“My real answer to what went wrong is that our civilization is profoundly inadequate. We have lost our ability to do things.”
This is the only conclusion I would challenge — we actually did do things, for a while. We locked down (almost) completely for a month. But the emerging consensus as the numbers resolved was that the disease wasn’t catastrophic enough to shut down society over for a year, or two, or three.
Does this mean that we couldn’t lock down and quarantine for a disease with a CFR of 20%? I don’t know. Maybe, and if not, it would suck. Hopefully this disease has given us a trial run and the skill to actually do it. But I don’t think especially evidence-based to extrapolate society’s response to COVID-19 to diseases with a CFR > 1%.
I think on the whole the US’ lockdown was pretty weak and had low compliance; I think compliance was to a large extent dependent on things already looking bad enough locally to feel dangerous, at which point it’s too late to get case levels low with the duration and severity of lockdown people have been up for. (‘Compliance’ might even be the wrong word for it, since I think people were mostly just avoiding things based on how dangerous things looked to them personally, not based on any top-down rules or guidelines.)
“My real answer to what went wrong is that our civilization is profoundly inadequate. We have lost our ability to do things.”
This is the only conclusion I would challenge — we actually did do things, for a while. We locked down (almost) completely for a month. But the emerging consensus as the numbers resolved was that the disease wasn’t catastrophic enough to shut down society over for a year, or two, or three.
Does this mean that we couldn’t lock down and quarantine for a disease with a CFR of 20%? I don’t know. Maybe, and if not, it would suck. Hopefully this disease has given us a trial run and the skill to actually do it. But I don’t think especially evidence-based to extrapolate society’s response to COVID-19 to diseases with a CFR > 1%.
I think on the whole the US’ lockdown was pretty weak and had low compliance; I think compliance was to a large extent dependent on things already looking bad enough locally to feel dangerous, at which point it’s too late to get case levels low with the duration and severity of lockdown people have been up for. (‘Compliance’ might even be the wrong word for it, since I think people were mostly just avoiding things based on how dangerous things looked to them personally, not based on any top-down rules or guidelines.)