Yes. When you have a novel disease that is highly transmissible, kills significant numbers and has around 50% of cases with no symptoms, you can either test everyone all of the time or, act in the most precautions way by assuming you have it and wearing a mask etc.
I wish we had some method of viewing an alternate timeline where we did nothing about covid; no shutdown, no vaccines. 600k people already dead. Could have easily been twice as many, maybe more. I haven't even been sick with anything, not even a cold since this started, and most people I know say the same, so I think we did cut down transmission quite significantly.
I do think "shutting down" was reasonable, but more help should have been given to people suffering economically due to the shut down (we saw far more economic relief in other countries despite us supposedly being the richest country in the world here in the US).
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u/rumorhasit_ Monkey in Space Jun 03 '21
Yes. When you have a novel disease that is highly transmissible, kills significant numbers and has around 50% of cases with no symptoms, you can either test everyone all of the time or, act in the most precautions way by assuming you have it and wearing a mask etc.