Remember the Great Barrington Declaration? Anyone involved in that admit they were deeply wrong?

A lot of the disconnects over covid mitigation come down to a very simple premise: we could stop the spread of the virus if we completely eliminated interpersonal contact for a short period of time.

Either you accept this premise and believe that pushing ourselves toward that number is a good way out, or you think the premise is so unrealistic that it should not be a consideration at all in mitigation.

For my part, I accept that It is unrealistic. But I also think that the precautionary principle, and the need to break as many chains of transmission as possible, suggests an aggressive response was required.

The amount of uncertainty over long term impact, and the payoffs, which are obviously very bad in a significant share of cases, suggest that standard cost/benefit has not been the right approach for this.

And I think that's where a lot of the skepticism fails. It's a garbage in garbage out model

The compromise, of course, was a dramatic expansion of testing, orders of magnitude greater than anything we did. But some people thought that was too expensive or too much of an incursion on liberty.

In a vacuum, I could respect this opinion. But this was not in the vacuum, it was in comparison to more lockdowns and other restrictions. Given that choice, the testing expansion was obviously the way to go.

Very silly.

I just think more people from top to bottom owe the country an apology.

Anyway, in happier news, in an hour: