We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.
That's a thought terminating cliche, not a response, as well as a complete misinterpretation of Ben Franklin's intent[0], thus not even a valid argument from authority.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
For example in CA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-24/l-a-coun...
Temporarily closing gun shops, like shops for anything else not required for daily life, is absolutely reasonable.
If you claim that guns are required for daily life, that says more about your country than any other point here (and not in a good way).
Thats a terrible analogy as it’s not a partial limit that’s being applied here. It is an absolute removal. If a citizen is not allowed to create their own firearms or order them by mail, closing local stores is a total elimination of that right.
> Temporarily closing gun shops, like shops for anything else not required for daily life, is absolutely reasonable.
Says you. Your personal opinion of which constitutional rights are required for daily life does not dictate which ones others enjoy.
> If you claim that guns are required for daily life, that says more about your country than any other point here (and not in a good way).
You could make the same facetious statements about the 1st, 4th or 8th amendments as well.
1. Police taking biological samples as a matter of course, even after the crisis. A sneaky politician or official manages to turn this in to DNA sample collection, maybe by sequencing swabs on the side to "catch criminals." Nobody stops it because everyone is focused on the virus.
2. Local governments end up with expanded power to shut down businesses, this eventually gets abused for some kind of extortion in a small town somewhere.
3. Police gain generalized "indefinite detention" powers instead of specific "court-ordered quarantine" powers in some jurisdictions, creating a ticking time bomb set to explode the first time a mayor wants to get rid of a protester.
4. Efforts to stamp out counterproductive conspiracy theories result in legal and bureaucratic infrastructure which sits around and is eventually used to suppress a very productive conspiracy theory.
5. Playing on the above, Google builds a system to delete every video that says 5G and COVID-19 are linked. This is eventually used to delete every video that suggests Darkriver Mercenaries Inc. and the scandal in Kumran are linked.
All of these cases share one thing in common: a bad, over-generalized law gets passed because legislators are panicking and not taking the time to think about civil liberties. The virus spreads fast, but not so fast that you can't take the time to legislate effectively.
That's the kind of thinking that leads people to believe in FEMA death camps.
History does not support the most hyperbolic speculations, but it does support the idea that the USG files away at the base of lady liberty every time the public's back is turned. Remember the Patriot Act and 9-11?
Maybe, but I've yet to see any plausible proposals. Do you have one?
So, this doesn't seem like an approach that has a materially different desired effect from what we're already doing. The policy's goal is to achieve temporary shutdown of businesses and prevent transmission of the virus. You're just using a more convoluted, less effective route to get there. As an added drawback, limited liability almost guarantees that many companies would cease respecting the rules (since their value will be zero if they respect the rules, due to bankruptcy, it costs nothing to go about business as usual and just shut down if you get unlucky).
I guess what I was asking was whether you have any ideas that have any likelihood of being more effective than current approaches. I can think of dozens of things that would be less effective than what we are currently doing. That doesn't really help us very much, though.
Well, what we're talking about is how to keep civil liberties while also effecting a quarantine. I think if we came up with a solution that was as good as the current solution but that had less risk of giving the government abusable and sticky power, that would satisfy the goal of the discussion.
I could offer some changes to the idea I proposed that would address some of your concerns (as well as argue that there are some effectiveness benefits over the current policy to balance out the downsides), and we could have an insightful discussion going over it, but that would distract from the broader point of "if we put our heads to it we might be able to avoid an expansion in government power while not making any unacceptable sacrifices."
And I guess my point is that I admit that possibility, but I consider the likelihood very low.
But you just said that the tort scheme would do the same thing in a more inconvenient way! Surely inconvenience is not an unacceptable sacrifice.
And atop all that I don't consider the libertarian ideal to be a goal worthy of pursuit. So yeah. Not a fan.
Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.
If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.
No, probably not. The seasonal flu infects a billion people a year, and still doesn't do things like collapse Italy's healthcare system.
The CDC estimates somewhere between 24k and 63k flu deaths since October. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
The previous season was estimated at 34,200. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
COVID-19 has killed at least 16k in the US, starting on Feb 29, with significant mitigation efforts that are not done for flu. Almost all of that is in the last week - the death toll stood at only 1.8k on 4/4. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
Comparing the two is like claiming a bicycle is winning a 10 mile race versus a Ferrari because it got a head start and got to mile #1 faster. (It's also likely some estimated flu deaths are actually COVID deaths.)
No, actually, I don't need to reconcile anything. I'd prefer to stick to the OP assertion. If flu deaths are similar to C19 deaths during mitigation, it is abundantly obvious that we've made a terrible mistake. You seem to want to litigate something. I want to do a t-test.
Of course if C19 deaths are 10x what the flu is during mitigation, and overall pneumonia deaths are much higher (aka we're not mistaking flu for C19), then shutting down the world economy was a good idea. I have no idea which thing is true. Your statements above indicate you don't either.
Are total pneumonia deaths (aka flu and covid19 summed up) bigger or smaller than in previous years? Presumably someone's tracking this?
You're asking for data we won't have yet. As I noted, COVID deaths are only just ramping up; 90% of them in the USA are in the last week or so.
There are early indications the lockdowns have impacted flu, as is fairly obvious. Local to me:
https://www.rochesterregional.org/news/2020/01/flu-season-20...
> New York State is reporting 157,426 positive cases. The latest data (ending March 28) shows a 77% decrease in reported cases from the previous week.
Anyway, let's agree that these numbers are worth tracking. I'm sure someone's tracking them!
Note that the lockdowns are not just to avoid spreading the disease, they are to avoid spreading it so quickly that it overflows the hospital system. The theory of "flattening the curve" is that you keep the peak hospitalization number under hospital capacity but spread the infection out over a longer period of time. The area under the curve (total hospitalizations due to infections) remains the same either way. Although it means at no time will someone needing hospitalization be turned away due to lack of capacity -- resulting in fewer overall deaths.
Put another way, let's agree that the number of flu deaths this season of 24k – 62k and 410k – 740k hospitalizations is acceptable from an economic perspective. We can lose and hospitalize that many people and operate as a society. How would it change if those deaths and infections occurred in the span of a month instead of 5 months?
Well if you mean now now and not just annual totals or totals over the 2019-2020 flu season, they aren't the same or comparable, Covid-19 is the leading US cause of daily death, flu is way back in the pack.
A = set of top 5 disease killers in the U.S (hypertension, obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc)
B = set of corona deaths in the U.S
The intersection between B and A is over 90% of set B's numbers. So basic counting shows that in order to get the proper amount of deaths you'd have to perform the following calculation of:
A + B - ( intersection of A and B)
Unfortunately most people are counting by adding A+B which results in double counting as person X who died in set B is also in set A.
Now compare to coronavirus, where we were late to start but eventually locked everything down, and we still have 17k deaths in less than a month, and we know that's a lower bound. We're not even a month past the first 100 deaths. The death rate now represents infections 2 weeks ago, which we measured at 14k. After that we started measuring 30k+ new infections daily, so the death rate is likely to get worse by the time we hit 1 month.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
We're past the seasonal flu peak and coronavirus is still on the upswing and hasn't peaked, it's not only killing more people per day than the flu, but it's actually now reached the status of leading cause of death in the US.[0]
Even with countermeasures, covid-19 is, short of a literal miracle, going to kill far more people in the US than the flu this year.
And it's also going already contributing more to deaths by other direct causes by clogging hospital systems, consuming resources like ventilators, etc.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/coronavirus-bec...