The plan specifically is to (somehow) isolate vulnerable people and only "let er rip" for the rest of us. I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
There's the GBD proposal, and then there's the actual media tours by the GBD proponents, particularly on Fox, where COVID-19 was downplayed. Some of them famously wrote columns how there'd be maybe 10,000 fatalities and it was like the flu. Is it surprising that downplaying the virus also worked against spending huge amounts of money to protect the elderly? Like govt renting hotels to isolate elderly living with families? Or providing deliveries so they could stay at home?
I think Dr. Jay B seemed reasonable and honest enough. For instance you can find him saying that he's not comfortable comparing it to the flu, since he suspects flu deaths may be greatly overcounted. He talks now (not sure about before) about deliveries and hotels as you say. Etc.
But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted.
Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.
I think Jay B was better than most of the GBD supporters because he seemed to focus more on the targeted prevention. The problem was he didn't counter the downplaying of SARS-CoV-2 by people using his own seroprevalence paper (which had problems), or at least I never saw him push back on Atlas and others. So his criticism about public health issues is completely devoid of his own part in the story. They went heavy with part 1 (COVID isn't that bad for non-elderly) and were surprised that downplaying the impact didn't shift resources to the elderly. If people using his data were saying the overall IFR was like the flu, why should the govt go way into debt protecting the elderly?
> I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
I don't see piles of dead people in florida, do you? Guess what went down in florida worked just as well as the most hardcore lockdown regions around. Almost like masks and lockdowns didn't do a damn thing at all. Who would have guessed?
Very few places in the world actually tried “focused protection” or seriously tried anything at all, so we probably won’t know until the next pandemic hits and we hopefully try something then.
The only thing we really learned, at least in the USA, is what happens when you basically do nothing society-wide in the face of a pandemic. Outside of a few major metro areas, the country was just like Florida. Business closures on paper but not enforced, weak stay-at-home suggestions that were largely ignored, voluntary travel restrictions that were similarly ignored and unenforced.
The school closures were the one major exception, where at least briefly, actual collective, coordinated action happened.
Several countries were highly effective at controlling it, and had far lower death tolls as a consequence.
These countries are very diverse in many respects, so one can't claim that they only succeeded due to some particular quirk they share in common: China, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and others.
Great to be sceptical about it, because that’s how we end up with robust plans that stand a chance of actually working.
But, for all the protesting about how GBD would have failed the old and vulnerable, it missed the point that we actually already did fail the old and vulnerable.
It’s argued as if we succeeded.
But for all our efforts, we failed those that really did need protection. They were stuck. (And some still are.) Community transmission rates were really high. And that matters when you’re in a vulnerable group, because anything >0 is basically “high”.
All our efforts were general protection, which helped groups that didn’t really need help, but didn’t help the groups that really needed it.
Isolation of vulnerable people is problematic because ~5% of the population was highly vulnerable, and actually isolating them would require extreme resources that we simply don't have. Rather, what was meant from the statements of signatories and drafters, was to let it rip for 99.5% of the population and offer less actual protection to the rest than we gave to the least protected in our scenario.
The plan specifically is to (somehow) isolate vulnerable people and only "let er rip" for the rest of us. I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.