I think that lots of people rationally fled from being exposed to the infected masses because the entire public health system of America is wildly Inadequate.
Not coming to work. Wearing masks that felt insulting to people who are stupid and don’t understand the germ theory of disease. Whatever...
Then, to cover up the embarrassment of “everyone implementing visibly obvious PRIVATE fixes because the PUBLIC fix was inadequate” many government actors engaged in performative bullshit that didn’t actually prevent the disease, but did seem like Doing Something.
That was the primary reason why lockdowns happened.
When I flew on planes during the Covid Era, they would get super upset with me for wearing a P100 rather than an N95 because P100s look like a gas mask (and make you safer, while also being way more comfy, and even also being easier to breathe in).
Also, they spray your exhalations through easy one way valves which is arguably rude? If I was infected, a P100 doesn’t protect anyone from me. But if I’m not sick that isn’t a real problem and the P100 can prevent it better than N95s.
If everyone had worn P100s then more people would have been safer from that choice and also avoided breathing problems from restricted exhalation. It was “deontically correct” for everyone to be very safe and very comfy by doing a simple thing… and they were often half forbidden.
(Or they could have fixed the planes to have cheap fast rapid tests before people were even allowed to board? Or whatever. There are many socio-technically possible ways to engineer a solution that systematically prevents sick people on planes from breathing germs into infectable people on planes.)
One time I was required to take my P100 off when I got on the plane, and then I instantly put it back on after I got to my seat, and they didn’t bother me. One time I was allowed to put a surgical mask over the top of the P100, for the aesthetics. It was silly and stupid and exactly what our dumpster fire of a civilization was prone to, and is still prone to.
Very generally speaking, the root cause analysis of the problem where “the thing that is supposed to prevent X didn’t prevent X” (where X is a pandemic) didn’t happen socially or institutionally or politically.
This partly cuts against my litany of failures to update, but Peter Daszak kept getting grants all the way to 2022 and it took public outrage and years of work to get that halted in 2024. But like… neither he nor Shi nor any of the people who did their insanely dangerous bidding were put on trial or went to prison that I’m aware of? Daszak wasn’t alone. Lots of microbiologists supported him for a long time and they aren’t be systematically defunded or given minders. There is almost no systematicity here in general.
The FDA and CDC and OSHA (who collectively regulate medical workplaces, epidemic tracking and prevention, and the deployment of new therapies) still exist in almost exactly the form they did when they catastrophically failed.
Like here is the bit of the OSHA law that is the practical barrier:
Following a report of an exposure incident, the employer shall make immediately available to the exposed employee a confidential medical evaluation and follow-up, including at least the following elements:
Documentation of the route(s) of exposure, and the circumstances under which the exposure incident occurred;
Identification and documentation of the source individual, unless the employer can establish that identification is infeasible or prohibited by state or local law;
The source individual’s blood shall be tested as soon as feasible and after consent is obtained in order to determine HBV and HIV infectivity. If consent is not obtained, the employer shall establish that legally required consent cannot be obtained. When the source individual’s consent is not required by law, the source individual’s blood, if available, shall be tested and the results documented.
This prevents people from having drive through sample deposit stations that report if “whoever gave the sample” is “sick or not” to a phone number by text message.
All samples might have HIV and workers aren’t allowed to consent to working with higher variance anonymous samples, and anoymous samples would be hard to document, so no one does it.
The OSHA pooled testing thing is ONE example.
More examples
2) China is continuing to take cowboy risks (as mentioned and linked above)
...
5) Also: FDA delenda est… and yet the FDA still exists.
6) The FAA is not redoing airports to make it easier to test people at the gate and send them to involuntary quarantine if they have a disease in order to prepare to stop the next pandemic at the natural boundary.
7) Trump is suppressing the H5N1 response in general. (There strain is still only jumping from cow-to-cow and I don’t know of any human-to-human transmission, but this is “nature being kind to the puny humans playing on easy mode” not “us making sure that never happens on purpose via competent prevention”.) And among cows, the disease is still expanding. Wisconsin cows had their first known case 3 weeks ago.
And so on, and so forth...
My position is that Public Health Bureaucracies as a group, from top to bottom, are a bunch of clowns who don’t take duties or competence seriously, and everyone with a brain CAN know it, if they just choose to Think about what they would see in the world if this was not the case, and then simply Look and see the absence of a coherent response to prevent recurrence of the same problem.
There are oversight groups ABOVE these Bureaucracies (Congress, POTUS, and SCOTUS) that have a duty to have made the changes in a responsible way, and they, by inference, also are also failing.
There are no responsible adults “in the room” in general, regarding Public Health… or maybe anything else?
The Biden and Trump administrations are equally large failures in regards to HAVING a duty to “find the root causes and fix them” and FAILING.
So if this was GOING to be fixed it would have to be fixed by The Voters, I think?
Like… things are so confused and amoral and incompetent within elite culture that the best solution might really be ochlocratic discussions, such as random people can show up and have here on LW?
And that loops around to “why I think adults should talk about how politics and self modification and preference cascades and so on really work” (even if talking about such things in front of kids is not necessarily good for the kids at first).
I think that lots of people rationally fled from being exposed to the infected masses because the entire public health system of America is wildly Inadequate.
Not coming to work. Wearing masks that felt insulting to people who are stupid and don’t understand the germ theory of disease. Whatever...
Then, to cover up the embarrassment of “everyone implementing visibly obvious PRIVATE fixes because the PUBLIC fix was inadequate” many government actors engaged in performative bullshit that didn’t actually prevent the disease, but did seem like Doing Something.
That was the primary reason why lockdowns happened.
When I flew on planes during the Covid Era, they would get super upset with me for wearing a P100 rather than an N95 because P100s look like a gas mask (and make you safer, while also being way more comfy, and even also being easier to breathe in).
Also, they spray your exhalations through easy one way valves which is arguably rude? If I was infected, a P100 doesn’t protect anyone from me. But if I’m not sick that isn’t a real problem and the P100 can prevent it better than N95s.
If everyone had worn P100s then more people would have been safer from that choice and also avoided breathing problems from restricted exhalation. It was “deontically correct” for everyone to be very safe and very comfy by doing a simple thing… and they were often half forbidden.
(Or they could have fixed the planes to have cheap fast rapid tests before people were even allowed to board? Or whatever. There are many socio-technically possible ways to engineer a solution that systematically prevents sick people on planes from breathing germs into infectable people on planes.)
One time I was required to take my P100 off when I got on the plane, and then I instantly put it back on after I got to my seat, and they didn’t bother me. One time I was allowed to put a surgical mask over the top of the P100, for the aesthetics. It was silly and stupid and exactly what our dumpster fire of a civilization was prone to, and is still prone to.
Very generally speaking, the root cause analysis of the problem where “the thing that is supposed to prevent X didn’t prevent X” (where X is a pandemic) didn’t happen socially or institutionally or politically.
The Chinese are STILL doing GoF research to make super dangerous chimeric bat viruses with novel spike proteins in BSL2s!
This partly cuts against my litany of failures to update, but Peter Daszak kept getting grants all the way to 2022 and it took public outrage and years of work to get that halted in 2024. But like… neither he nor Shi nor any of the people who did their insanely dangerous bidding were put on trial or went to prison that I’m aware of? Daszak wasn’t alone. Lots of microbiologists supported him for a long time and they aren’t be systematically defunded or given minders. There is almost no systematicity here in general.
The FDA and CDC and OSHA (who collectively regulate medical workplaces, epidemic tracking and prevention, and the deployment of new therapies) still exist in almost exactly the form they did when they catastrophically failed.
For example, pooled testing is essential to get unit prices on high confidence negative tests down into the pennies, and was used in Wuhan itself, but is still de facto outlawed in the US by OSHA last time I checked.
Like here is the bit of the OSHA law that is the practical barrier:
This prevents people from having drive through sample deposit stations that report if “whoever gave the sample” is “sick or not” to a phone number by text message.
All samples might have HIV and workers aren’t allowed to consent to working with higher variance anonymous samples, and anoymous samples would be hard to document, so no one does it.
The OSHA pooled testing thing is ONE example.
More examples
2) China is continuing to take cowboy risks (as mentioned and linked above)
...
5) Also: FDA delenda est… and yet the FDA still exists.
6) The FAA is not redoing airports to make it easier to test people at the gate and send them to involuntary quarantine if they have a disease in order to prepare to stop the next pandemic at the natural boundary.
7) Trump is suppressing the H5N1 response in general. (There strain is still only jumping from cow-to-cow and I don’t know of any human-to-human transmission, but this is “nature being kind to the puny humans playing on easy mode” not “us making sure that never happens on purpose via competent prevention”.) And among cows, the disease is still expanding. Wisconsin cows had their first known case 3 weeks ago.
And so on, and so forth...
My position is that Public Health Bureaucracies as a group, from top to bottom, are a bunch of clowns who don’t take duties or competence seriously, and everyone with a brain CAN know it, if they just choose to Think about what they would see in the world if this was not the case, and then simply Look and see the absence of a coherent response to prevent recurrence of the same problem.
There are oversight groups ABOVE these Bureaucracies (Congress, POTUS, and SCOTUS) that have a duty to have made the changes in a responsible way, and they, by inference, also are also failing.
There are no responsible adults “in the room” in general, regarding Public Health… or maybe anything else?
The Biden and Trump administrations are equally large failures in regards to HAVING a duty to “find the root causes and fix them” and FAILING.
So if this was GOING to be fixed it would have to be fixed by The Voters, I think?
Like… things are so confused and amoral and incompetent within elite culture that the best solution might really be ochlocratic discussions, such as random people can show up and have here on LW?
And that loops around to “why I think adults should talk about how politics and self modification and preference cascades and so on really work” (even if talking about such things in front of kids is not necessarily good for the kids at first).