See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...
In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.
I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.
And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.
Oh, so the law shouldn't be the same for everyone. Not making exceptions for celebrities is "bureaucratic, pointless, vindictive".
That's one way of looking at it. Seems to be yours.
* People who do not have COVID should be allowed to do whatever they like.
* People who are currently known to have COVID maybe should get treated differently.
Banning people who don't have COVID, who likely have immunity to COVID and who have more than enough money not to be a drain on the hospital system is really stupid. Spiteful behaviour just to make a point.
All these restrictions didn't stop 1.1mil ... so far & rising ... cases in NSW in 2 months. They are completely pointless. They didn't do anything. They are a waste of time that do no good and that we do not need. Anyone who cares can go worry about their own personal lockdowns.
There are single digit travellers daily who have COVID. 10,000+ daily local cases. Restrictions on tourists are literally meaningless. And didn't even stop Omicron crossing the border.
This has descended into farce, there is no justification beyond bloody-mindedness at this point.
BTW, I wish you guys luck in opposing your government. Hope our don’t follow.
Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.
Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.
Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.
Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.
I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.
It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.
The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.
There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.
There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.
It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.
The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.
Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.
This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.
My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.
A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.
Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.
Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.
Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.
I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.
Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries.
E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1]
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).
1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people
2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...
It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?
It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?
As the statistics show, no. Though luckily, things are changing now that Omicron is dominant, so I think all limitations are lifted pretty soon here.
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.
The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but higher, than Covid.
I’m more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed hospital well before there were vaccines.
Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.