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If you want a "control" against which to evaluate the forced government interventions, I would suggest Arizona. We are right next door to SoCal, we have about the same demographics and (this time of year) similar climate.
My observation is that, since about June, Arizona and California have been on opposite ends of the government COVID mandate scale. While CA continues to lock up tighter and tighter, AZ is mostly open for business.
Schools are open in-person. Our large colleges have in-person classes. Our restaurants and bars are all open for indoor dining -- some at reduced capacity, but some at full capacity. We all wear masks in the Walmart but pretty much no one wears a mask walking outdoors.
A wave of snowbirds (though fewer than usual) arrived from all over the country in October and November. As states like NY block their borders to fellow Americans, AZ has never done so (a LOT of new yorkers showed up here in April and May)
New arrivals and visitors marvel at how little COVID seems to affect business as usual in AZ (as compared to their states). I go to my gym and work out, walk the neighborhood and breathe the air freely, and sit at bars for drinks and dinner from time to time.
This does not mean I don't have friends in hiding. I know a number of people who have self-isolated in fear of the virus, sometimes IMO rationally (my 86-year-old mother in law) and sometimes less so. But that his the cool thing about a free society --
if individuals wish to stay home and not go out or see anyone in person for 9 months, they may do so (and BTW, thank capitalism for all the great services that allow one to live this way!) But in AZ those of us who do not want to live that way don't have to.
The percent of Americans aged 45-64 (my bracket) who have perished with (not just from) COVID is 0.06% (49K/81.5MM). At my age, I have probably 20 good years left. Am I willing to give up a whole year, or 5% of my enjoyable remaining live, to avoid a 0.06% chance of death?
Others think about the risk differently. Fine. Again, that is the wonderful feature of individual rights and liberty in a free society -- each person can make their own individual choices based on their own perceptions of risk and value
But in many places, like CA, such traditional American views of liberty have been abandoned. In 2020, the choices one can make are limited to only those that the most frightened and risk-adverse are willing to let one make.
Up until recently, those of us who live in places like AZ have been shamed for such attitudes, and our COVID rates have been treated as a scarlet A marking us for our wonton behavior. We were getting what we deserved, and worse we were bringing retribution down on the righteous
It is amazing how history repeats itself -- jews were persecuted and killed during the Black Death for the same reason, that their apostasy was bringing the disease down on the believers.
But to some extent, this situation is finally turning. It is becoming increasingly clear that much of the "science" behind lockdowns and other NPI is actually just a cargo cult. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/23/california-covid-surge-450315
Most of the "studies" in the media justifying lockdowns are crap. They take a hugely multivariable problem - demographics, density, climate & season, etc. and try to boil differences down to the result of politician's actions
This works only if you choose your data points carefully, and take North Dakota as it is experiencing its seasonal peak and compare it to NY after its peak or CA before its peak. But the bankruptcy of this is finally starting to show
It is going to turn out that costly political interventions were at best a rounding error on the numbers, and at worst are going to show up in other sorts of mortality in the coming months and years (eg unscreened cancer).
Absolutely unsurprisingly, if you read the article above, the response of CA officials boils down to "real lockdowns haven't been tried before." If only they had tougher enforcement and better compliance they would have worked. Right.
None of this is surprising because nearly the entire body of scientific research pre-2020 held that lockdowns once the infection takes hold are useless and/or counter-productive and that public mask wearing does little and can in some cases actually lead to disease spread.
And during 2020, almost the entire body of contact tracing studies has shown that the disease spreads in ways that public mask-wearing and business closures are virtually irrelevant. So we should be unsurprised when they don't work.
And the crappy science we get on TV! We see small bits of a complex process, like masks stopping projections of large droplets, but never studies of how the whole system performs, eg does mask-wearing actually lower transmission rates in real world situations?
I am not wishing death and disease on anyone. I have friends who have gotten COVID and it can be a nasty experience.
But our response to this thing has been simply insane, a result of moronic politicians following their crappy incentives to be seen as "doing something", and then defending and doubling down on that "something" rather than ever, ever admitting error
I am still behind the Great Barrington Declaration. In fact, I was ahead of that Oct 4 statement with a number of blog posts saying roughly the same thing in my own less sophisticated way https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2020/09/the-covid-rorschach-test-and-the-split-in-thinking-that-divides-america-the-sweden-tribe-vs-the-whitmer-tribe.html
We uselessly shut down a lot of people's businesses and now are trying to make up for that with several trillion dollars in spending spread across past and future stimulus bills. Why couldn't we remain open and spend a trillion or so instead on protecting the vulnerable?
I largely stand behind what I wrote way back in August. https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2020/08/a-framework-for-thinking-about-lockdowns-and-why-they-are-counter-productive.html
