Mooney Driver being harsh in ignoring for a moment the human impact on individuals this is a mere blip in population terms. At 1% mortality it simply is not serious. The human species will barely notice the event. Given such a relatively small impact I still have reservations about a complete an early lock down. Yes, it might eliminate the virus, and yes, in the short term, there will be fewer deaths. IF a vaccine is developed quickly it may be the right course of action. However if a vaccine isnt developed where do you go after the lockdown? How does your economy ever meet the rest of the world again? How much more serious is the impact when you finally open up, but the virus has run through most other countries? In short, not what is the short game, whats the end game? Of course with something a great deal more serious that is in the realms of rocking the human species, a complete lock down is the only answer, but this virus is not that. Another virus not long out of China that has dessimated the rabbit population is exactly that, so it could happen.
There are a lot of situations where a lockdown can be avoided.
For example there are many firms which comprise mainly of young people. I started in 1978 (aged 21) and for many years there was hardly anyone over about 30/35. I would not do this again because unless you recruit with great skill you get a huge level of absenteeism. You need to
In most B2B contexts this can be achieved.
Yet the economy has more or less ground to a halt. The postman tells me most businesses he visits are dead.
Hopefully this will end in the next few weeks.
If we had locked down sooner, we might have returned to some sort of local normality by now but we would still be being very vigilant for new outbreaks and international travel would still be restricted. Even if China were to have clamped down sooner I don’t think they could have prevented it from spreading internationally. As soon as it reached the developing world there was no hope of eradicating it by quarantine alone.
I confess that whilst I was aware of the seriousness of the disease quite early, I never foresaw the lockdown in its current form and had I been dictator I would also have been late to act.
There is a lot of dirt digging in the UK and I am sure the same will be happening everywhere else.
The UK authorities abandoned testing quite early (for a while) which looks like a big mistake but they didn’t have the test kits for everyone who should have been tested – like old people who were sent from hospitals to care homes to free up hospitals beds. This was done because everybody was running scared of “getting like Italy” where at one point anyone over 65 was – according to videos posted all over social media by Italian doctors – left to die in the hospital corridors. This lack of testing was then dressed up as “we were advised testing was not appropriate” i.e. a lie / disinformation / face saving to avoid admitting they didn’t have the test kits.
Nobody else (except S Korea, and perhaps Germany) had the test kits either, but nobody wanted to admit they were not prepared.
I bet there was a totally mad behind-the-scenes scramble to buy all this stuff, and as always in a real crisis each manufacturer fulfils orders from their own country regardless of when the orders were placed or whether they were prepaid. But nobody is allowed to say this at the political level because it shows up who doesn’t have domestic manufacturing of critical items. We are seeing this played out now in France when a French company developed some vaccine with partly French money but with a lot more US money and was going to ship to the US initially. In France, the whole “US takeover of French companies” issue is a nuclear topic and predictably it exploded.
kwlf wrote:
And yet it’s lower in Cuba than the USA.
Yes, I know, but I would say both Cuba and the USA are outliers in this case.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Had Europe locked down as a whole in the beginning of February, the whole thing would have been over by mid march.
No country has eliminated this, as in gone! So no this would not be over mid march. It is not over in the least for those countries that have been very successful in reducing the spread. NZ and Australia have been very successful but it is not over in the slightest.
If this was 1918 or 1518 you can be sure that we would all get it up to the level of herd immunity or it mutated to something less infectious. Without the fruits of the modern world. i.e. PCR testing and the like, we would not even no what the virus looked like.
YES the spread could have been considerably slowed down, to the point where test and trace infrastructure could be highly effective, along with many of the positive benefits.
If a complete lock down BY ITSELF is the answer why not start tomorrow or any day in the future? Perhaps that is the plan 
, when they have the necessary test infrastructure and or a partialy effective vacinne.
BTW I do think we acted far too slowly, because of the damage done.
Ted wrote:
No country has eliminated this, as in gone! So no this would not be over mid march.
We will never know but chances are pretty good that with a lockdown as it was enforced in some of the successful countries in this outbreak, the time involved would have been shorter, massively so. The incubation time for this thing is max 14 days, so when the first infections turned up, the country should have been sealed and shut down as it was later on immediately. IMHO this would have kept the spread to much lower figures and had allowed to keep up contact tracing all over. With a new infection rate of maybe 100 per day or lower, this is possible and is done now in Switzerland.
Where the western countries got it wrong was to take a soft approach, no masks, lame restrictions at first, basically letting the thing explode before they could justify harsher measures. Now we are in the third month of a shutdown which could have gone back to what the June 15 deadline now is set to be by mid march or early April.
What I do not see coming back anytime soon are mass venues such as sports events, theater, concerts, cinemas. But then while they are popular, most of them are not really vital for any economy. What is more critical is how to deal with public transport and also airline travel (which of course also is PT) and which countries to isolate further. And in case of 2ndary outbreaks, authorities need to act VERY fast to not repeat the same mistake.
In the US we are now finally starting to see the legality of quarantining people who are not sick being contested in the courts. Wisconsin has already ruled it unconstitutional. If you look at the state laws used as justification for doing it, you find it completely obvious that locking down the entire population was never the the intent, because it is indeed unconstitutional even when unenforced. I hope that in the fullness of time, this will be properly played out and that US governments will never, ever be able to do it again regardless of unproven potential consequences.
Silvaire wrote:
[…]and that US governments will never, ever be able to do it again regardless of unproven potential consequences.
Regardless of consequences, huh? Now that’s a stupid thing to say, from my vantage point. The consequences of inaction or insufficient action by the US government is already nearly 100 thousand people dead, a number which is likely to at least double in time. That are the “consequences” you speak of.
I’m very glad to live in a country where we have a well-written infectious diseases protection law that gives the state the powers it needs to properly fight epidemics, while we also have working courts and democratic opposition who ensure that this law is not abused. Just because a certain power can be abused is no reason to withhold that power from the state, one needs proper checks and balances and a working civil society to ensure that the laws are created and used for the public good.
Libertarianism will not help against Covid-19 or future pandemics, because viruses cannot be argued with or bribed with money…
All that is completely unproven. People’s behavior is not solely dictated by law, even in Germany.
This misuse of law is the worst example of government overreach in the US in my lifetime, and it should never happen again. What happens in Europe is not my concern given that the US will probably not come to the rescue again, when it goes wrong.
