Looking back on the lockdown debate, it's funny that it started as a debate between people in favor of letting it rip to get it over with quickly and people in favor of "flattening the curve", but everyone was wrong since no matter what you do more or less the same thing happens.
We have kind of forgotten that, because it has been almost 2 years since the pandemic started and we have gradually changed our positions without noticing, but it's really striking if you go back to the debates from last March.
For instance, I was briefly a "flatten the curve" guy, then after the first wave I became a "let it rip" guy and after the summer I became convinced that non-pharmaceutical interventions didn't make a big difference anyway so they weren't worth it, which is still my position.
To be clear though, while both sides were equally wrong in a way, their mistake was not equally damaging. We would have been far better off to be wrong with the anti-lockdown side, but on the whole that's not the path we took and we are still paying the price for that 🤷♂️
I have already said in no uncertain terms that I was wrong about that, so that wasn't really the point, but just in case let me repeat it: I was not only wrong but horribly wrong, and I will always regret lacking the foresight to see that at the time.
https://twitter.com/SauloLondono/status/1469378341337657345
In my defense though, even at the time (this is from 30 March 2020), I insisted that it was critical that we be willing to revise the decision to lock down as new evidence came in. That's what I did after the first wave, but most people on my side didn't. nationalreview.com/2020/03/corona…
Reading this now, what really strikes me (beside the fact that I didn't understand yet that the problem with models is how they model *spread*) is how naive I was about the ability of society to walk back this kind of decision, after lockdowns have been used once.
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