From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy.…

From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view, the deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix. Public policy is about time. /1 https://t.co/pW1QWIyhlp

For example, say we have a peak in drownings, 50 in a year. And then we implement some strategies, to reduce it to 10 a year. Within 5 years we're back at another 50 dead, just spread out more. The same outcome. Public policy is about the long-term. /2

I share Christina's happiness that right now, in the present, most of us don't need to fear dying of Covid, or in many situations (such as a declining wave) even catching it. But public policy isn't about right now. Kicking a can down the road isn't progress. /3

Suppressing the acute impacts of Covid is tremendous for people living in 2024. Unless that suppression leads to an end to the waves of infection though, we're just kicking the can down the road to future generations. As we do for many other things. /4

Our culture is now incapable of thinking in the long term. A catastrophe is still a catastrophe, if it happens over many years, or even multiple generations. It's why we developed vaccines for childhood diseases that killed very few people each year. /5

Because very few each year, multiplied by a lot of years, is a lot of children dead. We build some roads that last 35 years, because fixing them every year is a false economy. Maybe Covid is on its way out, and that's what we're seeing in the data. /6

The famed hybrid immunity. If it isn't, from a public policy point of view, progress has been near-zero. If anything, the task is bigger because there's widespread public apathy about doing anything at all, in the long-term. /end