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AJKamper's avatar

One point I would like to see incorporated into this discussion, but is hard because it’s so politicized, is that we should accept that mistakes were made but also be very forgiving of those mistakes because this was an incredibly hard problem that forced us to take our best guess a lot of those times.

Of course, many liberals don’t want to admit mistakes while many conservatives don’t want to forgive mistakes.

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Gordon Strause's avatar

Here's my question/pushback Nate. I seem to recall that the Northeast (and if i'm remembering correctly, Louisiana and Michigan) were hit super hard in the initial weeks of the pandemic and that the high death rates in those mostly blue states, which is the main reason the death rates in 2020 seem to be fairly evenly split across political lines, were for that reason.

Also, if I'm remembering correctly, I think California and Oregon were the first places to have cases but escaped the fate of the Northeast in part because of more aggressive social distancing measures in the first few weeks (although I'm guessing weather played a role too).

Long story short, while I would agree that some of the social distancing measures (most notably the continued school closings into the fall of 2020) went too far, I'm less convinced that social distancing didn't play an important role in minimizing deaths pre-vaccine.

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