The Atlantic is the first admit they all fucked up.... wonder how many others will actually man up or will they double down.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway.
But the thing is: We didn’t know.
I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.
Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are
alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate
****************************************
This is a surprising article coming from The Atlantic. I wonder how many COVID fantatics in this forum would have the modesty to admit that same... Likely now. As the Author notes most will get defensive in the face of their wrong opinions.
Especially opinions they emphatically declared as "The Science" and "Facts"... lol
There's going to be remnants for years to remind us of the morons who dictated policy during covid. Plexiglass in check out lanes. Social Distancing stickers on the floor. Idiots who will continue to wear masks everywhere, including while driving solo in their cars.
Meanwhile, there's still idiot Democrats clinging to their dumb decisions.