Please don't try and have other people do your research for easily answered questions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559034/

The article is conflating quarantines with lockdowns. They're not the same thing. Quarantines are more like the much-derided Great Barrington Declaration.

I disagree, I believe the article is generalizing that type of response.

A related comment of mine has a link with examples for the last several hundred years.

do you think if they could google simple questions they would still parrot silly talking points 3 years after?

Quarantining people who may have been exposed is a whole universe away from the lockdowns being discussed here, where whole cities, states and countries proactively prevented the free movement of their people who they had no reason to suspect had been exposed. Don't conflate these two.

It seems you may be looking to only discredit an argument instead of arguing the merits.

FTA:

> However, the use of quarantine and other measures for controlling epidemic diseases has always been controversial because such strategies raise political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues and require a careful balance between public interest and individual rights.

Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/short-history-of-quara...

In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?

> Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).

You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights? Not a compelling argument.

> In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?

Inform the public and let them assess the level of risk they're willing to accept. You know, like they do with literally every other health question. Expanding protections for people facing dangerous working conditions because of the virus to opt out of work, and mandatory sick leave, is perfectly reasonable as well.

I don't know why people act like this obvious answer is completely out of the question. Will it result in more death? Quite possibly. Giving governments moral authority to limit people's rights in such a fashion is never the right answer though. Would you support the draft too?

> You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights?

I'm not sure what this means. Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.

> Inform the public and let them personally assess the level of risk they're willing to accept.

This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.

The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.

> Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.

Yes, and? Is it not true that we have progressively recognized more rights over time, often at the cost of blood? That our "rulers" do not and should not have de facto power over our lives to impede our movements, that they should not have power over what we choose to believe or decide with whom we may associate?

Furthermore, none of the examples cited in the link you provided do the quarantine measures impact whole cities, states or nations, and where quarantine measures were broad, they were widely recognized as shameful and discriminatory in retrospect.

> This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.

Irresponsible? Do you think you have some responsibility to manage other people's lives for them? This really gets to the crux of the issue doesn't it, you think some people should have the right to make such decisions for others because those "others" aren't intelligent or well-informed enough to make these decisions for themselves. It's patriarchal, condescending and anti-democratic.

As for whether it's impossible, that's literally untrue. Sweden is proof by counterexample: they did exactly this and it turned out just fine. By the time the first lockdowns happened, we already had a reasonable assessment of the risks.

Instead the heavy-handed, duplicitous and authoritarian measures made the whole issue partisan, and so the US had one of the worst outcomes of all developed countries.

> The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.

Except it's not unrelated, it's just another example of curtailing civil liberties in the name of some ill-defined "collective good". People advocating for these positions simply take it as a given that their vision of the collective good needs no justification.

Editing to remove my comment; I’m done arguing with narrow-minded libertarians about effective government. It’s like arguing with a carnivore about why they should eat vegetables.

I'm not a libertarian, but do go on with your unjustified assumptions. We've gone through three rounds of you claiming you're right with no principled arguments or evidence, that it must be your way or the highway, and that the government responses were "effective" without considering obvious the most obvious counterexample that I cited.

You think the general public is equipped to quantify risk for a novel viral outbreak, and the government has no responsibility in attempting to keep its people alive. That’s about as libertarian as it gets. You have supplied no evidence that measures taken were ineffective, because every developed country had some plan.

I’m the one that supplied multiple citations. How about you go find some to support your assertions, instead of trying to snipe and mince mine?

> You think the general public is equipped to quantify risk for a novel viral outbreak, and the government has no responsibility in attempting to keep its people alive.

It's interesting that you experience no cognitive dissonance between what I cited as a good example of what I'm talking about, Sweden, and this strawman of my position.

You actually provided a citation? Or did you just say something with no evidence?

I have downvoted your comment

Seems like you may be unfamiliar with the guidelines here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh, some thing have too much time, with comment bulk, I must move on. However, how would OP know that I downvote? I tell him. This is allowed.