Covid restrictions over (for us)

[Marcel Birgelen]

I am of the position that yes, covid is real, it is unique, but I also don't fully agree that it is as bad as it has been made out to be. My doctor agreed with that, and he opined that it is a "super-flu" type of thing. And so far, the only patients of his or his colleagues who have died from it were ALL immuno-compromised or had other major health issues. All the rest of cases he is aware of (and he mentioned that the numbers were more on the level of a strong flu outbreak) recovered with no lasting effects.

That's in the eye of the beholder, because when is a pandemic really really bad? Also, keep in mind that the US is an ageing population and many suffer at least one serious health problem, many of which could be detrimental in combination with something like COVID-19. If the U.S. would consist of 90% "spring chickens" in perfect health, COVID-19 would probably not even have made a dent.

In a bad year, in the US, about 64.000 people die directly or indirectly from a flu-related infection. In a good year, it's about 24.000. Most flu deaths are also linked to "previous conditions", as it is very rare for a 100% healthy person with a good functioning immune system to succumb to the flu. We accept this as "collateral damage". There are countless other viruses that kill people, that are equally transmitted by close contact, but it's hard to find any definite numbers about them, unless I add them all up individually.

COVID-19 may be not as deadly as e.g. Ebola, but that's part of the reason why it was so successful in spreading itself. Yet, in the past 18 or so months, about 670K people have died from COVID-19-related infections in the U.S. alone. That's far more than even the worst flu would do. Right now, numbers are back up again, but most of the people that are dying, are unvaccinated people.

As for the vax mandates, I feel they are wrong, not a real solution to the problem, and will face serious legal challenges.

For me, the solution is pretty easy. There are people like you, that have a valid reason not to get vaccinated, as the risk of getting a blood clot in the wrong place may outweigh the risk of a serious COVID infection. This puts you into a disadvantage, as you either have to take sufficient precautions yourself, or take the risk full-frontal.

But for all the others, who don't have a valid reason, but easy access to a vaccine, I think they should simply be "out of luck" when shit hits the fan for them. We can't keep everything closed for a bunch of people that have decided for themselves that they're smarter than the combined force of scientists out there. This also means that once you get hit with a serious case, you're in the proverbial standby-line if you need help with your infection. I'm certainly not in favor of vax mandates, as everybody has to be free to choose for him or herselves, but if you neglect to get yourself vaccinated, because you subscribe to some conspiratorial belief and you get in trouble, there should be no special points for this.

Once the vaccination rate starts to hit 70% or higher, I think it's time to quit all the COVID measures in place. This may suck for those who couldn't get vaccinated and they should be supported as much as possible to get through this difficult period. Those who refuse to get vaccinated because their TV told them so, should know that they're the ones not allowing those who can't get vaccinated to return to a normal life.

As for those checks for "covid certificates", I personally find those things very intrusive. They're also a potential treasure trove of very sensitive information for our governments, who have proven not to be able to keep their fingers of this kind of data when it does exist. Showing your "hall pass" every time I want to eat something in a restaurant and every time I want to go visit a movie sounds very repressive and dictatorial to me.

[Bobby Henderson]

I have mixed feeling about "vaccine passports." The white paper cards are easily falsified. I'm sure there may be ways how to create fake digital versions of such things. Some places that might ask to see such info, such as a restaurant that requires all guests to be vaccinated, will mostly be looking at paper cards. Those are easy to fake.

As for privacy concerns, I think that one is pretty funny. What additional information is the government going to harvest from a vaccine card that it doesn't already have on an individual? The Patriot Act, among various other pieces of legislation, has already given Uncle Sam an enormous amount of snooping power. Combine that with the "digital life" just about all of us maintain. Our smart phones act as tracking devices. So do various other devices, from a personal computer to a digitally connected vehicle. It's pretty hilarious some people believe there are microchips in SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. It's kind of sad that it apparently hasn't dawned on any of these people that the big bad government wouldn't need to bother with tracking chips in vaccines in the first place (even if squeezing self-powered computer chips through a hypodermic needle was physically possible).

But for all the others, who don't have a valid reason, but easy access to a vaccine, I think they should simply be "out of luck" when shit hits the fan for them. We can't keep everything closed for a bunch of people that have decided for themselves that they're smarter than the combined force of scientists out there.

When over-loaded hospitals are forced to choose who to treat and who to make wait, yeah the unvaccinated COVID-19 patients need to be a lesser priority. Other emergency patients suffering heart attacks, strokes, severe trauma (car accidents, gun shots, etc) should be able to jump to the front of the line. But it doesn't work out like that.

Severe COVID-19 cases often run an excruciatingly slow process. One COVID-19 patient can use up a hospital bed or a bed in the ICU for many days or even many weeks. Dozens of other non-COVID patients could use that same bed over that same period of time. When someone spontaneously has a heart attack and needs a hospital bed he'll find that the COVID patients have already taken it. People who weren't suffering from COVID-19 have been dying via this very situation. Here in Lawton our hospitals (and the ICUs inside) are beyond full. They've erected MASH-style tents out in the parking lots. Right now is a really bad time for anyone to suffer a more garden variety life-threatening health event. The risk is very high they won't be able to get treated in time to prevent severe complications or death.

If someone has an actual medical condition that makes COVID-19 vaccines off limits to them, then it's fine if they don't take it. Our population doesn't have to hit a 100% vaccination level to achieve herd immunity. As for the others, I won't have much sympathy for them if COVID-19 ends up hitting them hard. Their stubborn stances are putting the safety of other people at risk, even children.

[Marcel Birgelen]

As for privacy concerns, I think that one is pretty funny. What additional information is the government going to harvest from a vaccine card that it doesn't already have on an individual? The Patriot Act, among various other pieces of legislation, has already given Uncle Sam an enormous amount of snooping power. Combine that with the "digital life" just about all of us maintain. Our smart phones act as tracking devices. So do various other devices, from a personal computer to a digitally connected vehicle. It's pretty hilarious some people believe there are microchips in SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. It's kind of sad that it apparently hasn't dawned on any of these people that the big bad government wouldn't need to bother with tracking chips in vaccines in the first place (even if squeezing self-powered computer chips through a hypodermic needle was physically possible).

Every time a restaurant, cinema or whatnot scans a COVID-19 passport in the form of a QR code, in order to validate the code, it will need to access some kind of backend. Once that happens, this backend can and will log that scan. Since your passport will be linked to your ID, this will give the government a pretty detailed map of your daily out-of-home activities. I'm simply not keen on giving them that information, since they're usually up to no good with any unnecessary information you give them. In the best case scenario, they'll eventually just end up leaking it and in the worst case scenario, a bad minded government could use this data against their own people.

Sure, Google, Facebook and whatnot probably know even more about you, but they are, technically, not the government and I'm not freely partaking in their big data harvesting party either.

Do I believe in some microchips being delivered with the vaccine? Heck, it seems like most people have no clue about what's technically possible and what's not and seemingly haven't seen any vaccination happening up close, or otherwise they would realize that their conspiracy theories are pretty much just fantasies.

[Frank Cox]

It's my understanding that the forthcoming vaccine passport app for Saskatchewan (to be made available sometime next week, apparently) does all of its validation locally and no data is saved or sent anywhere past the device that's doing the scanning. It will show your name and a pass/fail marker, and that's it. I guess that information is encoded into the qr code that's being presented for scanning so it doesn't have to go anywhere else to fetch it.

[Bobby Henderson]

Sure, Google, Facebook and whatnot probably know even more about you, but they are, technically, not the government and I'm not freely partaking in their big data harvesting party either.

Big government and big business often work closely, hand-in-hand, with each other. Businesses share all sorts of data or at least make the data easy for the government to access.

It's growing ever more difficult for a person to hide his out of home movement if he chooses to do so. A trip to a restaurant or theater provides all kinds of chances for personal movement/activity data to be collected, even without involving a vaccine passport. These businesses incentivize people to conduct transactions electronically, like using an app or web site to make dinner reservations or get reserved seats at a cinema. During the drive to the movie theater or restaurant one's personal vehicle will be recorded by dozens of surveillance cameras. There are cameras on traffic signal posts, on businesses, private homes and in a growing number of vehicles. Just about all the toll roads in the US are going to cash-less operation, requiring transponders of some sort. They penalize those who pay by license plate scan with higher toll rates. As the cost of road construction and maintenance continues to rise I think we'll see a lot more toll roads or even streets with tolls. And all this is on top of the tracking done by our smart phones and other elements of our digital life.

In order for someone to really be able to avoid scrutiny by big government or big business that person pretty much has to live off the grid out in the wood of some remote place. And the government has plenty of high tech tools to find people out there too.

With all that mind, I think the people citing privacy concerns as either a reason to not get vaccinated or not reveal vaccination status at a restaurant kind of waited a few days late to close the barn doors. Those horses are already long gone. The really funny thing is the anti-vax folks draw all kinds of attention to themselves when they want to get into a dispute with a restaurant employee asking about vaccine status. And the anti-vax people go viral as hell online when they decide to beat the shit out of the restaurant employee. Bystanders can't miss a chance to whip out a phone, capture an altercation on video and upload it. I think I'm doing more to hide in plain sight with all the other fully vaccinated people.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's my understanding that the forthcoming vaccine passport app for Saskatchewan (to be made available sometime next week, apparently) does all of its validation locally and no data is saved or sent anywhere past the device that's doing the scanning. It will show your name and a pass/fail marker, and that's it. I guess that information is encoded into the qr code that's being presented for scanning so it doesn't have to go anywhere else to fetch it.

It remains to be seen how secure such a system is. You're still required to manually check the identity via some kind of valid ID document, because those QR codes can be easily copied and shared.

For me, showing my passport to be allowed entry into a restaurant or cinema, it feels very creepy and repressive and I don't think it will serve any purpose at all. You're either vaccinated like me and most people around me and you're essentially safe or you're not, so you know what risks you're taking. If 70% or more people in a region are vaccinated, I don't see any need for COVID checks at the door.

With all that mind, I think the people citing privacy concerns as either a reason to not get vaccinated or not reveal vaccination status at a restaurant kind of waited a few days late to close the barn doors.

There are little to no privacy concerns about the vaccination itself for me, at least not in the way they're handled here. Vaccinations are only statistically counted and your name isn't entered into one big vaccination archive. My problem is purely with the new kinds of control infrastructure governments all across the world are rolling out. Once you start implement such programs, history has shown that it's pretty hard to get rid of them.

It's the same with many other stuff around us, the mobile phone that's constantly being monitored, the abundance of CCTV cameras around us. They are there for "our security", but in practice, our personal security hasn't really increased any bit in the last 20 or so years, quite to the contrary in many cases. Best example: My car recently got broken into. The perpetrators were on clear display on our CCTV footage, including license plate numbers. The responsible authorities didn't even bother to request this information, even though I clearly stated that there IS CCTV footage in my police report. But, when there was some kind of political demonstration a year or two/three ago, they DID ask all CCTV footage from everybody that potentially had some. This clearly indicates government's priorities to me, which isn't our personal safety. Meanwhile, we see how technologies like facial recognition software gets silently rolled out, only to get (temporarily) pulled after some minor backslash if it lands in the news.

I trust science, as science itself is a process of finding the truth, while accepting that we always start from assumptions. The science behind the vaccines is solid, that's why I urge everybody to get vaccinated. I don't trust politics, just look at the last couple of years in the U.S., if you want a supreme example why nobody in politics should be trusted on their blond hairpiece. That's why we shouldn't afford them the tools to suppress us. Those COVID-check apps can be easily repurposed into something else and before we know it, we really need the proverbial hall-pass to be allowed to walk on the streets... history has shown that stuff can turn ugly pretty quickly. That's why governments should only be allowed to keep the bare minimum of information about their citizens they require to function, everything else can and will eventually be used against us.

What I simply don't understand is how many of those anti-vaxers seemingly blindly trust all the fake news generated by once side of the political spectrum and would follow them blindly into the abyss, while they reject the one thing that is actually based on verifiable facts: science. Somewhere in our evolution from primates to what we are now, the evolution of our brains must have gotten stuck...

[Bobby Henderson]

If 70% or more people in a region are vaccinated, I don't see any need for COVID checks at the door.

Look at the issue from the perspective of the business. The US has a LOT of attorneys, many of whom salivate over the chance to take a local business to court over some liability issue.

Possible exposure to legal liability is one factor driving businesses to take all sorts of steps mitigating SARS-CoV-2 spread, including requiring customers to wear masks and/or reveal vaccination status. Legal issues are a primary motivation why some states have banned various mandates -the thinking is that it would shield the businesses since the state is setting the cavalier rules. Many businesses aren't buying that. So they're sticking with various mitigation steps, trying to balance customer safety with customer convenience.

Even if a local business was legally protected against liability for not requiring masks or vaccination it still runs another risk: bad publicity. No business wants to be known as the site of some kind of super-spreader event. Granted, at this point of the pandemic it can be very difficult to pin-point the location where someone got infected with SARS-CoV-2. That's especially true for places with really high levels of spread -like here in Oklahoma. But contact tracing still works to some degree and a COVID hot spot location would stand out as a common denominator in the movement history of those infected.

It's the same with many other stuff around us, the mobile phone that's constantly being monitored, the abundance of CCTV cameras around us. They are there for "our security", but in practice, our personal security hasn't really increased any bit in the last 20 or so years, quite to the contrary in many cases.

I don't agree with that. Even though the Big Brother is Watching element is pretty scary, those surveillance systems have helped solve many crimes. Countless numbers of burglars have been caught. People trying to commit insurance fraud schemes on highways have been busted (dash cams are a MUST for any commercial vehicle). I even saw an incident in the news recently of a child abduction being foiled thanks to door bell cameras that captured the perpetrator and his vehicle. The pedophile was busted before he could harm the child.

Criminals are notorious for being generally stupid, impulsive people. So it's taking them a little too long to realize they're probably going to get caught on camera when showing their ass. Plenty of crimes are still being committed. Our jails are bursting at the seams with idiots who didn't expect to get busted.

The thing that makes the public/private surveillance state scary: the general public's addition to outrage and how that is allowing governments to lurch farther in the direction of authoritarianism. In a functional democracy with plenty of checks and balances (and consequences) it's possible for powerful surveillance systems to be used in a responsible and limited manner. When an autocrat is allowed to take over the machine, well anything goes. I totally get the point that it might be better to reduce or eliminate much of this surveillance stuff. But the trade-off is a lot of criminals will have an easier time getting away with their bullshit. It's a difficult conundrum trying to balance personal freedom versus personal safety.

What I simply don't understand is how many of those anti-vaxers seemingly blindly trust all the fake news generated by once side of the political spectrum and would follow them blindly into the abyss, while they reject the one thing that is actually based on verifiable facts: science.

These people are following this stuff like fans following a favorite sports team. They're not digging into any of the nuance of various policies. In some cases they don't even know they're rooting against their own self interests. They've just picked a side to root for in a zero sum game, absolutist manner. The other side is the enemy and they all need to be rounded up and shot. Our 24/7 "news" channels and other media outlets exploit and grow this crap, all to sell advertising.

The Nebraska "Coughing Karen" is one really zany recent example. This lady was following a mother and child around a grocery store, harassing them, calling them "sheep" because they were wearing masks. The lady was so offended by the two wearing masks that she deliberately coughed on them repeatedly. Naturally, the altercation was caught on video. Then it got posted to Reddit. Internet sleuths figured out the identity of "Coughing Karen." Within days "Coughing Karen" was getting fired from her job at SAP. She might even be looking at criminal charges. If you spit on someone you can get charged with aggravated assault -a felony offense. Intentionally coughing on people during a freaking pandemic is not far off from that.

It's one thing for a person to get his nose bent out of shape by being asked to wear a mask. It's another to get offended by others choosing to mask up. If some guy is going to get his panties in a twist over others wearing masks he really needs to go fuck himself.

[Leo Enticknap]

Look at the issue from the perspective of the business. The US has a LOT of attorneys, many of whom salivate over the chance to take a local business to court over some liability issue.

In the context of which, a government edict saying that a business must require masks and/or vax passports is a convenient definition of the appropriate due diligence, beyond which the customer takes primary assumption of the risk.

What I simply don't understand is how many of those anti-vaxers seemingly blindly trust all the fake news generated by once side of the political spectrum and would follow them blindly into the abyss, while they reject the one thing that is actually based on verifiable facts: science.

For two reasons. 1 - the legitimate authorities have been caught lying to us repeatedly (infamous example), for purely political and/or self-interest reasons, making it difficult to trust anything they tell us. 2 - "The science" is not merely the presentation of facts, but drawing conclusions and recommendations based on the selection, comparison, and interpretation of facts. This is not about agreeing with, or disputing the claim that 2+2=4. It's about drawing conclusions (and in many cases, confusions) from a large amount of diverse, relatively young, and often conflicting data.

I know several vaccine hesitant people who believe that while on a balance of probabilities, the vaccines are likely relatively safe, that the authorities are also likely covering up the extent of adverse reactions and suspected long-term negative effects, because they're playing a numbers game: driving the covid numbers down now will get them political credit right now (and thus votes at imminent elections), whereas worrying about the 1 in 50 (for a hypothetical example) women for whom vaccination causes fertility problems will later, if ever. Therefore, what else could they be covering up? And given that covid is widely believed to have around a 99.97% recovery rate, what is really the lower risk? The problem with dishonesty is that once you've been caught doing it once, you're not going to be trusted again.

[Bobby Henderson]

1 - the legitimate authorities have been caught lying to us repeatedly (infamous example), for purely political and/or self-interest reasons, making it difficult to trust anything they tell us.

Is this to imply the outlets broadcasting contrary information (no masks, no vaccines, the pandemic is fake, people affected are "crisis actors," etc) are truth tellers? One 24/7 cable "news" network in particular constantly broadcasts anti-mask/vaccine misinformation yet requires its employees to either be fully vaccinated or submit to daily tests. That's some do as I say, not as I do hypocrisy.

The people disputing "the science" are often 100% guilty of not practicing what they preach when it comes to disseminating home-spun remedies -like taking copious amounts of horse de-worming medicine. None of the claims they're broadcasting, such as COVID vaccines cause infertility, are coming from legit, peer-reviewed studies. It's a bunch of bullshit. Yet there is a LOT of people putting more faith in that very dubious crap than "the science" behind the masks and vaccines.

Only 46% of people here in Oklahoma are fully vaccinated, thanks largely to all the bullshit that doesn't come from the gub'ment. So it's no wonder the hospitals here are overwhelmed with unvaccinated people and the staff are pulling their hair out trying to find room for medical emergency cases that don't involve COVID.

I'm thankful I picked a better time last year to partially shred my index finger in a lawn care accident. I had to have emergency orthopedic surgery on the finger and be kept overnight given IV antibiotics. I'd be up shit creek if I had the same accident today. I didn't realize such an injury was serious enough to warrant an overnight stay until a friend of mine died of a staff infection a few weeks later.

[Frank Cox]

I think the vaccine passports will make most people feel safer going out since they'll have some assurance that everyone who's sitting or standing around them at the event is fully vaccinated.

Plus it will give the anti-vax yahoos a kick in the pants and that's not a bad thing either.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't agree with that. Even though the Big Brother is Watching element is pretty scary, those surveillance systems have helped solve many crimes. Countless numbers of burglars have been caught. People trying to commit insurance fraud schemes on highways have been busted (dash cams are a MUST for any commercial vehicle). I even saw an incident in the news recently of a child abduction being foiled thanks to door bell cameras that captured the perpetrator and his vehicle. The pedophile was busted before he could harm the child.

Criminals are notorious for being generally stupid, impulsive people. So it's taking them a little too long to realize they're probably going to get caught on camera when showing their ass. Plenty of crimes are still being committed. Our jails are bursting at the seams with idiots who didn't expect to get busted.

The thing that makes the public/private surveillance state scary: the general public's addition to outrage and how that is allowing governments to lurch farther in the direction of authoritarianism. In a functional democracy with plenty of checks and balances (and consequences) it's possible for powerful surveillance systems to be used in a responsible and limited manner. When an autocrat is allowed to take over the machine, well anything goes. I totally get the point that it might be better to reduce or eliminate much of this surveillance stuff. But the trade-off is a lot of criminals will have an easier time getting away with their bullshit. It's a difficult conundrum trying to balance personal freedom versus personal safety.

Yeah, sure, CCTV will have trapped a whole bunch of stupid criminals over time. It probably will even deter some stupid people from doing some real stupid things. But even despite that, something like the January 6 insurrection, where everybody essentially brought their own surveillance camera and which we all could follow live on social media, still happened... Some even claim it might have stopped the odd terrorist attack, although I really doubt that claim, as we had pretty high security in airports before 9/11 and it still happened, the same with other terrorist attacks, that happened despite extensive CCTV networks, like those in the Underground of London back in 2005 or those in Brussels in 2016. In the end, crime rates across the board haven't seen any great trend downwards for the last 30 years or so, nothing that can directly be linked to increased mass-surveillance. Also, IMHO, the real danger doesn't come from the occasional petty thief, but either from organized crime by criminals sufficiently intelligent to outsmart those systems (Look at those drug cartels in Mexico for example, some of which who were running their OWN cellular networks to avoid surveillance...) and by those people who are so confident about "their cause", they don't mind being captured by those cameras anyway.

But you only need to look at what China is doing with their "Social Credit Schemes", what could be, if this kind of infrastructure falls into the hands of some oppressive government.

For two reasons. 1 - the legitimate authorities have been caught lying to us repeatedly (infamous example), for purely political and/or self-interest reasons, making it difficult to trust anything they tell us. 2 - "The science" is not merely the presentation of facts, but drawing conclusions and recommendations based on the selection, comparison, and interpretation of facts. This is not about agreeing with, or disputing the claim that 2+2=4. It's about drawing conclusions (and in many cases, confusions) from a large amount of diverse, relatively young, and often conflicting data.

That's why we have scientists, who do the interpretations of the numbers for us. Politics will take the "science" that fits them and will bend their arguments around it, but science that's biassed isn't real science, it's propaganda. But also here it's a simple numbers game. While you may not trust the individual scientist's claim, you need to look across the board and across many different countries and what you see then is that there is a large level of consensus on a lot of those things that even like almost 2 years into this pandemic, politics still doesn't agree upon, because it doesn't fit their purpose at that given moment.

I think the vaccine passports will make most people feel safer going out since they'll have some assurance that everyone who's sitting or standing around them at the event is fully vaccinated.

Well, that argument is based on a fallacy in logic. It's more likely for a vaccinated person to carry the virus as for an non-vaccinated person without knowing he/she is carrying it as the unvaccinated person is more likely to show symptoms. A person that hasn't been vaccinated is more likely to simply stay home if he/she is infected, because the chance of him/her feeling sick is bigger. So, it's more likely to actually get in touch with the virus in a fully vaccinated environment than in one where e.g. 30% isn't vaccinated.

I'm fully vaccinated and I don't have a problem to mix with unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people should be entirely aware that even vaccinated people pose a credible risk for them to still get infected though.

[Bobby Henderson]

Yeah, sure, CCTV will have trapped a whole bunch of stupid criminals over time. It probably will even deter some stupid people from doing some real stupid things. But even despite that, something like the January 6 insurrection, where everybody essentially brought their own surveillance camera and which we all could follow live on social media, still happened

A certain commander in chief -invited- those folks to the capitol during his rally prior to the riot. So they went. They weren't worried about cameras. And things got out of hand anyway. I think a bunch of those guys felt it was okay to invade the capitol because they were white and of a certain political persuasion, therefore they felt like they owned the place. Some where even saying so as they broke into offices. They probably also assumed since their group turned into a roaming mob there would be no way for security to catch anybody since there were so many of them overwhelming security. No way to pick out individual faces from that huge crowd, right? Well, they've been finding out they were wrong on that. Quite a few rioters have been busted via facial recognition technology, ID'ed in frame grabs from numerous cameras on the scene, including video the rioters themselves posted online. Computer scripts can process hundreds or even thousands of faces in a matter of seconds.

In relation to deterring crime, surveillance cameras do work. I love it when porch pirates get busted by doorbell cameras or when insurance scammers get caught in the act on the highways via dash cams. The technology is getting better, more affordable and easier to install. The cameras aren't going anywhere. If anything, we're going to see a lot more of them deployed.

The danger going forward isn't cameras. It's who can have access to all of them. If America is collectively stupid enough to put a full-blown tyrant into office then, yeah, we're going to be in some deep shit. On the other hand, despots who've done despicable things have not needed surveillance cameras to trample on the rights of citizens. With so much of our public compulsively entertained by anger pornography (the shit being passed off as news) the possibility is there for the US to become an authoritarian dictatorship. Collectively we're gullible enough, stupid enough and impulsive enough to let it happen.

Some even claim it might have stopped the odd terrorist attack, although I really doubt that claim, as we had pretty high security in airports before 9/11 and it still happened

There were multiple colossal failures in security leading up to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Some of the failures occurred in very high places. Despite the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building getting bombed in Oklahoma City, most Americans figured real terrorist attacks happen overseas. We were taking a lot of things for granted 20 years ago.

In the end, crime rates across the board haven't seen any great trend downwards for the last 30 years or so, nothing that can directly be linked to increased mass-surveillance.

I don't know crime trends in Europe, but here in the United States crime rates have indeed pushed down over the past 20-30 years. The numbers are publicly available via the FBI's UCR database. In 1980 the homicide rate in the US was 10.2 murders per 100,000 people, which remains the modern day record. The rate stayed high throughout the 1980's and then started trending downward in the 1990's. For the past decade the rate has hovered just under 5 murders per 100,000 people. Burglary rates have been on a steady downward slope since the early 1980s. Larceny peaked in the early 1990's then started trending downward. Vehicle thefts hit a high of over 650 per 100,000 people in the early 1990's; today the rate is about 1/3 that number.

We don't hear about this progress because the "news" media does not make money broadcasting good news. They keep viewers' eyes glued to the TV screens via fear and outrage. If a viewer went only by the tone of typical news broadcasts he would think crime in America is worse than ever.

Also, IMHO, the real danger doesn't come from the occasional petty thief, but either from organized crime by criminals sufficiently intelligent to outsmart those systems (Look at those drug cartels in Mexico for example, some of which who were running their OWN cellular networks to avoid surveillance...) and by those people who are so confident about "their cause", they don't mind being captured by those cameras anyway.

Cartels in Mexico are able to do what they do South of the Border because many government and law enforcement agencies down there are corrupted from the inside. Cameras don't make any difference there. North of the Border the cartels have the business model of simply flooding so much of their product across the border our agencies get overwhelmed playing whack-a-mole just trying to keep up with it. The only real way to fight that battle is by curbing the demand side of the equation with various approaches.

Surveillance cameras are not a panacea to fight all types of crime. But they are good with fighting many types of property crimes and violent crimes.