Time flies. It’s been five years since one of the (many) big lies about the pandemic.
We had to fumigate the house for termites, and decided to take the cats up to Cambria for a couple days (their first, and so far, only road trip, which they probably think was some kind of weird dream), so we wouldn’t have to board them. We were supposed to meet some friends from Berkeley, but the lock down had just begun in the Bay Area, and they decided not to go. I wouldn’t say that the town was a ghost town, but it was decidedly weird. When we got back to LA, things just started rapidly deteriorating with all the lunacy from there.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jennifer Sey: “The five-year anniversary of the lockdowns is here, and I’m angry.”
So am I. So should we all be. And Deborah Birx (among many others) has never been held accountable for her (her word) “subterfuge.“
[Thursday-morning update]
Lileks remembers.
[Bumped]
I didn’t need food, because normal stocking of the pantry means I had enough food to last a couple months, but I like to observe how people act and went shopping the night before they shut our state down. It was a bit of a madhouse and all the meat and produce was gone along with the staples like flour and sugar.
It was like shopping for presents at Christmas but no one was wearing nicer casual clothes and weren’t jolly even a bit.
The strange thing was that the bacon bin was full.
We went from COVID is no worse than the flu, so doing anything about it is a racist overreaction, to COVID is worse than the plague and we are all going to die and back to COVID is just the flu. Truth is it isn’t any of those things. It was/is neither as dangerous as some claimed nor as harmless as others claimed.
It is a manmade virus that impacts people differently. There isn’t a universal experience to getting COVID. For one person they are ok in a few hours and for others weeks but everyone thinks their experience is the same for others. Even now, I don’t think we have a good understanding of the dangers COVID poses or the damages from efforts to fight it.
We had people who wanted to force people to wear masks even when alone (I recently had to mask up at the dr office) to people so irate that they had to wear a mask for five minutes that they would ruin friendships over it. I’ve always said that COVID was a character test and very few people passed it. It was a very disappointing time to be an American.
It really was: Fifteen Days to
StopSlow the SpreadThat actually implied that the disease was going to be with us for a much longer time than in an outbreak with no prophylactic measures in place. The idea then was to prevent hospital ERs from becoming overwhelmed, not to stop the pandemic, which was impossible. But once you had buy-in for the 15 days, who was going to come forward on day 16 and say all is done, return to normal? No. Quarantines don’t work on corona-viruses. It would have been far better to have made the slow the spread campaign as voluntarily guidelines for those at greatest risk and leave it at that. Even the Greater Barrington Declaration which said exactly that came out months later (Oct. 4 2020 according to Grok) and that too was too late in the game to have made a difference. Irrespective of the propaganda campaign launched against it by the now discredited Collins/Fauci cabal at NIH.
I hope we have learned something about pandemic management and public health since, but I’m probably naive.
The lesson to them was, we didn’t lockdown hard enough.
The definition of insanity.