(01-27-2023, 07:42 AM)flsprtsgod Wrote: [ -> ] (01-27-2023, 12:02 AM)Lucky2Last Wrote: [ -> ]Man, out of curiosity, I went back and started rereading this thread. We were all so very wrong. I was mostly wrong in my speculations, especially in political and medical responses (though, I think I was making good calls), and I was also on the fence as to whether or not we had really seen the bad stuff yet. For example, I'm 100 pages in and it hasn't even gotten to FL yet. I still treated it like a real threat and was one of the early posters taking it seriously. I'll can't remember if I put what I said in this forum of it was in a different one. I posted much less on here back in the day, because I preferred to visit a progressive forum full of academics, that was until the death threats started. Anyways, gonna keep reading through this slog fest. It's actually pretty interesting to revisit it.
I do agree that early on we all missed a bunch. I was square in the "It's just a mild flu" camp until the beds started filling up.
It's not just that the beds filled up, but, rereading everything, you were almost flippant in your belief that there was any threat, so your reality shattered. I mean, from a psychological perspective, you had a belief that the authorities were lying, then, when you saw that it was a real threat, not only did you turn away from that opinion, but it seems like you went all in on believing the authorities so as not to repeat that same mistake. Which is perfectly fine and reasonable in some situations. I just think it's irresponsible to be unquestioningly compliant (not saying that's you).
Not trying to cast any stones here, but you don't think that could have contributed to the way you approached this moving forward? There was a cognitive dissonance that you would have faced during this time and one of the ways to alleviate that discomfort is to simply change your beliefs, and in this case, it could be to go all in on following the authority. I'm just spitballing here... I guess I don't really expect you to be able to diagnose that yourself, so it's probably a fool's errand to even bring it up.
I didn't have the same experience, so I have always just tried to create a paradigm based on the data and the results of the data. I was calling it in June 2020 (around page 150) that I think it hadn't gotten here yet, and we were still going to have to reimplement social distancing and masking when it arrived to keep our hospitals from overcrowding. I was encouraging people to take the threat seriously and social distance and avoid crowded places. That was a month before our numbers started spiking. Based on the trajectory, there was always the risk of hospital beds filling up, so my reality didn't shatter. It was expected.
I never denied the efficacy of the vaccines, because the data showed promising results. I recommended it to my obese and elderly friends, especially early on, since almost all deaths occurred in that group (ah, 2020... when I could just look up age-specific information, before they started obfuscating the data). And, even still, a lot of those deaths had other contributing causes, such as multiple comorbidities or immuno-comprised. However, by the time the vaccine got rolled out, they started restricting access to information that would tell us which groups should get vaccinated, and that's when I went from being pro-science to what you more progressive folks would call anti-science. I only care about the pursuit of truth, so I get mad when I feel like that's being intentionally hidden from me. If I have a bias, it will be rooted in that somewhere.
My issue has always been with how we are taking a one-size-fits-all approach to handling this disease, which comes across countercultural, because we have a one-size-fits-all society. That just doesn't work. From the way we did antibody testing, to the way we implemented lockdowns, to the way hospitals were tracking and categorizing deaths, to the way we rolled out vaccines. Actually, we started fine on that last note... priority to the elderly and healthcare workers that wanted it. After that, it went haywire. Almost none of it has been logical or forward thinking. I believe the reason for that is predominantly profit driven. Either for media to get more clicks or government to get more power or corporations to make more money. That's the other thing that makes me mad. So again... potential area of bias. Side note: Anywhere you have a strong feeling about something is a potential area of bias.
Anyways, still just slowly rereading through this thread. Like I said, it's not like I was perfect. Nobody was, but I clearly have been ahead of the curve and have a good understanding of what was happening... despite not being an expert.