Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
The gaslighting was done by governments and public health authorities who convinced so many people that this was a killer virus, that their children were/are at risk, that employers were basically committing murder by making their 20-something year old staff go to work, etc.
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There's been gaslighting on both sides. Both with danger from the virus in most populations (e.g. vaccinated people under age 65, unvaccinated children) and on the side of the severity of public health measures. As you suggest, masking requirements, vaccine passports, travel restrictions, and rolling school closures or even curfews (which Quebec had until recently) are not minor. Yet they are applied for long periods of time with a low evidence bar and a lot of people are happy to do a 180 and support restrictions that a few months earlier they would not have imagined or said were inappropriate.
It reminds me of 9/11 where there was a real threat but it was exaggerated, and then measures to cope with that exaggerated threat were pushed far beyond a reasonable cost-benefit. I believe in the future, when the political aspect dies down and the people who made the decisions are out of the picture, this will look like a similar era of massive policy failure. Many people have a warped view right now because they are fearful or partisan (remember when the US was doing badly due to Donald Trump and Joe Biden was going to bring things back to normal?
).
I think for us to have an "off-ramp" we will need some kind of narrative for why the measures are not needed anymore (even though many did nothing or were never justified). I'm hoping the shift from omicron will provide this pretext, and maybe it just can't happen right now because of high cases. Wide availability of vaccines would have been a good point at which to dump most of the restrictions.