Counties like S. Korea, had bold actions like contact tracing and lockdowns. Many many countries covered pay for folks to stay home. The US initially had a lock down then just quit acting really.
Sure, preventing ANYONE from getting COVID was unrealistically, but preventing most people from getting it was always possible.
Easy for the laptop class of this website to call not wanting lockdowns selfish when it disproportionally harms the poorest and most vulnerable of our society.
So does dying from Covid, or getting sick numerous times and missing work. Or not being able to afford missing work so you go in anyway and spread the disease, leading to your work being shutdown for weeks.
No matter what is done, the poorest and most vulnerable will be disproportionally affected. While I agree we can't perpetually mandate stay-at-home orders and expect everyone to live off savings, we _can_ expect the gov't to make that possible beyond the pathetic payments that folks received.
Another way to look it it is birth rate versus death rate. Globally speaking COVID death would need to be at lest one order of magnitude higher to stagnant growth. The 2 year pandemic made the global world population lag by about a week. So in a week we have the same number of people as we would have today if there were no COVID. Its that insignificant.
On a population chart over 100 years COVID will be p much invisible, a tiny tiny slow down of the growth. There are no absurd levels of death there are just many many humans and thus the death number feel subjectively high.
The current policies in the west have done nothing to proactively protect the fragile, and everything to restrain the non-fragile.
As an example of what I mean : I spent a couple of lockdowns in a relatively poor country (Serbia) which for example allowed the 60+, fragile and immunocompromised exclusive access to shops, malls and other commerce until 9, a 30 minute pause to ventilate with nobody inside, and then normal access for the rest of the population. Subsidised delivery services were organised, etc. 16 hospitals with 900 ICU bed each (pop 6 million) were built chinese-style in 6 months, so the local healthcare system could go back to normal.
Also, health insurance has a basic public option, with price-controlled drugs, generally 10-15x smaller than the US retail price, even for US-made drugs, new or old.
Watching the US figuratively struggle for air for two years has been quite demoralizing.
You need to compare it to normal (expected) total.
excluding comparisons means you cannot judge severity one way or another. Basic stats here
Now if you have something against government mandating that businesses operate within certain safety parameters then I’ve got news for you….
As an immunocompromised person, and considering the ADA, I'm of the opinion that some mitigation strategies, like required masking in the grocery store, help preserve my civil liberties and should be considered reasonable accommodations.
Given our civil liberties conflict, you wind up in a tough to resolve scenario.
Positive rights are your assertion that you have the right to action from another group. In general, medicine is one area where positive and negative rights conflict regularly. For example, imagine abortion, assisted suicide, or emergency care during a pandemic. Some of these are solved by employment contracts -- as an ER doctor you are accepting to be bound by people's positive right to emergency medical care.
However, your assertion is that society et large should be bound by your positive right.
You should have a very strong case for this. Do you?
In the US, we've made this call already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
You know this because you did not have an established mask mandate or legal requirements for facilities to validate that patrons were not ill. Either of these would infringe on the rights of other groups. Like it or not, there are established groups of people who are unable to wear masks. The other route of validating that customers are not sick would paradoxically infringe on the rights of the immunosuppressed.
A COVID test before entering every facility would probably not be a reasonable accommodation. I'm of the opinion that a Federal mask mandate in public spaces could probably have been justified under the ADA - anywhere that can be forced to have an accessible bathroom, access ramps, etc.
> Like it or not, there are established groups of people who are unable to wear masks.
Balancing that would similarly be an ADA question. A lot of people claimed to be in this category, but attempts to use the ADA to bypass state-level mask mandates tended to flop.
Frankly the risk to the immunocompromised does not appear to have been that high. Countries like South Africa, which have nearly a thirty percent HIV positive rate, did not see substantially different outcomes.
Beyond that, we had pre-existing data that masks don't do much. Post hoc analysis and wishful thinking have contributed to a modern round of pseudoscience claiming that masks are effective. When the dust settles, I think we'll see that well-fitted N95s are just about the only effective prevention measure. But, as I'm suspecting you know, this would not constitute a reasonable accommodation. In industries that require it, mask fitting and regular testing are commonplace. Further, fitted N95s can only be worn safely for a short duration.
On the other hand, I think that what the ADA should mandate is proper ventilation systems in these heavily trafficked areas. I do think that this is similar to what we've seen for accessibility requirements for businesses, and frankly a bizarre untackled problem for public health.
I disagree. We agree on many of the same facts - better masks are important, as is ventilation - but not, apparently, the approaches those facts inform. The "as I'm suspecting you know" shit is rude; in this case, for example, some other countries (correctly) don't count cloth masks as legit. We should've done that, too, way back in 2020.
Re: South Africa, it's a young population, and being HIV+ alone doesn't make you inherently immunosuppressed if treated effectively - which SA is quite good at.
For example, requiring a workplace to provide an employee who requires it an N95 mask very clearly falls under the 'reasonable accommodation' category.
However, requiring all employees or patrons to wear N95 masks does not track with other examples of reasonable accommodations.
Of course the value of any lockdown policy is contingent on the practical ability to correctly assess the threat of a new disease early enough that such short-duration, non-pharmaceutical interventions could work. But I don't think temporary restrictions are incompatible with basic civil liberties.
EDIT: Removed amateur-hour epidemiology, restated "philosophical" argument contingent on NPIs being effective.
I was in South Korea from March-June 2020, there was no lockdown in South Korea. The only serious restriction was the 2 week quarantine required to enter the country. Businesses and everything were open just as usual - I was eating out at restaurants and working out of coffee shops everyday. Hell I even went to an amusement park one day (ok that did end up shutting down a week or two later when it was discovered that someone who had tested positive had been there).
Meanwhile my family in the U.S were under lockdown not allowed to leave the house without an excuse deemed acceptable by the government, shocked that South Korea was life as usual despite having such a low case count.
In comparison, countries like Canada (which I'm in) and US, does a half-hearted job in contact tracing.
We rolled out the COVID Alert app, which is supposed to balance privacy concerns with the need for contact tracing, but now with Omicron burning through all the provinces, most have shifted to only PCR testing people in high-risk groups. And having a PCR testing from public health is the only way to get the one time key to fire off the alerts.
North America could barely get masks going, paid lip service to contact tracing...
Australia implemented absolutely dystopian contact tracing decisions, countrywide lockdowns, left its citizens abroad, and it's still clear that every single person in that country is going to get COVID. It will be endemic, just like it is everywhere else. Even worse, the country has by-and-large taken a vaccine which gives them resistance to a spike protein that is not the most common in today's COVID cases. Recent (simian) experimentation has shown that the Omicron booster is not effective for previously vaccinated individuals.
You will not see long term differences in outcomes between Canada, the US, and countries like South Korea or Australia. Our measures did not work, do not work, and are exclusively security theater. Countries which 'have things under control' are either extremely ruthless in their lockdown and travel approach, and have deferred pain, or are lying on the numbers.
Although this would be a non-starter in the U.S due to privacy concerns, I don't deny that this was probably effective. At the same time I imagine cases were drastically underreported because testing positive would result in your whole office shutting down, potentially getting one fired. So there's no incentive to get tested unless you have no choice.
Went and donate blood mid Dec 2021, it's one of the things that I kept up, because people still need that stuff. 10 days later, I get a email from them saying that I may have been exposed. While it's nice that they notify me, it's not from public health's contact tracing.
We've tried nothing and it doesn't work.
South Korea has a total confirmed case rate 10x lower than the USA, and a death rate 20x lower. It's absolutely realistic. It just requires serious effort on the part of everyone to follow straightforward rules about testing/tracing/mitigation. Korea hasn't been shut down for two years. They've just been smarter about it.
Its know fact that Europeans were immune to some of the diseases they brought to America that nearly wiped out Native Americans. Therefore its not unreasonable to think that different populations will have different levels of response to a disease. Perhaps South Koreans were more likely to be exposed to similar enough corona viruses in the past to garner them enough protection this time.
This fallacy is distressingly common. That's not the way logic works. The contention above was that it was impossible to mitigate the spread of covid. I provided an existence proof that it was not. It's not on me to refute every contradicting hypothesis. It's clear that Korea did something right, and people interested in techniques to fight the virus would do best to study those actions instead of make excuses for why it must have been something else.
As far as natural population immunity though: that's just wrong. It's a novel virus (c.f. the initial outbreak in a nearby east asian nation), everyone gets it. Korea has absolutely had rapid outbreaks too (the church group got a ton of press early) that show that covid can spread rapidly there. They just handled it better.
I'm guessing. I don't know. If anyone has actual information, feel free to jump in...
I know there are some standards for recycling air in public buildings such as schools, and air born sickness seems like something they would have to worry about normally, so I would imagine they were pretty prepared for that aspect
I skimmed this but didn't really see much past the actual heat source https://www.cibsejournal.com/general/life-support-keeping-sc...
Bigger issue is getting people to vaccinate especially since long Covid will cost billions in increased insurance premiums and Medicare costs.