I think Sweden should be commended for a relatively level-headed response. Whereas most other national responses seem panicked, inept, trigger-happy and all too ready to violate fundamental rights of their citizenry even when they don't really understand the problem they're faced with.
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Too many nations are too concerned with being seen as 'doing their part' and too few are actually paying any heed to the long term ramifications of the precedents they are setting now.
Yea: at-risk populations should be protected. Even with a complete lockdown, nursing homes are being decimated. Politicians have no interest in admitting their failure. It's clear that Cuomo is being hailed as a hero, despite thousands of old people being lost due to ineffective measures and ineptness.
None of these politicians have an interest in bringing attention to the complete tragedy that happened under their watch re: the most vulnerable.
The Swedish approach places the onus on the at-risk demographics to isolate themselves. If you are worried about your parents (and I would be), then I'd help them in their self-quarantine.
My parents are both 75+. They both still work in the service industry. They would not listen to me when I told them to self isolate before our lockdown.
Their reasoning was that other people their age were still visiting their business.
Edit: are you downvoting my parents decisions? Or my anecdote?
Who's measuring the cost of lock-down? I think it's going to show to be very costly (perhaps net-negative) as time goes on. Cancer, heart attacks, strokes, deaths of despair, economic disruption, etc.
I honestly have no idea how you are able to reason an idea that a full blown epidemic does not disturb a national health service.
Moreover, it seems you're entirely oblivious to the fact that covid19 infections are known to trigger cardiac and renal and even neurological problems. Thus if you were honestly concerned about heart attacks and strokes and other conditions then you most certainly wouldn't be putting up lame strawmen like those.
And God forbid that a nation needs to spend the citizen's resources caring for the best interests of said citizens.
I don't really follow your response here. The idea that lockdowns have serious costs is not a "strawman" and doesn't imply other options have no costs.
Death rate in Sweden is still way too low to have warranted a lockdown. Lockdown hurts quality of life a lot for everyone and not just the economy. It isn't worth it to lock down thousands of people for months to save a single life from a quality of life stand point. Like, you wouldn't spend a 100 years in lockdown to extend your life by a month.
So you would prefer to wait for lots of people to start dying then lockdown?
It seems to me the countries that are emerging well right now locked down hard and early. The ones that are in a lot of pain took a laissez-faire approach at the start.
I don't understand what the hell are you talking about. The nations who were hit the hardest by the epidemic were also the ones which took the longest to react after the first infection. For example, compare Spain's experience with Portugal's.
More importantly, even the nations that were hit the hardest were only able to recover from the initial impact after imposing adequate quarantine measures. Another good example is Spain, which managed to drive down their 1k/day death count down to next do double digits after decisively acting on declaring state of emergency.
If you feel that ramping up a death wave with a collapsing healthcare system is a good approach then you should reconsider your priorities in life.
Testing does nothing to address infection rates. Either you have the infrastructure in place to isolate spreaders or you have no alternative to nip the epidemic in the bud by quaranting everyone.
The first option is not on the table with covid19 because asymptomatic and presymptomaric carriers can walk freely among us weeks at a time without anyone having a clue.
many countries have succeeded by testing and quarantining contacts of known infections. why do you say an empirically effective response is off the table due to some supposition?
The threat of collapsing healthcare system is really hard to estimate. Most of our treatment options are not especially effective against the disease. In the event that triaging needs to occur, you don't cause that many extra deaths by triaging those with the highest risk of dying, given treatment.
Spain may have reduced deaths in the short term, but there's no particular reason it hasn't just spread them over a longer period of time. You can't eradicate this disease permanently without closing your borders permanently.
> The threat of collapsing healthcare system is really hard to estimate.
You don't need to estimate, you only need to look at the facts. In Spain the covid outbreak forced them to comandeer hotels to serve as intensive care units and even then they were compelled to open an emergency hospital in Madrid with capacity for 5000 patients just to be able to admit covid19 patients requiring immediate medical care.
And that alone was just to alleviate their healthcare system.
The countries that were hit hard were countries that had a collapsed healthcare system to begin with, collapsed through austerity, politicians of these countries only try to safe their ass and re-elect-ability...
The article straight up mentioned arguments against what you're saying. Sweden has more deaths per million than their neighbors and it's only getting worse as the confirmed number of cases grow.
Your idea of a level-headed response is letting people die straight up to the coronavirus.
Your rights ended where the rights of 60,000+ now dead in the US began. Too bad nobody had enough respect for their rights to stop travel from China 2 or 3 weeks before they actually did, when the disease was shown to have pandemic potential. Too bad nobody thought to implement containment measures when we had the first recorded cases of community spread. Too bad our president was too busy politicizing criticism of his "response" to do anything at all.
> Your rights ended where the rights of 60,000+ now dead in the US began.
This is a super simplistic view of reality. I get that my rights are limited and contingent on circumstance to some extent. But violating the right to assembly should be treated much more seriously than you are leading on.
On the contrary, it's you who has a simplistic view. You have no right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, just as you had no right to promote the spread of a disease that's going to kill hundreds of thousands of people. This is why public health officials have the legal authority to impose these lockdowns.
I wish everyone who believed as you do would "assemble" at the graves of those who died because of them.
Fine, but you still have no right to promote the spread of a disease that will kill hundreds of thousands of people. If you're going to downvote on a point, downvote on a substantive one.
Here is what was actually written by Holmes:
> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
I maintain that my argument remains unchanged based on the full quotation. Your rights do not trump (hah!) public safety.
You literally do have the right to do that, at least legally.
Edit: yes, and Holmes was wrong — and the decision overturned. The Brandenburg precedent establishes the "imminent lawless action" test. Promoting the opening of the economy (notwithstanding the death count) fails this test, as it is manifestly not "lawless" to spread disease by living your life. If you had smallpox and accidentally spread it to me by going on about your own life, you cannot be held liable for that.
Incorrect, on both counts. Especially the latter, because morality isn't absolute. What you think is a moral right can be different from what I think is a moral right.
Under what moral framework do I have the right to cause the death of innocent people simply because I want a haircut? Or, because I'm a billionaire who wants to make more money? Do I have the right to kill you in self defense for suggesting so?
> Under what moral framework do I have the right to cause the death of innocent people simply because I want a haircut?
The same moral framework under which you have the right to contribute to killing 35,000 people/year because you want a quick/convenient way to get to work everyday.
Well, in fact, I have contributed to killing 0 people in a car accident by driving. Can you reframe your objection now? If I spread the coronavirus by going about my day as normal, how many infections would that result in, and how many deaths, hmm?
There is no analogy to be had. When I get in my car, the overhwelming probability is that absolutely nobody will be killed by my action, including myself. If we resume "normal life," the overhwelming probabilty is that I will eventually contract the coronavirus, and there is a significant probability that I will be killed, or that my actions would kill someone else.
Do you not see the difference? Try a little harder to grasp reality.
There absolutely is an analogy: in both cases, the risk you do as an individual in a vacuum is nearly 0. The aggregate risk of everyone engaging in that behavior is not only non-zero, but results in tens of thousands of deaths.
If we all started driving our cars again, the overwhelming probability is that someone will eventually get into a car accident and die, and in aggregate we've observed that to be about 35,000 every year.
If we all resumed a "normal life", the overwhelming probability is that 60,000+ people will die from COVID.
> There absolutely is an analogy: in both cases, the risk you do as an individual in a vacuum is nearly 0.
This is absolutely untrue.
> In order to achieve herd immunity, scientists say that a community would need to have at least 60% of its population infected. That’s the lowest estimate I’ve been told. Other scientists have told me 80% to 90%. The reason this percentage isn’t precisely known is because it depends on things like exactly how contagious the virus is and also whether people who have been infected are immune forever, or if they lose immunity after a while, which researchers also are furiously working to figure out. [0]
With an infection fatality rate of 0.5% (which is on the conservative side), resuming normal activity means between 1.5 and 4.5% of the population will likely die. This is not an insignificant risk at all. In contrast, 35,000 dead from traffic accidents is .01% of the US population. This is precisely why your so called "analogy" is invalid. Why do you not realize this?
> With an infection fatality rate of 0.5% (which is on the conservative side), resuming normal activity means between 1.5 and 4.5% of the population will likely die. This is not an insignificant risk at all. In contrast, 35,000 dead from traffic accidents is .01% of the US population.
Right, so you are essentially making a tradeoff! You have decided that losing 0.01% of the US population is, to use your framing, an "insignificant risk". I don't disagree with that.
Your original argument was that we simply do not have the right to promote or otherwise further actions that will unnecessarily cause the death of innocents, even if there is an economic tradeoff to be had. I argued that we absolutely have the right to make tradeoffs with lives, we do it all the time. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, sometimes it isn't.
You have just argued to me that "the analogy is invalid" because in one case a lot of people die, and in the other case far fewer people die. You are essentially making the same tradeoff, under the same moral framework — only your boundary for what constitutes an acceptable number of deaths is different.
> Right, so you are essentially making a tradeoff! You have decided that losing 0.01% of the US population is, to use your framing, an "insignificant risk". I don't disagree with that.
I have not. I have stated that a moral framework that could theoretically justify driving cars does not also justify releasing lockdowns. I have made no normative statement about Americans driving cars. Please show me where I have, if you disagree.
> I have stated that a moral framework that could theoretically justify driving cars does not also justify releasing lockdowns
It's the same moral framework, you're just coming out of it with a different decision based on the number of lives impacted.
> I have made no normative statement about Americans driving cars. Please show me where I have, if you disagree.
Your words:
"resuming normal activity means between 1.5 and 4.5% of the population will likely die. This is not an insignificant risk at all. In contrast, 35,000 dead from traffic accidents is .01% of the US population."
You've implicitly shown that there is a line you draw at the number of lives lost that you feel is unacceptable, and that's somewhere between 1.5-4.5% of the population. 0.01% of the population is acceptable to you (it is acceptable to me, too). Drawing this line is a normative point of view!
And my fundamental argument is that different people have different "lines". Your "line" isn't magically the universally correct one. We need to have the discussion to understand all of the "lines" we might be able to draw (ie what are the varying degrees of lockdown), what everyone's personal "lines" are, and then try and come up with the acceptable "line" for society.
Where did I say 35,000 people dead was insignificant? The statement you quote literally does not say that. Again, I am claiming that even if you can justify .01% of the population dying in car accidents on the basis of "economic activity," then the same argument does not work for 150-450x as many deaths. You are putting words in my mouth when you say I claimed 35,000 deaths was acceptable.
Again, I note that although you say there are LOADS of frameworks that could justify this, you have not yet even articulated one. Why is that?
> Again, I am claiming that even if you can justify .01% of the population dying in car accidents on the basis of "economic activity," then the same argument does not work for 150-450x as many deaths.
And I'm arguing that '150-450x as many deaths' is an arbitrary limit. If you can justify 0.01% of the population dying in car accidents on the basis of "economic activity", can you justify 0.02%? 0.1%? 0.3%? 0.5%? 0.9%? 1%? 2%?
Where did it stop being justifiable by the same argument? My argument is that there is no objective line, it is strictly subjective. THAT is the moral framework.
Your "slippery slope" justification literally does not work. I could use that same argument to say that anything that justifies one death justifies 90% of the population being killed. No sane individual believes that there's an argument for executing billions of people.
And, what if I believe even one death for the sake of economic activity is too many? What of your argument, then?
First of all "capitalism" has nothing to do with this. Even a perfectly centrally planned socialist economy might come to the same conclusion. People need goods and services. Capitalism is one way to deliver them.
Second of all, I'm not really sure where you got "5,250,000+ deaths per year", because current projections with reopening of the economy is about 161,000 by Aug 4[1], and that's about 5 months since the outbreak, so let's call that 386,400 annualized. Let's say we get a vaccine in 2 years, for a total of about 772,800 deaths. That represents 0.2% of US population.
I want to make it clear that I, personally, do not think that it is acceptable for 0.2% of the US population to die, but I want to try and convey to you that it is entirely within the realm of possibility for REASONABLE people to conclude that 0.2% over a one-time 2-year interval is "okay", if they already think that 0.01% of Americans dying per year is already acceptable — because at that rate you reach the same 0.2% figure over 20 years, and it continues to grow unbounded.
> And, what if I believe even one death for the sake of economic activity is too many? What of your argument, then?
It's totally fair for you to have that opinion! But the vast majority of people do not believe that, and you absolutely cannot argue that people lack the moral right to believe that 1 death for the sake of the economy is acceptable.
I did not mean to say that unnecessary deaths were the result of capitalism and only capitalism. I only used the "C" word to highlight that those interested in restarting the economy are those who will benefit the most from it. And, those people are not the vulnerable people on the ground making the sacrifices. Under socialism, the people who would benefit and the people making sacrifices would be identical, and that's the fundamental difference there. Sorry to have been unclear.
Regarding 5.25M deaths, I showed my work upthread on that. It's 1.5% of 328.2 million (approximate current US population). This is what the likely result would be if we just "resumed normal activity" and waited for herd immunity, which may or may not come.
> you absolutely cannot argue that people lack the moral right to believe that 1 death for the sake of the economy is acceptable.
Why not? No one has the moral authority to choose to end my life besides me.
Because it is practically unenforceable, and almost nobody considers 1 death for "economic activity" to be unacceptable, so by extension means that everyone holds an immoral world view, and everyone is violating your supposed natural human law...in which case, of what use is that law?
I don't consider it acceptable, but the number of people that would die if we literally just shut everything off (including "essential" services and utilities) is unacceptable. "The economy" as it exists today simply leaves too many people behind. When 8 billionaires have as much wealth as half the world, and when wealth is essentially freedom, that's what's unacceptable.
There is also an argument to be made that society spends a lot of resources[1] to keep automobile carnage low as it is. It would stand to reason that society response to something even dangerous would be proportionate.
[1] We have extensive and complicated vehicles laws. We have traffic cops performing surveillance 24/7. We ban dangerous drivers. We require cars have crash protection. We design roads to be as safe as possible. Goes on and on.
Yes, and few people are arguing for a total reopening free-for-all.
The death projections from reopening account for the existing amount of COVID testing, people wearing face masks, self quarantining, and random sample tracing.
I think a fallacy of half measures are in play here. In that the shorter term needed for extreme measures will cost less in the long run. Consider this fall China, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand will have been virus free for six months while the US and Sweden continues to fester.
The economic damage isn't proportional to the extremity of the measures, but of that multiplied by length of time they are imposed.
And, that's almost the entire reason why lockdowns are necessary to prevent its spread. Remember how we had lockdowns when Ebola came to the US? Oh, yeah, we didn't, because it only spreads when symptoms are present.
Sure, it's definitely an argument in favor of lockdowns — and I don't necessarily disagree with that.
What I disagree with is the argument that even entertaining the counterargument (that the deaths are some how "worth it") is tantamount to daylight murder. We have the right to entertain that tradeoff, and we also have the right to exercise it if society decides to.
First of all, we absolutely have the legal right — it's well within the confines of the Brandenburg test, so I have no idea what you're on about there.
Second of all, we entertain this tradeoff all the time.
If we just all stopped driving cars, we would save about 35,000 lives per year. It would likely cripple the economy (until we can find alternatives), but we all just decide that it's worth it to not cripple the economy. It's an example of us sacrificing lives for economic activity (or in your words, "profit").
Maybe the tradeoff is actually wrong (and it could be!), but it's by no means illegal to make that tradeoff...
Who said anything about "legal"? 200 years ago, slavery was legal. Do you think we have the right to re-implement slavery if it would stop this pandemic? Or even that we should entertain a plan to re-implement slavery if we believed it could stop the pandemic?
Provide one such framework that justifies the certainty that innocent people will be harmed, in exchange for imaginary numbers in a computer being incremented ("economic activity"). If there are LOADS of them, it shouldn't be that hard. Yet, you have not done so.
The same framework that justifies the collective driving of automobiles for personal transportation which results in the deaths of about 35,000 innocent people per year, in return for measurable improvement to "economic activity", as told by the imaginary numbers in my computer.
As I said, that analogy is false. The magnitude of the damage is so much higher for the coronavirus, and the people endangered are already those most vulnerable in society.
Let me put it to you this way: my parents are in no danger from you crashing your car. They are if you go out and start resuming "normal activity" to increment your fake numbers in a computer. Is scoring imaginary points really worth endangering my parents?
You seem to have an inordinate amount of trouble finding a single justification for endangering people at this scale, even though there are apparently LOADS of frameworks that would say it's okay. Why is that?
The analogy is not "false", it's used to show you that we all decide how many lost lives we find to be acceptable for modern society to function.
Your parents have a non-zero statistical probability of dying from a car crash, the same way that they have a non-zero statistical probability of dying from COVID due to "normal activity". The probability of the latter is undeniably higher than that of the former, and you appear to consider the former to be acceptable.
I mean no disrespect to your parents, but you have to accept that for some people, they draw the line differently, and the probability threshold is within their limit.
> You seem to have an inordinate amount of trouble finding a single justification for endangering people at this scale, even though there are apparently LOADS of frameworks that would say it's okay. Why is that?
I'm going to emphasize "At this scale", in your statement, because you're implicitly arguing that THIS scale is unacceptable. I'm simply arguing that, while that may be true for you — and for the record, it's also unacceptable to me — you have to understand that different people have different acceptable thresholds. You think that one loses the moral right to entertain the deaths of innocent people at some arbitrary threshold. But it's arbitrary, and unique to you.
Again, I have not stated that I accept 35,000 deaths per year so capitalism can continue on its merry way. I again invite you to quote where I have said so, if you don't believe me. I have simply stated that the difference in scale means that an argument that justifies 35,000 deaths cannot justify 5,250,000+ deaths.
> I have simply stated that the difference in scale means that an argument that justifies 35,000 deaths cannot justify 5,250,000+ deaths.
at some point the number of deaths is high enough that you decide that "the scale is different and this can no longer be justified". I'm simply stating that this limit is arbitrary, and debatable.
Since when does enforceability have any impact on whether something is a human right or not? One aspect of "human rights" is that they are universal. They apply to both me, you, and everyone else on the planet equally. And, it is entirely reasonable to believe that nobody has the right to end my life but me. So, yes, I believe 0 is the correct number of lives to be sacrificed for economic activity, even though we don't come close to that practically.
You sacrifice people for people, not people for economy. Quality of life takes a huge hit during lockdowns, not being able to see friends and family matters a lot. Most of the world decided that grandma living another month is worth more than the entire childhood of a kid. Sweden decided that it wasn't, so it didn't shut down schools. Simple as that.
We don’t sacrifice lives for your “quality of life,” full stop. People may choose to sacrifice themselves, but you don’t get to make that choice for them.
Your whole argument relies on the faulty notion that the lockdown prioritizes "saving lives" over the economy.
This simply isn't true, and I'd argue that lockdown will directly or indirectly kill more people than it will "save".
In other words, saving economy is about saving lives, and less to do with "profits".
And then it becomes a matter of who gets to decide which set of people dies - "the old and the weak" or - in arguably greater numbers - everyone else (while their liberties get stripped away in the process).
Mind you, lockdown doesn't solve the problem, but only slows it down, namely the amount of people it will save is arguably rather small compared to numbers of people who will die from the economic damage.
a) economic depression will directly or indirectly kill people
b) lockdown doesn't "solve the problem" - it merely slows it down
We can argue all day about exactly numbers of how many people will get killed by the economic damage, but if you want to take away rights and opportunities for people to provide for themselves and their families, the onus is on you to prove that the lockdown will save more people than it will kill.
And at the end of the day - it's still a question of which set of people is going to die - whatever those numbers might be.
Going outside as an individual that is not unwell is not 'knowingly spreading an infectious disease' by any reasonable definition of the phrase. It's reckless at worst, not actively malicious.
If that were the case then literally no-one would be going to work at the moment.
Are we constructing a police state? How do we wind down emergency measures? These are completely valid and vital questions we should be asking right now, especially since the balance of the discussion almost exclusively falls on the side of expanded and unquestionable police power. History shows that emergency and "temporary" measures end up being permanent and irrevocable. Look at the Patriot Act.
I am interested in public safety. And it's really frightening how any well-intentioned critique of lockdown ends up with responses like yours that sound like "how dare you consider that, you inhuman, dangerous fool!"
Nobody is suggesting the creation of a police state. We need to maintain lockdowns until we don't. Specifically, we need to develop measurable, scientific criteria for easing lockdowns, similar to how the state of California and the Bay Area counties have done. Once cases reach a sufficiently low level that we can handle the remaining epidemic via testing and contact tracing, then and only then is it safe to start returning to normal. Along with this must come criteria for re-imposing the lockdown -- the moment things get beyond the point where contact tracing, etc. can handle existing cases, then we need to tighten back up.
Government already has the authority to impose these lockdowns as a public safety measure. There is no additional "police state" power being created here de novo.
If you want to reopen the economy now without considering these things, then, yes, that does make you an inhuman, dangerous fool.
> Nobody is suggesting the creation of a police state.
That's explicitly what's being suggested. What else is a centrally-planned, police-enforced, compulsory lockdown and shutdown of the civilian economy? What's worse is indefinite house confinement.
What's being suggested is a temporary public health measure. Please point out where I suggested otherwise.
Again, I repeat temporary, public health measure, where criteria for lifting said measures are specified in advance. Your rights have no bearing on this. You have no right to endanger me or my family. You have no right to promote the spread of a disease that's already killed 60,000+ people. You have no right to force people back to work to be so endangered.
I can walk outside and practice social distance. That doesn't endanger you or your family. I think that's what's so weird about the unreasonable risk-aversion some people are advocating. It's like healthy people have become complete OCD agoraphobes. The air isn't poison and humans won't be exterminated. Have a sense of proportion: the consensus upper range of the IFR (1%) means an overwhelming majority will survive, and beyond that, most of the deaths will be older people and the unhealthy.
I'm not proposing that all lockdowns be abolished completely across the country. I'm arguing that there's severe consequences and precedents set with lockdown and that reasonable precautions and practices could effectively mitigate disease spread and allow economic activity and reasonable freedom.
> I can walk outside and practice social distance. That doesn't endanger you or your family.
That's correct. And, to my knowledge, none of the lockdown measures in the US prohibit walking outside. Your previous claims of "indefinite house confinement" were made in bad faith.
> most of the deaths will be older people and the unhealthy.
So, these people are somehow worth less to you than young, healthy people?
> ...reasonable precautions and practices could effectively mitigate disease spread....
And, what are these "reasonable precautions and practices"?
>... and allow economic activity and reasonable freedom.
Economic activity is not prohibited. What is prohibited is unnecessary face to face interaction. Your freedom is not relevant here. What is relevant is containing the spread of the most serious public health threat in a century, and you're coming dangerously close to saying we should sacrifice certain "useless" people because you feel protecting them infringes your "freedom." You have a civic obligation here. Take it seriously.
when people outside of vietnam who are infected travel there, they will have to shut everything down again, whereas Sweden will have herd immunity faster than any other country
Bold of you to think there will be any such thing as lasting herd immunity via natural infection, when no other human coronavirus induces such immunity.
There are corona viruses spreading among humans all the time, a significant fraction of "common colds" are corona. Most doesn't get sick since we already have herd immunity against them.
> if there is so such thing as immunity then waiting for the vaccine is pointless no?
The keyword there is lasting, we know immunity exists we just don't know for how long. If a vaccine could be distributed to enough people in a short enough time frame (we're talking billions and months) it could still wipe out the virus. But if that can't be done then mandatory vaccines for travelers could work.
> ...so what is the lockdown for again?
To keep the number of infections manageable and/or eradicate it entirely, it was never about stalling time for a vaccine.
to keep the numbers manageable?
all the hospitals are empty, the field hospitals they built for this have had 80 total patients out of the expected 10 million+
the whole purpose of "flattening the curve" was so that everyone one would get the virus but at different times, if no-one is getting it now, then that just means everyone will get it later
> when people outside of vietnam who are infected travel there,
they will be tested, quarantined for two weeks, tested again, and then only if they test negative they will be able to interact with the rest of Vietnam. It's a hundred times easier than controlling a disease running wild in the population.
You think there will be tourism and business trip into Sweden when their strategy is explicitly "you will get the virus anyway"?
In the end, the Vietnamese will have more freedom than the Swedish. When countries that have put the virus under control agree to reopen borders against each other, Sweden will be left out.
> You think there will be tourism and business trip into Sweden when their strategy is explicitly "you will get the virus anyway"?
You don't seem to understand that the more a population builds up immunity, and the less the virus can circulate in this population. So Sweden might end up being the place where you're the less likely to get the virus, if any.
Plus, for people under 65 and no pre-existing conditions, the risk from Covid-19 is negligible. Peaople under 65 represents a lot of tourists and business people already. I personally would go to Sweden without the slightest worry, but that's just me. In the end everybody will assess the risk by themselves, like grown-ups.
> In the end, the Vietnamese will have more freedom than the Swedish
Freedom within the country? Freedom to travel in other countries? Freedom to open their border and welcome foreigners? What do you mean exactly?
As long as the virus circulates in the world, and the population of a country was never exposed to it, then the epidemic is just waiting to happen. I don't see how a country like VN which has presumably not build up immunity at all can be in a good position.
If the virus disappears completely from the surface of the planet, then that's great news for VN. They will have managed to keep the virus out, and to safely re-open the borders. A great success.
But if the virus doesn't disappear, and lingers around for years, Vietnam will have to maintain draconian measures at the borders for a very long time. This will have a cost, and yes it hurts the economy, you can't deny that.
> When countries that have put the virus under control agree to reopen borders against each other
I don't know how you will define "put the virus under control". Good luck with that. And good luck handling all the travelers with two nationalities and two passports.
Except we don't know that and nobody is tracking it very well. It's an enormously risky approach.
I think it will work out 'ok' for Sweden only because COVID isn't that-that bad, but if death rates were a little higher and R0 a bit higher it could have been a disaster.
Specifically: " They do not need to be coerced into a lockdown because they can be trusted to act properly." This to me is ridiculous - it's not 'trust' that matters, but policy: if restaurants are open and many people go there ... well, that's hugely different from 'restaurants closed'. Same thing for almost everything else. How can you 'trust' people to do the right thing whey nobody knows what the right thing is? Even certain behaviors like hand-washing and masks need to be propagandized and 'nudged' in order for people to take them seriously.
It may very well be that 'soft shut-down' in the long run is the right balance ... but I'd be wary to claim a big win on this if it was mostly a guess.
Taiwan and Korea are clearly the winners, in the West I suggest it's Germany.
why germany? there seems to be plenty of states doing better than germany. it seems germany gets points just for having a long serving trusted leader at the helm
Because Germany has 1/4 the deaths per capita than other Western states and considerably more testing.
Spain has 550 deaths per million, Germany has 90. Most of the rest are in between.
UK, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands etc. - not so good at all, though Switzerland did a good job of getting things under control after a breakout.
E. Europe has fared well, but there are lower testing and some questionable governance so well have to take a deeper look.
Sweden's position is untenable and possibly unethical given the unknowns, it was a huge gamble.
Not everything can be measured in deaths. For every one dead in the US, there are 500~ who lost a job. One death is a tragedy but what about those 30 million families now that have a breadwinner out of work?
This virus is clearly not the plague that it was projected to be. Why are we destroying the economy and the lives of millions of young Americans just so that the few at risk people can live 3 months longer?
In particular the recent increase in deaths in Sweden is not merely some numbers but a particular phenomenon: The most vulnerable are elderly with health problems. These people are clustered in care centers. For them to remain safe they would have to be isolated from the general population, but unfortunately there have been many clusters of infections in facilities where sick elderly are concentrated. How this latest rise in deaths might have been prevented is a different conversation than the more broad issue of how the rest of society should react.
“normal” people like doctors and nurses who are dying from the disease?
That’s among the many problems with this attitude. At what point do we stop treating healthcare workers as cannon fodder?
Besides which, that ignores the fact that strokes from the disease are killing people of all ages. And that we don’t know the long-term impact on the health of victims yet.
Health care workers get unusually high levels of exposure, so they are kind of a special case. If you look carefully at the whole numbers the average COVID-19 victim is over 80 and has at least one major chronic health problem already. It makes sense to focus mitigation efforts on this group.
It's way too early to see if it's working or not. It could very well be the better approach compared to the total lockdown unemployment mental health disaster that other countries are doing. We don't know this yet but while we find out I look forward to take daily walks in the spring sun and excersizing extra care when confronted with other people.
the core of the article was that sweden's approach is damaging to the swedish culture. i guess it's not possible to say if that's true, short of sweden becoming hungary or zimbabwe
Swedens approach is working. Current number of deaths is still too low to warrant harsher measures and deaths per day has been going down for weeks now.
300 deaths per million isn't that many really. That means 3000 persons per death, significantly hurting 3000 persons quality of life for several months just to save a single life which 90% of the time is above 70 and therefore doesn't have many years left to live isn't worth it. If locking down 3000 persons for 3 months makes everyone who died live 10 years longer then we say that 75 years of lockdown is worth 1 year of life. So a person would happily spend almost their entire life (75 years) in lockdown just to live one year longer. I don't believe that at all, nobody would make that choice. Just quitting smoking would save way more with way less effort.
And that example was with 10 years per death, most who are dying were already on their deaths door with less time left than that. Also we assumed everyone would survive if we did lock down, which is very unlikely.
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