Another Big Think Piece on COVID

I lost interest in this a long time ago, but everyone I know is sending it to me today because they remember me saying this part of it way back when:

Sometimes, experts and the public discussion failed to emphasize that we were balancing risks, as in the recurring cycles of debate over lockdowns or school openings. We should have done more to acknowledge that there were no good options, only trade-offs between different downsides. As a result, instead of recognizing the difficulty of the situation, too many people accused those on the other side of being callous and uncaring.

Well, I guess it's good people are coming around to the idea now, I guess. There's some nice talk about how the open spaces of the world are probably pretty safe most of the time, which is good to hear said in the hope that the Karens of the world might come to believe it.

UPDATE: This piece, also sent me today, has an interesting claim about mass transit including about the Japanese trains we were interested in at one time.

As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another, New York’s subway-germ panic seems irrational. In Japan, ridership has returned to normal, and outbreaks traced to its famously crowded public transit system have been so scarce that the Japanese virologist Hitoshi Oshitani concluded, in an email to The Atlantic, that “transmission on the train is not common.” Like airline travelers forced to wait forever in line so that septuagenarians can get a patdown for underwear bombs, New Yorkers are being inconvenienced in the interest of eliminating a vanishingly small risk.