No stop this nonsense. China was sealing apartments in 2020 to enforce quarantine.
The worst that happened in the west was that we couldn't get dinner and beer at one of our many corporate restaurants that willingly shut down.
>Groceries 50%+ in the last 3 years. House prices are off the charts. Inflation that the government will blame on Russia, COVID supply shocks, aliens, but never their actions.
The cost of goods and housing and inflation have all gone up outside of Australia too. My US state did little Covid prevention besides allowing us to order alcoholic drinks to go; why are groceries and housing up in my little US city, not to mention the US Dollar inflation? Is it Australia's fault?
Yeah the minor inconvenience of being a prisoner in your own home & the police beating the tar out of you "for your protection"
This is whataboutism.
> The worst that happened in the west was that we couldn't get dinner and beer at one of our many corporate restaurants that willingly shut down.
Do you even remember 2020/2021? Schools, daycare, workplaces shut down, people not allowed to leave their apartments?
I am personally of the opinion that an ounce of prevention is well worrh a pound of cure, and so don't have any philosophical problem with either of these policies in the appropriate measure. But I can't imagine getting behind them in such an emphatic way as a lot of my colleagues and peers did. In hindsight is quite obvious that one of the causal factors for their enthusiasm was simply that they were not affected by the consequences to the degree that almost everyone else is.
Academics typically do not have a rigid nine to five schedule and often only go on campus for classes, or to work in theor lab where everyone's often wearing masks anyway. And work from home folks obviously are in a similar situation in terms of the impact these practices have on their productivity and lifestyle. So it was quite easy to support this stuff given their particular circumstances. I'm very disappointed in the inability of some these otherwise quite smart and seemingly perceptive people to take the place of others and understand why there could be legitimate non-ideological reasons for pushing back on the intensity of some of these policies.
The fact is, COViD is a problem for those at high risk, and those risk factors were well known in the early days. One response could have been to make just that subset take precautions.
But for some reason the vast majority of liberal societies went all totalitarian on their people. Why that was is as interesting as how Sweden did.