Closing borders is racist.
Two weeks to flatten the curve.
Don’t mask.
Mask.
Stay Inside.
Trump didn’t close the borders fast enough!
Double mask.
Protest crowds are not superspreaders.
Trump Rallies are superspreaders.
School is dangerous, distance learning is good.
Go outside, inside is bad.
Dems-don’t trust Trump Vaccines.
Biden/Pelosi - we can’t mandate vaccination.
Dems-you must trust our vaccines, they are effective.
Biden/Pelosi- we are mandating vaccines.
No mask if vaccinated.
School is good, kids don’t get it.
Still mask if vaccinated.
School is bad, kids are getting it.
Vaccine boosters because they are not as effective as we thought.
Ya, people who have problems with dynamic situations (e.g. best practices continually changing via new information coming in) have had real problems with this pandemic. They wanted a static stable unchanging story from the onset, and were very disappointed and anxious when they didn't get that.
But everything you’ve written above is simply condemning authorities because they didn’t have the best solution from the onset.
This wasn’t an evolutionary change of best practices. This was waffling from one extreme to another, then back again. When you do that, people will lose confidence in leadership.
Everything I wrote above condemns authorities not because they didn’t have the best solution from the start, but by all appearances never had a solution at all. Additionally, one party by my observation spent more time trying to exploit the pandemic for political power gains rather than treating it as a problem to solve.
18 months is a long time. I’m ok with plans changing to find something that works. But again, I understand that a lot of people crave the single right answer from the start.
If we have a dynamic situation, why is it necessary at every step of the way for governments to arbitrarily ban things and then mandate them? Could they not just offer strongly worded advice in line with their levels of confidence?
It is still unclear - and will remain so for some time - if the lockdowns and knee jerk emergency measures were worth the cost.The economic ripple effects have started to appear and we'll have to see how bad it gets.
The changes above weren't caused by "best practices changing via new information", they were caused by political and ideological imperatives.
I mean, seriously. Protests are incredibly deadly. Not BLM protests, those are fine. No, now BLM has run its course protests are illegal again. Obviously that isn't anything based on "new information", and nor have the other changes been so motivated.
Closing specific borders because you don't like the people who come through that border is racist. Closing them all probably wouldn't have done enough anyway since it would have to be combined with mandatory and strictly enforced total lockdown to also prevent the spread internally.
We were able to affect the curve. Maybe it would have been flat or even inverted if people actually stayed home for 2 weeks.
They said not to use masks because hospitals needed them. They weren't sure at the time if the masks were effective enough for others to wear them anyway. Later we both got our supplies in order and determined that even cloth masks limit the spread by significantly reducing the radius around you that is dangerous. We said masks weren't needed for the vaccinated because there was solid safety against the original strain. A few months later, the delta strain became a problem because people didn't do enough to stop the virus from spreading, so we had to go back to masks since the vaccine only partially protects against delta.
Protest crowds were certainly dangerous when it came to spreading the virus. However those people were also far more likely to be wearing masks than people at Trump rallies. Also there's a difference between pushing back against people getting murdered by police and people all gathering to hear a politician that they were already going to vote for tell them all the things they wanted to hear.
I don't want to put any more time into this comment, but I think I've made my point that the changes have been logical.
Yes, you have appropriately conveyed all of the political talking points that attempt to tie logic to the illogic behind some of those flippy floppy positions. The changes are only logical when viewed from a political lens. The party behind all that political exploitation of the pandemic I listed never measures it’s success by the outcomes of their policies, only by the virtues behind their intent (Just as you have done here). Perhaps that is how you think to measure success. Me? I measure success by public trust and successful results. The US government and its experts are sorely lacking in both of those areas.
Did I miss anything?
Edit: added some punctuation for clarity