Thread by @patio11

Torn between “not really thrilled by gotcha journalism in general” and “forcing people to evaluate hard tradeoffs concretely versus abstractly best way to make sure that some evaluation of tradeoffs happens.”

No subtweet rule: this is about pandemic policy, specific subgenre the politicians who violate generally applicable restrictions on liberty designed to improve population-wide health outcomes such as e.g. the SF mayor violating the mask ordinance, and the discourse about it.

As somebody who was and is very much on team Smash The Big Red Button This Is Very Bad, I wish there was some acknowledgement that the policy regimes implemented have constrained liberty to a degree that I would have had difficulty imagining a few years ago, largely w/o debate.

Which is not obviously the wrong call! But it’s a *very singular thing* that swathes of the United States banned funerals and public celebrations of religion this year. That was a thing and it happened and it exists now today.

And so if one wants people to be onboard with extremely costly interventions like that I would hope that one also understand one is demanding very minor sacrifices like e.g. no unmasked karaoke even if one really enjoys karaoke and is high status.

Also, beating a drum:

We should want to return to normalcy faster at the margin, we should explicitly link success in containing pandemic as accelerating path to normalcy, and we should publish success criteria and urgently work towards them versus spending years Winging It.

I understand that when in urgent incident response mode you’ve got to make some quick tradeoffs but given that we’ve had over a year and a half with one issue stapled to the top of the docket you’d hope every government would have a dashboard with transition criteria on it.