Freedom is not absolute. As Hobbes said, without government to help organize us, life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Obviously there is such a thing as too much control, but there is also such a thing as too little.

Situations such as this are extraordinary. We have a virulent and serious disease we're trying to control the best way we can. The best leaders are making difficult decisions using the best science we have to guide them.

Protecting the innocent and the vulnerable -- and valuing life in general -- is a tenet that our society has chosen to adopt. How do we do that? By balancing freedom with measured restrictions that are consistent with that tenet.

We can argue about whether the measures taken are effective, or whether they restrict too much freedom. But to just say "Fuck it all, absolute freedom for everyone! Everyone toss out their masks and get together indoors!" during this crisis goes much too far in my view.

I said nothing about masks. This thread has people advocating murder charges for going to a wedding and spreading to someone who dies afterwards. WHO said lockdowns should not be primary method of stopping the spread. Lockdowns harm as much as help, loss of jobs at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, cancer screenings delayed, mental health issues related to isolation, and we don't know the huge cost of what has already occurred. Quite a few want to look at one thing and not the entirety of a situation. The stats show that this virus is no worse than the Hong Kong flu (1-4 million people died in 1968 / 1969). We went to the freaking moon and held Woodstock during that time. You don't value life by not living it.

Slight difference is that this disease is fifty times more deadly than the HK flu. Just about everyone in the US got that one and about 50,000 people died. We are at 5 times that level already and only 10% of the population has been exposed. (Also the value placed on old people’s lives has increased drastically... you might not like it but it is social consensus to spend millions to extend the lives of 75-year-olds by a few more years. )

Where do you see it as being fifty times more deadly? Wikipedia lists Hong Kong flu deaths in US as upwards of 100,000 with 100m less people in the country. Even at fifty times more deadly it is not greatest cause of death this year. Heart disease and cancer have killed far more (over a million collectively). The response is way out of proportion to what we have seen. I believe the initial response was appropriate given the projections (which turned out to be a complete fabrication) of millions dead in US alone. We've seen what this virus is, it's not millions dead. We can't cancel life for a couple of years waiting for this to go away, everyone needs to get on with their lives, getting married, seeing people over the holidays. This continued fearful response is preposterous.

>> This continued fearful response is preposterous.

Careful pal. The Emperor's new suit is made of the finest hypothesis.

What's the death rate right now? How many people have died over the norm?

Your choices and decisions are what threatens your life. If you don't want to be exposed to Covid, don't leave your home. I don't see why others shouldn't walk around / party, if they're themselves willing to take on the risk of infection.

Those killed in the story didn’t go to the party. As well as those who died, some number will have long term disability and illness. Many of them won’t have been guests at the wedding.

They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. I'm not saying it's easy to avoid such choices, but even things like going out to buy food - how many layers of mask are you wearing? What hours do you go shopping? How many months of food do you have stored at your home (inb4 "survivalists are just paranoid")?

> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently.

Please, read the article.

Neither the residents of the long-term care facility nor the inmates at the jail are likely to have had any meaningful ability to vet their contacts.

Indeed, in those case the duty of care was explicitly (legally?) delegated to someone else. Someone in the chain of transmission had a duty of care, and failed in that duty.

> Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next.

It wasn't a partygoer. I'm fine with holding specific people responsible (even legally) if they failed their explicit duty of care, but assigning blame to the whole population just because they don't comply with your narrow moral senses is intellectually dishonest. If we stopped doing that, maybe we could also focus on actually being effective (e.g. specifically protecting the old / vulnerable & their caretakers with specific, targeted and (most importantly) effective measures), not just requiring that everybody abide by arbitrary rules.

That's a bit like saying you should personally vet every automobile driver before they drive close to you to see if they're intoxicated, and if you get injured by a drunk driver, that was your fault for not having vetted them sufficiently.

> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party

Some (all?) of the fatalities were rest home patients and many who caught it were prison inmates. They didn’t get to make any choices about who they saw or who cared for them.

Because of... what the top-level comment in the thread you're responding to says?

I waited too long to post my rant and the comment got killed, so you've become my rant-patsy, and I'm pasting it below. Also, yeah, things like choosing to eat, just choose not to go get food and you're good, right?

Jeez, what a short-sighted, selfish, impatient, and entitled point of view. I'm guessing you haven't spent much time living anywhere that's actually dangerous?

A large percentage of people in the world have live their lives cautiously, because where they live is really dangerous. There are places that have to deal with ebola still, there are places where not being deferential to the right person means that you and your family are hunted and killed. Most of these places are what we call third-world countries, and being in danger, having your family in danger, is a staple of living in them. If they've been dangerous for a long time, then ALL of the people living there live cautiously, defensively, because everyone who wasn't genetically predisposed to this behavior was killed by their environment long ago.

In most first world countries, and the USA in particular, a vast majority of the population has no clue what it's like to live under these types of conditions, where you actually have to try to take steps to protect yourself. Until this year, the most danger the average American was in was during our morning commutes, where being actively defensive means "Try not to look at your phone too much while driving". Now we're just experiencing a taste of how it is to live in many of the third world countries.

What is absolutely insane though, is not that we are too stupid to figure out how to live cautiously and defensively (we're not used to having this burden, so it's somewhat understandable that we don't know how to handle it), it's that even when we're told common sense procedures to act defensively, we actively fight against them. Taking precautions that are stupid simple, that are common sense, that are EASY, and that will preserve our lives, the lives of our family and friends, and the lives in our communities, we reject those because we can't get past the delusional narcissism that we should never have to sacrifice anything.

And that's why we've had 240 thousand deaths due to covid since March. Cause we, as a nation, responded as entitled yuppy assholes, instead of taking some basic, easy, mature steps to protect ourselves.

I'm not sure if you meant to write this sarcastically, but it kind-of sounds like you're comparing COVID with third-world countries full of Ebola and tribal killings? You do realize you're the comparison is a bit ridiculous?

Ultimately, it's a question of value. How much do you value not getting an illness with 99.9% survival rate, vs. living your life. And then imposing your own value system onto others (or not).

At no point did I compare COVID to a country, so no. Also, you use an awful lot of nasty little rhetorical manipulations in your posts, did you realize that? Actually, that last sentence is an example of one of these tricks you use! Go back and read my post if you're interested in learning something, but do not use faulty summarization to misrepresent what I wrote.

But aside from your creepy and manipulative way of writing, let's get down to the heart of the matter. You wrote: "How much do you value not getting an illness with 99.9% survival rate, vs. living your life." This is a stupid and fallacious argument. It presupposes that you cannot take cautious, responsible, defensive measures against being infected without sacrificing "living your life". I'm currently living in a first world country, living happy, content, and healthy, and also only going out in public places when I really need to, and always masking when I do. It's not the SAME as pre-Covid, but it's also not painful, difficult, or boring. So taking some simple, possibly inconvenient precautions means you can still "live your life", it just means that there are some boundaries dictated by your circumstances.

Secondly, let's say for the sake of really destroying your argument that you can't both take these common sense precautions and still "live your life". Fine, COVID 19 is destroying your mojo during 2020. All you have to do is take a year off. It's ridiculously fucking easy. We'll have good enough therapies early next year to make COVID not a huge problem anymore, so when you say "live your life", what you're actually taking about not being able to do is "living your life for a year and maybe a couple months", which is really not a big deal when you consider all the harm you can do to the people around you by being a selfish twat.