[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28139889
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/protest-stop-c...
That's a bit condescending. In recent weeks there were tens of thousands of people marching on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne to protest covid lockdowns and defend their right to free assembly.
Perfect example, nicely done.
As an Aussie I must say that I see these protests rather differently. For better or worse, Australia has gotten used to having zero COVID: people here tend to see the protesters not as brave individuals defending their rights, but as idiots who recklessly endanger the lives of others by spreading disease through a largely unvaccinated populace. Many people here are of the opinion that some ‘fundamental’ rights can and should be suspended in a critical emergency.
Thankfully only 3,500 in Sydney out of a population of 5 million. Fortunately the vast majority of Australians aren't completely selfish and thoughtless. Nobody likes lockdowns. The government doesn't benefit from them, it's not lining some evil overlord's pockets.
It feels to me that Australia will be a country suffering from PTSD once it finds a way out of the pandemic and impossible dream of zero covid.
(For comparison, here in Europe, the pandemic is largely over, and our vaccination wall is looking strong enough that even what's coming over winter shouldn't be too bad.)
They aren't benefiting from anything: the governments are all rightly tanking in popularity, and being held up by Rupert Murdoch's multi-decadal commitment to dumbing down the narrative.
When we're not in pandemic conditions, people are quite welcome to gather and protest whatever the heck they want.
Question: why is there not a flu pandemic every year? Answer: because the flu is not a novel virus, and does not hit the population in the same way. The flu can be very severe, which is why we vaccinate against it, but within any given population there is a multitude of degrees of existing immunity from previous rounds of flu through the population.
COVID-19 is a novel virus - no human on Earth until 1.5 years ago had ever been infected with it, and it's spread follows the expectation of a novel virus: with no prior immunity, the entire population is initially infectable.
This, obviously however, is not a continuing situation: prior infection with COVID-19 confers immunity against COVID-19, as well as effective immunity against the variant mutations which have arisen. There have not been cases of reinfection within over a year. Even if COVID-19 can infect vaccinated populations, it does so with less severe outcomes, and having done so leaves behind a reservoir of now immune recipients.
In fact even if a new COVID-19 strain arose well after infection, people who had been exposed or vaccinated to earlier strains would not present the sort of completely vulnerable population which the initial COVID-19 virus represented.
COVID-19 is now going to be an endemic disease, but that hardly means people will keep catching up, but instead that in any given year a small subset of the population is likely to contract it and recover - possibly requiring medical intervention, but this is a number which can be managed and planned for.
What has made COVID-19 a problem though, is the novel nature of the virus and it's rapid spread. We are perfectly able to deal with expected loads on healthcare, but not with a surge of 10-20% of the entire population of a country within a 6-12 month window with over a month of recovery time. But against a vaccinated population that figure falls by almost 92-96%, with 60-70% of people never developing symptoms. That is a manageable number over the same time frame.
COVID-19 is not like the flu, and infectious novel diseases will always require immediate and drastic countermeasures. An ideal outcome for COVID-19 would have been containment in Wuhan: it would have lent plenty of time to develop, test, and incorporate into routine vaccine schedules innoculations against it.
We all keep good spacing (1.5m) between each other, wear face masks, etc.
Very, very different to the protests apparently, judging by the photos in the newspapers.
Australia is a largely apathetic country, complacent because of their own wealth and removal from the international community.
But the situation is going to turn quite negatively for Australia, its becoming progressively worse because nobody actually believes in anything fundamental. We keep installing savvy businessmen politicians rather than people with a longterm vision for the country.
The result is exacerbating social problems. It makes you think where the countries priorities are when homelessness in Melbourne has gotten terribly worse in the past 7 years. People rather maximise their gains on the property market, borrowing exorbitant amounts of money to buy property they cant really afford, meanwhile devaluing the currency.
The result is the social fabric of a nation disintegrating.
Hilariously, Australians protest about their rights by trying their best to extend lockdowns further [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/24/anti-...
I didn't protest the lockdowns because it seems reasonable to me that you'd want to ban proximity to curtail the spread of a disease that spreads by proximity. That doesn't mean I won't protest a dictator just declaring an emergency and violating everyone's rights.
This does seem a pretty common misconception. People seem to forget that even the most liberal countries still regularly and systematically infringe on people's rights, e.g. by imprisoning criminals. But you don't see many of the anti-lockdown types protesting the existence of prisons.
In both cases, it's a matter of proportionally balancing the loss of individual rights with the interests (and indeed, other conflicting rights) of the community as a whole.
If you’re saying a government shouldn’t be locking people up so that an individuals rights aren’t violated, then you’re saying a government shouldn’t be looking after the wellbeing of its people. In which case, you’re essentially talking about anarchy.
How far along the spectrum does the emergency need to get to justify a lockdown?
For example
- The Black Plague which killed 30%~ of Europe. At what point would a lockdown be justified?
- Germany just invaded my northern border. Again. Am I allowed to force my residents to turn their lights off to avoid bombing?
Rights aren't universal, and no serious person argues this. There is always an emergency that's bad enough.
The question is 'what is bad enough' and this has no scientific answer. The answer is up to the government of the day, and the population who can decide whether to turf that government.
I feel like this is the point of contention. Many people truly don't consider things that can be taken away a right. Is the constitution a suicide pact a serious question that has been argued in the US Supreme Court (that phrased originated by a justice arguing that it wasn't... he was in the minority opinion).
I will try to keep this neutral, but people say things like "driving isn't a right, it's a priveledge"... what distinguishes between rights and priveledges?
How's that boot polish tasting?
Most EU countries are not sovereign states, given by the fact they don’t control their borders nor their economy (See Greece, or the other affectionately named PIGS countries). There is an insane amount of influence from Germany and Belgium.
This is a glasshouses and stones situation.