I have an analogy that describes how I see our current public health measures and government response to COVID;
Imagine a house is on fire. The fire department shows up, but at the wrong house. They quickly begin the process of unrolling the hose, hooking it up to the closest fire hydrant and spraying the house. But it's the wrong house. The neighbors see all the commotion and they come over and start a bucket brigade. Countless people begin scurrying about, filling and passing buckets down the line and throwing the water... on the wrong house. They're all busy and "doing something", but none of what they're doing is actually helping to put the fire out. So they start yelling at the bystanders, blaming them that the fire isn't out because they too are not throwing water on the wrong house. All the while the house burns to the ground, but they feel good about themselves because at least they were "doing something".
This is what all of our current mitigation efforts look like. As was pointed out above, a cherry-picked snapshot in time deceives people into thinking what they're doing is working (or not). But that never ages well. It becomes clear as time passes that they were putting all their effort into things that absolutely did not help. The fire rages on, and they blame other people for not joining them in their futile, ineffective measures. It never seems to occur to them as they encounter failure after failure after failure that perhaps what they're doing just isn't effective. No, the logical explanation, to them at least, is that it has to be all those other people who haven't bought into the mystical capabilities of the mask talisman. They are the reason we have such a problem.
This would be fine if it were just everyday people, but this has also been the approach of our public health "experts", who really ought to know better. Instead of doubling and tripling down on efforts that continually fail, you would think that the health "experts" would realize that we cannot stop the spread of this virus, and therefore it is VITALLY important to FOCUS our protection on the most vulnerable to reduce the number of deaths. You would think they would realize that vaccinating the elderly is of utmost importance while not worrying so much about whether we can safely vaccinate our toddlers, which have almost zero risk of any kind of complications from COVID. You would expect people who allegedly care about others so much would RUSH to the aid of India, sending them as much vaccine as possible, or to states that were out of control. But no, the director of the CDC says, eh, clearly it didn't work the first time, but let's try locking down again and again, because we "know what works".
The illusion of knowledge is the enemy of progress, and as long as public health and government continues to believe and push this illusion that masks and social distancing are effective, the pandemic will continue to rip through and many more people will die needlessly as they fail to focus the protection where it is needed most.
