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Comment by offby37years | Hacker News Reader

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — John Dalberg-Acton

That's a nice quote, but still doesn't answer the question. No government in their right mind wants to continue lockdowns unnecessarily. Lockdowns cost a lot of money and make a lot of voters angry

Lockdowns were just meant to be for two weeks to “flatten the curve”, remember?

Unfortunately pesky reality got in the way.

Who ever said 2 weeks?

They serve the exact same role they did at the start. If we'd open stadiums now the exact same thing will happen, that happened 1 year ago.

Lockdowns will continue until we either reach herd immunity naturally or through vaccines or we have a treatment/mitigation for the disease.

Every offical that was selling the initial lockdown. Just have to get the R0 below 1, remember? You really think the masses would have been OK with a year of lockdowns and the despair that entails up front?

Your conclusions don't match reality. States like Florida have open stadiums and are fairing the same as states like California that insist on totalitarian overreach.

California has done somewhat better than Florida overall — and the vast, vast majority of cases in California came from Southern California, where the lockdown and mask rules were largely not followed. California is 40+ million people; it's basically two Floridas. The northern one followed the rules, the southern didn't, and you can see very clearly which way resulted in fewer cases and deaths. Northern California had one of the lowest case rates in the country. Southern California had one of the highest.

post hoc distinction

> States like Florida have open stadiums

With the exact same density as before ?

No western nation, except perhaps italy briefly, had a lockdown like the initial suggestions were.

I won't say with confidence that a short, hard, lockdown would have solved things in the us, but such approaches did work in many other nations.

Well, in Germany three politicians who had to resign because of corruption where they had made deals with companies manufacturing masks and made hundreds of thousands of euros. And this is just facts and no conspiracy theories, and I bet this goes on at every level. If you find a way to (legitimately) control people and peoples behaviours, of course it's lucrative.

You can't just say it's "lucrative." You have to say how. Are you saying that a controlling number of powerful politicians or their backers are heavily invested in mask manufacture, but not in any of the parts of the economy that are affected negatively by the lockdowns?

And "hundreds of thousands of Euros?" That's a pittance. There has to be more to be made (than maybe enough to buy a studio apartment in Berlin) in order to justify the shutdown of a large part of world industry.

Have you never heard of corruption before? This is not something that I'm saying, it's out in the news in plain sight

That might happen, but when you think about conspiracies, always think who would be against them.

Ok, they make money from selling masks. But do you really think no shareholders in hotel chains, airlines, airports, etc. are trying to push back against that?

Covid is hurting a ton of businesses. A lot of powerful people are behind those businesses that feel that pain.

But don't lockdowns cause a "loss of power" (economic, trade, prestige)? This just doesn't make sense to me.

They do, but people complaining about this tend to convenient focus on the powerful people making money because of lockdowns while absolutely ignoring the powerful people <<losing>> money because of them.

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