You quarantine people (and animal) who might be sick, that’s the point of it.
It doesn’t look like madness to me when you look at the comparative death rates.
So are we going to do a quarantine for the flu next? A pandemic that claims up to a 2 million lives a year globally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932018_United_State...
Heart failure and car accidents claim a higher risk.
Should we have locked down in 2017?
> we need to close everything for years on end?
Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
See the recent case explosions in so called "zero covid" utopias like Mongolia: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
You can delay. You cannot run forever.
I don't know what went wrong in Mongolia, because I haven't been following that country, but China and New Zealand have demonstrated that with a good public health system, elimination is possible and sustainable.
Today there are no flights out of China and we have to trust the same government when they say they have no transmissions.
Need I point to the centuries long history of communist regimes hiding mass deaths?
No, this did not happen. Infection rates weren't calculated until January 2020. Nobody even knew there was anything like SARS spreading in Wuhan until 27 December 2019.
Within 72 hours of the first test result indicating a SARS-like virus, it was all over Chinese social media, and even CCTV reported on the outbreak. And of course, it only took a few weeks afterwards for the hospitals to become overloaded with sick patients.
> Today there are no flights out of China
This is simply untrue. Just to take one example, yesterday alone, there were 9 flights from Shanghai Pudong Airport to LAX.
The situation in China right now is obvious: the virus is gone. Just ask any of your friends/colleagues who live there.
Do you know what AIDS is?
Unlike Covid which kills something under 1 in 100 people it infects AIDS until the mid 90s was a death sentence for anyone who got it.
I remember being in an emergency room and the nurse asking for people to give blood because their blood banks were tainted and the doctors could either let patients die from from blood loss or in 10 years from AIDS.
I have no idea why that whole pandemic has been pushed down the memory hole. It's like everyone born after 1985 doesn't even know what it is, let alone what it was like to see people you know just wilt and die.
>Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months. NZ is the most successful and they are currently in their 5th national lockdown.
What kind of a question is that? It's a horrible disease, and it shows how important it is to have a good public health system.
> Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months.
China hasn't had a widespread lockdown since early 2020. In recent outbreaks, lockdowns have been very geographically limited. For example, the Guangzhou outbreak in May-June 2021 was ended without locking down more than just a few districts of the city. Mass testing, contact tracing, and testing requirements for people leaving the city were sufficient.
https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/nsw-health-lim...
I wish this was a joke, or fake news. But no, once they control where you can go, when you can go there, etc, it's not a big jump for them to demand control over what you put in your body. It's for your own safety, after all.
If there hadn't been a lockdown, many more people would have died from COVID than now died from drinking. Sweden for example, famous for its non-lockdown, suffered 10 times as many COVID deaths than neighboring Norway with lock-down (and alcohol).
In contrast, when someone is separated from society because they are known to be infected, that is called "isolation."
Surely, we should aspire to be better than 14th-century Venice. To not treat people as if they are nothing more than viral vectors. Instead many would trade away what little control over our own lives we still have in exchange for imagined safety from a virus we will all contract eventually. That the vast majority of people have no issues recovering from.
It's not the plague. It's not Ebola. It's not the worst case scenario we were rightfully concerned about in early 2020. How this hasn't sunk in yet for most people is just baffling to me. Then I look around and see lots of motivated reasoning and state-sponsored propaganda about a permanent transition to remote work, increased government surveillance, curtailing the movement of citizens, and other social initiatives various coalitions were already working towards, that are of course suddenly "absolutely necessary" because of a "once in a lifetime pandemic", and it becomes a little clearer.
1. https://ktrh.iheart.com/content/2021-06-01-after-covid-lockd...
2. https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/09/07/out-covid-lockdowns-...
3. https://www.guardiangazette.com/2021/08/30/climate-lockdowns...
And for those who aren't convinced, I'll be available to accept apologies at my nearest concentration camp.
It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone.
Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even people who do not appear to be sick be quarantined.
You may argue that China, New Zealand et al. should not have pursued a zero-CoVID policy (and in that case, you should be prepared to argue that the 4 million deaths that would likely have resulted in China would have been acceptable), but given that they've pursued this policy, they need to quarantine international travelers, even if they appear to be healthy.
10 million is frankly a drop in the bucket. We don't shut down society and hand over control of our lives over car accidents, heart failure, or anything else that kills hundreds of millions.
The behaviors that lead to those deaths are absolutely a form of social contagion and in no world are they less important or relevant because they're not caused by a communicable disease. People could choose to stop the world for those, too. It would probably work. That we choose not to, or rather, that we understand there are tradeoffs involved, does not make us callous murderers.
I feel truly sorry for people who believe that "zero Covid" is a possibility. We have documented evidence of animal reservoirs for the disease. You can vaccinate every single person on the planet and it will not eradicate this virus.
Particularly now that we are aware that 1) our vaccines are not sterilizing and 2) we have evidence of a vaccine resistant mutation on the horizon.
If you want to play whack a mole with restrictions and injections your entire life please do so of your own accord and stop trying to force the rest of us to live in this dystopia with you. I have a short life to live.
Humanity has lost its tragic sense. That there are things outside of our control. This reality does however tend to catch up with each and every one of us.
"People die" as an excuse for letting millions of people die of preventable causes is a terrible attitude to take.
I hate to be this blunt but you're kidding yourself if you think this was ever an option for the United States.
With respect to "preventable causes", I already responded to that point. Most death is preventable. Or at least delay-able. That does not mean everyone agrees with your scorched earth campaigns to prevent it.
Here on HN, there are plenty of people who live in China, or who have family/friends/colleagues in China. They can tell you what the situation in the country is.
For more than a year, bars, restaurants and most other things have been open, mass gatherings have been allowed, etc. In densely packed cities with Guangzhou and Shanghai, what do you think R0 would be under those circumstances? Any community transmission would quickly grow into a major outbreak, just like in Wuhan in December 2019.
Yet there's no such outbreak. And no, there's no conceivable way the government could hide such an outbreak.
That's why it's simply not credible to claim that there is any substantial community transmission in China.
The other thing is that you can look at how rigorous the reaction is to every new case of community transmission. There have been small outbreaks in China over the last year, but they've been contained using contact tracing, mass testing, and lockdowns (usually only of individual neighborhoods, but sometimes of cities).
Responding to your edit: still madness