The absolute zealotry of the "Zero Covid" movement, displayed for us in the comment above, is truly terrifying.
"Lockdowns achieved nothing"
"We didn't actually lockdown"
"Lockdowns are illegal"
The point is that a huge portion of businesses were completely open through the entire pandemic. A large number of people did not follow health guidelines.
Thankfully, we haven't had to test these yet in a court of law over covid. That's the beauty of having these rights enumerated explicitly. Would-be tyrants are afraid to challenge them.
In any case, quarantines have in fact been implemented in the US repeatedly over the years. So either the Constitution has changed recently (which might explain why your copy is different from mine), or they were so obviously not a violation of the First Amendment that nobody bothered to test it in a court of law.
For instance, here's a 1902 Supreme Court case confirming the ability of a state government to prevent passengers on a ship (some of whom were US citizens attempting to return to their homes) from leaving the ship: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/186/380
No mention is made of the First Amendment.
> That from an early day the power of the states to enact and enforce quarantine laws for the safety and the protection of the health of their inhabitants has been recognized by Congress, is beyond question. That until Congress has exercised its power on the subject, such state quarantine laws and state laws for the purpose of preventing, eradicating, or controlling the spread of contagious or infectious diseases, are not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, although their operation affects interstate or foreign commerce, is not an open question.
(And the implication is that the only thing that would prevent a state from passing laws about quarantines is the federal government passing laws about quarantines and preempting the states - i.e., that Congress could certainly enact a nationwide quarantine if it wanted.)
Anyway, this is all beside the point - plenty of places other than the US, with no First Amendment or equivalent, have also failed to ever implement a real lockdown, because a real lockdown would have been politically unpopular. So it's not a matter of constitutionality.
The use of PCR tests with ridiculously high thresholds to determine "asymptomatic carriers" was an extreme overreach.
It was such an overreach that the public health establishment has already backtracked on this level of sensitivity in PCR testing, with respect to vaccinated individuals, because they keep getting all these pesky "false positives" after vaccination. It's really messing with their outreach campaigns, understandably.
You can be sure this will all be clarified in litigation over the next few decades while the Trump appointees get to work.
Unless, of course, the restrictionists come down off the ledge. It seems you all are folding on all fronts recently. My genuine prediction is that all of this will be moot in a years time once no one pays any mind to the coronabros anymore.
> ... on September 29, 1898, the vessel arrived at the quarantine station some distance below the city of New Orleans, was there regularly inspected, and was found, both as to the passengers and cargo, to be free from any infectious or contagious disease, and accordingly was given a clean bill of health, whereby the ship became entitled to proceed to New Orleans and land her passengers and discharge her cargo. This, however, it was asserted she was not permitted to do....
Nobody on board the ship was sick, according to tests, and they were still lawfully quarantined, and the law was constitutional.
But you're right, this will all be forgotten in a few years and relitigated afresh in the court of public opinion (in every country) next pandemic, just like this particular case has been completely forgotten, the quarantines of the Spanish Flu have been completely forgotten, etc.
> "It was asserted that the plaintiff, a corporation created by and existing under the laws of the Republic of France and a citizen of said Republic, on or about September 2, 1898, caused its steamship Britannia to be cleared from the ports of Marseilles, France, and Palermo, Italy, for New Orleans with a cargo of merchandise and with about 408 passengers, some of whom were citizens of the United States returning home, and others who were seeking homes in the United States, and who intended to settle in the state of Louisiana or adjoining states, and that all the passengers referred to at the time of their sailing were free from infectious or contagious diseases. It was further averred that on September 29, 1898, the vessel arrived at the quarantine station some distance below the city of New Orleans"
It does not in any way justify indiscriminately restricting the constitutionally protected freedoms of American citizens, on American soil, for more than a year. Try telling someone in the early 1900's that their church or synagogue is closed for the next 15 months, by order of the U.S government. Good luck. In this case, when Americans have chosen to travel abroad, it justifies a limited quarantine when they return to the country. Nothing more. Indefinite lockdowns of entire states or the entire country is not quarantine. Rather, it's a grave human rights violation that we cargo culted from Communist China.
Edit: lol to the comment below. gnight bro.
Anyway, once again, this is all beside the point. I'm not talking about one particular country. I'm talking about the worldwide desire to avoid serious lockdowns.
And I don't know about your church or synagogue, but my church closed voluntarily - and remains closed (we're reopening in limited amounts in a couple of weeks) - because our religion teaches us that when Satan says "You will not surely die!" and tempts us with short-term freedom, we say no. We've been online. It works great.
On top of that, it's pretty clear by now that East Asian populations have some level of preexisting resistance to this family of respiratory viruses, given their proximity to past outbreaks of genealogically similar viruses. It would make sense that their totals will eventually be lower than those in parts of the world that haven't been exposed to SARS like viruses.
Here's to hoping things get better, but knowing that the nuts run the nuthouse now.
Edit: May I ask which country you are from?
This is a tenuous link at best. China does not have the same cultural makeup of the United States, and they shut down more aggressively than any western nation. (bear in mind this is not a compliment, I would not like to see US officials literally weld people into their apartment complexes.)
You might just get a bullet in China for defying those orders.
That is what happened.
> Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow.
Western governments largely did follow that policy, but the US was never able to get out of free-fall. So COVID policy became a bang-bang controller of lockdowns, then slight reopenings, then more lockdowns, because there was never a two week period where spread slowed enough to materially change the risk landscape.
Even when there were lulls in the second derivative, limited re-openings resulted in enormous case spikes. If our numbers ever reached DE or NZ levels, we would've been back in offices and schools. And, in fact, I had plenty of conference calls with Germans who were sitting in their offices last summer.
The re-opening criterion didn't change (except to become more liberal over time, the exact opposite of your characterization). What happened is that the lockdowns -- for whatever reason -- never got spread under control in the USA. That wasn't true everywhere.
> irrational panic
On April 1, 2020 there 26K new cases in the USA. One year later, on April 1, 2021, there were 77K new cases. Vaccination rates among at-risk populations were starting to pick up, but nowhere near where thy are today.
What is the rational policy that would call for lock downs in March 2020 but not in March 2021?
> some would argue...
And others would argue that the expectation that a pandemic should last exactly and only two weeks is its own rather extraordinary neurosis.
Pray tell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc.
Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Also: no one ever expected the pandemic to be over in two weeks. We did expect our public health officials to stick to the second part, "to slow the spread". Clearly, that was a line to manipulate the public, as things quickly shifted to "until we have a vaccine". People on my side of this issue will never forget or forgive the bait and switch.
But, returning to my original point, once things locked down, a number of politicians realized that they would be blamed for any deaths that occurred when the lockdown was lifted. These politicians received support from the "if we can save even just one life" crowd — which I'm characterizing as the neurotic.
OP states that the original lockdowns were reasonable but then complains about continued lockdowns, and my comment was responding to that sentiment.
You're making an entirely different argument -- that lockdowns were always unreasonable.
> Pretell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc. Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
This is probably one of the least intellectually humble/curious things I've ever seen someone write on hacker news.
There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated". For each of your examples I can give a counter-example, and that exchange would be completely specious and unscientific political punditry. This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested. And certainly not helpful if not entered into as an honest search for truth without preconceptions.
I don't feed trolls.
Goodness. Unfortunately, you'll be positively devastated to learn that this exact discussion has been ongoing in countless threads here for over a year.
> There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated"
It's not that complicated. We have enough data at this point to start revealing signals where they exist. So far, there is some evidence that individual behaviors (e.g., masking, physical distancing) can have positive effects. There is also increasingly strong evidence that state-imposed controls (e.g., lockdowns and mask mandates) have not significantly affected the long-term course of the pandemic.
> This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested.
If your constitution cannot abide listening to people discuss this (or any) topic without first completing your requisite thousands of hours of research, I might gently suggest that HN isn't a safe place for you.
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I own a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn. It's all yours for the right price. I'd love to talk to you about it.
Have a good day.
I think that, by and large, mask mandates should have been effected privately: meaning, business owners should have been free to institute mask policies the same way the do shirts and shoes policies. Government should have publicly given such policies support.
Lockdowns should have been periodic and local: meaning, focused on time and place. The aim of lockdowns would not be to "save even a single life," but to try to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, so that people who could pull through with supportive care would have an available bed to recover in. In the meantime, government should have endeavored to setup emergency hospitals to make more beds available, relocating them as necessary.
Every point I'm making stresses free choice and personal liberty; and every point I'm making stresses the idea that there are no easy answers and no one has the "master plan."
Instead, what I saw — what we all saw — was federal bureaucrats and state governors dictating what hundreds of millions of people should do, based on conjecture and even whim, and dare I say, even at times personal vanity.
But I'm the arrogant one?
The same reasoning is being used in the climate change debate. Corporations are gearing up PR teams to promote individual responsibility campaigns so that corporate action can be minimized. Again, it disconnects the values from the results so that at the very end when nothing changes a group can be happy that even though it fails, we did the right thing. The end result is cynicism and skepticism to these tactics.
Okay, that's just my opinion, right? Fine. Call me crazy for believing that prolonged isolation, idleness, and political repression leads to egregious economic dislocation and social unrest, but I'm going with that until I hear a better explanation.
Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. I find the GP's argument very persuasive. Sitting here in June of 2021 and looking back it's so easy to agree with his plan.
But back in May of 2020? All options looked bad, and I think things were a lot less clear. The "full lock down" did only last a couple of weeks, while things things got incredibly muddled quickly as different organizations and regional governments put their own spin on things.
I don't think we really understood enough of the actual mechanics of the virus, nor enough of the social pressures, until it was far too late to course correct (for the reasons the GP describes).
But, let me come clean about my prejudices. I live in New York. When Governor Cuomo was on television every day, I saw — every day — comments to his feeds on Facebook and Twitter from people saying things like, "Thank you, Governor. Whenever I listen to you I feel calm and safe. I listen to you every day for my sanity."
I wish I were making this up! But, as I said months ago, I am astounded by the people who I imagine have no qualms going on about "patriarchy" bestowing what I see as sycophantic praise on a governor whose entire affect reminds me of the stereotype of an immigrant family's "papa."
This is, in part, why I say "neurotic." We can't have a free country when we have so many people — voters! — like these. The SARS-CoV-2 virus isn't the scariest thing about this pandemic.
[1] https://twitter.com/gbdeclaration/status/1358449223197466627...
So, I think it's terrific if people would accept their neuroses and not bother the rest of us. But there is no evidence that that's how things work.