I don't have the personal freedom to get drunk and drive my car down the highway because that puts the lives of everyone on the road in jeopardy. Spreading disease is the same thing. Your personal freedoms end when they start invading my personal freedom to continue living.

Let me ask you something; Has there been any setting in the past 50 years other than changing sexual mores in which people have gained any personal freedom? And have any of the instances in which people lost bits of their freedoms in that same timeframe ever been reversed (again aside from changing sexual mores)?

If you do want to ignore all those issue, I will point out that freedom of speech is more prominent today than it was 50 years ago. After repeal of the fairness doctrine, the loosening of obscenity laws, and various court cases including Citizens United most recently, free speech rights might be at an all time high in the US.

Also there are examples of freedom being lost and regained in gun ownership. The assault weapons ban in the US that lasted 10 years is one that comes to mind.

The reason I said that about sexual mores is because from my perspective almost all of the increases in personal freedom since the civil rights era have been related to that, and other freedoms have mostly been on a steady decline since that time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good for people to not be forced into some religion’s definition of a ‘good relationship’, but if that’s the only thing heading in the right direction and everything else from an individual rights perspective is heading in the wrong direction it’s a distinction very much worth considering.

What about their personal freedom? What about the people who don’t want to work in an environment that might put them or one of their loved ones at risk? You talk about living in a bubble but you don’t seem to consider the teachers, first responders, medical workers, who have to make the choice between working during a pandemic or losing their livelihood.

None countries you mentioned didn’t descend into authoritarianism by enforcing restrictions during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/north-dakota-lets-healt...

So when a pandemic is hitting us and our collective personal responsibility is failing, our only choice is to roll over and get sick?

There are plenty of options to feed those who are going hungry due to COVID, but you should look at who is throwing up roadblocks to assistance.

The current best estimates of IFR for SARS-CoV2 are:

* 0-19 years: 0.00003 (0.003%)

* 20-49 years: 0.0002 (0.02%)

* 50-69 years: 0.005 (0.5%)

* 70+ years: 0.054. (5.4%)

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

"Using these age-specific estimates, we estimate the overall IFR in a typical low-income country, with a population structure skewed towards younger individuals, to be 0.23% (0.14-0.42 95% prediction interval range). In contrast, in a typical high income country, with a greater concentration of elderly individuals, we estimate the overall IFR to be 1.15% (0.78-1.79 95% prediction interval range)."

The CDC citation is aggregating these studies, and (essentially) picking the middle. Cherry picking a single study from the larger pool is not a rebuttal.

It's very strange that people won't just wear a mask (with it over their mouth and nose). There might be some tiny fraction of people that have a real issue with it, but not anywhere the number of people that feel the need to loudly object to it.

Surely obvious, but there are people who will think that you make bad personal choices and need to make better ones. If those people also wield extraordinary power, well, it becomes less fun to find yourself suddenly having wrongthink.

Let's not forget the cadre of objectors who want us to wear a mask to protect their peace of mind, explicitly stating this goal as needful. Or those who vociferously demean anyone who objects for personal reasons (e.g. I tear up and start sneezing if I wear a typical cloth mask or sterile surgical mask for more than a few minutes, and have a sinus headache for several hours subsequent; I'm not the only one in this class).

Can you cite the transmission rate for asymptomatic carriers? The false positives for the various tests? The critical aspects of the efficacy of masking?

The easiest way to get infectious people to wear masks is to have everybody do it in high contact situations, there's no need to be fancy about who wears mask during a raging pandemic, so your other two questions don't really need answering.

(I mean inside places; I don't wear a mask outside either, as I am not going places where there are crowds outside)

The measures we've taken are deteriorating society in more subtle ways, and there are deaths and suffering indirectly caused by these measures. They are just not easy to sum up. How many people have killed themselves because of the lockdowns and economic problems? I know of at least one. How many people in third world countries are starving as a result of it? I've read millions. How many families are being torn apart due to increased divorces? These kinds of effects pay out their harm over longer periods of time, and in less obvious ways. We aren't tracking those on a widget on TV.

Because the pro-lockdown, pro-authoritarian case is so much easier to back with clear and obvious numbers the government and media are able to easily manipulate the population, most of whom won't consider the trade-offs, into conformity. This is so sad to watch.

It's not the government ruining people's lives, it's the pandemic.