been. I would agree the stimulus was excessive, but given the economy was down you don’t just pull the plug on all economic stimulus. I think the extended unemployment ended around sept 2021. Otherwise I really don’t know what shutdowns Biden was pushing or what you are talking about.
As I said above Biden was really pushing to open things up by July 4th. The OSHA regulation was in response to people who refused to get vaxxed. CDC recommendations are recommendations. They aren’t law. Most people dying were indeed non vaccinated, but there still was non trivial risk even for the vaccinated, especially elderly and immune compromised.
Trump is ranked correctly but , man, after reading that, we should overlook the record-setting inflation, the ballooning debt and the complete negligence in the way the border crisis was handled (among other failures) and move Joe all the way up to the top three. In fact, if Biden can prove he can still actually count to three, it should be a done deal.
The infection numbers for Delta may have been brutal, but certainly not the death rate for people who were vaccinated. Contrary to media hysteria, we had turned a massive corner by the time of Delta and wide vaccine availability. Delta was basically dangerous for people who both were unvaccinated and possessed other high risk factors. And I’m sorry, but you don’t build the rules of all society around the tiny percentage of people who satisfied all of the following criteria: 1. Didn’t get the vaccine and could not get the vaccine for whatever reason 2. Wanted to get the vaccine 3. Possessed other serious health conditions that radically increased their risk of mortality from COVID. 4. Wanted the government to keep everything shut down. You build exceptions around that group. You don’t keep all children out of school and keep the economy shut down and keep giving crazy amounts of money to everyone who asks for it for an additional six months to a year over that small group.
You could say that about the entire pandemic. 1. If you have additional risk factors, such as obesity, cardiovascular or pulmonary disease, autoimmune disorder, stay home. 2. If you are overly concerned for your health or the health of your family, stay home. 3. If you are otherwise healthy and unconcerned, do what you want. 4. Let Darwin sort it out.
Incorrect. And this logic (based on things that are false) is exactly the sort of thing that furthers skepticism regarding the vaccines. On one hand, they’re incredibly effective, and you’re stupid for not getting one. On the other, COVID still poses such a serious threat for you even after vaccination, that we need to keep everything shut down, despite the Delta variant at that point being far less deadly than the original. That latter statement undermines vaccine efficacy in the eyes of the public and it does so under a false premise. The media peddled the hysteria because hysteria is good for ratings. Many doctors and institutions peddled the hysteria because they observe policy through a hyper focused public health lens. Public health is never the only consideration we have with respect to policy, even when it comes to pandemic responses.
There was a lot more randomness earlier on in the pandemic. What made the vaccines such a dramatic turning point is it gave people agency. It gave them the option to dramatically mitigate risk. I guess people have some degree of agency with respect to things like morbid obesity, heart disease, and diabetes (sometimes). But 1) that’s largely a genetic luck of the draw 2) most people (including me) aren’t a big fan of going full Darwin and letting unhealthy people die just because they chose to overindulge on food, not exercise, and smoke cigarettes for 50 years.
The difference there is primarily that COVID was a deadly risk for a far greater group of people pre-vaccine, and there was much less we can do to mitigate that risk pre-vaccine.
If people chose to eat Twinkies and Cheetos and sit on the couch, then yell "Merika" and go out without precautions, that's on them. Many of the first group were also the second group.
All it ever was was hysteria. I call it pan-panic. In the early weeks and months you’d turn on the tube and an impeccably coiffed David Muir would clear his throat, lower his voice an octave and ominously intone, in effect, “More tonight on how you could get this and DIE.” As effective a terror campaign as I can remember living through. And the piped-in terror was so relentless that we will never know how many multitudes died from its effects.
My issue is there was far too large of a group pre-vaccine that couldn’t just hide at home 24/7, were at serious risk of death due to COVID, could not mitigate their risk, AND were more than happy to do so if they could. That was probably a majority of the elderly in the country in the first year or so of the pandemic. And even if it wasn’t a majority because let’s assume for a second a majority can quarantine in their house 24/7 and live off social security (which I don’t think is true, but just for the sake of argument), it posed far too great of a group to just leave everything open from the beginning.
The terror campaign was so successful that people were more afraid of catching Covid than dying. And so they died at home in record numbers … People Are Literally Dying to Avoid Contracting the Coronavirus
I understand people want easy answers but sometimes the answers are not as easy. Yes, the vaccination was very effective against severe illness, 80-90%, but 10-20% still have significant risk I don’t think your assertion that Delta was at less deadly is correct - to the extent it was, itwas only due to vaccination or prior natural immunity. These are tradeoffs and such tradeoffs are difficult. So at what point do we risk grandmas life so we can go to our favorite restaurant? There is no right answer, it is a judgement and that is hard when you are in the middle of it. The decision was made harder by many of your party mates who refused to get vaccinated. Their risk of transmitting was moderately higher, and when people are dying all around you, vaccinated or not, it creates a lot of fear and worry. It just seems to me there is a lot of convenient revisionism going on at that point. There was a lot we still didn’t definitely know and then politics had infected the conversation. The resistance to do anything collectively really started when Trump started feeding the narrative that Covid was making him look bad and then it just magnified from there.
A variant is essentially a sequencing error. If you have a loved one who died of a sequencing error call …
TBH, we should not look to rank any POTUS until at least 20 years after he leaves office. Take Truman for example. He had a terrible approval rating when he left office and since has been considered one of the best we've had.
