@badvoltage I am very much with @sil on the tangent about preparedness, and I feel a bit like there are more similarities between the responses to 9/11 and COVID than were actually discussed.

Before I get to that though, yeah, we've learned absolutely nothing from COVID and it is incredibly depressing. I'd assumed that going through all that would make people think about things like clean air and ventilation and expecting masking in healthcare settings (hey there's a bunch of ill and also vulnerable people, let's not spread things! You know, like how doctors eventually realised washing their hands is a good idea!), but instead it feels like as soon as vaccines seem to have stopped it from killing as many people we can just accept that number of deaths and a whole bunch of people being disabled by a highly transmissible virus, and talk about the ongoing pandemic in the past tense, and do literally nothing to limit it (and barely anything to monitor it)

Anyway, back to the similarities; how many of the things implemented after 9/11 actually have real benefit? And how many things are we not doing that might actually help? I think about the number of times I've seen people prioritising hand washing/sanitising over masking/ventilation, even when we definitely knew that COVID is basically only airborne, and compare it with all the security theatre that's been put in place since 9/11 that likely doesn't actually do anything remotely useful