You’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s not about if the lockdowns were better or worse, not even a bit. It’s about whether or not governments should have the power and ability to enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were absolutely necessary. Now that the data, retrospectively, seems muddled and unclear, the conversation can recenter on if the government we want should even have the power to do what they did.
It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group.
Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions.
I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.
It’s about whether or not governments should have the power and ability to enact lockdowns in the first place. This was a somewhat mocked perspective when the general idea was the lockdowns were absolutely necessary.
I'd never mock the perspective, the situation is too serious.
When there was an active fire threatening my town a couple years, emergency issued an evacuation order and arrested people who came into the area. When I worked as a teacher in the 1990s, I had to get various vaccines as a condition for having a job. When I traveled in 2012, I also had to get some vaccines to visit various countries. Health departments have for a long time required restaurants to control the behavior of their customers including preventing them from, say coughing on the salad bar.
Covid involved the state using it's existing powers on a larger scale, no doubt. And how well it did that can certainly be debated. But all the powers the state used existed already.
So the arguments that try to put paint this situation as fundamentally new and wrong are incorrect. That they were accompanied by efforts to also falsify the nature of the illness itself reinforces the perspective that they were disingenuous. But I recognize people can convince themselves of a lot when it suits them.
if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off
As far as I can tell, the anger about state actions against and claims that it was some new are part of the generally polarized state of American politics. So, I think I understand. People are map 'cause they're convinced themselves of self-serving baloney. That's not an unusual source of anger for humans. But this doesn't make me "understanding" as you can imagine. Indeed, those people sure aren't the only angry ones and shouldn't be treat as special for their anger.
My early memory is when I was a kid they were drafting 18 year olds and sending them to Vietnam. 15 years before that they were sending young men to Korea. And before that 10 million men to Europe and the Pacific.
If you want something more related in 1948 or some such there was a small outbreak of smallpox in New York. And they vaccinated 80% of the city in a couple of months.
Speaks to me that while the state has and always had had these powers it's become loath to use them.
Whether or not you agree if these particular lockdowns were needed, I can't believe anyone would argue there is NO situation where a government should have the legal authority to order a lockdown.
What if Covid had a 50% mortality rate? Would that not have justified a lockdown?
It wouldn't have been needed. Nor was the one we did have. The huge amount of fear in March 2020 resulted in evidence of that*: Cell phone tracking data in the US showed people were staying home about a week before a single lockdown started. The lockdown orders had no effect, no additional people stopped moving around, and movement started creeping back upwards only a few weeks later while the lockdowns were still in full effect.
*I've looked for this over and over since then and haven't been able to find it, I get the feeling it might have been taken offline.
No, not even a 100% mortality rate justifies a lockdown
Movement of individuals (as long as he/she is not moving into your home/territory etc.) is IMO a sacred 'right' that one must offer one's fellow humans. It's a slippery slope if a dire situation however real is used as a justification for a lockdown.
After reading your comment, I have a better understanding of the thoughts that may be going through the mind of "Tuberculosis Tammy", who has infectious TB and has been on the run from isolation/treatment since January 2022[1].
I disagree with the concept that individual freedoms trumps the safety of other's, as does society at large, which deems some level of negligence to be criminal.
I hope the next pandemic has a short incubation period and ultra-high mortality.
I was hoping you'd explain in more detail, so I wont have to assume what your reasoning. By "do both", were you perhaps referring to measures like masks mandates while allowing people move freely? Unsurprisingly, some people felt mandates violated the sanctity of their individual rights too.
>I was hoping you'd explain in more detail, so I wont have to assume what your reasoning. By "do both",
sangnoir, Think really hard and you will be able to come up with something (where 'both' can be done).
If you cannot come up with anything then I'd say that even having a discourse with someone who can potentially come up with something is pointless because of the wide chasm.
I think it is a slippery slope to say that freedom of movement trumps all other rights. No one has the right to kill me and my children just so they can exercise their right to go wherever they want whenever they want.
At least as far as COVID is concerned, and that's because COVID isn't a realistic concern for most children.
There are people (children, but also others) for whom it is a marked concern, and appropriate risk mitigation strategies should be taking. Working with the gung-ho assumption that all spaces are essentially risk free would represent a fail in your duty of care.
I was not necessarily talking about Covid, but about a hypothetical worse pandemic with a much higher fatality rate. The person I replied to said there would be no situation worth restricting freedom of movement for, no matter how deadly the disease.
If you're of child rearing age your risk of dying was like driving 10,000 miles. Also, you're delegating your responsibility to the "other". As other posters mentioned if that level of risk is unacceptable you can choose to take measures that bring the risk more inline with whatever tolerance you have.
Some of us are more afraid of an all powerful state using any excuse to further their own interests.
We have to ban accounts that post like this, no matter how incorrectly someone else read a comment, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This is really interesting. So you would genuinely be okay with with the death of something like 99% of the human population, because government imposed lockdowns are worse? Because that's what a 100% mortality rate COVID means without NPIs, 90-95% of people dead from the virus directly and almost all of the rest dead because society had collapsed around them. I am absolutely fascinated by the kind of person that can genuinely believe that, is it a sort of extreme libertarianism? Or maybe an ecological thing, you think the death of humanity would be a genuinely good thing and this 100% mortality COVID would just be a means to an end?
>okay with with the death of something like 99% of the human population
No, certainly not. I want people to make their own informed choices. It can be heart-wrenching for oneself to observe people make (what you think) an obvious wrong choice, but if you had any any life experiences of substance, you will realize that all you can do is give people the most accurate information that you have, but you should never, ever impose your decision (even if it's for the person's good) if the person does not consent to it. One could probably make an exception for very young kids.
Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Side note: who exactly decides what is good for the individual?
>No, certainly not. I want people to make their own informed choices.
These are two contradictory sentences. Wanting people to make their own informed choices unimpinged by government action while a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate exists is definitionally being okay with the death of 99% of the human population. Like, that is the outcome so by definition if you're in favour of only dealing with pandemics through personal responsibility and you're saying that would be the case even with a virus with the transmissibility of COVID and a 100% fatality rate, then you are saying that the death of 99% of people in existence is an acceptable outcome. What I am asking is why you believe that.
What? are even _trying_ to understand me? People can stay at home and impose their own 'lockdown' and save their own lives. The one's that venture out should know that they will die, it's their choice.
The obvious outcome of that is that 99% of existing people will die. I am not asking about and do not care about whether they're "choosing to die" (an absurd thing to say about the need for food and water, anyway), I am asking why you are okay with the outcome where 99% of people are dead.
So you assume that people are too stupid (a fair assumption) to know the correct decision to take . Who is to say that you (or the govt) are not stupid, in the eyes of others? The arrogance here that you actually think you know better than others (again a fair assumption) and you want your way to be the only way(the really evil part).
>I am asking why you are okay with the outcome where 99% of people are dead.
Do you have any real life experiences? this happens all the time, why the fuck do you keep repeating that I actually _want_ people to die? Really evil things happen, when you try and help people even if it is for their own good without their consent. Often _more_ than 99% people will die if you do that. Let me repeat: you do not have enough life experiences. Let me also say another thing: you do not read enough history especially of the 'extermination' kind. There is also a good possibility, that you are a nerd/sociopath if you do not understand the concept of live, and let live.
I mean ultimately the answer is yes. People look at COVID and say it's not a big deal, but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse. We're not at all prepared if we have something like a Black Death 2.0 and ultimately your ability to function as an individual depends on society's ability to actually function. Even the half-assed measures we took against COVID helped prevent our hospital systems from completely collapsing which would've led to far more deaths.
The fact that people don't see this means they've grown too comfortable with modern society and how far we've become in preventing disease spread. Maybe it'll take a Black Death 2.0 for people to understand this.
> but I look at it and say that we're lucky it wasn't something far worse
So it wasn’t. We knew it was mild, certainly worse than flu, but still mostly killing the elderly above life expectancy.
- We knew newspapers were grossly exaggerating information to the point of saying obvious bait (“the vaccine enlarges the penis” — yup they said it),
- We knew newspapers were under gag order to publish misinformation.
- We knew that most governments declared the law of exception and state of emergency, so from that point, no information could be trusted.
We knew it was mild because everyone was in a state of hysteria, from “SO YOU WANT TO KILL ALL GRANDMOTHERS” to “IN NYC THEY USE GIANT DUMPSTER TRUCKS TO CARRY THE DEADS TO THE MORGUE, SO WHY ARE YOU AGAINST LOCKDOWNS”. We knew it was all a gross exaggeration.
The assumption here though is that there is not a situation where lockdowns are not only entirely appropriate, but would be uncontroversial except for a tiny majority. But there are trivial examples where it would be.
Like outbreaks of:
- Smallpox
- Ebola
- Weaponized Anthrax
- Some other novel bug with high fatality rates.
You don't have to go very far back to figure out WHY the laws being used were put in place. Even in the 60's-70's, if someone had Measles they'd be in enforced quarantine in their house along with the rest of their family until it cleared. Because not doing that kills people. Innocent people. Often a lot more innocent people than the original infected, all because someone got selfish and couldn't control what they were doing.
Public Health == Police == Fire fighting. They all exist to protect the population. They are peers. That some how Public Health would occur outside of the government is truly odd. Would you be in favor of Fire Departments being left up to individuals?
Slight tangent but that's an interesting example, because while healthcare and police have (at least in theory, not the point here) training/accountability requirements, there are many places with locally organised fire response units alongside of the gov organised ones. Especially in areas far away from larger towns, communities pick up a lot of organisation and responsibility for practical reasons. In extreme cases of very isolated farms, it's literally the individuals that deal with the problems unless it's likely to becomes a widespread issue.
It’s not even a little bit about being inconvenienced, and anyone who says that is either a straw man or an idiot. It’s about the basic principle of the individual and their rights versus the group.
Of course it was a chaotic natural disaster. The question is, in the face of a natural disaster, do you or do you not want the ability to make your own decisions.
I’m no anarchist or libertarian, but if we can’t understand why those folks are really pissed off and why it has nothing to do with whatever the R-naught actually was, we’ll never make progress.