michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
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There's definitely a better reason for these "were lockdowns too harsh?" conversations in places that actually had harsh lockdowns. The thesis of the book, though, is that these non-pharmaceutical interventions didn't work to and that's not remotely what the evidence says.
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are you aware of what i do for a living
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no one was "made to stay at home indefinitely." Saying so is a straightforward lie
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I mean, most of them were definitely orders to stay at home but movement bans weren't enforced
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The average stay-at-home order in the United States lasted 43 days.
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In NZ we clamped down so hard excess deaths in winter 2020 were NEGATIVE, fewer people died than we would have expected, by June 14 we could have 43000 fans at a rugby match KNOWING there was no covid
And the backlash against the govt was almost literally murderous, antis wanted to kill the PM
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It's similar with other pandemic policies. Lockdowns straightforwardly work — if everyone stays home, a virus has less chance to spread.
Whether *lockdown orders* worked is a question about how much mobility fell, protections for workers, etc.
Very important to study but a useful distinction!
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check the quote tweets tiger I've been talking about this for weeks
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Already did it was really interesting!
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Also evidenced by the wildly different policies between states! If "public health elites" were given dictatorial powers to govern our lives we wouldn't see different lockdown durations, mask mandates, vaxx rollouts etc
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Nearly universal shift to the right among developed democracies because far-right parties were able to capitalize on everyone's frustration with the pandemic and turn it into frustration with public health officials and "elites."
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Sweden's public health chief and its own COVID commission admit that the strategy in March-April 2020 was a mistake! It's wild to have two random Americans with no subject matter expertise circle back and be like, 'this was good, actually.'
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Literally every premise of the book is just up-is-down false, I've never come across anything like it.
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So the authors are wrong, but sort of right, but actually wrong.
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Also even looking at this entire span, Sweden had 36% more deaths than Denmark. The Swedish model does not remotely indicate that America shouldn't have done stay-at-home orders in March of 2020.
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However, the question is why you would look at this two-year span rather than the only two months when Sweden's policies differed from other countries'.
Sweden took a lax approach in March-April 2020 but it was a disaster so they got more stringent! Other countries' deaths are concentrated in 2021.
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The weird thing is that their overall point is true: If you look at the entire course of the pandemic Sweden's death rates are in the middle of the pack compared to the rest of Scandinavia.
academic.oup.com/eurpub/artic...
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HOW DOES THIS NOT MATTER? The forces at work here are precisely the forces gutting healthcare and passing tariffs and fucking over millions of Americans.
Treating it like an inconsequential blip *creates* the situation where it falls out of the news cycle and doesn't inform voters.
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Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and an open white supremacist, has a child's understanding of how government works. He has fired tens of thousands of people and believes all taxation and spending are illegitimate. He thinks his financial assistance to Trump gives him the power to set policy.
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Donald Trump, despite being the head of a party that has railed about deficits for decades, is about to pass a budget that increases the debt by $2.4 trillion. This happens whenever Republicans get into office, they reveal that a core tenet of their ideology is a lie.
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they shouldn't even be on here they should be brainstorming about how to make the fight even messier