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Comment by lax4ever | Hacker News Reader

There were plenty of instances of state leadership (not sure if you are in the US or not) asking people to stay in their homes and not go out or meet with people. This is message from the Wisconsin governor when he signed the Executive Order for staying at home:

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/articles/governor-tony-...

And here's the actual order https://evers.wi.gov/Documents/COVID19/EO094-COVIDRecommenda...

It actually calls out staying as close to home as possible and not even travelling to a second home if someone owned it.

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That “order” contains recommendations, encouragements, and suggestions. It doesn’t seem to be legally enforceable.

I think every state had its own variation but ultimately after around April 2020 everyone has been free to get in a car and drive anywhere or get on a plane and fly anywhere within the USA. Some states had compliance regimes where you were supposed to quarantine or be tested after arriving, or be fined, but many did not. I traveled to one state with such an order twice and each time it was essentially voluntary - there was a theoretical fine if I didn’t follow the rules, but no one ever checked up on me to make sure I had a negative test. Unlike overseas governments (Singapore, Australia, China, vietnam, etc) our restrictions were basically on the honor system everywhere.

I believe one major exception is Hawaii where they actually did enforce quarantines somewhat and jailed or expelled tourists, and also had the lowest cumulative per-capita covid death tolls.

Based on the data from Worldometers, Hawaii is running a CFR (ratio of confirmed cases to fatalities) of 1.4% per capita which is low but not as low as say Utah, Nebraska, Wisconsin, others which remain below the US national CFR average of 1.8%. Frankly, that Hawaii did this the way it did is a scary abuse of power in my mind. As an opposite example, the UK which had and still maintains restrictions and lockdowns that are greater than the US maintains a CFR of 2.7%. If you are going to quarantine, quarantine the most vulnerable populations (if they want to be quarantined. Personally, my grandfather refuses to quarantine at all since that reduces his ability to be around his family). It seems inadvisable to quarantine a low risk population, especially as we are starting to see speculation of the negative impact lockdowns have had to the general immune response of the body to other diseases.

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