I would not in a million years trade Australia's restrictions for those of the United States just to exchange Australia's death rate with that of the US, and it's hard to imagine that any reasonable, well-adjusted person would want to do that.
so tell me if you know personally anyone who has died? What if that trade includes someone from your family? Does your tune suddenly change if the lack of restrictions would affect you?
All i hear is that you feel you don't want to make any sacrifices, because it only benefits somebody else.
We tolerate --- even demand --- higher speed limits because the time saved by driving faster outweighs the additional deaths caused. It may sound callous to put the trade-off in those terms, but it's true. And I bet you, personally, would absolutely hate it you weren't able to drive more than 25mph ever.
Why should COVID be different?
When you optimize for "safety" to the exclusion of all other considerations, you create a dystopia.
A non-zero number of COVID deaths is a fair price for restoring our society to normality. The weird refusal of people to apply cost-benefit analysis to COVID mitigation is gravely concerning. Without cost-benefit analysis, we can't make good decisions.
1) You leave out the long list of ways we've tried very, very hard to make driving as safe as possible while not sacrificing the entire point of the car, to get somewhere faster. There is a trade off, but the equation isn't nearly as callous as you make it seem.
2) The equation for Covid isn't "live free or die" either. There's a lot of middle ground that mostly involves taking up limited medical resources for something that could have been avoided while still conducting your normal day to day activities with some minor modifications. That trade-off is a simple one.
We don't drive above 25mph because there is already cost benefit analysis done, at the governmental transportation department level. The average person assumes this analysis is mostly correct, and thus agree (implicitly) to follow the rules.
How come all of a sudden, people stop believing that such analysis wasn't done for the actions undertaken for lockdown?
How come, conveniently, that people who oppose such lockdown are claiming that their preferred option - that of opening up - is somehow a better trade?
45,000 people in Australia are alive right now who would be dead if Australia had the USA's death rate.
I'm quite sure the family and friends of every single one of those 45,000 people strongly disagree with you.
And the AZ deals the gov't has made was not transparent, which reeks of corruption, and it bit them in the ass now. Even now, the gov't (note, the gov't, not the medical community) is recommending that young people talk to their GP and take AZ (conveniently, this absolves the gov't of the responsibility of providing more pfizer, and force the young people between a rock and a hard place in terms of risk).
So if there are any australians here reading this, you will do well to never vote for the liberal party in your life time.
The Aussie population, by and large, really wants to be vaccinated. There's some who are a bit illogical about the perceived risks of AZ blood clots, but that's firmly on the media who played up that risk at a time when the risk of covid proper was minimised due to our success. This has created a subset of people who insist on waiting for Pfizer.
But that wouldn't be a problem if our government hadn't fucked up ordering vaccines so badly in the first place. Their work was truly atrocious.
Am I reading that correctly?
The federal gov't almost didn't want to have lockdown in the first wave, and fortunately it was the state gov't doing it (by medical advice) that pushed it over.
The fact that you somehow confuse it together into one lump, and attribute it to a singular government entity decision, either means you did not really do any research or look into it. Or you are maliciously spreading FUD to cause distrust in existing institutions.
You trust the government decision to implement lockdown but not the decision regarding the AZ vaccine?
For example, my partner goes for a daily walk along the foreshore of the beach. On the weekend she'll go for a bush hike. This is all within the strict Sydney lockdown laws because she's staying within a 5km radius of her home.
Moreover, their lockdown means that I can go about my life more or less uninterrupted, because their outbreak is limited from reaching me.
There are 45,000 people in Australia who are alive right now who would not be if Australia had the same death rate as the USA. So they're doing pretty well.
the idea that the difference in death rate is due to some intrinsic policy or mandated behavior rather than something more simple like population density/metropolis commonality/average temperature/humidity, etc seems like a pretty big leap -- and that seems to be your point , no?
is there already some big comprehensive list of social policies that provably worked to reduce death rate during the covid-19 pandemic across the board with environmental factors normalized out?
I thought we were still in the middle of this experiment, but i'd love to see some data if it exists.
Also, Australia is ridiculously dense. Most of our pop is in capital cities. it's big and empty.
You might have missed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391548
> In return for trading away their liberty, Australians gained a huge safety dividend. COVID-19 has killed 194 of every 100,000 Americans, 77 of every 100,000 Israelis, and only four of every 100,000 Australians. That low death toll is a tremendous upside. What remains to be seen is whether Australia can maintain that performance without permanently ending core attributes of life in a liberal democracy, including freedom of movement, peaceable assembly, and basic privacy.
We’re still in the middle of this. If we could have nice things, these restrictions wouldn’t need to be enforced. We’ll have to see what happens once the country is adequately vaccinated.