"The Fickle 'Science' Of Lockdowns"

Hindsight is etc....but this is roughly in accord with my own half-assed layperson's understanding. First and foremost: even before Summer 2020, it became clear that the public-health messages we were getting via the media were hysterical and (at least as-if) designed to fan the flames of fear. I can't believe it took me so long to figure that out. But it took months, IIRC. I never really understood half-assed lockdowns. A short, hard-assed lockdown would make more sense--or so I thought. Here's a telling--but not surprising--paragraph:

So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”

It's certainly possible that those were factors. But people who don't understand the technical reasoning in question often revert to something they think they do understand: social/political explanations. Sometimes those explanations are right--or partially right. But if you don't understand the technical arguments you're not in a position to tell whether nonrational social/political explanations are warranted. Magness and Earle do seem to understand those arguments--so they, at least, are in a position to know if nonrational social/political explanations are called for. 

   Obviously everything is politicized now. There's no doubt that the left tends toward certain kinds of hysteria. They love masks--Twitter and Zoom are full of people wearing masks in their profile pics...seemingly take from home... They also became bizarrely, passionately pro-vax...worse...vax-max...as soon as the baton passed to Biden. The right, in this case, went approximately equally and oppositely crazy. Even fat old wingnuts with diabetes and asthma are often devotedly anti-vax. Whereas lefties can hardly wait to get their babies triple-vaxxed...  It's all just crazy as hell.

   Anyway. We didn't know what to do at first. We certainly could have done better. But our mistakes were at least partially justified--or so it seems to me. Perhaps the weirdest thing is how long relevant facts about age and comorbidities were suppressed. Basically the first thing we should have been told was that healthy young people are not at appreciable risk. The suppression of that information--at least by the media, and perhaps by elements of the public-health-industrial-complex, is, to my mind, just about the most amazing part of this whole story--on the social/political side of the thing at least. Second might be the suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis...but there's so much crazy in play that it's kind of hard to rank.