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Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

Except other western countries haven't "gotten it under control"... they are all having second waves and resurgences with or without large lockdowns and with or without draconian processes.

> fairly simple

Until you start looking at how many lives are saved vs the second and third tier effects. Higher suicide rates from losing jobs and stress? People in third world countries dying from a cratered world economy? etc.

COVID needs to be handled and those more affected by it need protected. More hospital prep and masks around grandma... but the "fascist" and unproven shutdowns which by any measurements not only don't work but - as mentioned - causes more damage than it prevents?

nowhere near as simple as you proclaim it to be.

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Lockdowns, social distancing and masking – done consistently – do work. Even the half-measures lockdowns the US has gone through has stopped the entire medical system from collapsing, and at times it has been very close. In NYC in the first wave, it did.

But that isn't what has happened in the US, largely for political reasons.

There are no good options, only less worse ones, and aggressive lockdowns have got Australia, for example, back to work. The cumulative cost of the US's failure to grasp the nettle and just shut everything down for two months properly back last March is enormous.

and yet states that didn't - and aren't - locking down - like Florida - are doing fine. Or better than states that have extensive lockdowns like New York, New Jersey and California...

> Political reasons ... aggressive lockdowns in Australia

Locking down a small country like Australia is much different than locking down a country like the US. Australia is only 20% smaller than the US yet has 10% of the population. The layout is different. Temperature. Density. etc.

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/united-states.au...

Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states - not only does the President not have the ability to do it - he's a President not a King... but locking down the country make zero sense for a virus with a 99%+ survival rate.

again... we can take precautions to protect our hospitals and to "flatten the curve" (which we are loooooong past) and to protect the vulnerable (old, existing conditions, etc)... but locking down America? Coast to coast? No chance this side of turning the President into a Dictator - which was never on the table for Trump and definitely not for Biden.

> Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states

This is very wrong. Australia is very, very dense, where people live: it just has a lot of absolutely uninhabited land. Functionally Australia is almost entirely urban.

Didn’t a person literally get arrested for trying to publish the real numbers of deaths in Florida?

Yea, Florida is not "doing fine" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that they don't want to report numbers that show them not doing fine, as the entire state is funded by tourism.

They seem to be doing a pretty good job with vaccination though, so there's that!

Australia has had recorded zero locally acquired cases for more than 7 days now. At one point, Melbourne recorded 700 cases in a day, after several months of hard lockdown, it's down to 1 case in 30 days.

There's also no indication that the suicide rate in 2020 changed significantly from previous years (https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/co...)

You know that it's summer in Australia now, right?

Yep, and Melbourne had it's "second wave" in the middle of winter. Locked down and got it under control. We've had the opportunity for things to go pear shaped, but due to decisive action, an educated and thinking public and fairly strict enforcement we've got no community transmission. The only issue we have is that our methods of isolating people returning to the country are proving to be somewhat inadequate with people like cleaners picking up the virus from the isolation facilities (Hotels). These issues are being improved and it looks like we are going to continue to be virus free.

Meanwhile in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter surges correlate with latitude, after a quiet summer. There’s a pretty obvious pattern: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81419-w

And depression can be a slow killer, I’m more interested in the 2020 numbers for strokes and heart attacks. People have been hesitating in emergencies for almost an entire year (and counting).

Living on the border of two such western countries, I'd like to point out that they are definitely taking measures (currently lockdowns) to keep things under control, the lockdowns have a very measurable effect on R, and the death rate in both countries is something like 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the USA.

Basically you're trying to control R. As long as you keep R under 1, you can increase and reduce measures to keep the disease under control. If R goes too far over 1, you bleeped up, and you need to resort to a lockdown to get it back under control.

The theory a lot of (european) western countries are working on is that they want to allow as much freedom as possible, but keep the worst of the disease out.

I'm not entirely convinced this is actually the strategy that optimizes freedom though. It might be better to use the method some asian countries used: close the borders, do maximum effort lockdowns anytime the virus shows up at all; and you might have less days total in lockdown or restrictions, and more days where you are free to go out and eat indoors etc.

The one huge tragic problem with that plan is that when we surrender our freedoms “temporarily” to the government, they never give them back! Or at least we do not trust they will give them back, based on vast experience (see: Patriot Act), so this plan cannot work.

The naïveté on display here is staggering. "You can vote your way into fascism, but you have to shoot your way out."

In other comments people pointed out that New Zealand followed this more stringent strategy.

Right now, they're all outside enjoying summer with almost normal freedoms, while we're still stuck indoors. I must admit I'm jealous!

I don't think the Kiwis are currently preparing to shoot their way out of anything right at the moment. Probably because they're pretty much free to do whatever they want.

I will grant that New Zealand had an easier time of it as an island nation with a low population density, but it does give you pause for thought. Maybe we all could do better next time when the next pandemic rolls around.

Theory vs Practice. Who's more free right now?

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