291–295 of 295 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Centralism worked well enough in Europe. The problem is counterpowers and rule of law, not the structure of government.
Where were these checks and balances when Europe decided to rob and enslave the whole world? (British, Spanish and Belgian colonies)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Centralism worked well enough in Europe. The problem is counterpowers and rule of law, not the structure of government.
Where were these checks and balances when Europe decided to rob and enslave the whole world? (British, Spanish and Belgian colonies)
What link is there between COVID management and the colonial empires ? How can administration predating or concurrent to the industrial revolution could possibly be used as a placeholder for current administrations ? Your comment makes no sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, I am highly confused by China's zero coivd policy. Just by the nature of how viruses work, that seems impossible. It worked for original SARS, no?
2 big differences SARS didn't explode all over the globe and if you got SARS your fate was decided very quickly. Covid can be very mild or even asymptomatic making it easy to miss.
It is possible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 in countries with competent public health systems. However, most countries did not attempt elimination. Instead, they followed their standard pandemic response plans, which are based on influenza, and which only aim to slow the spread of the virus.
Notably, a number of countries did not follow the standard response plans for an influenza pandemic, and instead went for (and rapidly achieved) complete elimination: mainland China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, and others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people weren't so resistant to government policy we might have seen something close to zero covid rolled out in the US and, instead of the US being the locus of disease for a number of years, we might have actually ended this pandemic with a decisive but painful quarantine - instead we'll continue in this state of psuedo quarantine for who knows how many years... how we comport ourselves today might just be the ne…
That's just nonsense completely divorced from scientific reality. Even a strict quarantine wouldn't have sufficed to stop a highly contagious respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs. It's now clear that the best strategy would have been to focus on protecting the most vulnerable, as recommended by leading experts back in 2020. https://gbdeclaration.org/
The countries that pursued an elimination strategy (a.k.a. zero-CoVID) have had orders of magnitude fewer deaths, and were able to enjoy long periods of time with virtually no restrictions on everyday life. Life in the vast majority of China has been basically normal for most of the last 2 years. People have been going to restaurants, holding parties, going to concerts, etc. without having to worry about the virus, because it hasn't been spreading in the country.
> recommended by leading experts
The Great Barrington Declaration isn't some sort of consensus of "leading experts." It's a document drawn up by a libertarian think tank, that a small number of academics signed. For political reasons, most Western countries have ended up following something close to this strategy since fairly early on in the pandemic, and the results (both in terms of deaths and economic impact) have been abysmal, particularly in comparison with the zero-CoVID countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are assuming their reported death numbers are accurate. You are also assuming the deaths caused by these policies won’t end up exceeding that number. Neither assumptions are backed by evidence.
> Neither assumptions are backed by evidence. To the contrary, there is no evidence to suggest that China has had the spread necessary to kill 3 million people nor any evidence suggesting that they have covered up 3 million deaths. You might naively think we have no way of checking, but this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China. We have seen no indication of a dec…
> this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China.
Who is doing that testing?