https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/29/armys-informatio...
At least in the U.S., the "public health emergency" "ended" less than a month ago!
Come on, no one knew if it was a new black death or just a harmless virus. The hysteria about government taking valid steps in an unclear situation is childish.
It was also quickly made taboo to say anything comparing it to a common cold. Many platforms silenced these ideas by censoring posts and shadow banning users.
There absolutely was hystaria involved but it was leaders, medical experts, and society responding irrationally based on fear. We did know it wasn't the plague, there were some in early 2020 raising valid points that it looked to have a mortality rate closer to 0.1% largely impacting the elderly and seriously ill.
How where these steps taken by governments valid, both legally and morally, when they were driven by fear and crushing individual rights?
And yet hospitals and ICUs were still packed. No one remember when Italy first got hit and the military had to be called in to remove bodybags/coffins?
* https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-italy-videos-sh...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/04/coronavirus-unimag...
Even one year later morgues needed refrigerated trailers:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/bodies-stored-trailer-...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-request...
Should we close schools semi-indefinitely to protect the elderly after vaccines were widely available (like in SF)?
Shutting down debates on these issues was and is controversial.
In The Netherlands it’s mostly a secret which people were part of the unit, though a couple have been discovered and perhaps there will be more to come.
When did "no one know"?
There was already data in early May 2020 showing risk by age group
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The idea that we should only worry about ourselves feels deeply immoral to me.
See the Twitter Files coverage for another example etc.
What do you expect from a country that's been a police state for the last 23 years or so.
With the introduction of the RIP Act in 2000, which compels those with encrypted data to divulge the keys, under penalty of imprisonment. From that, I could tell something had gone very wrong with our government, even back then.
The RIP Act opened the door to government policing of what information we are reading. Because you could no longer encrypt your data to hide it from the state's prying eyes. It was a watershed moment. And that point was where I could say the UK is no longer a free country anymore.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/cross-whitehal...
Alternatively, they have to try and "police" social media, which can not look like anything but policing free speech, which, especially in times of uncertainty, is bound to backfire.
I wonder if people would be concerned too if the social media platforms were, in the end, ruled by juges rather than governments?
It would still be a "them", but at least it would not be the same "them". Or would the social networks start to revolt against judges ?
(Yes, I know, it will look a lot like separation of powers ((c) Montesquieu), and like we're going to reinvent "judges" and "the laws of free press from the late 1800s" any time soon.)
For those who don't know, The Telegraph is an extreme right media outlet which regularly publishes absolutely batshit denialist nonsense about Covid, climate change, immigration, and all the usual hits.
It's a Q drop for the UK's upper class.
Not coincidentally it used to employ Boris Johnson, and while PM he allegedly said that it was his real boss.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/boris-johnson-refers-telegraph-re...
So here we are with more than 200,000 dead and more than 2 million with Long Covid.
Good job, Telegraph writers. I hope you're all proud of your "journalism."
See for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55676037
Does HN have any guidelines about paywalled articles? I assume a large proportion of people commenting here won't have read the article.
No, they were not.
More evidence of the Fox-ification of the Telegraph, a once respectable source of news...
Death tolls in this early outbreaks did, though, show that severe illness and death was almost entirely impacting individuals with multiple comorbidities, which weights heavily towards the elderly population.
We also knew as soon as the vaccine study preprints were released that the studies were not designed to test for protecting against infection or transmission, they were only comparing symptomatic illness over roughly 30 days.
Governments coordinating censorship of any ideas that question the relative risk of the virus or the vaccine efficacy claims touted by politicians was completely unreasonable. Not only was it a massive overreach and destruction of many democratic values, it was silencing discussion of reasonable concerns given scientific information that was already available at the time (namely the population distribution of deaths and the tested hypothesis in the vaccine trials).
We were all operating at some level of fear during the pandemic, but now that we've largely moved on its time we actually take a sober look at what was known when and how the decisions made at the time actually measure up.