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Will Cooling's avatar

Really enjoyed this article. I do think it misses a key part of the story which is the seeming success of South East Asian, Australiasia and even European countries in supressing the virus compared to Britain and America. That really fed the narrative that the two English-speaking countries led by the hated populists had taken the virus lightly, and if we just had the common sense/determination to impose a proper lockdown then all would be well. This gets discredited as the virus spreads around Europe to the point that the UK is a middling rather than unusually bad performer, China proves to have been lying about its covid success, and other countries with the harshest lockdowns struggle to come out of them. And of course US/UK lead the world in developing and distributing vaccines. But I think in 2020 there was a real crisis of confidence in American and British science/medical communities that they had gotten this big call wrong

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JCW's avatar

I had the very interesting experience of going into the pandemic as a public health person, but only on the undergraduate education side, and as an expert on pandemics specifically, but from a historical standpoint--that was my original academic training, and I had opened an exhibit on pandemics at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum at the end of 2019, literally a couple months before the actual pandemic (it was tied with a big Flu 1918 retrospective). So I knew a lot but had nothing to do with actual policy in any respect; I was just an observer. I had a lot of time to watch and think about what was happening. I did a little bit of writing about it on my blog that I think held up pretty well (if you're interested, website in my profile).

But one of the things I did both predict and watch happen in real time was a kind of breakdown amongst public health people who had actual or theoretical policy influence. Basically, you had a lot of people who I think in their heart of hearts believed that their expertise would matter more than it did. A lot of those folks kept thinking or even saying something along the lines of, "When it gets bad enough, people will realize that they should pay more attention to me / us." If you go back and re-read about Florida's reopening, for instance, you will find some great quotes along those lines. And a lot of those folks, or at least the smart ones, had a more or less accurate view of how bad it would be. I think we forget just how bad the numbers were: a lot of people died or were long-term disabled. Like, a lot a lot.

Since I had studied the history of pandemics, I knew that this would not happen. That's just not how it works. Public health people in Philadelphia got ignored while they were burying the dead in trench graves with steam shovels. Humans get comfortable with very surprising levels of suffering at astonishing speed, in a this-is-fine-dog-meme kind of way. The moment was never going to come for my colleagues where everyone was like, "This is your moment! Lead us! We agree with you about all kinds of things that we didn't agree with you about earlier!"

And I think a kind of sincere bitterness or disappointment over that drove at least some of the counterintuitive hardcore Covid doomerism amongst some of the public health community, because those folks kept expecting (and, because they were human, kind of secretly wanting) their moment to come, and it was never going to come. At least, that was one of my impressions.

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