not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.

The "there is no evidence" => "this is not true" is rapidly becoming one of my most rage-inducing things science writers use to mislead the public, and it is everywhere

In addition, he felt that the worst thing officials could do was overreact, which could create a panic.

lol, not even close. The worst thing they could do is lie about the virus' non-existence, convince people to take dewormers instead of vaccines, and demonize masks so severely people won't even wear them to filter smoke from forest fires.

That's as far as I could get. We don't have enough emotes (which is saying a lot) to carry on

there was a wave of COVID-19 cases as bad as anywhere in the world

To be fair, this was partly because China did such a poor job of vaccinating its citizens

The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust — the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”).

The states with less education and higher poverty rates, etc. were more likely to be red states that opened up sooner, so lockdowns likewise corresponded to fewer infections and fewer deaths.

Look at Alabama and Oregon. Similar population sizes. Alabama opened up earlier and had about three times as many infections and deaths (or more).

I had to stop reading after a paragraph because I could feel an aneurysm coming on

Like that thing is just all lies...

:principle-skinner: Could it be that the united states has little-to-no capacity to coordinate efforts outside the context of war-fever? No, it must be the lockdowns that are ineffective.

paywall

we could have avoided lockdowns if everyone wore n95 masks.

But they told us it wasn't airborne and masks wouldn't help at the start. Mainly because they were worried about liability issues.

They simply couldn't imagine a world where covid was contained.