The other group claims their goal is to save lives while preventing economic disaster. In practice, they act as if their goal was to destroy as much economic and social value as possible in the name of the pandemic as a Sacrifice to the Gods, and to pile maximum blame upon those who do not go along with this plan, while doing their best to slow down or block solutions that might solve the pandemic without sufficiently destroying economic or social value.
There are less cynical ways to view countermeasures that go too far. I’d compare it, especially early on, to many of us developing mild OCD because of how terrifying things were—compliance was also very high early on.
they act as if their goal was to destroy as much economic and social value as possible in the name of the pandemic as a Sacrifice to the Gods
...
they act as if their goal was to have everyone ignore the pandemic, actively flouting all precautions
A lot of the response in Europe/UK has not looked like this, or like your opposite side but it still hasn’t been very good.
The UK/Europe response been more like an inefficient, clumsy attempt to strike a ‘balance’ between mitigation and saving the economy, while showing no understanding of how to make good tradeoffs—e.g opening the universities while banning small gatherings. It looks more like an attempt to do all the ‘good’ things at once for the economy and health and get the reputational/mood affiliation benefits from both. E.g. in the UK in summer we half-funded the tracing and isolation infrastructure, ignored that compliance was low and gave subsides to people eating out at pubs and restaurants after suppressing the virus hard and at great cost, and now might be employing incredibly costly lockdown measures again when we could have fully squashed with a bit of extra effort in the summer when numbers were almost zero—and that’s the same story as most of Europe.
That’s more a failure to understand/respond to opportunity costs than either of the failures you describe, though it has aspects of both. It doesn’t look like they were acting with the goal of getting people to adhere to the costliest measures possible, though—witness the reluctance to reimpose restrictions now.
The pandemic has enough physical-world, simulacra-level-1 impact on people to steer most ordinary people’s individual physical actions towards what seems to them like useful ones that preserve economic and social value while minimizing health risks. And it manages to imposesome **amount of similar restrictions on the collective and rhetorical actions. **
This is the part that I like to emphasise, and the reason that we’re still bound for a better outcome than most March predictions implied is because of a decent level of public awareness of risk imposing a brake on the very worst outcomes—the Morituri Nolumus Mori. Many of us didn’t properly anticipate how much physical reality would end up hemming in our actions, as I explained in that post.
That doesn’t mean equivalence between sides, let alone equivalence of individuals. But until the basic dynamics are understood, one can’t reasonably predict what will happen next.
This is also worth emphasising. In general, though not in the examples you mention from e.g. California, going too hard works better than going too soft because there just is no pure ‘let it rip’ option—there’s a choice between coordinated and uncoordinated suppression. It looks like voluntary behaviour has (in Europe and the US) mattered relatively more than expected. Countries that relied on voluntary behaviour change like Sweden didn’t have the feared uncontrolled spread but also didn’t do that well—they ended up with a policy of effective ‘voluntary suppression’ with a slightly different tradeoff – economic damage slightly less than others, activity reduction slower and more chaotic, more deaths. This was essentially a collective choice by the Swedish people despite their government.
that’s probably not true, and probably not true sooner rather than later. Immunity and testing continue to increase, our treatments continue to improve, and vaccines are probably on their way on a timescale of months. Despite the best efforts of both camps, it would greatly surprise me if we are not past the halfway point.
The initial estimates said that 40-50% infected is a reasonable lower bound for when weak mitigation plus partial herd immunity would end the pandemic naturally. I think that’s still true. So, it would all have been ‘worth it’, in pure death terms, if significantly fewer than that many people end up catching coronavirus before much better treatments or vaccines end the epidemic by other means. Last time I checked that’s still likely.
There are less cynical ways to view countermeasures that go too far. I’d compare it, especially early on, to many of us developing mild OCD because of how terrifying things were—compliance was also very high early on.
A lot of the response in Europe/UK has not looked like this, or like your opposite side but it still hasn’t been very good.
The UK/Europe response been more like an inefficient, clumsy attempt to strike a ‘balance’ between mitigation and saving the economy, while showing no understanding of how to make good tradeoffs—e.g opening the universities while banning small gatherings. It looks more like an attempt to do all the ‘good’ things at once for the economy and health and get the reputational/mood affiliation benefits from both. E.g. in the UK in summer we half-funded the tracing and isolation infrastructure, ignored that compliance was low and gave subsides to people eating out at pubs and restaurants after suppressing the virus hard and at great cost, and now might be employing incredibly costly lockdown measures again when we could have fully squashed with a bit of extra effort in the summer when numbers were almost zero—and that’s the same story as most of Europe.
That’s more a failure to understand/respond to opportunity costs than either of the failures you describe, though it has aspects of both. It doesn’t look like they were acting with the goal of getting people to adhere to the costliest measures possible, though—witness the reluctance to reimpose restrictions now.
This is the part that I like to emphasise, and the reason that we’re still bound for a better outcome than most March predictions implied is because of a decent level of public awareness of risk imposing a brake on the very worst outcomes—the Morituri Nolumus Mori. Many of us didn’t properly anticipate how much physical reality would end up hemming in our actions, as I explained in that post.
This is also worth emphasising. In general, though not in the examples you mention from e.g. California, going too hard works better than going too soft because there just is no pure ‘let it rip’ option—there’s a choice between coordinated and uncoordinated suppression. It looks like voluntary behaviour has (in Europe and the US) mattered relatively more than expected. Countries that relied on voluntary behaviour change like Sweden didn’t have the feared uncontrolled spread but also didn’t do that well—they ended up with a policy of effective ‘voluntary suppression’ with a slightly different tradeoff – economic damage slightly less than others, activity reduction slower and more chaotic, more deaths. This was essentially a collective choice by the Swedish people despite their government.
The initial estimates said that 40-50% infected is a reasonable lower bound for when weak mitigation plus partial herd immunity would end the pandemic naturally. I think that’s still true. So, it would all have been ‘worth it’, in pure death terms, if significantly fewer than that many people end up catching coronavirus before much better treatments or vaccines end the epidemic by other means. Last time I checked that’s still likely.