COVID-19: New Health Secretary Sajid Javid says 'we can't live in a world where the only thing we are thinking about is COVID'

I don't think it's because people half-assed shutting society down for a single month. Pretty much everyone did that. It's just that any place which couldn't adopt a so-called Zero COVID strategy found that none of the things that were supposed to keep the virus in check, actually worked. Contact tracing, in particular, was a huge bust in most of the world. Everyone wound up having to lock down again because nothing they did to prevent a second wave actually worked.

Maybe my fatalism is wrong, but in 1918, lockdowns and closures on this scale weren't (couldn't be) attempted, and... society mostly went on as normal, with some short-term closures and mask mandates, and even Broadway theatre stayed open with some extra precautions. Maybe that wasn't possible this time, but what's been going on for the last 15 months is an unusually harsh response to a pandemic, not an unusually lax one.

/r/Coronavirus Thread Parent Link - news.sky.com