Adios. I'm calling it. The crisis is over. I am going back to the office. The disease will be with us for a long time, possibly forever, but the restrictions won't come back. That's my guess anyway. Oh I'm sure there will be a random outbreak here or there. Some number of people won't get vaccinated; a decision they will live or die by.
While on that topic, I should note that for many many years I skipped out on the flu vaccine, given the worst thing that would happen was I would get laid up sick in bed for a couple of days. I did this partially because I'm lazy and partially because a microbiologist I knew said she didn't get a flu vax because she felt it would hasten the vaccine resistant mutations (I'm a bit suspicious of this now). Anyway, I suspect on more than one occasion I'm sure I was out in the world while flu-infected, spreading it left and right. So I guess I can't be too righteous about healthy folks not fearing Covid and not getting vaxxed. The truth is, my jumping on the opportunity to be in an early vaccine trial was more about me being a good citizen (or perhaps moral preening) than any fear of infection.
The biggest takeaway for me from all this is how startlingly irrational and sclerotic our public health bureaucracy is. It wasn't just slowness, which is pretty much expected from a bureaucracy, it's that the decisions were not even based on the amount of lives that could be saved, but on deep-seated quasi-ethical dogma. Things like the forbidding of human challenge trials, vaccine nationalism, accepting a greater death toll as long as the deaths were distributed "fairly". This post at the Effective Altruism Forum gives a good summary. There's a lot of jargon and speculative calculation in that post, but the upshot is that had it not been for comically bad institutional failures, we could have been getting vaccinated as soon as August 2020, rather than December of that year. We would have been broadly vaccinated by the wintertime pretty much preventing the second wave. An estimated 1-3 million lives could have been saved. Just astonishing.
The silver lining is that science came through. At the outset we had never had a vaccination for a coronavirus before, now we have many. I needn't rehash how quickly it was developed (versus how quickly it was allowed to be used). The actual scientists doing the actual science -- as opposed to the bureaucrats screeching to follow the science while simultaneously stymieing it -- were equally astonishing.
Another silver lining is how some ingenious folks stepped up to get past the institutional incompetence. The story of Fast Grants should be examined by everyone who wants to make a difference next time.
Another thing that was clear to me is how easy it is for people to adopt a moral stand that conforms to your personal circumstances. People like me, who could work from home, who had minimal disruptions, who society adapted to support -- in other words, for whom the virus was little more than a 15 month long annoyance and media event -- seemed to almost revel in the restrictions and the opportunity to chest beat about righteous behavior and sneer at those who didn't comply, even as they looked the other way during protests and such. Isn't it wonderful to have options? We dismissed the concerns of those who lost jobs and hit the skids without a second thought. Our behavior in that respect was truly shameful. Even if we were objectively correct -- and that is debatable -- the smug, unsympathetic sanctimony was truly awful.
So yes, I'm declaring it over. Everything going forward will be post-script. Think pieces will dwindle. Blaming everything on Covid will no longer be possible. Even service levels (currently atrocious due to lack of employees or raw materials) will slowly recover. Maybe some small fraction of lessons will be learned. Geography will shift, cities may no longer hold their sway. (Can you imagine anyone looking to start a business in Portland, OR?)
What a mess, from start to finish. May we never reach a point where we remember it fondly.
One last reading from Scott Alexander: Lockdown Effectiveness: More Than You Want to Know. My reading: certain aspects of lockdowns had a solid positive effect, others didn't. When costs are considered, it's still a matter of opinion how severe a lockdown is worth it. Thus, practically speaking, within a given range, lockdown policy will be motivated by politics and priors.
