821–830 of 894 posts
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For pandemic flu, yes, quarantine would be reasonable. The 1918 pandemic claimed tens of millions of lives.
The 2017 flu season killed 200 Americans per million, world wide that amounts to 1,400,000 people. Should we have locked down in 2017?
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You said that quarantine was only for sick people. That's simply wrong. It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone. Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even…
People die. My loved ones and I have made peace with that. Life is not about avoiding death. 10 million is frankly a drop in the bucket. We don't shut down society and hand over control of our lives over car accidents, heart failure, or anything else that kills hundreds of millions. The behaviors that lead to those deaths are absolutely a form of social contagion and in no world are they less important or relevant be…
"People die" as an excuse for letting millions of people die of preventable causes is a terrible attitude to take.
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The 2017 flu season killed 200 Americans per million, world wide that amounts to 1,400,000 people. Should we have locked down in 2017?
Which means that CoVID-19 has had about 10 times the impact as seasonal flu. That's extremely serious.
Should we have locked down in 2017? What number of deaths is the magic one where we decide that it's too much and we need to close everything for years on end?
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> IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea." Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.
> Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK. That's his point. He's drawing a contrast to blackout laws,by claiming that an individual sees direct benefit from compliance (not getting bombed) while breaking lockdown doesn't create a lot of risk for the vast majority of offenders. Ie, if a hypothetical person was 100% optimizing for self-interest, th…
Yes… except that’s the other way around from what happened in reality. People did break blackout lockdown rules but they generally didn’t break COVID lockdown rules.
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I guess I don’t understand this concern, because it doesn’t seem historically accurate. There have been many pandemics in the past. Governments have responded in the past with aggressive quarantines. Yet, before this current pandemic, no country had aggressive quarantines in place. These kinds of restrictions imposed by governments have historically disappeared with high reliability when the situation calling for the…
Maybe, but in the past no government has had access to the tracking data we are freely allowing them to have to us. I sound like I'm an anti vax conspiracy theorist, and I don't want to put that across, but there is a strong precedent for abuse of power in every government across the globe. A lot of draconian measures ease when the panic is over, but shadows of them seem to remain in place, at least in the U.S. (agai…
I'm not sure I fully buy that. What authoritarian powers were left in place as a hangover from the Spanish Flu emergency powers that governors wielded at the time? Historically, the executive of governments have had _incredible_ emergency powers during infectious diseases crises, but I don't know that I've seen those powers extended indefinitely.
I'm absolutely wary of handling governments unlimited and unchecked power, even in emergencies. I generally agree with your concerns about governments being reluctant to return powers once they're granted. But I do think it's important not to overact and refuse to allow any government action on the other side of the equation.
In the given Australia example, the state is exercising quarantine powers to stop an infectious disease. That sounds...not that novel or expansive to me. Nor does it seem like something the government will have an interest in beyond the pandemic. Quarantines, I think, are a really strong example of an _extreme_ limitation on liberty and expansion of the state's powers that are tolerated during a pandemic but absolutely abhorrent outside of one. It's also an example of powers that almost never are extended indefinitely beyond the pandemic.
> Here's an example of how anti Covid measures are being used to stop protests.
Turning to the cited article, I don't think it supports the position you're stating. The author appears to be discussing legislatures using the COVID emergency as a _distraction_, but doesn't present any anti-COVID measures being used to stop protests.
I'll admit that each of the bills passed and signed are an abhorrent restriction on the right to protest and the right to free speech and assembly. Accepted and granted. But none of those bills appear to be anti-COVID measures in any way. As far as I can tell from reviewing the legislation and reviewing contemporaneous articles, the only connection to COVID was the fact that the public was distracted.
The South Dakota bill for example (https://mylrc.sdlegislature.gov/api/Documents/69887.pdf) doesn't mention "COVID", or "pandemic". The only mention of "disease" is in the definition of intoxication (to explicitly say it is not a mental disease).
The Kentucky bill is similar (https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/20rs/hb44.html). It doesn't mention "COVID", "pandemic", or "disease", and doesn't appear in _any_ way to be designed as an anti-COVID measure.
The only anti-COVID measures discussed in the article by the author are praised as a measured and reasonable response. The only "use" of the pandemic by the legislatures was as a distraction.
I do agree that anti-COVID measures targeted at public protest should receive significantly more scrutiny than many other anti-COVID measures.
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This is why I’m an anti-authoritarian first and a democrat second. Civil liberties are more important than democracy, they’re worth too much to let the masses throw them in the bin at the first scent of fear.
Same for me. I'd like to see many more small countries and city states. Or at least people taking federalism and subsidiarity serious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity That's because people seem to be much more reasonable when voting with their feet and wallets, then when voting at the polling booth. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter for some background.) Eg in a US context,…
I've lived to see this kind of thing enacted in a good portion of the Anglosphere and my visceral reaction is to engage in a combination of civil disobedience and a determination to undermine every overstep made. With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of hav…
You seem to be referring to the South Australia Home Quarantine app [1]. There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about this app recently. I'd just like to clear up some things: The app only applies to people that need to quarantine, not the general population. The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being f…
Wait. So if I refuse to be tracked by the government, the government will take me by force to a detention camp?
Did someone accidently ran a search and replace for Cuba and Australia before publishing the article?
You know, of all places where Big Brother would be a real thing, Australia was not in my list. I always think a country that use the C word as a term of endearment would know how to take things slow.
Are there any Australians here on HN? Who in your country is pushing this BS? What's the selling point? What do media say?
It's "for our safety". For context, I'm Australian and have just come back after almost 20 years away, living around the world. Safety is now the absolute most important thing in Australia above everything else. Sadly, it's now more important than enjoying life. I'll be leaving, only come back to visit family from time to time. I have zero interest in living here.
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Right, there's something disconcerting about the way people are behaving in this situation, and it's hard to process this as something that could reasonably happen. "I thought we were rational people in a free society?" The terrible thing is that this is exactly how people behaved in "historical" times - a foreshadowing to what lies ahead. The vast majority of people believe we are post-history, and that we're someho…
> . "I thought we were rational people in a free society There is no polity in the world in which "rational people" drove covid policy (or individual behavior) to any significant degree. Whether we're talking about Florida's low restrictions and high cases or the Bay Area's converse outcome, the best you can hope for is that the masses, through their blind superstition and social signaling, ended up somewhere close t…
I would even say that DeSantis isn't really trying to follow science in his decisions, but more trying to align with the beliefs of Floridians.
Sweden is one country which seems to have made the right decisions, though they themselves have said they would have done lockdowns if it were legal to do so. Because of that, I'd say that Sweden is at least competent and transparent in it's democratic policies. Other countries simply made lockdowns legal, clearly subverting their own established democratic processes. Now Sweden seems to be quite happy about it's decisions though.