The health care system is built with capacity to handle obesity and smoking related illnesses. It is not built with the capacity to handle covid on top of that.

Additionally, a pandemic and the measures to stop it is a temporary situation. If we could end obesity, opiod abuse, or car crashes by making drastic societal changes that only lasted for a couple months, I'd argue that we should do that. The equivalent actions to stop other high-mortality trends would be permanent changes to society.

We had a year now to beef up our health care system. I guess it’s just easier to take away human rights?

Wait, are you suggesting that more infection of a novel virus (whose family is known for more fatality and lingering effects) is an acceptable trade-off for temporary freedom from masks and limits on gathering?

Assuming that ones hostipals could handle the worst case scenarios.

There are people for whom liberty is an absolute and there is litterally nothing that justifies curtailing it. For a sizable population the entire moral supremacy of the United States is that it is a place that they feel uniquely safeguards it.

I have no dog in this fight as I don’t live there, but I see it as a theme in enough comments and threads that I’m surprised some Americans seem so oblivious to the perspective of their fellow countrymen.

> it is a place that they feel uniquely safeguards it

This isn't news, just read de Tocqueville.

As an American I'm comforted by the idea that a significant part of my compatriots will resist any order by virtue of being ordered.

Treat other people like humans with dignity that must be persuaded instead of commanded. That's the American ideal imo.

That's not the way America treats other people around the world.

Hence why they're referred to as ideals.

No one lives up to them as a consequence of being human.

That doesn't invalidate them.

> the measures to stop it is a temporary situation

Lockdown advocates are arguing authoritarianism is how we get zero deaths.

I don’t care to entertain authoritarianism on a “temporary basis.”

The thing is, authoritarianism justifies itself with tons of utopian excuses like:

Zero crime

Zero poverty

Zero hunger

Zero obesity

Zero sin

It is wrong to pretend that lockdown isn't effective. No man is an island with respect to communicable diseases.

Instead, we decided that this health issue is an ideological struggle of authoritarianism versus liberty, or democrats versus conservative, instead of working together to solve this problem so that we can return to normalcy ASAP.

It's pretty embarrassing that China had got the disease beaten, while we're still struggling with COVID-19.

> It is wrong to pretend that lockdown isn't effective.

If they were effective, why do graphs show seasonality predominates?

There's yet to be conclusive scientific evidence of the effectiveness of lockdowns.

No where in the 2006 Bush plan does it even mention something akin to lockdown - there's mention of quarantine and isolation under police power but that's about it.

Surely the medical community and govt would have written about something like that beforehand?

> It's pretty embarrassing that China had got the disease beaten, while we're still struggling with COVID-19.

Why are they spending billions as part of their campaign to control narratives through means of propaganda, etc.?

> If they were effective, why do graphs show seasonality predominates?

That doesn't follow. Growth prior to the initial lockdowns was expoenential with a doubling rate between 5-7 days. Had this been ineffective we'd have all been sick by now and maybe 50-100M people would be dead worldwide.

Clearly "lockdown" (which is a loaded term people tend to use for anything from stay at home orders to simple mask requirements) worked. The question is how well and to what extent the regimes were followed, and by which populations.

> Growth prior to the initial lockdowns was expoenential with a doubling rate between 5-7 days. Had this been ineffective we'd have all been sick by now and maybe 50-100M people would be dead worldwide.

You know this isn't true because practically every local area that suffers an outbreak follows the same curve regardless of how they implement a strategy.

It looks different at larger levels (town, city, state, country, globe) because it's the aggregation of multiple outbreaks.

> You know this isn't true because practically every local area that suffers an outbreak follows the same curve regardless of how they implement a strategy.

That's just laughably wrong. Explain how these are the "same curve"?

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

Did you even read what I said? I said local outbreaks all follow the same spread curve.

When aggregated at the country level you're looking at many separate outbreaks superimposed, hence the wide curves.

And that too seems trivially falsifiable. You have something to cite?

It also ignores actual lockdown which brought cases down to 0 in Victoria. Holding up for a month or so already.