I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.

Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.

I think you need to draw an actual timeline of all the measures that were taken, and where and when they happened. That should help clarify.

Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.

Alright that's one measure, keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!

> keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!

That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.

If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.

Those people were then transferred into a quarantine facility for two weeks where they weren’t isolated from each other, and then sent home on planes all over America without even being tested for COVID on exit from quarantine.

It's a mistake to think "authoritarian" means "effective". It doesn't. Authoritarian governments derive their power from the appearance of power, and that amongst other things means being brutal and never admitting that you're wrong.

In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.

I'm sorry, but this just bolsters my position. There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible. You have to tend to the infirm, you have to run critical systems, people need to eat (not even 50% people have ten days worth of rations stocked up; who is going to distribute more food, water and meds as they run out, etc?)

> There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible.

It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.

i think the last two years shown that nothing acceptable from a human rights pov could have been done to stop the pandemic from spreading once it was out of the bag.

i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.

R_t was under 1 in the US for extended periods of time, so your idea that the required measures can't be implemented there is empirically false.

Original COVID had an unmitigated R of about 3. All you have to do is reduce transmission 66% and you beat it. China did this very successfully. The later variants were much more transmissible though.

With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.

"china did this successfully"

We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?

Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?

We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.

Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?

Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.

If there were widespread covid on the scale of every other country, China is not so closed off that they could keep that a secret.