3 ms·

Sure, but one of the biggest complications of COVID is that majority of transmission is asymptomatic.

• pmiller2 6y ago
  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.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    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.
    • pmiller2 6y ago
      No, we don't have the right to entertain a tradeoff that sacrifices people for profits.
      • bhupy 6y ago
        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...
        • pmiller2 6y ago
          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?
          • bhupy 6y ago
            Ah yes, very good, the "slavery" argument. In your own words, "legality" isn't everything. Moral rights aren't absolute, nor are they objective — different people have different morals. There is probably no moral framework in which slavery can be justified. There are LOADS of valid moral frameworks in which economic vs number of lives cost/benefit tradeoffs are made. Many things can be true at the same time. The world isn't as simplistic as you seem to make it out to be.
            • pmiller2 6y ago
              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.
              • bhupy 6y ago
                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.
                • pmiller2 6y ago
                  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?
      • username90 6y ago
        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.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • pmiller2 6y ago
          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.
          • username90 6y ago
            We do, all the time. What we don't do is sacrifice thousands of others quality of life just to slightly extend your expected lifespan.
      • Johanx64 6y ago
        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.
        • pmiller2 6y ago
          Where is your research paper showing this?
          • Johanx64 6y ago
            Do you question the premise that: 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.