1. comparing US and Australian COVID mortality is comparing apples to rocks. Surrounded by an ocean, a mere fraction of ports of entry, and lower population density. New Zealand?? Oh, wait South Korea, now there's an apt comparison. wide open borders there.
2. Mask mandates don't work. See Cochrane review. There is a difference between something working for an individual and then forcing a population to emulate that individual's behavior. It's Intention To Treat vs Per Protocol.
3. Credit for correctly pointing out the atrocity of school closure. No mention that it disproportionately hurt poor, Black, and Brown students. Something Progressive never miss an opportunity to point out.
4. There are 1000's of variables that determine a population's COVID mortality. cherrypicking your favorite ones that support your thesis is always flawed. I could easily show the relationship between COVID mortality and density of waffle houses and probably provide a better causal explanation than enforcement of mask mandates.
Florida and California Age related COVID mortality are nearly identical. California's All Cause mortality is much higher than Florida's. Yes, people do die from other things than COVID.
5. no mention of vaccine mandates. People who recovered from COVID were fired from their jobs for refusing a medical intervention that would have done nothing in advance of the 2022 Omicron wave. Shameful.
6. for that matter, no mention of how the Progressive Literati dismissed a phenomenon that has been understood to some extent since the ancient Greeks, adaptive immunity following an infection.
7. no mention of how many people may have died from prioritizing a 20 year old "essential worker" over an 85 year old in a nursing home.
8. credit for the final paragraph. This is all a a manifestation of the pandemic of the political polarization mind virus. When Trump was briefly COVID alarmist, it was dismissed as anti-Asian xenophobia by progressives. Nancy Pelosi was in SF Chinatown in Feb 2020 telling everyone to come visit, nothing to fear. When Trump became anti-lockdown because he saw the stock market dip and worried about his re-election hopes, Democrats pivoted to hard pro-lockdown, pro-mask. Battle lines drawn. Battle lines blurred for a bit when Trump took credit for vaccine development and predictably, Democrats vocally expressed vaccine skepticism and hesitancy in Fall of 2020 (look it up), labels that would later apply to right leaning folks.
Matt, I was hoping (and perhaps you could still write) a more parent- and education-focused COVID response postmortem. As a non-parent, hearing your perspective on COVID interventions, DEI, education issues, etc. as a parent is a welcome part of reading your columns.
Australia has a federal system, albeit one where the powers between states and the federal government are somewhat different, and Scott Morrison spent the pandemic coordinating the response with state premiers (governors), many of them from the Labor Party. A further nuance to consider when weighing comparative pandemic responses and partisanship.
What does Matt think of Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s* Covid post-mortem, “The Big Fail?” Seems like this is the first big stab at a comprehensive look. I like it, but agree with what I’ve heard a few others say that it might have benefited from another year or so of dust settling, yeast rising, etc., before tackling the full picture. Still, an informative read.
While Trump deserves a lot of criticism for his response (or lack thereof) early on in the pandemic, Operation Warp Speed was quite successful and an impressive feat. It seems that liberals don’t quite acknowledge this. I recall the reporting from The NY Times revealed that not surprisingly, Trump himself was not involved much with it, but it proceeded despite Trump. So the Trump Administration should get a lot of credit for it. But it’s unlikely something like Operation Warp Speed could happen in a 2nd Trump term, given their goals of completely disrupting the administrative state.
I think an incredibly underappreciated or just forgotten element of this is the utter lack of concern that Trump and pretty quickly all his supporters had for those of us living in NYC at the time, and that got mirrored into national partisanship pretty strongly.
In March of 2020 I was living in Brooklyn and my wife was 9 months pregnant. Her final OB check ins were solo and I'd park around the corner from mobile morgues. We spent weeks listening to sirens every half minute, 24 hours/day. I won't get into what my daughter's birth experience was like.
The hardest part of all that is that while it was happening, in real time, the President of the United States - who was bitter about the city of his birth rejecting him - basically told us we were on our own and refused to take basic steps to help NYC. In pretty short order those of us who lacked second homes or parents with spare bedrooms in other states were social distancing in packed apartments while people elsewhere complained about having to wear a mask. Most of us who were from NY knew people who died (not all of them old in the early days) and were one degree removed from many more, and while the trauma of that first month was still ongoing we were subjected to half the country calling it a hoax and refusing what seemed like even the most basic care toward other human beings.
Yes, in that context partisanship will absolutely get layered into pandemic management, every time, especially when many nationally leading journalists and writers shared a similar experience to me. The basic lack of concern Trump had for liberal Americans as human beings is the original sin behind all the chaos that followed.
Matt’s #16…”or that Covid deaths were the result of a classification error…”
Willfully so, according to some, out of pure grift meant to attract government reimbursement.
Such claims left me bitter toward those who espoused them blindly.
To wit: mom died during Covid, and after her passing, but before I flew home, a seemingly well-meaning, but certainly cynical friend asked from what, and when I replied “Alzheimer’s,” he rolled his eyes and said, “watch, they’ll call it Covid on the death certificate.”
It was pretty insulting.
What he got right is that fiscal largesse of course incentivizes behavior, not all of which is conducted in the spirit of the law. I mean who knows? I haven’t investigated any hospital records…and apparently no one is going to, if Matt’s right.
Likewise, I’m sure many can recall SM feeds littered with folks who pleaded with all to not worry, it’s just the flu, you’re not gonna die, it’s all overblown…and yeah, the disease had an awfully high survival rate, if you want to look at it that way.
But the assumption of fraud and conspiracy and dismissal of the harsh reality was so often transparently an excuse not to join the fight, to alter behavior in the spirit of solidarity or common interest…as I saw and felt things.
This is where the tension comes from: the desire to see others act in community, but to be rejected in that desire, fueled a perverse desire for mandates and measures. The kind that as Matt says couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be enforced.
You're giving ScoMo way too much credit - the majority of the NPIs in Australia were imposed by State governments.
Pretty much all of them were strict in different ways - Victoria and NSW were strict on local travel radiuses, masking, limiting gathering sizes, stay-at-homes, while Western Australia was strict on interstate (and at a few points, intrastate) travel.
In general Labor (vaguely left) governments were more willing to impose stricter rules but it truly was state-by-state. I think state level was the exact right level of governance for this - federal would have been dumb (Victoria, NSW and Queensland had very specific border twin-town issues which would have made the kind of hard border enforcement that WA did very difficult, and those eastern states have fairly closely linked economies). Council or postcode level would have been dumber. City level maaaybe could have worked, but generally State governments made good provisions for that - in VIC, regional towns didn't have the same restrictions as the Greater Melbourne Metro area, and you simply didn't need those restrictions outside of Greater Melbourne. (Also, limiting everyone in Greater Melbourne to like 5km of their home kept them out of the regions anyway).
The Prime Minister (Federal government) had like one job (securing vaccine approval and supply as quickly as possible) and did pretty badly because of the right wing elements. Unfortunately, they decided to let the vaccine hesitant voices delay approvals and that impacted how quickly we could secure our supply - basically, other countries beat us to order them.
Also, Jobkeeper should have gone straight to workers instead of sitting with employers as the intermediary - it wasn't an efficient way to stop income losses and they had to chase some employers afterward for repayments because they didn't actually qualify for it.
But overall, the highlight with Australian COVID policy was consistency of messaging and enforcement. The public was kept updated, often daily, by our state leaders. We knew what stats our leaders were monitoring and what that meant for rules being imposed or lifted. The daily press conferences in some states were clear on current rules, penalties, and why, and whether there was a light at the end of the tunnel (e.g we have done this contact tracing and we think we've contained the outbreak, if we don't find anymore cases we can't trace, you guys can come out of lockdown by Sunday, for example).
And with rules, we generally had that "critical mass" of rule followers. It's very easy for your police force to catch maybe 3 - 5 parties across the whole metro area, far harder if the entire city has decided that they're not following the rules. I think they managed to get enough people on board so the rule breakers were in the minority and hence enforcement wasn't hard. This held for Victoria's very restrictive stay at home rules, as well as Western Australia's hard border (only having like 3 highways and Perth being like 12 hours from the closest land border helps, and of course planes are really easy to manage especially since all the flights got cancelled. Though they also caught like, one party yatch?)
If you want to study rule enforcement, though, Greater Metro Melbourne would be interesting - large dense population with very strict rules that they somehow successfully enforced.
Thank you for acknowledging how bad Covid was in NYC while at the same time laying out how warped the warp speed, how dysfunctional all governing bodies were.
People criticizing Big Pharma etc seem to need to discount how bad the infections were as they try to demonstrate that Fauci et al were wrong in every word spoken. Crucifying globalists and billionnaires does not point the way to what to do the next time. I think sentient humans know there will be a next time.
The golden example in my mind of relying on voluntarism and providing good information is not Sweden but Japan. From the outset they had a very crisp and correct message of avoiding the "three Cs" (closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings) plus a preexisting masking culture. The rules were enforced and respected largely through social/peer pressure rather than police.
Even though Japan had a far inferior contact-tracking program as its peers South Korea and Taiwan, its overall death rate ended up barely higher.
Things I would have had our government do different:
(1) Get ahead of testing in December of 2019 when we knew there was a problem in China. I knew as soon as I heard the news out of Asia that there was a high liklihood that it would be in Seattle and started making plans for how that might impact my business. In Seattle we got a head start because we had already done widespread testing of flu patients and had samples we could test as soon as we got the first confirmed case. I think it helped us having a very different experience than NY where I think the virus was circulating much longer without detection. Every areas should be regularly collecting and testing samples from patients with respiratory disease to see trends and to have samples to test if novel viruses are spotted. We still do this in Seattle but we could do more. When my daughter had the flu they offered to sample her for the flu survey but said it wouldn't personally benefit her since they wouldn't treat her differently. She opted not to do it. If they had offered her a $5 Starbucks card or Amazon card she would have. I think many areas are not doing this at all.
(2) Clearer messaging about what we know and don't know, what we are mandating and what we are recommending.
(3) Stop with the hygiene theater when we knew fomites were not a big vector. Immediately reopen outdoor spaces and invest in ventilation once we knew it was airborne.
(4) Have more masks and PPE and more capacity to domestically manufacture it.
(5) Have clearer communication about masks. Admit when prior advice was wrong to maintain trust.
(6) Reopen schools once all teachers could vaccinate while providing remote option to parents who wanted/needed it for high risk situations. (I was wrong about this. I kept my own kid out until she could be vaccinated even when in person was offered. I underestimated the amount of damage being out of school would do to kids.)
(7) Acknowledge the mental health toll during and provide more resources, especially to kids and schools afterwards. Free online mental health services doing isolation would have helped a lot.
(8) Depoliticize vaccines. I blame Trump and other Republicans who didn't get ahead of this and do more to save their voters.
I think we downplay the role of grief too much in our discussions of Covid. It was so polarizing that it became something to argue about. I think some of that rage was just misplaced fear and grief. A lot of Americans died of Covid, they left behind actual grieving relatives. Others had loved die of other illnesses without getting to say goodbye to them in person or hold funerals. People missed on important cultural rituals like weddings and graduations. People had to endure long periods of isolation or illness. Some people are still sick with long Covid. There are still people dying of Covid, especially older unvaxxed folks. It was really, fucking sad. We aren't really great in this country at facing death in the face and just grieving. We generally prefer to be angry. But angry doesn't really process grief not matter how angry you get or how long you stay angry.
I work in the area of law focused on death so I saw a lot of Covid deaths. I ended up really feeling like we were not processing it well as a community. In the fall of 2020, I decided it would be healthy to try to do some sort of safe memorial. I bought a gong and set up a table in a neighborhood park with a sign that listed total deaths in Seattle to date and sounded the gong once for each death. Anyone who passed by was welcome to take a turn and sound the gong 10 times. I was surprised how many people who just happened by ended up in tears participating. Folks told me about teachers, friends, and grandparents who died. Many had felt like they couldn't really publicly grieve because Covid had become a disease that people either want to deny was serious or wanted to place the blame for on people not being sufficient rule followers.
I ended up doing it every other weekend for about six months at different outdoor spaces. It felt kind at a time when not a lot of things felt kind.
I think we do need to make plans for what to do better next pandemic. But I think we also need to acknowledge that we are fragile mortal beings and a lot of life is ultimately out of our control. Changes could have reduced death but not stopped it. I am not sure we are really to be that honest and vulnerable with each other as a country right now.
The really big (ongoing) miss is a lack of focus on indoor air quality.
We learned that probably most common viruses (not just Covid) are airborne or aerosolized. And that air filtration can greatly reduce the risk of infection.
We should be putting cheap and simple CR inspired air filtration and upper level UV *everywhere*.
Espcially schools and other public high density places.
This would be a *massive* improvement for everything.
Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both warned of getting Trump's shot before it was fully investigated (before the election). Had Trump won the election, Democrats would have demonized the vaccine and taken the anti-vax posture because Trump would be touting the success of his vaccine. The two sides are so much at each other's throats that they cannot agree. As it became more clear about what worked and what didn't, most could not let go of the fight.
I feel so pessimistic about the longterm health impacts of increased alcohol and drug use, increased sedentarism, decreased gym use and weight gain that I think was very prevalent during the pandemic. It's hard to roll that stuff back and I suspect we'll be losing a lot of people in their 50's and 60's to preventable liver damage and diabetes.
"And Australia, of all the countries on the planet, is probably the most socioculturally similar to the United States of America. If the Australian right could implement hard lockdowns to control the virus, I believe the American right could have as well."
No. Australia *IS* one of the most socioculturally similar countries on the planet in many ways, but as an American who lives in Australia, the vibe around this is where the countries diverge significantly. Australia has two aspects of culture that feel a bit odd and baffling to Americans considering otherwise our cultures are so similar. One is rule following and another is risk aversion. You see this manifest in a number of different ways such that people are MUCH more concerned with collective safety. This includes driving laws (they are incredibly putative for speeding and routine traffic violation by American standards), risk assessment paperwork for routine activities at work, gun laws, and biosecurity. Biosecurity is a biggie because anything perceived as a risk can be kept out from lack of permission to import or onerous quarantine rules since it is an island nation. Everything from importing a pet from the US/Europe (no rabies on the continent), to bringing in strains from collaborations overseas in my microbiology research lab is a real pain and involves a ton of cost and paperwork.
The level that Australians permitted incredible restrictions on their lives would absolutely never happen in the US. The idea of "mateship" is oversold, but Australians do collectively concern themselves for the greater good of Australia to a much bigger degree than Americans do, the idea that anything undesirable from overseas can just be blocked out bureaucratically is normal, and people are very risk adverse. This is a completely different sociocultural attitude than the US.
Part of the lucky country's vibe is built on its isolation from the rest of the world. It's impossible to understand unless you live here.
1. comparing US and Australian COVID mortality is comparing apples to rocks. Surrounded by an ocean, a mere fraction of ports of entry, and lower population density. New Zealand?? Oh, wait South Korea, now there's an apt comparison. wide open borders there.
2. Mask mandates don't work. See Cochrane review. There is a difference between something working for an individual and then forcing a population to emulate that individual's behavior. It's Intention To Treat vs Per Protocol.
3. Credit for correctly pointing out the atrocity of school closure. No mention that it disproportionately hurt poor, Black, and Brown students. Something Progressive never miss an opportunity to point out.
4. There are 1000's of variables that determine a population's COVID mortality. cherrypicking your favorite ones that support your thesis is always flawed. I could easily show the relationship between COVID mortality and density of waffle houses and probably provide a better causal explanation than enforcement of mask mandates.
Florida and California Age related COVID mortality are nearly identical. California's All Cause mortality is much higher than Florida's. Yes, people do die from other things than COVID.
5. no mention of vaccine mandates. People who recovered from COVID were fired from their jobs for refusing a medical intervention that would have done nothing in advance of the 2022 Omicron wave. Shameful.
6. for that matter, no mention of how the Progressive Literati dismissed a phenomenon that has been understood to some extent since the ancient Greeks, adaptive immunity following an infection.
7. no mention of how many people may have died from prioritizing a 20 year old "essential worker" over an 85 year old in a nursing home.
8. credit for the final paragraph. This is all a a manifestation of the pandemic of the political polarization mind virus. When Trump was briefly COVID alarmist, it was dismissed as anti-Asian xenophobia by progressives. Nancy Pelosi was in SF Chinatown in Feb 2020 telling everyone to come visit, nothing to fear. When Trump became anti-lockdown because he saw the stock market dip and worried about his re-election hopes, Democrats pivoted to hard pro-lockdown, pro-mask. Battle lines drawn. Battle lines blurred for a bit when Trump took credit for vaccine development and predictably, Democrats vocally expressed vaccine skepticism and hesitancy in Fall of 2020 (look it up), labels that would later apply to right leaning folks.
We're so dumb.
Matt, I was hoping (and perhaps you could still write) a more parent- and education-focused COVID response postmortem. As a non-parent, hearing your perspective on COVID interventions, DEI, education issues, etc. as a parent is a welcome part of reading your columns.
Australia has a federal system, albeit one where the powers between states and the federal government are somewhat different, and Scott Morrison spent the pandemic coordinating the response with state premiers (governors), many of them from the Labor Party. A further nuance to consider when weighing comparative pandemic responses and partisanship.
What does Matt think of Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s* Covid post-mortem, “The Big Fail?” Seems like this is the first big stab at a comprehensive look. I like it, but agree with what I’ve heard a few others say that it might have benefited from another year or so of dust settling, yeast rising, etc., before tackling the full picture. Still, an informative read.
*shout-out to my home girl: Go Bluejackets!!
While Trump deserves a lot of criticism for his response (or lack thereof) early on in the pandemic, Operation Warp Speed was quite successful and an impressive feat. It seems that liberals don’t quite acknowledge this. I recall the reporting from The NY Times revealed that not surprisingly, Trump himself was not involved much with it, but it proceeded despite Trump. So the Trump Administration should get a lot of credit for it. But it’s unlikely something like Operation Warp Speed could happen in a 2nd Trump term, given their goals of completely disrupting the administrative state.
I think an incredibly underappreciated or just forgotten element of this is the utter lack of concern that Trump and pretty quickly all his supporters had for those of us living in NYC at the time, and that got mirrored into national partisanship pretty strongly.
In March of 2020 I was living in Brooklyn and my wife was 9 months pregnant. Her final OB check ins were solo and I'd park around the corner from mobile morgues. We spent weeks listening to sirens every half minute, 24 hours/day. I won't get into what my daughter's birth experience was like.
The hardest part of all that is that while it was happening, in real time, the President of the United States - who was bitter about the city of his birth rejecting him - basically told us we were on our own and refused to take basic steps to help NYC. In pretty short order those of us who lacked second homes or parents with spare bedrooms in other states were social distancing in packed apartments while people elsewhere complained about having to wear a mask. Most of us who were from NY knew people who died (not all of them old in the early days) and were one degree removed from many more, and while the trauma of that first month was still ongoing we were subjected to half the country calling it a hoax and refusing what seemed like even the most basic care toward other human beings.
Yes, in that context partisanship will absolutely get layered into pandemic management, every time, especially when many nationally leading journalists and writers shared a similar experience to me. The basic lack of concern Trump had for liberal Americans as human beings is the original sin behind all the chaos that followed.
Matt’s #16…”or that Covid deaths were the result of a classification error…”
Willfully so, according to some, out of pure grift meant to attract government reimbursement.
Such claims left me bitter toward those who espoused them blindly.
To wit: mom died during Covid, and after her passing, but before I flew home, a seemingly well-meaning, but certainly cynical friend asked from what, and when I replied “Alzheimer’s,” he rolled his eyes and said, “watch, they’ll call it Covid on the death certificate.”
It was pretty insulting.
What he got right is that fiscal largesse of course incentivizes behavior, not all of which is conducted in the spirit of the law. I mean who knows? I haven’t investigated any hospital records…and apparently no one is going to, if Matt’s right.
Likewise, I’m sure many can recall SM feeds littered with folks who pleaded with all to not worry, it’s just the flu, you’re not gonna die, it’s all overblown…and yeah, the disease had an awfully high survival rate, if you want to look at it that way.
But the assumption of fraud and conspiracy and dismissal of the harsh reality was so often transparently an excuse not to join the fight, to alter behavior in the spirit of solidarity or common interest…as I saw and felt things.
This is where the tension comes from: the desire to see others act in community, but to be rejected in that desire, fueled a perverse desire for mandates and measures. The kind that as Matt says couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be enforced.
Mom’s D.C., by the way, cited dementia.
You're giving ScoMo way too much credit - the majority of the NPIs in Australia were imposed by State governments.
Pretty much all of them were strict in different ways - Victoria and NSW were strict on local travel radiuses, masking, limiting gathering sizes, stay-at-homes, while Western Australia was strict on interstate (and at a few points, intrastate) travel.
In general Labor (vaguely left) governments were more willing to impose stricter rules but it truly was state-by-state. I think state level was the exact right level of governance for this - federal would have been dumb (Victoria, NSW and Queensland had very specific border twin-town issues which would have made the kind of hard border enforcement that WA did very difficult, and those eastern states have fairly closely linked economies). Council or postcode level would have been dumber. City level maaaybe could have worked, but generally State governments made good provisions for that - in VIC, regional towns didn't have the same restrictions as the Greater Melbourne Metro area, and you simply didn't need those restrictions outside of Greater Melbourne. (Also, limiting everyone in Greater Melbourne to like 5km of their home kept them out of the regions anyway).
The Prime Minister (Federal government) had like one job (securing vaccine approval and supply as quickly as possible) and did pretty badly because of the right wing elements. Unfortunately, they decided to let the vaccine hesitant voices delay approvals and that impacted how quickly we could secure our supply - basically, other countries beat us to order them.
Also, Jobkeeper should have gone straight to workers instead of sitting with employers as the intermediary - it wasn't an efficient way to stop income losses and they had to chase some employers afterward for repayments because they didn't actually qualify for it.
But overall, the highlight with Australian COVID policy was consistency of messaging and enforcement. The public was kept updated, often daily, by our state leaders. We knew what stats our leaders were monitoring and what that meant for rules being imposed or lifted. The daily press conferences in some states were clear on current rules, penalties, and why, and whether there was a light at the end of the tunnel (e.g we have done this contact tracing and we think we've contained the outbreak, if we don't find anymore cases we can't trace, you guys can come out of lockdown by Sunday, for example).
And with rules, we generally had that "critical mass" of rule followers. It's very easy for your police force to catch maybe 3 - 5 parties across the whole metro area, far harder if the entire city has decided that they're not following the rules. I think they managed to get enough people on board so the rule breakers were in the minority and hence enforcement wasn't hard. This held for Victoria's very restrictive stay at home rules, as well as Western Australia's hard border (only having like 3 highways and Perth being like 12 hours from the closest land border helps, and of course planes are really easy to manage especially since all the flights got cancelled. Though they also caught like, one party yatch?)
If you want to study rule enforcement, though, Greater Metro Melbourne would be interesting - large dense population with very strict rules that they somehow successfully enforced.
Thank you for acknowledging how bad Covid was in NYC while at the same time laying out how warped the warp speed, how dysfunctional all governing bodies were.
People criticizing Big Pharma etc seem to need to discount how bad the infections were as they try to demonstrate that Fauci et al were wrong in every word spoken. Crucifying globalists and billionnaires does not point the way to what to do the next time. I think sentient humans know there will be a next time.
The golden example in my mind of relying on voluntarism and providing good information is not Sweden but Japan. From the outset they had a very crisp and correct message of avoiding the "three Cs" (closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings) plus a preexisting masking culture. The rules were enforced and respected largely through social/peer pressure rather than police.
Even though Japan had a far inferior contact-tracking program as its peers South Korea and Taiwan, its overall death rate ended up barely higher.
Things I would have had our government do different:
(1) Get ahead of testing in December of 2019 when we knew there was a problem in China. I knew as soon as I heard the news out of Asia that there was a high liklihood that it would be in Seattle and started making plans for how that might impact my business. In Seattle we got a head start because we had already done widespread testing of flu patients and had samples we could test as soon as we got the first confirmed case. I think it helped us having a very different experience than NY where I think the virus was circulating much longer without detection. Every areas should be regularly collecting and testing samples from patients with respiratory disease to see trends and to have samples to test if novel viruses are spotted. We still do this in Seattle but we could do more. When my daughter had the flu they offered to sample her for the flu survey but said it wouldn't personally benefit her since they wouldn't treat her differently. She opted not to do it. If they had offered her a $5 Starbucks card or Amazon card she would have. I think many areas are not doing this at all.
(2) Clearer messaging about what we know and don't know, what we are mandating and what we are recommending.
(3) Stop with the hygiene theater when we knew fomites were not a big vector. Immediately reopen outdoor spaces and invest in ventilation once we knew it was airborne.
(4) Have more masks and PPE and more capacity to domestically manufacture it.
(5) Have clearer communication about masks. Admit when prior advice was wrong to maintain trust.
(6) Reopen schools once all teachers could vaccinate while providing remote option to parents who wanted/needed it for high risk situations. (I was wrong about this. I kept my own kid out until she could be vaccinated even when in person was offered. I underestimated the amount of damage being out of school would do to kids.)
(7) Acknowledge the mental health toll during and provide more resources, especially to kids and schools afterwards. Free online mental health services doing isolation would have helped a lot.
(8) Depoliticize vaccines. I blame Trump and other Republicans who didn't get ahead of this and do more to save their voters.
I think we downplay the role of grief too much in our discussions of Covid. It was so polarizing that it became something to argue about. I think some of that rage was just misplaced fear and grief. A lot of Americans died of Covid, they left behind actual grieving relatives. Others had loved die of other illnesses without getting to say goodbye to them in person or hold funerals. People missed on important cultural rituals like weddings and graduations. People had to endure long periods of isolation or illness. Some people are still sick with long Covid. There are still people dying of Covid, especially older unvaxxed folks. It was really, fucking sad. We aren't really great in this country at facing death in the face and just grieving. We generally prefer to be angry. But angry doesn't really process grief not matter how angry you get or how long you stay angry.
I work in the area of law focused on death so I saw a lot of Covid deaths. I ended up really feeling like we were not processing it well as a community. In the fall of 2020, I decided it would be healthy to try to do some sort of safe memorial. I bought a gong and set up a table in a neighborhood park with a sign that listed total deaths in Seattle to date and sounded the gong once for each death. Anyone who passed by was welcome to take a turn and sound the gong 10 times. I was surprised how many people who just happened by ended up in tears participating. Folks told me about teachers, friends, and grandparents who died. Many had felt like they couldn't really publicly grieve because Covid had become a disease that people either want to deny was serious or wanted to place the blame for on people not being sufficient rule followers.
I ended up doing it every other weekend for about six months at different outdoor spaces. It felt kind at a time when not a lot of things felt kind.
I think we do need to make plans for what to do better next pandemic. But I think we also need to acknowledge that we are fragile mortal beings and a lot of life is ultimately out of our control. Changes could have reduced death but not stopped it. I am not sure we are really to be that honest and vulnerable with each other as a country right now.
The really big (ongoing) miss is a lack of focus on indoor air quality.
We learned that probably most common viruses (not just Covid) are airborne or aerosolized. And that air filtration can greatly reduce the risk of infection.
We should be putting cheap and simple CR inspired air filtration and upper level UV *everywhere*.
Espcially schools and other public high density places.
This would be a *massive* improvement for everything.
Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both warned of getting Trump's shot before it was fully investigated (before the election). Had Trump won the election, Democrats would have demonized the vaccine and taken the anti-vax posture because Trump would be touting the success of his vaccine. The two sides are so much at each other's throats that they cannot agree. As it became more clear about what worked and what didn't, most could not let go of the fight.
I feel so pessimistic about the longterm health impacts of increased alcohol and drug use, increased sedentarism, decreased gym use and weight gain that I think was very prevalent during the pandemic. It's hard to roll that stuff back and I suspect we'll be losing a lot of people in their 50's and 60's to preventable liver damage and diabetes.
"And Australia, of all the countries on the planet, is probably the most socioculturally similar to the United States of America. If the Australian right could implement hard lockdowns to control the virus, I believe the American right could have as well."
No. Australia *IS* one of the most socioculturally similar countries on the planet in many ways, but as an American who lives in Australia, the vibe around this is where the countries diverge significantly. Australia has two aspects of culture that feel a bit odd and baffling to Americans considering otherwise our cultures are so similar. One is rule following and another is risk aversion. You see this manifest in a number of different ways such that people are MUCH more concerned with collective safety. This includes driving laws (they are incredibly putative for speeding and routine traffic violation by American standards), risk assessment paperwork for routine activities at work, gun laws, and biosecurity. Biosecurity is a biggie because anything perceived as a risk can be kept out from lack of permission to import or onerous quarantine rules since it is an island nation. Everything from importing a pet from the US/Europe (no rabies on the continent), to bringing in strains from collaborations overseas in my microbiology research lab is a real pain and involves a ton of cost and paperwork.
The level that Australians permitted incredible restrictions on their lives would absolutely never happen in the US. The idea of "mateship" is oversold, but Australians do collectively concern themselves for the greater good of Australia to a much bigger degree than Americans do, the idea that anything undesirable from overseas can just be blocked out bureaucratically is normal, and people are very risk adverse. This is a completely different sociocultural attitude than the US.
Part of the lucky country's vibe is built on its isolation from the rest of the world. It's impossible to understand unless you live here.