We're told a lot of things by "officials" not because it's correct, but because it holds the least legal liability for official parties involved, especially anything involving healthcare. These officials also sometimes include doctors, who work to protect themselves and the system first, and then patients.
Sometimes doing what you're told is the right thing. Sometimes, not doing what you're told is the right thing. Sometimes, you're told to do the intuitive thing, and it's wrong. Sometimes, you're told to do the unintuitive thing, and it's wrong. It's hard to tell the difference between those situations, even when you're not stressed.
For some reason, chronic contrarians always to point at a few details that were gotten wrong during the fog of war, and shout from the rooftops that if only they were in charge, we'd all be living in castles made of candy and shitting rainbows.
Joke's on us, though, those contrarians have since made a moron who doesn't believe in germs... The Secretary of Health.
But let’s not pretend that many of the precautions and policies weren’t performative. Mask mandates were always dumb. Most people didn’t wear effective masks and many didn’t cover their noses. You had to wear a mask on airlines long after the vaccines were available and everyone took them off at the same time to eat or drink.
The US government down played that immunity wore off within six months and that the vaccine was much less effective than they publicized at first even when there were credible studies and evidence from other countries health departments and domestically.
Again, I have every recommended vaccine imaginable. I get a flu shot every year and Covid shots at the recommended times
We have specific evidence that not masking and not distancing caused superspreader events. Before there were too many cases, contact tracing backwards showed that specific parties, weddings, etc. were responsible for accelerating the early spread above baseline.
Thus, the burden of proof is on the "anti-mask, anti-distancing" people to prove that they aren't worse than the alternative--doubly so given the post hoc analyses available due to Norway and Sweden.
It’s fine to have your opinion but don’t dismiss others’ experiences and values.
The extreme lockdowns caused irreparable, long-term harm to many people. You’re glossing over this as if it’s a minor error that anybody could’ve made, which is not correct.
It is essentially a trolley problem. You value “extreme intervention that is statistically better overall but unnecessarily devastating to some”, whereas many other people are happy to let nature run its course to some extent than have their government turn against them “for the needs of the many”.
That is a moral discussion, not a scientific one, and people are rightfully angry when it’s misrepresented as purely a scientific one.
Then there were aspects that we had pretty quickly figured out made no sense (no hiking by yourself, no leaving to do solitary things). Worse, they were broadly ignored by most people-- I was worried I'd get busted in a parking lot with my telescope when I knew people who were having dinner parties.
Then the very strict orders continued well after the containment was ineffective and the rest of the country had, to some extent, eased up. A couple of weeks to flatten the curve became "wait until there's a vaccine" which is not what we'd all signed up for, and unnecessarily restrictive even for these purposes.
It would have been better to pick a "set point" for policy that could have been actually upheld, rather than setting a very strict policy that was often ignored and then enforced arbitrarily.
> I said it was stupid to have a mask mandate when most people wore ineffective cloth masks and even then didn’t cover their nose.
This was mostly true because "wearing a mask" became a partisan political issue so half the country wouldn't even try to be responsible.
Even if you didn't want to wear a mask, not getting together in gigantic gatherings like churches and weddings as well as quarantining yourself after such gatherings or travel was also effective. The fact that I quarantined after air travel prevented my in-laws from catching the Covid that someone gave to me.
Alas, this also became a partisan issue.
And, as I pointed out, the burden of proof is on the anti-mask, anti-quarantine crowd. We actually have analyzed the tracking and spread after the fact and have the appropriate evidence.
But that doesn't matter to people like you. It was never about evidence and facts anyway.