I can imagine the fatigue of what I’m currently going through of constantly locking down for 4 months at a time!

Compared to that, having to lock down every couple of months for a week or two doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad. Oh, and we wouldn’t have 130,000 dead in the UK and 500,000+ dead in the USA!

A couple of weeks is basically the bare minimum. New Zealand seem to have gotten a little lucky with their latest outbreak; one or two people not noticing their symptoms, or going for a walk with someone different, or interacting for a little longer at a restaurant and they could easily have ended up having to lock down for months like Guernsey or the Isle of Man. (Arguably, it's still a little too soon to be sure they've gotten away with it.)

We did a 3 day lockdown in Brisbane to give our contact tracers time to track down a single case. It worked, too, which was neat.

So the population of a whole city is normalized on lock down as if they were inmates of some large prison camp, while the government uses all sorts of surveillance mechanisms to track whoever they please freely for some very marginal public health benefit, and this whole situation is considered "great". What kinds of things have been normalized in the supposedly free countries by this pandemic.

That’s beyond ridiculous, and your assumptions about “marginal health benefit” are wrong on their face. You’re american, I assume?

You assume wrong about my nationality. One doesn't have to be Trump-loving caricature of an American to deeply mistrust restrictions of basic individual liberties.. And if not marginal health benefit then most definitely highly ambiguous, debatable health benefits as far as a large weight of evidence is concerned. Some countries with lockdown measures have had lower mortality rates while others with just as strict rates have had high mortality rates, and many countries without much in the way of restrictions have had mortality rates little or not at all different from those of other countries with severe restrictions. There is no existing consensus here and all evidence seems to be all over the place. The themes I mentioned in my previous comment however are normalizations that bode dangerously for the future of supposedly free countries, the future of social globalization (a good thing overall because it strongly counteracts nationalist tendencies) and none of this is to even mention the still unknown long term consequences of the vast economic destruction cause by so much callous but ambiguously backed lockdown policy in so many places.

We wouldn't? That seemes like a bold statement.

To put your numbers in perspective, in a population of 330mio with life expectancy 70-75y (USA numbers), every year around 4mio people die for some reason or another. Not saying covid is not a problem, but these numbers don't really support the claim.

The numbers absolutely do support my claim.

A quick check shows the U.K. death toll increased by 15% in 2020 (600,000 in 2019, 690,000 in 2020). That was WITH the lockdowns in place.

40,000 people died of Covid in January 2021 alone as a result of the government's ineffective response leading up to Christmas.

Compare that to New Zealand’s 26 total Covid deaths, or South Korea’s 1,669 total Covid deaths.

I think my numbers support my claims perfectly well.

> Oh, and we wouldn’t have 130,000 dead in the UK and 500,000+ dead in the USA!

No they don't. Unless you have a way to create and investigate a parallel universe where you can put your thesis to a test, but I assume you don't.

I’ve pointed to countries we can compare strategies with to back up my case. What’s backing up yours beyond “I said so?”

Virtue signaling? That seems like a stretch. GP is only saying how they think covid-19 should have been handled.

Yeah but that's unrealistic proposal that looks nice on paper, but completely ignores real human nature and how complex and diverse real world is.

Who has the authority for global shutdowns? Nobody. Many nations wouldn't agree on that and political discussions would be endless, everybody has their own agenda regardless of virus. Can you imagine some Europeans telling USA 'OK now whole of your nation will stay at home for 2 weeks'. Not going to fly on any US level. Or Americans to Chinese.

Globally it haven't been handled OK by any means, but these naive suggestions don't help getting a workable solution.

'If only all people behaved rationally' can be wished in any discussion, sure, but it doesn't get us anywhere closer to solutions.

Wouldn’t you need fewer and less extreme lockdowns every couple of months if you aren’t opening everything up every couple of months?

Yeah, you’d only need one strict lockdown if you’re not opening up everything every couple of months. It just never ends.

Is this a joke?

Well, no, that’s exactly what I’m saying would not be the case. The longer lockdown would not need to be anywhere near as strict as the lockdown that comes after a month of opening everything back up.

Wow, so now instead of the ‘three weeks strict lockdown to stop the spread’ fantasy we now have this ‘lockdown light’ idea. Where did this theory come from?