I don't want to live in a country where the government enforced wide-reaching shutdowns of businesses and quarantined people forcibly in their homes like China and Taiwan do. I think it's a violation of my civil liberties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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….