Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Which was neither an American nor a Democratic Party phenomenon, and again the US did better with recovery than anyone else by a huge margin.

Revisionist history points toward COVID response being a left-wing thing, but there was almost zero variation in policy state to state. The only point of variation was school reopening schedules.

The one thing that was knowably wrong to do at the time we did it was to deliberately slow down testing to keep Trump’s numbers looking good. Everything else was flying blind and to the extent we made mistakes (visible in retrospect), we made fewer of them than any of our peers.

> almost zero variation in policy state to state

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears..

Did you visit any midwestern state during COVID? Florida?

You can use the Google on the internet machine as much as you like and cherry-pick some leftist city in any state, but: broad/legally-enforced mask mandates, forced business closures, etc. were absolutely not happening in many areas of the United States.

> there was almost zero variation in policy state to state.

That’s not true, what on earth are you talking about? Everything was closed for way longer in New York than in Arizona for example.

The vaccine was developed quickly under Trump. A genuine success he can claim happened under his rule.

He stopped talking about it at rallies because his supporters boo-ed him whenever he mentioned it.

We're partly at the mercy of his stupidity but also the stupidity (that we're not supposed to talk about apparently) of his most devoted voters.

He stopped talking about it because it was unpopular (because it is ineffective) and was forced.

No other vaccine is given entirely under the pretense that it will basically only be of benefit to other people.

COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.

If I am 18-30, why would I take a novel vaccine when it doesn't even prevent the illness or make me meaningfully more likely to survive? "To protect grandma, of course!" isn't why we agree to use TDAP vaccinations or formerly administered Polio or Smallpox vaccines.

> COVID had a 0.1% IFR across the whole population.

The US population is around 340 million people, no matter how "low" a rate appears (besides your number being wrong, it's 1% [1] and the number of reported infections is likely to be way lower than the actual amount), the sheer size of the country will be problematic. At the very least 1.2 million Americans died of Covid over the four years of the pandemic. That is the equivalent of one average size city getting wiped out by a nuclear blast - if this amount of death were caused by an external force, the US would utterly annihilate that external force. Hell they flattened Afghanistan for a few thousand people who died in 9/11.

And additionally, deaths aren't the only metric. I caught it two times, I was out sick for three weeks with more weeks of lower productivity following because that shit fried my brain. Others had it worse, a friend of mine was out for half a year. That is an effect worthy enough of a mask and vaccine mandate.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/