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SvennoJ on 19 December 2020
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EricHiggin said:

The smart thing would've been to play it safe, within reason. Asking everyone to wear masks right away would've been a minor ask initially, even if they ended up finding out they were 100% useless. Some would've complained later, but not many, because for what really? Same with social distancing. As long as it didn't take them far too much time to come up with reliable test results anyway.

When the people already don't trust the Gov, the bigger the misstep, the bigger the perceived problem. Even worse, when the people and the Gov are divided, and the leadership won't unify, how do you expect the 'sheep' to?

Ya I realize there are exceptions. Every country, democratic and free or not, does things a little differently. I think you get the point in general though. There used to be conscription in some places, there also used to be little done to stop the spread of worrisome illnesses at times.

With most things, if you screw up initially, you're screwed entirely. The worse you initially screw up, the worse the outcome will eventually be, sooner or later. Especially with the instant widespread communication of today. Western Gov's and CDPR are on the same page, and that's not a good thing. Life isn't a game.

The initial problem was also trust. There was a shortage of masks, first responders needed them, yet confiscating shipments and forcing factories to produce for the government only is another thing we can't do here. We can't stop scalpers either, hoarding was a big problem at the start and was more dangerous than the pandemic itself.

At first it was widely believed that the main path of transmission was from surfaces and touching people. That the main pathway is through the air took a long time to be recognized and still isn't really. A reason why I don't trust the back to school stuff, lack of ventilation measures. But when you believe the virus transmits through surfaces and touch, whole social distancing doesn't make much sense.

It's the world we live in nowadays. The government doesn't trust the people and vice versa. Both continually show they can't be trusted. I don't know the answer to that. Initial screw ups are unavoidable with a new unknown disease (unlike making a game) and the biggest problem was not trusting the Chinese data and recommendations. It took way too long to figure out how much more vulnerable older people are and many were sentenced to death by closing schools in Italy, getting the grandparents to take care of the kids while the parents continued working. Here it exposed the shortcomings of our elderly homes, although shortcomings is an understatement.

It's been almost a year now. Currently we do have a good grasp on what works and what doesn't. Yet how do you convince people? My sister still believes masks are completely pointless, since numbers went up in the Netherlands despite people using masks.

Perhaps it's the result of poor education standards. How much did you get here in school about probabilities, exponential spread, growth factors, pandemics, etc. We did get the math part in school but never in relation to biology and pandemics. In biology we did look at bacterial growth but not at viral spread. R0, never heard of that before this all started. In history we did learn about the Black plague and Spanish flu. But nothing connected all the dots, all separate things, taught in different years.

(Btw the online schooling is a joke, it just teaches my kids to let the computer do the work for them. My wife caught our 9 year old copy pasting text he was supposed to read into a text to speech thingie from windows, let the computer read it to him. Then dictate his summary to one note instead of writing or simply copy paste parts. Crafty buggers)