Putting that aside, let's assume that the epidemiology of this disease is settled. What would you do differently policy-wise to address this, given that you seem disinclined to favor suppression methods?
Let's even assume incorrectly that all COVID deaths are on top of the 600k normal deaths. So in 2020 85% more people die of natural causes than normally. Almost exclusively very old and already ill people. It's just not a big deal and it's crazy that people think it is.
Now let's say that the death rate is 0.2% as the Oxford institute estimates, 20% of COVID casualties would have died anyway, and that isolating the at-risk people further reduces the casualties by half. We end up with 40,000 extra deaths, 7% more deaths than normally. A non-event.
If you think that the death toll of the lockdowns will be lower than that, then I hope you are right. I expect not.
[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...
The Oxford CEBM estimate is an extreme outlier, and I have not seen a pre-print of any rigorous work that was used to produce those estimates. That, for lack of a better word, blog post you linked to is full of spurious analyses like the following:
>Therefore, to estimate the IFR, we used the estimate from Germany’s current data 22nd March (93 deaths 23129) cases); CFR 0.51%
So they essentially just took the current cases and produced a naive case fatality rate, despite the fact that many cases are still ongoing? By the way the number of deaths is 281 now and Germany's nCFR is climbing quickly, yet they have not revised their estimate higher. Why is that?
I'll also note that they conveniently exclude South Korea from their analysis. Why are they only choosing countries that favorably support their "low IFR" hypothesis?
>The results of screenings have suggested 0.5% are infected; the true figure is likely higher due to asymptomatic and as a result of many not seeking testing: estimates suggest the real number infected is 1%. Iceland is currently reporting two deaths in 737 patients, CFR. 0.27%; if 1% of the population (364,000) is infected then the corresponding IFR would be 0.05%.
They neglect to include in their analysis that the 1% infected ratio for Iceland came from a voluntary screening study, meaning that it was not a random population sample but most likely enriched for infected cases. They then naively back this out to a ridiculous IFR of 0.05%. Honestly, are these people even actual researchers?
>Let's even assume incorrectly that all COVID deaths are on top of the 600k normal deaths. So in 2020 85% more people die of natural causes than normally. Almost exclusively very old and already ill people. It's just not a big deal and it's crazy that people think it is.
This ghoulish statement is all that I really need to know about you.
The same question could go for you, why do you only listen to specialists that are contrarian outliers?
People are whining about volunteer isolation after a couple days. I've been living it for roughly 6 months. And my self quarantine reduces my individual risk while a disease spreads fast. This is just the beginning for normally healthy people.
PRC is new model of what we should aspire to.. because they stopped the pandemic(after covering it up and letting it spread first)
When your parents put you in timeout did you equate it with being imprisoned?
That attitude that the government is like a parent and the citizens its child to be disciplined, as opposed to a humble servant to the citizens, is exactly the kind of totalitarianism the poster was referring to.
My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts.
My point is that it's generally accepted that children have less rights than adults. E.g. it's accepted for parents to lock their kid in a room for hours for swearing, but it's not accepted for the government to do the same thing. The fact that it's socially accepted to treat a child a certain way doesn't mean it's socially accepted for the government to treat adults the same way.
Similarly for the argument about not having enough hospital beds due to other people getting infected: the classical idea of rights was as "negative rights", not "positive rights". A negative right means you have the right that somebody else will not do something to you, whereas a positive right means that you have the right for somebody else to do something to you (or, somebody else has the obligation to do something for you). Positive rights necessarily impinge on negative rights. Since requiring hospital care is a positive right, not a negative right, approaching it from a system of negative rights one wouldn't have any right to restrict other peoples behaviour under the justification that it would improve your access to hospital care.
Similarly, you have the right of free assembly, but not when it puts others' lives at risk.
And regardless of the legal/moral distinction, I would suggest that these limitations are both legal as well as moral.
That's an interesting example, because that quote was actually originally used in the context of jailing somebody for opposing the WW1 draft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the.... And the actual ruling was partially overturned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio. There's an in-depth analysis here: https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... . In short, it's not clear that you don't in fact have the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre.
Personally I don't support quarantine because I believe a negative-rights-based system produces the best outcomes in the long term. Yes it might do worse in a pandemic like this, but it also severly limits the possibility of other worst-case outcomes like the hundred million people killed by Mao and Stalin, the Cambodian genocide, Hitler's atrocities. If the countries involved (and by extension their governments) had been absolutely committed to the protection of such negative rights (and had institutions that made it extremely hard to violate these rights, a strong court system and constitution), they could never have justified the atrocities they committed.
And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy.
The best government is the one that harms the citizens as little as possible in the process of taking value from them to give it to the people that sit on all the weaponry, so they don't take whatever they want with that weaponry. Everything else is a sideshow aimed at improving the stability of this setup.
It's not as simple as stupid. Humans have different values and risk preferences, and all values are ultimately arbitrary so there's no objective way to say some values are better than others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument). In that case people have highly conflicting values in terms of weighing up loss of life against destruction of peoples' standards of living. People also have conflicting estimates about how much economic damage the shutdowns will cause, so even if they did have the same values they wouldn't necessarily agree.
>And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy.
This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way..
Most relevant knowledge at the moment comes from epidemiology.
The most important value we have to take into account at the moment is that suffocating to death is very bad and we want to inflict this upon least amount of people possible.
Money is just a way of keeping tabs of to how much of the output of our civilisation every entity is entitled to.
We did it sort of dilligently in hopes of encouraging people to increase the output of civilisation. It kinda works but also led us to dog tailors, Jeff Bezos private wealth and cruise ship industry and various other crap so there's definitely room for improvement.
Lots of people hope that economy won't crash but will be knocked out of this local optimum it sits stuck in for at least few decades.
> This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way..
This is an argument that they always behave in authoritarian way. The only thing you can hope for is that they bother you the least amount possible while doing their thing which is taking part of your output.
You had rights because it was beneficial for the government to give you rights. Epidemic changed that. When it subsides if it will still be beneficial for the government to give you rights back, you'll get them.
If government fails, army will step in to take what they want from you more directly.