NPIs still helped get us to a vaccine. Post vaccine they were worthless. The truth is we never had lockdowns even though that's a buzz word. But if two people never cross paths there isn't a transmission of the virus. Therefore NPIS had to have an impact on hospitalizations and deaths unless everybody caught the disease anyways (pre-vaccine).
I also think people aren't appreciating the level of uncertainty we had at many different points. Things are pretty certain now which is why NPIs are worthless now. That doesn't mean we can treat the next pandemic necessarily the same way we did this one. What if there's a virus that has an incubation of 2 weeks and a 100% hospitalization rate and as transmissible as omicron. It's purely hypothetical, but it certainly means we can't ignore that like it's nothing. We need a sliding scale/dynamic response.
Ultimately I'm glad that we aren't going the China route. I just wish we were more like Denmark or Norway - high vaccination rates, low hospitalization burden, NPIs when they made sense, but remove ALL NPIs when it's clear there's no value anymore.
I also think people aren't appreciating the level of uncertainty we had at many different points. Things are pretty certain now which is why NPIs are worthless now. That doesn't mean we can treat the next pandemic necessarily the same way we did this one. What if there's a virus that has an incubation of 2 weeks and a 100% hospitalization rate and as transmissible as omicron. It's purely hypothetical, but it certainly means we can't ignore that like it's nothing. We need a sliding scale/dynamic response.
Ultimately I'm glad that we aren't going the China route. I just wish we were more like Denmark or Norway - high vaccination rates, low hospitalization burden, NPIs when they made sense, but remove ALL NPIs when it's clear there's no value anymore.