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Comment by mrroboto0101 | Hacker News Reader

The Government is playing god in protecting it citizens from death?

Not sure if I understand this reasoning, the government has to protect its citizens, that is the number one task.

It depends on how expansive we take the whole "government as protector" role. It is a perfectly reasonable position to believe our government overstepped their responsibility if you take a more narrow view of this idea. In the last 2-3 decades in the US we've seen a consistent erosion of our civil liberties, because people want more "protection" from an ever increasing list of harms.

So if the government did such a bad job policing people from staying at home, why did we even bother with continuing with the stay at home orders? It was obvious from the end of 2020 that nobody was abiding by it and police clearly weren't enforcing these completely unconstitutional laws.

Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply chain failures all around.

But hey, at least we saved a few old or obese people already knocking on deaths door...

I don't think it's ever been about saving people from Covid, it's always been about saving hospitals from bad-but-eventually-non-threatening pneumonia explosions to the detriment of everything else they're supposed to care for.

I live in Hong Kong, where we have still a somewhat silly aggressive policy. We had 213 deaths for 8M people, so around 26 deaths per million people. Our hospitals never even felt the pandemic. Nobody is suffering of doubling inflation, ridiculous shortage or supply chain failures all around, but it's true we have less obese people than the US in the first place...

If the US didn't let their people free to have so many co-morbidities, they wouldn't pay such a dear price each time a cold mutates from a lab in China. Talk about a powerful country if such a small thing coming from here can knock them down, don't you think ?

It's a revision of history to suggest that government-imposed lockdowns are the only thing that caused the economy to stall. If you recall in the United States at least, not much had really changed until the NBA, a private organization, suspended play on their own on 3/11 [1]. Then the floodgates opened as other private organizations followed suit. The first government shutdown orders then came from San Francisco on 3/16 [2] and New York followed suit on 3/20 [3].

You can see in [4] that consumer spending patterns were changing well before lockdown orders were issued. In fact, consumer spending falls off a cliff the day the NBA suspended its season, which was also when the US stopped all flights to Europe. I don't think anyone argues that stopping travel to Covid hotzones was a bad idea, right? You can see that people starting to eat out less the first week of March, whereas lockdowns really came into full swing around the end of March.

Did lockdowns impact the economy? Sure. But you can't say the economy would be inflation-free and there would be no shortages or supply chain failures if no lockdowns were imposed.

[1] https://www.nba.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-causes-nba-sus...

[2] https://sfmayor.org/article/san-francisco-issues-new-public-...

[3] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-03-20-...

[4] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-consumers-are-spend...

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