Italy has closed all stores other than grocery and drug stores. All non-essential travel is banned. There's a short list of valid essentials, like taking care of aging parents; there are roadblocks, they'll make you fill out a form stating your purpose, it's a crime to lie about it, and they do sometimes check.
In China, every place you go you get your temperature taken. Go in a building, get on a bus, they take your temperature. Show a fever, they take you to a dedicated fever center, where they check you for flu and bacterial infection. Come up clear on those, you're waiting four hours for a covid-19 test. Come up positive, you're there for the duration. You don't go home to your family because they've found 80% of transmissions are in family clusters.
Because the individual makes the wrong call for the whole.
Saying the individual makes the wrong call for the whole is remarkably stupid. The West is built on correct decisions for the whole by individuals.
Mindless politics.
Social distancing is therefore vital when patients keep coming out of nowhere. If there's a group of people they could easily spread the virus before they even know. If people don't listen, it may have to be enforced for public safety. It's the approach China, Singapore, and South Korea have done and succeeded in various levels.
But it's not just about you. It's about the elderly, the sick, the weak around you. Even if you end up fine after getting the disease, you're going to transmit it to other people, directly or indirectly, who may end up dying because of you. That's what R0 is about.
So yeah, a lock down will suck for you, but I hope it makes you feel better to know that it will help save someone else's life.
There are about 35k car crash deaths in the US each year [0].
I’ve seen estimates for total infection rate all over the map. Conservatively (?) if 30% of the US population is eventually infected and the fatality rate is 1%, that’s 1 million people, and basically two orders of magnitude larger for a comparable (?) time period. If we don’t do more than we currently are to limit transmission, these figures don’t seem that implausible.
Auto deaths are still a huge problem, but we can take more targeted action like improving transit coverage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
Italy has 3,333 deaths from car accidents per year. Currently 0.04% of Italy has confirmed covid-19. They have 1809 deaths from it.
* Only stores open are grocery stores, pharmacies and some other essentials.
* No going out except to go to work or go food shopping, or a brief walk in your neighborhood, on your own.
* No weddings, funerals, church.
* No travel outside your town, except for work.
* Work from home if you can.
* Some companies, like Ferrari, are simply shutting down for a bit - they're not a key element in anyone's supply chain.
My mom and dad are 73 years old and I don't give a damn about someone's tin-foil-hattery about "fighting the war on viruses 20 years from now", if I can keep them from dying. Go read some first-person accounts from people living in Italy, not just the ones about the roadblocks and forms you have to fill out, but also the ones from people who couldn't even say goodbye to their loved ones who died or the ones from HCWs about the collapse of their hospitals.
All of us who are pissed off about the lockdowns should hold on to that anger and express it fully after we have to stop worrying about our parents and grandparents being left for dead.
Reasonable precautions? Of course. Going nuts and disrupting everyone's lives and businesses like that? I'd rather not.
1. Go nuts and lock everything down, Wuhan-style. 2. Be really competent at testing people, tracking everyone they've come into contact with over the previous ~2 weeks, test them too, and recurse. South Korea/Singapore-style. 3. Accept that ~60% of your population will get the virus and take the ~million deaths.
Obviously 2 is the best choice to take, but in the absence of competent government, you will inevitably get overreaching government because reasonable precautions taken by mediocre government DOES NOT WORK!
You left out a fourth option:
4. People exercise common sense and take precautions on their own initiative to minimize their risk.
You don't have to wait for the government to tell you what to do.
Yes, this was the oddest thing I noticed while shopping for necessaries. Every single place I went to was totally cleaned out of toilet paper. Other paper products were depleted but not completely out, but TP--nada. I don't get it.
At least in the US, I think it's too early to tell what the outcome of that option is.
We are not solving this through cleverness anymore, if it was ever on the table.
There are parents at my kids' schools rolling their eyes and planning playdates. The local ski hill closed and people are complaining falsely "it's less lethal than the flu". There are people filling bars all over the country.
It doesn't take all that many of these people to flood the hospital ICUs - which already run pretty full in normal times - well beyond capacity.
This is exacerbated by the political angle: once a huge, well-funded and entrenched propaganda system picked this up, it became inevitable that there’d be a lot of people who will take inordinate amounts of personal risk because they think doing so is somehow sticking it to liberals. The latest NBC poll showed a stark partisan divide on even basic personal safety measures:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/sixty-percen...
I like choosing lock-down to reduce no of wild cases to a small number followed by option 2. I believe that is what they are planning in Wuhan and China. They'll lift off the lock down gradually but will continue with aggressive monitoring/testing and tracing. This will bring back the economy while still keeping the risk of epidemic.
this implies 0.5% fatality rate. That's about an order of magnitude off.
Look at South Korea. Do you see a 5% CFR there? Of course not.
Every other nation would rather not too but, as soon as every single hospital collapses due to the sheer volume of cases (it's really that bad)... oh, you'd all rather yep, just like we did. It doesn't look like the US is going the South Korean way.
And when I say "the hospital collapses" I really mean it cannot even take care of other emergencies. There are not enough ICU beds nor ventilators. Period. Normal operation is mostly halted too (I know this from first hand).
The worst is I know you won't listen, just like nobody else listened until it was too late. Quote me on that.
"If a quarantinable disease is suspected or identified, CDC may issue a federal isolation or quarantine order.
Public health authorities at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels may sometimes seek help from police or other law enforcement officers to enforce a public health order.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Coast Guard officers are authorized to help enforce federal quarantine orders.
Breaking a federal quarantine order is punishable by fines and imprisonment."
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...
The commerce clause doesn't override the second amendment (or any other part of the bill of rights), there are only cases where a particular amendment was found not to apply.
What you're looking for is emergency powers, but they're not actually in the constitution. In practice what has happened is that Presidents do whatever thing in an emergency and then get sued over it after, and typically lose, but by then it's years later and whatever temporary measures they ordered in the middle of the emergency are long since discontinued.
It's kind of a kludge, but it also kind of works, because it keeps the emergency measures from extending longer than it takes for the courts to catch up to it, and also gives the victims of rights violations the ability to get compensated after the fact for being done wrong in the midst of a big mess.
There are also strong restrictions on the scope of quarantine orders that would be allowed to circumvent due process in emergencies.
What a free society could do is massively incentivize and subsidize new drug research, while lowering the barrier to entry for human trials. Right now this is only being done manually in the US with a few drugs and major players, such as Remdesivir, instead of allowing a systematic approach for non-major players to skip the line, too (e.g. university research labs).
I hate to say it but this whole thread gives me the vibe of democracy dying to thunderous applause.
Personally, I believe very strongly in personal freedom, so I would absolutely rather have a million deaths than go into a state-mandated nationwide total lockdown.
Anyway, the truth is it’s not an “either or” scenario.
Hopefully there’s a sane middleground that we converge on :)
Stay at home as often as you can, reasonably. You don't need a curfew, yet!
People should stay home unless they're getting groceries/medicine or going to work in a hospital or other piece of critical infrastructure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22218495
But there was not widespread interest here at the time.
Edit: Who likes drones anyway?