Furthermore, many countries have laws that prohibit house arrest, which is essentially what you are suggesting here.
Finally, unless the entire world did the same, we would not be "covid-free". As soon as one person with covid entered the country post-lockdown, cases would grow. If Australia had actually beaten covid, then they could welcome people back. But they didn't beat it! That isolated themselves from the world and continue to do so. That isn't beating it at all.
You may be right that almost everything is open again, but there are also leaving thousands of their citizens stranded abroad. This is an absurd payoff for a virus that, at worst, kills .5% of people who contract it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australia-...
Similarly, we have no constitution or bill of rights, so a house arrest law is easy and quick to pass.
The issue with the .5% figure is that 5% of covid patients would die if they didn't receive care. So the death rate is only 0.5% until your last hospital bed / ventilators / nurse is busy. Then it's 5%.
We've fucked about letting more and more people get it. Which is fine because 0.5% and because we're following the "herd immunity" strategy. Unlike Aus that went for eradication. But now, so many people are sick the hospitals are full.
London expects to run out of beds within 2 weeks. Rest of the UK in 3 weeks. Given the 5-6 day incubation period, that means we need to reduce the R number below 1 by Monday in London (where people are densely packed and rely on public transport). You have 7 more days for the rest of the place.
Or we accept the 5% marginal death rate. 5% is pretty fucking high.
Look around your office, your sports team, your family and fields. Pick 1 in 20 to die. And that's 5% across the board. It's higher for your grandparents, your sick cousin etc. Plus you have people permanently disabled and "Long Covid" to factor in.
So having encouraged people to go out, having let people test the rules and find them unenforced, and having done all the easy cheap shit (office worked wfh), the government finds it has to get very strict, convince people it means it this time, and get them to stay home, all in the next few days.
Oh, and the current government was elected by the people most likely to die of this. And the current leader is dumb and lazy. And he's spent the last year promising his party no more lockdowns...
But lets take your numbers as they are. It wouldn't be 5% of all infections, or 5% of all severe infections. It would be 5% of all infections _above hospital capacity_. Health systems wouldn't disappear, they would just not take in more folks, or triage more aggressively. I know you address this in your comment, but it is important to note. Because it greatly changes the emotional appeal for your emotional argument to spell it out.
Don't bring long-covid in to this discussion, there is no real hard evidence that it even exists AND is an artifact of covid.
I'm going off:
Positive tests in the UK yesterday: 52,618
Patients admitted yesterday: 3867
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
That's 7.3%. It's gone up since I last looked, about 1month ago. But I wouldn't call it a true rate as there are plenty of people not getting tested. If half the people are asymptomatic or don't get tested for whatever reason, that gets you 3.6%. There aren't many beds left so I don't think they're admitting many people who don't need it.
I'd be happier discussing a range of anything from 2 to 10% because who the fuck knows. Fair?
To address the marginal vs absolute point, again you are quite right.
I'd actually go a bit further: good triaging would be a bit brutal but it would also mean the majority of deaths were old or otherwise ill. There is a concept in UK medicine called quality adjusted life years (QALY). This tries to mathematically account for "obviously you save a young healthy person with kids over an old, otherwise ill person". Death rates don't incorporate that at all. I'd like to see what the QALY figures are like for covid. I don't think they're public though.
A 1.2 R number (the figure being used for London, again a wild estimate...) gives you a 3% daily growth rate. That means number of infected doubles every 23 days. So assuming we stick with just current measures (reopen schools), your death rate will tend to the hospitalisation rate on a 23 day half-life. Assuming 5% hospitalisation rate (again, try it with your own numbers, I'm not wedded to 5%), the death rate will be 2.75% around Feb 7th. Then 3.5% around March 3rd. Then 3.88% around March 26th etc.
I don't know what will actually happen. And I'd add that trying to extrapolate anything exponential is a fools game. So who knows? I'm merely pointing out there are very possible, very severe outcomes.
This was literally the most opposed aspect of Trump's presidency.
I suspect one element that hasn't been touched by Democrats is admitting that absolute control of the border is something they want but would look like complete hypocrites admitting.
Nancy Pelosi was encouraging everyone to go to Chinatown when the virus was beginning to spread. In retrospect it's obvious how pretentious and unhelpful that was.
I'm just pointing out that politically the issue is tough given the stances people staked their identities on.
Trump did launch a Muslim ban back in early 2017. Scotus struck it down. People called it racist.
Trump later, separately, banned flights from China (with a bunch of exceptions, after most airlines already suspended them).
I don't think anyone mainstream called him racist for that did they? Nancy Pelosi criticised it for being too little and too late (since the virus was already spreading fast in the US). But did she call it racist?
Can you point me to who called Trump racist for the China travel ban?
> Biden added, repeating a line from his USA Today oped: “Diseases have no borders, they have no borders.”
> The same day, Biden Tweeted similarly, “A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it…”
https://www.cerescourier.com/opinion/editorial/biden-flips-c...
All Biden's statements are suffused with reminders of the idiotic things Trump is associated with even when it serves no purpose in context of a pandemic. "Diseases have no borders"?
He was looking for opportunities to bring up campaign lines.
At the end of the day, the narrative switched completely where before established health knowledge recognized NPIs outside of social distancing as largely ineffective.
I'm disappointed in Biden, all he needed to say was "too little too late" but instead of being in front of things leading, he was still behind the curve scoring points. And he's the guy leading the US for the next 4 years.
Again, sorry I didn't believe you. I'll be more open next time!
I don't know the last time I ever saw a conservative do this. This is one of the fundamental differences right here.
And I apologize because, I bet your words were sincere, and that probably means you do not actually approve of me using them for point scoring.
But you are you and of course would not praise yourself, and I, being a 3rd party, am free to say "See that? That's how it's done."
Canada adopted a policy of mandatory 2 weeks quarantine for every inbound traveler, and if the numbers are any indication, it worked quite well (but then they went lax on some other aspects in H2 and now are seeing numbers go up again...)
Santa Clara, CA is about as democrat as they come and they've recently announced quarantine policies based on travel distance as well, so in my mind, it seems possible to de-politicize.
Where Trump was continuously treated as a dictator but then his opposition is openly admiring China for their authoritarianism in combating coronavirus.
Likewise his border wall efforts were always stymied cause they were "racist."
That could very well be true but with such sweeping generalizations the political support for border control re: coronavirus isn't really there since everyone's staked their position based on opposing their own enemies.
The UK does not have the capability to close its borders, even if we had the political will to do so. Odd for an island but it’s a fact. Too much coastline and too few people to patrol it.