I believe you’re being sarcastic, because as free society and governments move more towards authoritarianism, it will become everything but temporary

I agree with everything else you said

This is an old Soviet proverb. This also applies to tech.

I understand the lack of love for lockdowns.

But, on this piece about it not being temporary: is the belief genuinely that COVID-related lockdowns are really just a nefarious ploy for introducing longer-term control in order to subvert our freedoms and usher in authoritarianism?

Why is it so hard to recognize that governments like to give themselves special "temporary" powers and then not give them up?

No need to be condescending. I understand that it's happened in the past.

But, there's an "unintentional slippery slope" concern; then there's the "willful conspiracy" concern.

So, I'm asking whether, in this specific instance, people believe it to be the actual intent of the U.S. government to willfully and maliciously use COVID as a pretext for turning the U.S. into an authoritarian regime?

Trust me, we all really hope we're wrong. But that's what we think.

In the first scenario, the government is doing exactly what it says and taking the public health measures it feels are necessary to save lives and end a pandemic.

In scenario two, the government is deliberately overreaching and applying unnecessary measures, purely designed to deceive the public and curtail freedoms (or to condition people to accept such limitations in the future) in order to set us on the path to authoritarianism.

This raises a number of earnest questions:

>they won't hesitate to do it again in the future in response to something far less serious

The concern about it being done for some "future far less serious thing" seems to be a tacit acknowledgment that the current thing warrants these measures to some degree:

1. Given that these things aren't very frequent (i.e. the last pandemic of this scale was ~100 years ago and we've already rivaled that death toll), would it be more prudent to worry about hypothetical future abuses if/when they come to pass, versus resisting the current measures?

2. If we were currently dealing with, say, an equally virulent airborne strain of Ebola, would current measures seem more justified, thus significantly allaying your current concerns?

>we all really hope we're wrong

Me too!

1. What do you think the odds are that you're right (roughly speaking)?

2. What if the people actively resisting and interfering with government efforts to contain the pandemic are wrong? What is the cost?

3. How (or perhaps more accurately, when) will you know whether you are wrong?

The difference between the slippery slope concern you're referencing and a willful conspiracy is significant to say the least.

This is why I first explicitly sought to clarify my GP's belief, which they emphatically confirmed as of the purposeful, malicious intent variety. In their view, COVID measures are merely a conspiracy, intended to transform the U.S. into an authoritarian state.

So, that's what my reply was addressing.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/people-don-t-agree-with-l...

That's a direct quote from one of the principal architects of the lockdown policy. He is, not coincidentally, in an open relationship with a member of the hard left Extinction Rebellion group, and the SAGE committee that he sits on which advises the government also contains a member of the British Communist Party.

The above are all unarguable facts. What you derive from them depends on prior intuitions.

Yes, millions of Americans believe that.

It is also true that the Democratic Party is an authoritarian and corrupt government that is spreading corona throughout the US by opening the southern border to over 2 million illegal aliens in 2021, and allowing Afghanis to enter the US without corona testing or even a reason for admission. (The only quarantine restriction on Afghanis is if there's a measles case on the plane.)

Here's 10,500 illegals on Sept. 16 waiting under a Texas border bridge who likely have corona (the White House ordered the FAA to stop drone s from recording this because it's so horrific):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcFtbrcr7w

That said, thinking the immigrants are responsible for an uptick in Covid infection rates is ridiculous.

Also you're linking to Hannity and Ted Cruz. It's hard to take those seriously

Around March 2020, for most countries. A bit earlier than that in Japan, China, Italy, South Korea, and Iran.

Being against lockdowns in April-May 2020 is problematic, but should still be allowed because of free speech. Being against lockdowns in September 2021 is almost a civic duty. European governments had until now plenty of time to get their act together so that lockdowns would no longer be necessary.

I take issue with that statement!

I haven't been COVID-jagged for one simple reason: I do not take experimental medical procedures whose only promise is to make me feel better if I catch COVID and doesn't prevent spreading or reinfection - I've had COVID recently with no side effects. I especially don't take experimental drugs made by companies that are immune from prosecution!

There is a reason that vaccines take years to develop! On that note, what are the long-term side effects of the jag? Anyone got data on that?

Edit: forgot a bit... and I'll be downvoted to hell but that will just reinforce my point

All of the COVID-related ones.

There are no known long-term side effects as these drugs that have been injected into humans are only a few years old at most.

According to Reuters [0] the trials are still ongoing. According to the UK government these vaccines were given out while still in trial [1] and some are ongoing.

Whether that's standard practice or not, they are still working out the long-term side-effects.

So what happens in 5 years? What data do we have on these? What happens if Alzheimers cases go through the roof in 5 years? Do we just throw our hands up and say, "Well, we never saw that coming!" By then there will be billions with the injections.

Vaccines take up to 10 years to make [2]. There is no possible way you can simulate the long-term side effects. None whatsoever. You need to observe people that have taken it for years! You also need a diverse group of people: female physiology can change dramatically based on age. Asians, white people and black people may react differently to the injections and so on... there is no long-term data on these injections! None!

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-monitor...

[1] - https://post.parliament.uk/covid-19-vaccines-november-update...

[2] - https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/12/vaccine-manufacturing-q-and-a/

It are you an established doc?

It's great to have independent experts here on hn.

So we don't need to trust those experts who are in the global pandemic circles since beginning.

Tell me more how you were able to conclude your Statements based in how you Google articles from the Internet which align with your world view :)

As far as I am concerned there are far too many people with vested interests polluting the waters.

I was merely linking to mainstream media sources as most people on here appear to shoot down anything that isn't mainstream media or mainstream thinking.

For the last several months, when I come across an article that has "science" about COVID in it I automatically look for peer-reviewed papers in the text. I don't care if Albert Einstein himself told me that the COVID vaccine is safe, or if he said I will die from COVID... unless there is a peer-reviewed scientific paper I will disregard anything said by that media outlet.

Too many sources are just quoting scientists and celebrities about how safe (or how dangerous) vaccines (and other info) are. No one questions anything [0]

I'm fucking sick of the lack of critical thinking! I'm fucking sick of not being able to question something without getting downvoted, shouted down, branded a conspiracy theorist. The fundamental core of science is that I can question it! This is no longer allowed. It's dogma, religion, whatever you want to call it, not science!

COVID is no longer about science any more. There is literally no science behind giving 12 year old children an experimental drug that has a higher chance of inflaming their heart than it does of preventing COVID symptoms...

FFS, only 25 people in the UK under the age of 18 died last year from COVID! [1]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/14/uk-covid-vacci...

> 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717

This is the (social) media tactic: remove the distinction between 'die with covid / die of covid', don't mention comorbidities, don't mention age, throw in a couple anecdotes of healthy people taken down by covid, and before long people believe that 10% of healthy children are going to die a covid unless we acquiesce to the most drastic measures in perpetuity. At the same time our sophisticated leaders throw large parties with no masks to keep greasing the corruption machine.

I want dialogue! I want lots of it. I want people on mainstream media and social media to question all science. They are not able to. They are not allowed.

The BBC will not have anyone on any show that questions the dogma! It's not science. Science is when I can question your results, or try to replicate your results, or come up with alternative hypotheses etc. This isn't allowed today! If I publich legit research on Twitter that goes against the mainstream government data on COVID, it will be banned.

Social media are notorious for only allowing people to speak in positive tones about all the mainstream COVID information.

I'd love to have proper discussions but that's not possible these days!

Getting the jab is less risky than not.

I'm most surprised to read comments like yours on hn.

I don't know why but I wouldn't have expected this. People who read hn should be able to Research better and be able to read numbers better than the avg.

Edit: sounded a bit snarky, toned it down a touch

I was also pretty unenthusiastic about taking an experimental vaccine, but I was more unenthusiastic about getting coronavirus or, worse, giving it to somebody who was more vulnerable.

For a tiny tiny fraction of the population! You forgot that bit.

Anyway I wholly agree the GP, the West had gone crazy in both the handling of the pandemic and how heavy handed it is with opposition against the ambient madness. And now governments know they can get away with such power tripping without any consequence, situation will continue going worst and worst on the freedom front.

> Japan never had lockdown and is doing fine without it

Japan does have an emergency lockdown, it's just that it's not legally enforceable. However, people who have disregarded the lockdown have and will be subject to intense public shaming and bashing.

Additionally, the Covid situation in Japan is far from being okay. The government and IOC's insistence on proceeding with the Olympics despite the slow vaccine rollouts have resulted in a surge of new cases and is continuing to put strain on the health care system [1]. The situation is so bad that the current prime minister is quitting over this.

https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/

17,000 deaths may be a lot better than some other countries, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "doing fine" compared to the near-zero death counts in regions that imposed fast and strict lockdowns.

Nothing can be done to prevent this. It is just a fundamental fact of life. If you believe that it is the governments duty to extend lifespans and prevent illness at literally any cost, then there is literally no level of tyranny that you won’t tolerate. Why should you be free to choose your own diet? Why should you be free to choose for yourself how much you want to exercise? More people die every year from making those choices badly than anything else. Why should you be allowed to leave your house for anything except the most essential purposes? The outside world has so many things that are liable to kill you.

“Oh but x number of people will die” is just a fear based argument that dismisses all other considerations. 100% of people will die. If you believe liberty is important on any level, then you would believe people should generally be able to decide for themselves what risks they want to take with their lives. If you believe in democracy on any level then people should certainly be free to discuss what risk decisions they should be denied by the government making them on their behalf.

The fact that we’re debating whether we should be allowed to leave our houses is somewhat shocking. The fact a significant number of people believe we shouldn’t even be allowed to discuss this is a more dystopian reality than I could have previously imagined.

I do not. The cost of fast and strict lockdowns is very minimal. It's when you wait to enact a proper lockdown that it becomes very very expensive, because it suddenly takes six months to finish instead of six days.

> More people die every year from making those choices [diet, exercise] badly than anything else.

Yep, which is most countries tax things like sugar more heavily than they do vegetables, and why your health insurance is cheaper if you're in good physical health. We already have restrictions to incentivise good habits there.

> If you believe liberty is important on any level, then you would believe people should generally be able to decide for themselves what risks they want to take with their lives.

I'm fine with people deciding what risks they want to take with their own lives, I'm not fine with them deciding what risks they want to take with the lives of anyone who happens to come into contact with them.

I think you've misunderstood my comment. All of these costs are significantly greater if you do not enact a fast and strict lockdown.

If you lock down at a single digit case count, you can be out and free with no restrictions by the end of the week, as the virus can be quickly eradicated in those conditions. The costs of that are very minor, and mostly amount to annoyances in rescheduling things. I've gone through this twice. It's not ideal, but it's pretty easy to cope with.

If you wait for cases to balloon to the tens of thousands, you will have to outright cancel events instead of rescheduling them, lest you want your wedding guests to die from preventable illnesses. Those are the kind of extremely heavy social costs you're describing, and I 100% agree that avoiding them is extremely important.

I also think that the argument you’re putting forward here shows close to zero regard for the welfare of other people. Perhaps the lockdowns are inexpensive to you, but they are life-changingly devastating to others. Perhaps you have a comfortable living arrangement, and the ability to work from home. Perhaps you haven’t had to attend a parents funeral over FaceTime. Perhaps you haven’t lost your career. Perhaps you haven’t been confined to a dormitory for months on end. Perhaps you haven’t been stuck at home with a domestic abuser. Perhaps you haven’t had to liquidate your business. Perhaps you haven’t been driven to suicide by having your entire life taken away. But many people have. Surely we must be allowed to debate the indiscriminate costs of the measures you demand to increase your own personal safety.

Your argument for controlling others to protect your own safety can also be extended without limit. Most of the things that can kill you outside are the decisions of other people. Why should they be allowed out for non-essential purposes when they are clearly imperilling you for their own leisure? I’m going to cook dinner tonight, why should I be allowed to do that when I might burn my house down, and your house too, killing both of us and our entire families? Surely some laws are necessary, but surely we must be entitled to debate them to figure out which ones are reasonable.

So let's minimise how devastating they are by doing them hard and early, so that they don't end up lasting for months.

Or is your proposed alternative not doing them at all? Because dying is a hell of a lot more devastating than a lockdown is.

> Perhaps you haven’t had to attend a parents funeral over FaceTime.

Letting thousands more parents die so that someone can attend a funeral seems rather counter-productive.

> Perhaps you haven’t been stuck at home with a domestic abuser.

Even the harshest lockdowns I'm aware of have explicitly allowed for accommodations in these types of situations, and I've never seen a single person arguing that they shouldn't.

> Perhaps you haven’t been driven to suicide by having your entire life taken away. But many people have.

Bullshit. Here's a direct quote from the AIHW:

"Since 2020, suicide registers in Victoria and New South Wales have regularly published data on suspected deaths by suicide in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The Suicide in Queensland: Annual Report 2020 (Leske et al. 2020) included data on suspected deaths by suicide from January 2015 to July 2020. In all cases there is no evidence of any increase in 2020 or 2021 relative to previous years."

Source: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/co...

This is an extremely common blatant lie perpetuated by the exact kind of disinformation merchants this thread is about. COVID-19 related restrictions and lockdowns have had no effect on suicide rates.

> Surely some laws are necessary, but surely we must be entitled to debate them to figure out which ones are reasonable.

You're absolutely entitled to debate them - you're doing that right here. No-one's getting banned for posting "I think this lockdown is unnecessary". They're getting banned for spreading false information and advocating for people to actively break said laws, creating major health risks in the process.

Having a loose association with groups that promote civil disobedience, or even directly promoting it is clearly not the reason that Facebook is banning these accounts. Because Facebook doesn’t do this with any other cause that promotes or associates with the promoters of civil disobedience (in democratic jurisdictions at least).

You also can’t make the case that civil disobedience during the pandemic is disallowed. Because the promotion of civil disobedience and mass gatherings was very clearly allowed, depending on the cause that was being promoted.

I also find the suggestion that one of the least trusted companies in the world should be entrusted with the authority to police “false information” to be completely laughable. Your own interpretation of what constitutes “false information” is clearly rather inadequate. I made the claim that people who would not have otherwise committed suicide did as a result of the lockdown. Something I know for a fact to be true. Your claim is that this is not true because you claim that the total number of suicides hasn’t changed. Which, even if true, doesn’t refute my point in any way. Which demonstrates perfectly why preserving democratic principles is so important.

Which is about half the japanese population. Or are we comparing apples to jetskis here?

There is more to death than numbers. 16.000 genocidal industrialized slaughterings or 16.000 targeted kindergarden assassinations are certainly something a free society cannot tolerate, while 16.000 dying of old age is something a free society has to tolerate because it is part of nature.

Now that we are clear what kind of deaths a free society has incentives to prevent for sure (genocides, assassinations) we can move on into murkier territory: Preventable pandemic deseases. Note the pandemic in there, it is the thing that makes the difference between "you lead an unhealthy lifestyle and now it comes back to haunt you" and "you did everything right, but your neighbour caughed in your face today". Being in a pandemic situation where everybody can potentially become another ones killer is a delicate situation for any form of society, but especially for a free one. But compared to the times of the black death it is much, much easier if you know what is killing you, how it is doing it and how to prevent people from getting it, either by organisational changes (lockdowns, mask mandates, home office) and/or by medical means (vaccinations).

Now any free society usually also values life itself. Preventable deaths are bad. Preventable pandemic death is worse, because it is not a fixed number ("x people get struck by lightning a year"), but a partially exponentially developing one.

I think it is totally rational for any kind of free society to:

- do more to avoid preventable death than unpreventable death (the easier this prevention is the bigger the moral duty to do sth)

- do more to avoid preventable pandemic death than preventable non-pandemic death (because logistic function)

The easier and the less side effects this prevention has the more moral mandate there is to do it.

Of course measures can go over the top as well. Politicians/corporations can abuse the situation to extend their powers and these are legitimate concerns.

Sadly nowadays they are filled with very un-nuanced, self-lying fundamentalist people ("My freedom to not wear a mask is more important than your freedom not to die") that are quite frankly right now the reason why this pandemic is still rolling.

It is hard to form reasonable criticism in companionship of people who do as if a piece of cloth in front of their mouth is the most fundamental breach of human rights ever.

“X number of people will die” is an equally un-nuanced argument, and in the comment I was replying to above, it was the entirety of the argument they put forward.

It is possible to have a nuanced and properly considered discussion or debate about the intricacies of this topic. But on Facebook, you’re only allowed to do this if your perspective is on the list of approved perspectives. It’s the same for a lot of other social media outlets. Even if you don’t necessarily get banned, the idiots who are only capable of seeing black and white tend to do their best to drown out any opinions they don’t like.

Edit because rate limiting:

In any "lockdown" situation, a large percentage of the population must, by definition, exist in the world to enforce the lockdown, deliver food, keep critical services running, tend to the sick, etc.

The desirability and feasibility of a "fast and strict" lockdown is a fantasy of the laptop class and/or authoritarian propaganda.

Closing borders before there is community spread, a la Australia and NZ, is a separate issue. Those were not "fast". The borders to those countries have been closed since early 2020. In the case of Australia, their citizens cannot even leave without a special permit that is almost never approved.

There is currently no end in sight to their "fast and strict" lockdown. In fact, they have increased restrictions in the last several months in an attempt to prevent interstate spread within the country.

I live in Adelaide, a city of over a million people that has done two strict lockdowns (at 17 and 6 cases respectively), and neither of them lasted more than a week. Both of them completely eradicated the virus from the state, and we've had 0 COVID-related deaths in over a year. Looking at the absolute disasters happening everywhere else that doesn't react as quickly (even just over in Sydney) shows exactly how well those have worked.

> Closing borders before there is community spread, a la Australia and NZ, is a separate issue.

For the record, we actually didn't do this - borders we only unilaterally closed after community spread had occurred. It was only after eradicating the virus from the community in early 2020 that it became a primary line of defence against further spread.

> Those were not "fast". The borders to those countries have been closed since early 2020.

By "fast" I meant reacting quickly, not that the lockdown was over quickly. However usually those are the same thing - it's a hell of a lot easier to eradicate the virus when you start at 10 cases instead of 10,000.

Conflating closed international borders with a lockdown is somewhat confusing. Australia and New Zealand closing their borders to countries that couldn't successfully restrict COVID spread has had virtually no impact on anyone's day-to-day life.

> There is currently no end in sight to their "fast and strict" lockdown.

Only 2 Australian states are currently locked down (Victoria and New South Wales), and describing NSW's as "fast" or "strict" would be downright laughable.

When does this end? "Until Covid goes away" isn't an answer if Covid never goes away.

Right now the magic number for Australia is getting 80% of the population vaccinated, at which point the current COVID-zero approach will be abandoned.

I believe New Zealand has a similar approach, although I'm not sure on the exact number they're targeting.

My source shows them at 64.4%, where are you seeing 80%?

> Had the world's highest daily infection rate last week.

And the world's ~50th highest death rate.

The point of the vaccine isn't simply to prevent you from getting the virus, it's to prevent you from getting sick or dying. Ideally it makes transmission harder too (a less severe infection means less viral load to spread), but that's just a secondary benefit. The primary thing is to stop people from being hospitalised.

Israel has among the world’s highest levels of vaccination for COVID-19, with 78% of those 12 and older fully vaccinated, the vast majority with the Pfizer vaccine. Yet the country is now logging one of the world’s highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people.

More than half are in fully vaccinated people, underscoring the extraordinary transmissibility of the Delta variant and stoking concerns that the benefits of vaccination ebb over time.

I think that 60% figure is the percentage of vaccinated and hospitalised. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/nearly-6...

For months we were confined to our homes. The lockdowns began in March, just like they did in Australia.

We wore masks (after our health agencies recommended them in late March/early April), we didn't go outside, we didn't go to work. At least those that were lucky enough to not be in one of the essential groups I mentioned above.

Your international border was completely shut to non-citizens (correct?). You live in one of the most remote places on Earth, surrounded by the South Pacific and Indian oceans. You control your entire continent.

In the U.S., we are unable to prevent millions of people from entering the country via our southern border, that stretches many thousands of miles, in any year. Many who are otherwise very serious about the pandemic are indifferent to this issue. Even if we had been able to eradicate the virus in the lower 48 states, it would have been instantly reintroduced into the country.

I'm only discussing closed borders because, from what I can gather, that's the only meaningful, discernable policy difference.

I'm curious which restrictions you believe were implemented in Australia, aimed at reducing community spread, that were not in the U.S.? What did you do that "eradicated" the virus that we were unable or unwilling to do? This is an honest question.

I've never been to Adelaide but judging by the map, and your response, it's a more remote area of the country. Those that lived in mega-cities like Sydney had much more community spread, before the seriousness of the issue was known, due to their global interconnectedness. Those of us who live in such places might wish they had the type of advanced warning that others did. But we didn't. Once the virus was widespread within the community, it was not possible to stop it. I say this as someone who spent the pandemic in New York City.

So maybe you are right that "fast and strict" is the way to go (if you define fast by meaning, before uncontrollable community spread). But if that's the case, can't you understand how that was never an option for many places? While Adelaide/Australia as a whole was dealing with its 10 cases, NYC alone likely had many more than 10,000. This is why many Americans were furious at the endless, largely pointless restrictions that occurred after the initial 2-3 month lockdown.

> It's sort of fascinating that Australians believe that we didn't take measures to stop community spread in the U.S similar to what was done in their home country. [...] I'm curious which restrictions you believe were implemented in Australia, aimed at reducing community spread, that were not in the U.S.? What did you do that "eradicated" the virus that we were unable or unwilling to do? This is an honest question.

Last year my state enacted a lockdown after the discovery of 17 cases over a period of two days. During that lockdown you were not allowed to leave your house unless you were an essential worker. The only exception to this was one person per household being allowed to go directly to the nearest grocery store and directly back once per day.

This lockdown was meant to last for a week, it ended up only lasting for three days as that was all that was necessary to eradicate the virus.

I'm unaware of any state or even city in the United States that has done anything even remotely comparable to that at any case count, let alone having done it at the onset of an outbreak. Yes, not even allowing exercise is extreme, but it then gave us six months of having absolutely no cases or restrictions whatsoever. Very much worth it as far as I'm concerned.

I will also note that compliance seems much better in Australia (or at least, my corner of it). I don't think I've seen a single person in a public building without a mask since our mask mandates were first introduced. Based on what I've heard from my American friends, this is extraordinarily far from the case in even the most pandemic-conscious communities in the States.

> Claiming that you only shut your borders to "countries that could not control spread" is incorrect, no? Your international border was completely shut to non-citizens.

Australia's border had been open to New Zealand (and vice versa) for significant chunks of the last year. It no longer is due to ongoing outbreaks in Sydney and Auckland, but generally speaking free travel between countries that had eradicated COVID-19 did exist.

> Even if we had been able to eradicate the virus in the lower 48 states, it would have been instantly reintroduced into the country.

Yep, reintroduction is a major issue and every time it happens carries a major risk (just look at Sydney right now). However, exponential growth having to start from the ground floor buys you so much time to get vaccinations up to an acceptable level. And while expecting everywhere to successfully eradicate the virus is optimistic at best, if the US actually set a good example rather than being an absolute dumpster fire in its pandemic response, I believe that the rest of the world would have followed suit and made things at least slightly manageable. I really can't understate how much of the anti-lockdown and "COVID is a hoax" conspiracy sentiment in Australia is very clearly directly copied from the talking points of the previous US President. There's thankfully not much of it, but almost all of it comes from people who can't even name the leader of the main left-wing party in Australia but spend 3 hours a day posting about Joe Biden on Facebook.

> I've never been to Adelaide but judging by the map, and your response, it's a more remote area of the country.

I wouldn't really describe it like that, but I suppose it depends on your definition of "remote". It's definitely heavily urban, and travel between different major cities is still high despite the large distances involved.

>Those that lived in mega-cities like Sydney had much more community spread, before the seriousness of the issue was known, due to their global interconnectedness.

This is correct, but given that all of Australia - Sydney included - successfully eradicated the virus the first go around, it doesn't seem to have been a major sticking point.

> Once the virus was widespread within the community, it was not possible to stop it.

This is possibly true in some environments now with the Delta strain (although we may never know for sure - increased vaccination rates mean that eradication is no longer the only strategy), but it certainly wasn't a year ago. In mid-2020 Melbourne (a city of over 5 million people) had uncontrolled community spread during its second wave, with up to 700 cases a day and about 20,000 cases through the course of that outbreak. They managed to completely eradicate the virus. It took a long time because of how slowly they reacted to the outbreak (initially attempting postcode restrictions instead of a full-city lockdown, something that turned out to be woefully ineffective), but they did get down to zero again.

Now perhaps you're using a definition of "widespread" that is far greater than was the case for Melbourne. That would be reasonable - even that major outbreak pales in comparison to almost anything overseas - but I would make the argument that almost every city in the world knew that COVID was a serious problem well before they got to that point.

> But if that's the case, can't you understand how that was never an option for many places?

If China managed to eradicate the virus in Wuhan, then it should have been possible for any developed country. Sure, Western nations can't exactly go to the same extremes that China did (thankfully), but we also had the advantage of 2 months to prepare before things got really bad.

It's really hard to buy this notion. 3 days is not long enough for symptoms to manifest after infection. There seems to have been a great deal of luck that this was all that was required. And like you said, it started from an extremely low basepoint. One that's basically impossible for more densely populated countries or cities given the situation.

A 3 day lockdown would have done nothing for NYC. Monitoring and enforcing the goings on of the 9 million people in the city itself (20.3 mil in the metro), given the size of the police force, would not have been possible.

When I speak of "the situation", I mean that it would have been nice if China had been more forthcoming about the pneumonia that developed late in 2019, rather than censoring and imprisoning their own public health professionals and front line workers, but that didn't happen. So here we are. It's easy to forget that conservatives were the ones sounding the alarm about a "Chinese virus" in January 2020. Trump wanted to end travel from that nation. He was told in no uncertain terms that he was a hysterical racist and that sensible policy never materialized.

> I wouldn't really describe it like that, but I suppose it depends on your definition of "remote". It's definitely heavily urban, and travel between different major cities is still high despite the large distances involved.

I looked at the aerial photographs. Chinese, Europeans, coastal Americans, would have a hard time thinking of such a place as "dense" or "urban". Certainly it's one of the most remote metros over 1 mil on the globe.

> "COVID is a hoax"

Covid isn't a hoax but it certainly was cynically exploited for political gain by Democrats who sensed this as their opening for the 2020 election. After the March lockdowns (the ones Trump agreed with at the time and helped implement), Democrats then encouraged the most destructive riots in American history (measured in dollars) for more cynical political gain. "White supremacy is the real virus", mass demonstrations all over the country during a pandemic. After we had all been locked in our homes. Insanity. Totally irresponsible.

This absolute nonsense, and the subsequent finger wagging and blame pointing at Trump, despite how widespread the virus had already become in March before we were able to react to it, was the breaking point for most conservative Americans, myself included. The hypocrisy was too much.

When American conservatives say "covid is a hoax", they largely mean the cynical response to it that I just described, and the effect it had on the American election, not that it literally doesn't exist. There are some absolute crazies on the far right who post nonsense about "5G", and unfortunately that spread to Australia, I'm sure. But I've never met such a person, and I have many connections to conservative states.

> If China managed to eradicate the virus in Wuhan, then it should have been possible for any developed country.

They're lying. The West used to not be so quick to take the word of authoritarian regimes, especially those so obsessed with the concept of "saving face". Covid still kills people to this day in China despite their unwillingness to be honest about cases and deaths.

So in your previous comment you alluded to the idea that infections can creep in to a community where it has been previously eradicated. The virus wouldn't really be dangerous at all if we knew that this was happening in real-time, because we could just isolate every case. The reason the virus is dangerous is because it rapidly spreads undetected, and by the time we find out things could already be pretty bad.

The point of the immediate lockdown isn't that it will inherently prevent spread for long enough the virus dies off - it's just to give the contact tracing teams enough time to find every single person who has interacted with any single person that has interacted with any known case. Then all of those people have to do a proper quarantine (usually 14 days) and get tested regularly. Once you've done that, you wait a couple of days to see if any other seemingly random cases appear out of nowhere, and if they don't, everyone else can be assumed safe to go out as they'd please.

> I looked at the aerial photographs. Chinese, Europeans, coastal Americans, would have a hard time thinking of such a place as "dense" or "urban".

The trick here is that no-one lives in the areas that no-one lives in, so they're not really relevant. Yes, the desert 100km away from Adelaide is empty. But people travel by plane to Melbourne or Sydney, not by wandering around the desert - Australia has one of the most urban populations of any country on the planet.

You wouldn't say that Malé isn't dense or urban just because it's surrounded by water, and indeed that characteristic has not helped the Maldives at all when it comes to COVID-19.

> They're lying.

About having (previously) eradicated COVID in Wuhan? Definitely not. Just ask anyone who actually lives there - life returned to complete normal after a couple of months. If COVID was still present in a megacity with absolutely no restrictions, everyone in the city would have stories of friends and relatives dying. That was happening in February. It wasn't happening in May.

New Zealand is currently around the 10-20/day cases mark contained to their largest city which remains in hard lockdown. The rest of the country has eased restrictions.

The delta variant has proven very difficult, the state of Victoria in Australia which really pushed the lockdown strtategy has given up. They're now pushing for vaccination in hopes of easing restrictions further. They remain in lockdown as a larger outbreak would overwhelm the healthcare system.

Similar case for New Zealand - they have a capacity of less than 250 ICU beds for COVID for 5 million people. The risks are much, much worse if the outbreak spreads.

NZ has had sustained mass immigration for years, and the population grows incredibly fast. All the infrastructure is designed for a country with 80% of the population level we have now, and I don't see it getting better.

Someone else defying lockdown, test & trace, mask, or vaccine mandates can affect me, especially prior to when I was able to get the vaccine.

That's the difference.

Death toll would be way higher than 17k especially with the more older population in Japan compared to other countries. Not to mention hospital overcrowding leading to higher fatality rates compared to now and even highet non covid deaths due to lack of emergency medical care.

Trust me I would stand up for my rights if I would not totally align with mask Mandates and co.

And yes mask waearing is for me similar to a car safety belt.

I just wanted to clarify this because it Sounds sometimes that no one agrees but only follow blindly. That's bullshit.

I was more surprised that our politicians actually went so far.

But I also watched docus about sars outbreak and you can see how little we knew back than. It actually transmitted through vents from one Tower to two others!

It is really depressing that even 18 months in, and even with instant access to the case curves of every country, significant numbers of people still believe that these tactics worked. You can just look at the development of cases over time and compare countries to each other to see that they've had no effect at all.

Do they?

If it's all about the money, my guess would be Facebook has lost out on ad revenue, because a lot of the ad payers don't have customers.

There's still a third possibility, they're making some moral decision, although that's hard for me to believe given the company's past decisions. Maybe the lost revenue has made them make a moral decision?

It could always be a combination of these reasons, and I'm sure there's others I haven't accounted for.

The media said they are dangerous since the beginning. Some estimates say there are up to 15-20% of right-extremists partaking in the „protests“. The conclusion for the majority in germany is: there are nazis and that‘s why the protests should be forbidden.

Obviously we shouldn‘t allow people fighting against minorities to do whatever they want. But the remaining 80-85% are „normal“ people (a lot might be too esoteric, but hey, that‘s nothing bad per se).

„One bad apple, spoils the bunch“, it seems.

Though, the current government (mostly of the CDU, party of chancellor Merkel), was involved in a few corruption scandals lately. Politicans are no apples, but these dangerous people wanting their constitutional rights back obviously are.

I don‘t like the opinion of the „querdenker“ movement. But i am much more concerned with the german acceptance to restrict their constitutional rights.

Germans are good following rules. They‘re no revolutionaries, they‘re top executors. So they should be extra careful on which rules get set. There will not be a lot of people questioning rules as soon as they are set but rather just live by them. as history has taught us more than the one, bad, bad, time.

Btw: Even most people in east germany who have important roles are from the west.

While my city was still in „lockdown“, no private meetings with groups bigger than 10, police checking in on private parties, we had 13x the „incidence rate“.

This was one of the cities with the lowest cases in all of germany.

I wonder how that‘s possible. Might all these measures not be as effective as we hoped? Should we return to accept that life is a risk, thank science for the vaccine, take it or not and live life?

I know it sounds bad, but to me, this whole pandemic politic still seems fishy.

We now know that the vaccines widely available (at least those used in the US, Israel, the UK) have waning effectiveness, likely requiring periodic boosters.

We also know those vaccines are non-sterilizing, meaning it is at least possible for fully vaccinated individuals to contract and transmit the virus.

Even assuming vaccine mandates in perpetuity, and widespread compliance, there will presumably be some overlap of "lapsed effectiveness" in the population between boosters. We literally don't have the capacity to administer boosters to all 200 million American adults exactly at the same instant, or even in the same month. Nor do we know for sure how long the effectiveness window lasts, or whether that may vary between individuals or type of vaccine.

How exactly are we going to "eliminate" covid, given this reality? Many Americans are terrified that the goal is "elimination" of the virus. Similar to the War on Terror, wherein we did a tremendous amount of collateral damage endlessly chasing an unattainable ideal.

thatsthejoke.jpg

Do you regularly interact with white-tailed deer in confined spaces?

> We now know that the vaccines widely available (at least those used in the US, Israel, the UK) have waning effectiveness, likely requiring periodic boosters.

What's wrong with a vaccine needing boosters? Many do.

> We also know those vaccines are non-sterilizing, meaning it is at least possible for fully vaccinated individuals to contract and transmit the virus.

Even more reason for people to be vaccinated. It keeps them out of the hospital.

Even assuming vaccine mandates in perpetuity, and widespread compliance, there will presumably be some overlap of "lapsed effectiveness" in the population between boosters. We literally don't have the capacity to administer boosters to all 200 million American adults exactly at the same instant, or even in the same month.

> Even assuming vaccine mandates in perpetuity, and widespread compliance, there will presumably be some overlap of "lapsed effectiveness" in the population between boosters.

Lapsed effectiveness isn't something that prohibits us from containing the virus

> We literally don't have the capacity to administer boosters to all 200 million American adults exactly at the same instant, or even in the same month.

It's honestly pretty sad that you think we couldn't do this. Have Americans really gotten that lazy?

> How exactly we are going to "eliminate" covid, given this reality? Many Americans are terrified that the goal is "elimination" of the virus. Similar to the War on Terror, wherein we did a tremendous amount of collateral damage chasing an endless, unattainable ideal.

I'm not sure what to say to this. "We don't care to contain it, therefore its' impossible to contain"?

You do realize that people eat deer? And other livestock? Is it not a leading hypothesis that the origin of COVID-19 was an animal market? If it exists in the surrounding environment that's not "elimination". There will always be a risk of an outbreak.

> It's honestly pretty sad that you think we couldn't do this. Have Americans really gotten that lazy?

Yes? Is that not obvious? Though, not the point I'm making.

> I'm not sure what to say to this. "We don't care to contain it, therefore its' impossible to contain"?

You've interpreted my comment precisely backwards. Try this:

"It's impossible to contain, therefore we should approach it as a harm mitigation problem, rather than a candidate for 'elimination', through vaccination and early treatment, not dystopian lockdowns and restrictions"

Can you name another respiratory virus we've been able to completely eliminate? Any coronaviruses? Flu? Common cold? The ones I'm aware of are endemic.

How many people are eating raw deer? Do you have evidence of spread of covid-19 from deer to people?

> "It's impossible to contain, therefore we should approach it as a harm mitigation problem, rather than a candidate for 'elimination', through vaccination, not dystopian lockdowns and restrictions"

Why not both, (as long as you don't include the word 'dystopian' which is clearly just an emotional word). Vaccination and restrictions can work together to address the pandemic.

If you're implying mandatory vaccinations, sure. But when you've got a percentage of the population not willing to be vaccinated, if that percentage of the population is high enough to overwhelm our hospitals, restrictions make sense.

Tell me you don't hunt without telling me you don't hunt. Typically, after killing an animal, you skin it and hang it to drain before cutting it into steaks and cooking it. Similar to what happens in a wet market.

> If you're implying mandatory vaccinations, sure.

I'm not. At-risk populations will make the right decisions for themselves. Even republicans have high vaccination rates above a certain age. To any extent that this isn't happening, more education is the way to go.

Remember: the vaccines are about preventing serious illness. Not eliminating the virus.

As for hospital capacity, it's interesting how vaccine mandates are drastically exacerbating this issue, given how many frontline health care workers, who are largely naturally immune, are being fired or walking off the job due to these mandates.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. We largely do have physical capacity. We even have the ability to spin up more than is current online. Our bottleneck is the supply of medical professionals themselves.

Yes, and these medical professionals take a long time to train, hence why we care about hospital capacity.

When it leads to a healthcare crisis.

I'm not responding to what Facebook is doing in the article or coronavirus lockdown response specificly, just your statement: 'Seriously, they're called "lockdowns," because they are the very opposite of things you want to normalize in a free society.'

In a free society you still can't drive on the wrong side of the road. You can't go into a business and fire off shots in random directions (maybe won't hit anyone, like you maybe won't infect anyone vulnerable or infect someone else who will go on to during a deadly outbreak).

Does this word mean something akin to alt-thinkers? Or maybe sideways thinkers?

But then there's this internet mass that self-identifies using the label "anti-lockdown" which is full of people who are at best crazy and unhinged. But people read the headline and assume that "$social_media is censoring my opinions!" when it really just a specific group that has co-opted some label to pseudolegitimze their views.