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Comment by throwawayxxcr | Hacker News Reader

Here's a summary of US states' quarantine and isolation statutes (since, to many Australians "freedom" means whatever the US does):

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-quarantine-and-is...

Have a look at "freedom-loving" red states like Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama. All seem to be quite "draconian" when it comes to quarantine

That eliminates the US. Maybe there's some other country that doesn't have "draconian" quarantine measures?

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I'm genuinely confused by your point. Are you saying that because other countries have quarantine restrictions, that makes their pandemic approach equivalently restrictive as Australia was? Victoria spent over 250 days in lockdown between March 2020 and October 2021. We had curfews at 6pm for weeks and were allowed out of the house for 1 hour a day and not beyond 5km of our houses. Are you seriously asserting that if the US enacted these restrictions, I would be on here professing that these were the pinnacle of freedom?

What I will remark is that US citizens have certain constitutional protections which we do not that in theory inhibit their government's ability to enact restrictions like these i.e. "freedom of movement".

6pm curfew? Did Sydney do that? Melbourne didn't. The rest seems about right.

But having seen what Italy was going through - lockdowns with COVID still spreading and hospitals overloaded with the dying. I didn't want that for us.

The "freedom of COVID movement" people were cursed many times - they kept the lockdown running for longer because they couldn't see beyond themselves. They were the cause of the curfews because they tried to use cover of darkness.

We were talking about the "lift sneeze man" violating quarantine, and whether it was "draconian" or not for the authorities to pursue him. I pointed out, by way of the US, that authorities pursuing someone who violated a quarantine order is not uniquely Australian nor particularly draconian.

We were not discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of lockdowns. Let's not shift the goalposts. But FYI: Here's a list of lockdowns in response to Covid worldwide, including the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns

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