I live in a pretty liberal area, so I assume we are taking stronger measures than your average area, and I have to say that nothing surrounding any covid precautions even approaches what it takes to get on a flight. Wear a mask indoors? Get the jab that most people wanted anyway? I'm just not seeing this Orwellian oppression that some people seem to be suffering under right now.

NYC is the most strict, but they are also the most densely populated. Beyond that, I just don't feel like I've given up any rights.

Can't say the same about a shoeless, invasive patdown where a stranger runs their hand down your butt crack after having waited in line for an hour and gone through a nude scanner.

your comment sounds like what someone who doesnt fly might have said after 9/11. its not hard to think of some examples that apply to the covid security theatre. for example, there are fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of movement, that turn out not to be so fundamental after all. safety first.

I live in Moscow, Russia, and there was a brief time when I was stripped of rights to enter a restaurant, cafe, gym, theater, concert or sports venue. There was talking about requirement of vaccination to use public transit and even a taxi.

Fortunately, those restrictions were cancelled after 3 weeks, because you know, voting day is coming and we don't need angry citizens to vote against ruling party. But the infrastructure is there and it may be used again any time now.

It's not the same. Covid is clearly causing a significant increase in mortality. Even if you don't believe the covid-reporting numbers, you can simply look at excess deaths.

It's very difficult to falsify death stats on a mass-scale especially in a country like the US.

when the towers fell, nobody got hurt? the threats are legitimate, but its fair to be critical of the response.

the threats are legitimate and every death counts but it also makes sense to prioritize and focus our limited attention to areas where it has the most impact.

Terrorism kills something like 28k/year whereas Covid has killed 5 million.

The majority of the ~5 million that covid killed would have been dead of old age, heart disease, etc. in 5-10 years anyway. Covid just shaved off a few years of life expectancy; the same people would have shown up in CDC death counts as heart disease or natural causes statistics a few years later. With the 28k killed by terrorism, not so much. You have a lot more young and healthy dying with decades of life expectancy remaining.

Same with comparing covid deaths to WWI deaths. On the one hand you have thousands of healthy 18-year-olds dying, and on the other you have thousands of elderly, obese, and sickly people dying. Not quite a fair comparison.

We'll see, it's a falsifiable prediction, which is good, but we won't really know until we get the excess death numbers for the next 5-10 years.

Even in the 25-44yr age range, we see a pretty significant increase in deaths: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm#F2_down

The existence of the pandemic is a very observable and testable. The ways to combat the pandemic are also well known and tested.

How a person can deny the existence of something that can test it personally?

Yeah lockdowns were super well tested and worked wonders /s

No, they cratered the middle class while making the rich richer.

Now they know not to lock down to destroy the economy but instead push to destroy personal freedoms.

> No, they cratered the middle class while making the rich richer.

Isn’t this economic policy, not lockdown policy? Any government could decide to pay laborers 100% of their salary to stay out of work. They could decide “essential workers” would be paid on top of their salary as compensation for the risk and danger. They could deice that corporate profit during a shutdown would go to support laborers. Lockdowns only hurt the middle class and help the rich because the government chooses to force the middle class to stay home while not forcing the rich to stop profiteering off it.

The lockdowns didn't work because people pushed back against them causing the measures to be half-assed as a way to appease those people.

This happens all the time in politics and it's infuriating.

You can't judge the effectiveness of a plan if the plan is modified as a shitty compromise or just plain ignored. But people do judge them, which makes those compromises an effective form of sabotage.

The last state lockdown orders expired in June 2020. Most lasted on the order of a few weeks.

The economy is not destroyed. Assets are appreciating, GDP is growing faster than it has in a decade and employers are desperate to find workers. The unemployment rate is near 5%.

If there is a weak spot in the economy, it is that rising case numbers of the Delta variant are causing people to voluntarily limit their in-person activities. When you ask business leaders what can help the economy, they say “more people getting vaccinated” because it’s the fastest way to reduce new COVID cases.

When I ask small business leaders that they say to stop paying people to stay home.

I said middle class. Small business was destroyed. The corporations got richer.

How does your neighborhood look? All businesses still intact?

Not talking about the stock market.

In my neighborhood several small businesses are still intact. The businesses that relied primarily on commuters are gone, but the staples catering to the people who live here are still intact. My favorite local bar, coffee shop, drycleaner, and bookstores are still going. I'm a bit sad about my pho place closing down, but they're a small chain, and they have another one a bit further away from me that I can still go to.

Talk to your local lockdown provider if you are not happy with the results.

Done properly, of course a lockdown would be effective. Why? Because of the Germ theory. The viruses exist and they don't teleport.

If anything, I would have much preferred if we had a month of global lockdown instead of years of slow burn battle. We wouldn't have had to convince people for vaccination too. It worked for Wuhan.

No, locking down for an indoor virus is stupid.

Vitamin D and open air works, not lock downs.

I am all in for spreading the population sparsely under the sun for a month(I'll take the Greece beaches or the French Riviera). We can make the immunes ones prepare the food and bring the beer.

Well that's a large swing in the other direction, but I enjoy the hyperbole. You do realize lockdowns are the far other direction though? Do you see my point why lockdowns were bad?

Allowing and encouraging people to go outside is the happy medium.

The idea is to separate people from each other for long enough for the virus to die off. Could be done in many ways. Accommodating people in small separate groups for a month under the sun has it's practicality issues but if someone can pull it off the results would be exactly the same.

That idea is stupid when the high density areas live in multi-family housing.

do you know what would happen if everybody on earth gave themselves 6 feet of space from each other for 14 days? the same thing that would happen if you teleported the virus to the moon. why didnt anyone think of that!

Both have theater aspects and let me propose something: that's good.

When you approach airport security (theater) you wonder what their capabilities are _today_. Are they sniffing the air at large with their GCMS? Is there going to be a dog today? Its intimidating to think of it as a theoretical attacker because of its large and multifaceted apparatus, which is part of its deterrent power.

Masks are somewhat similar, they have a vanishingly small chance of actually intercepting a virus particle/droplet that was going to infect you on a case by case basis BUT they make people approach you differently. They say "stand back".

Actually they did a study on the masks and proved effective.

It was done by picking a population of 350K, then separating them to test and control groups, encourage mask for the test group.

The results are that at 39% mask use in the test group the covid cases were %12 lower than the control group.

There was also a difference between surgical mask(%12) and cloth mask(%9) use.

[0] https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1433036933400305673/phot...

No actually required :-). I didn't say masks were not effective, I said part of their effectiveness is the making-conscious of transmission vectors. E.g. when you wear a mask and see others do it you are more likely to wash your hands or stand back.

When you wear a mask (as I do) in addition to blocking some particles you signal to others "lets play the not kill eachother game by limiting virus vectors!"

Fair enough:) They should also made some of the test ground really chill to see if it is the mask or the attitude!

When you approaching airport or train station security theater, you slowing down due to limited throughput. And then bang! - a terrorist blows up in the crowd right in front of security gate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2013_Volgograd_bomb...

> Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.

Take a peek at a hospital if you have some time.

Probably because we can't see much evidence of airport security doing anything.

And vaccines and etc are backed by science?

Know of any randomized controlled trials on airport security?

There absolutely are red-team exercises against airport security. Sometimes the TSA has fared very poorly[0]. In the face of decreased air travel during this pandemic their "catch rate" has gotten better[1].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/01/26/960872502/2020-firearm-catch-...

It would be nice if they would do that.