I appreciate this article because (and I say this as a triple-vaxxed rule-follower) the phrase "better safe than sorry" has become a trigger for me. All it means is the speaker hasn't done a true cost-benefit analysis that includes anything beyond their immediate concerns. School closures and the move to (for us) a very poor online experience is a big example: I have a child in late immersion who was supposed to learn French over this period before integrating with kids this year who've been speaking it since the age of 5; you don't make much progress with a couple of hours of group zoom sessions each week. More importantly school is the one safe space for a huge group of kids, and might provide their own healthy meal of the day. I don't really wnat to think what they went through over the past several years and fear some of them may never recover.<p>There's no doubt a lot of the actions had positive impact on immediate disease transmission, but I question the more subtle impacts and true long term cost. I state this knowing the leaders in place will never be assigned any responsibility and will be long gone when we start to ask why...
I think we're under-calling the negative effects of the lockdowns. The economy seems substantially less stable, inflation isn't going to get attributed to the COVID response but realistically is related. Humans suddenly seem to be facing a bunch of energy and food problems that weren't feeling quite so urgent in 2019. The global situation w.r.t war is suddenly a lot more tense and there are serious concerns about several nuclear-armed nations moving their armies about.<p>No scientist is going to link those things to the COVID response, because the link is too vague. And there is a chance that maybe all this stuff was going to happen anyway and the timing is a coincidence.<p>But there is a good reason that "freedom" is a higher civilisational value in the west than "be healthy". Allowing small councils to decide that people can't go to church, meet their neighbours or run a business is a very effective way to bring down a civilisation. It is impossible to do that and enjoy a high standard of living.
Odd – this is a duplicate: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793535</a><p>I thought having two submissions of the same URL wasn't possible.<p>(Not that the article doesn't deserve it; it is well worth reading.)