7 ms·

The most annoying thing to me is that when one critiques lockdown policy (which by the way is unique to the west, Korea for example never had a lockdown [1]), o

The most annoying thing to me is that when one critiques lockdown policy (which by the way is unique to the west, Korea for example never had a lockdown [1]), one is labeled as selfish, anti-science, and lumped into the Trump-supporting right wing camp. It feels like having an honest discussion isn't even possible without being downvote bombed to the point where your comment gets censored (especially on extremely one-sided sites like Reddit), so I just gave up. Although COVID-19 has improved a lot of things for office workers who didn't lose their jobs, life has become a miserable shadow of what it once was. As someone who's spent the last 3 years living a nomadic lifestyle traveling the world, now I'm severely limited in where I can go, and anywhere I go life isn't the same - people wearing masks, distancing and avoiding eye contact, half of local businesses closed, fear. And now someone's going to reply to me saying "don't you know there's a pandemic! How could you be so selfish as to complain about not being able to travel when people are dying." And that's exactly my point. [1] EDIT: I meant to say that many of the Asian countries hailed as role models in handling the pandemic - South Korea, Taiwan, etc - never had to resort to lockdowns. Meanwhile the U.S. had strict lockdowns and Europe is still practically shut down. This makes it even more absurd to me that one isn't allowed to question lockdowns without being labeled some selfish Trump anti-vaxxer.

wvenable 6y ago
Lock down or not, people aren't going to go about their normal lives when hospitals are beyond capacity due to the pandemic. Maybe in that scenario, without corresponding lock downs, life wouldn't be as miserable but you don't know that.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  Hospitals are not beyond capacity everywhere where lockdowns are being imposed. Hospital overcapacity is extremely location-dependent. Also, hospital overcapacity in itself does not justify lockdown policies. Some would argue that not being allow indoor dining or to walk outside after 10pm is a violation of basic human rights (not to mention neither of these measures were implemented in Korea for example).
  - wvenable 6y ago
    South Korea has had a relatively small number of COVID cases. Kindergartens, schools, universities, cinemas, gyms were closed soon after the outbreak with schools and universities having online classes. You're mixing up cause and effect. South Korea has definitely considered lock down measures as cased increased but so far they haven't needed to. Not only is hospital overcapacity location-dependent but so have been the location and severity of the lock downs around the world. Every few weeks where I am from the restrictions are re-considered based on the rate of infection, etc.
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      My point was that lockdowns aren't necessary, and rather than jumping to lockdown, we should be looking to learn from the countries that handled the pandemic better than us. In America the dialogue basically seems to just be "omg cases are rising? SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING". Not enough attention is put on the million other less destructive measures that can be taken to reduce the spread. Right now for example I'm in a third world country with a highly ranked healthcare system (above Germany). No lockdown here, hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and life is almost like normal (other than half the local businesses appearing to be out of business). There are basic measures like hand sanitizer everywhere, and needing to put it on to say enter a shopping mall. 2 weeks ago I was in the U.S., and I never really even saw that. I was in a post office, and I had to ask the cashier if they had sanitizer and she took a little bottle from the back, after which I'd imagine she put it back behind the counter as if hiding it from customers. When I took an Amtrak train nobody offered hand sanitizer or checked my temperature. I'm not saying that having hand sanitizer available is the cure to containing COVID, I'm saying that these are the absolute easiest to implement measures that even third world countries have managed to implement, and the U.S. is not even capable of that. The U.S. seems incapable of doing anything other than telling restaurants they need to shut down, which is absurd (yes there are things being done behind the scenes and I'm hand-waving a bit, but the point is that even compared to third world countries, the U.S./west appears to be immensely incompetent despite being the wealthiest countries)
      - wvenable 6y ago
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Where exactly are hospitals beyond capacity ? Please provide sources for extraordinary claims.
  - lukebitts 6y ago
    How is saying hospitals are full extraordinary? My country is going through it right now, we just had our first death from someone who could not find a hospital bed. Im sure a google search on this subject would be very easy.
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      Because it's extremely location dependent, and not true for most hospitals. Full hospitals are in the minority.
  - wvenable 6y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/09/us/covid-hospitals-icu-capacity.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/09/us/covid-hosp... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/944379919/new-data-reveal-which-hospitals-are-dangerously-full-is-yours https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/10/933253317/covid-19-hospitalizations-are-surging-where-are-hospitals-reaching-capacity https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/10/9332533... https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospital-icus-running-space-due-covid-19-surges/story?id=74169792 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospital-icus-running-space-du... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/diversions-transfer-delays-plague-hospitals-overwhelmed-covid-19-cases-n1248014 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/diversions-transfer-del... https://patch.com/us/across-america/its-bad-hospital-over-capacity-nurses-have-coronavirus https://patch.com/us/across-america/its-bad-hospital-over-ca... https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/valley-hospitals-are-over-capacity-with-covid-19-patients/ https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/valley-hospita... https://homehealthcarenews.com/2020/03/over-capacity-challenges-loom-large-as-us-covid-19-hospitalizations-projected-to-reach-4-8m/ https://homehealthcarenews.com/2020/03/over-capacity-challen... https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/st-louis-leaders-warn-of-over-capacity-hospitals-a-reality-for-some-illinois-families/63-75eabc7e-d930-4169-b26c-95d80f396c4c https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/st-l... And good news: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/12/30/covid-19-hospitals-over-capacity-searchable-database/4066765001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/12/30/covid-19-hosp...
MattGaiser 6y ago
> which by the way is unique to the west The idea came from China and was considered unthinkable here when they did it. India also locked down. Friends in Ghana also told me that they locked down.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  Ok I stand corrected and should've been more explicit. What I meant was that the east Asian countries hailed as role models - South Korea, Taiwan, etc - never had to resort to lockdowns. Meanwhile Europe is practically shut down, the U.S. had very harsh lockdowns, etc.
  - ilikehurdles 6y ago
    Taiwan has temperature checks to get anywhere and very effective contact tracing to segregate all potentially infectious individuals in quarantine. Coughs and fever, even if unrelated to covid, result in the individual having to spend some time in a hospital room. Its borders are almost fully closed to outsiders. Not only that, a culture of mask wearing has been normalized throughout east Asia for ages. Do you honestly, honestly believe that Americans or Europeans at any level would have been able to transition to and adhere to such strict restrictions?
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      > Do you honestly, honestly believe that Americans or Europeans at any level would have been able to transition to and adhere to such strict restrictions? Of course. Why would that not be possible? This is another common response I see, this defeatist attitude that the west is not capable of implementing the same smart common sense policies that the east did. With this pessimistic attitude it's sure as hell not possible, and will be the west's downfall.
      - ilikehurdles 6y ago
        I admire your optimism. I agree to the extent that our pessimistic attitudes are a cancer that will lead to our downfall. I do not believe we can overcome them as they permeate up and down the spectrum of influence and political power. I realize the irony in taking a pessimistic stance and recognizing the harm in that pessimism, but I don’t really know what else to say or how to change it.
clairity 6y ago
don't give up. there's plenty of us who actually have assessed the risks and weighed them apropriately, using our own brains rather than relying on others to assuage our fears. almost none of the publicly pronounced mitigations have much mitigative effect. the most reasonable mitigation is sensible distancing when you're going to spend extended time with non-household members in tight quarters, but that's not big enough or visible enough for many, so we get the extended security theater to deal with the fear externalized onto the rest of us. combined with light masking in situations where prolonged indoor closeness (not incidental closeness, like in a grocery aisle, but rather among friends hanging out) is unavoidable, we could have kept most businesses and institutions open and had essentially the same results. we didn't need lockdowns, school/office closures, curfews, outdoor masking, incessant handwashing/disinfecting, or any of that other stuff that didn't really have any substantive effect.
- chii 6y ago
  > didn't really have any substantive effect it did, but the effort was not sustained, nor done consistently enough in the USA to have had return on the investment/cost. I would argue that a bigger, more stringent lockdown, for at least 1-2 months, would have produced vastly better results. It's not like you can half-mitigate the pandemic with a half-lockdown.
  - tjs8rj 6y ago
    I mean, that’s life? Sure, doubling my money in every investment is great, but unrealistic. Plenty of strategies work as long as every does it and everything works perfectly. The problem is finding a strategy that works in the real world. Lockdowns failed because they weren’t the right solution, because reality is what it is and they weren’t calibrated for the reality that locking down everyone’s lives for a month simply isn’t realistic at all. I think this was obvious to everyone on some level even early in the pandemic, but the politicization of the pandemic meant safety theater and then blaming the noncompliant was the play, when a winning strategy was probably more like: protect the vulnerable, be completely transparent with the people about the dangers, make accommodations to minimize unnecessary risks (no sit in dining, close non essentials, sanitize often), then let people make their own risk calculations based on the available evidence and their own situation, taking steps to ensure their decisions don’t affect others as much as possible. A realistic strategy should have been the go-to, not some ideal strategy that only works in dreams.
tobasq 6y ago
Do you really imagine a USA that didn't lock down doing as well as South Korea and Taiwan? Look at our numbers with the lockdowns. The Asian countries were only able to do what they did because they were prepared, culturally and logistically, for a viral epidemic before one arrived.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  It certainly DOES appear that when lockdowns go in place in a state or country, the new cases start to go down - usually dramatically. At this point, we probably have well over 100 examples of this. I'm interested if there are any counter examples. Are there? But on the same hand, there's not any controlled experiments going on. Has this actually been statistically proven? For example, major populations centers in Florida and Texas had lockdowns for different parts of their spikes. But the states in general were much more lax. And yet, they seemed to have fared similarly to California and New York - which had much more strict local and state-wide measures.
  - nl 6y ago
    Exponential spread means small mistakes in containment are difficult to distinguish from an endemic infection - except in the time dimension. You can see the difference pretty clearly looking at the time series. But as soon as you open up again infections go up unless you have suppressed the virus completely. Countries that took it seriously did this.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    There have already been studies that found lockdowns don't help with mortality (which is what matters, not cases), like https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full#SM6 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
  - rhino369 6y ago
    I don't think you need much evidence to believe that lockdowns are temporarily effective. But I'd be curious to see evidence on whether they are effective at reducing overall infections over a longer period. Because it seems like they just delay (for only a matter of weeks) what is going to happen anyway. Most of the United States really had two significant waves. NY and other early hotspots never had the summer peak. The summer peak states never had a huge outbreak in spring because they locked down two months. The states that managed to not have several outbreaks until fall (California and the Planes states) all got hit much worse. It all seemed to even out.
nl 6y ago
Korea (and the other countries mentioned) reacted hard and strongly at the start of the pandemic, and kept numbers low. In Korea the worst day had just over 1000 new cases in the whole country. They had forced quarantine for those infected and very strong (legally enforced) contract tracing[1]. Meanwhile in the US and Europe they seem to have abandoned contact tracing completely (unsurprising given how widely spread it is now). Lockdown (or vaccine) seems the only alternative in that case (or lots of deaths of course). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Korea#Containment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Kor...
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  It's sad that the U.S/Europe is not capable of implementing contact tracing. I don't want to be spied on by Big Brother more than anyone else, but I'll take that over the government telling me I'm not allowed to leave my house.
  - nonford150 6y ago
    Maybe people just want the freedom to make their own decisions while taking proper precautions. Lockdowns in the US haven’t had any positive outcomes versus the freedom to live with masks and social distancing.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      > Maybe people just want the freedom to make their own decisions while taking proper precautions. This is basically the argument from anti-maskers (the ones against mask mandates, not the ones arguing masks don't work): Don't treat us like children.
NorthOf33rd 6y ago
Critiquing lockdown policy because you can’t live your “nomadic lifestyle” is selfish. Critiquing lockdown because there are better alternatives is not. You chose to frame your argument in the former.
- brighton36 6y ago
  If you don't believe the policy is legitimate, then, it's altruistic. (Because you're justly defying tyranny) There is no objectively good determination here.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  That's why I brought up countries that handled the pandemic extremely well without lockdowns. My critique of lockdowns goes far beyond not being able to live a nomadic lifestyle. Notice how I said that life isn't the same no matter where I am. I could write a whole essay, talk about how all my friends are depressed, etc., but that's outside the scope of my comment.
sk5t 6y ago
You want it to be one way—but it’s the other way.
irrational 6y ago
> life has become a miserable shadow of what it once was Eh, I think it depends on your personality. As an introvert, I’ve never been as happy as this past year. It has been fantastic and I am dreading having to work in an office again, social distancing going away, perhaps masks going away. I try not to think about the end of the pandemic since it just makes me depressed.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  Oh I hate offices too, but I was already working remotely prior to the pandemic. For what it's worth I consider myself an introvert too. But introversion is definitely a spectrum, and if I'm alone all the time then I'll feel depressed (I wish I didn't though).

wvenable 6y ago

Lock down or not, people aren't going to go about their normal lives when hospitals are beyond capacity due to the pandemic. Maybe in that scenario, without corresponding lock downs, life wouldn't be as miserable but you don't know that.

JSavageOne 6y ago
Hospitals are not beyond capacity everywhere where lockdowns are being imposed. Hospital overcapacity is extremely location-dependent. Also, hospital overcapacity in itself does not justify lockdown policies. Some would argue that not being allow indoor dining or to walk outside after 10pm is a violation of basic human rights (not to mention neither of these measures were implemented in Korea for example).
- wvenable 6y ago
  South Korea has had a relatively small number of COVID cases. Kindergartens, schools, universities, cinemas, gyms were closed soon after the outbreak with schools and universities having online classes. You're mixing up cause and effect. South Korea has definitely considered lock down measures as cased increased but so far they haven't needed to. Not only is hospital overcapacity location-dependent but so have been the location and severity of the lock downs around the world. Every few weeks where I am from the restrictions are re-considered based on the rate of infection, etc.
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    My point was that lockdowns aren't necessary, and rather than jumping to lockdown, we should be looking to learn from the countries that handled the pandemic better than us. In America the dialogue basically seems to just be "omg cases are rising? SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING". Not enough attention is put on the million other less destructive measures that can be taken to reduce the spread. Right now for example I'm in a third world country with a highly ranked healthcare system (above Germany). No lockdown here, hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and life is almost like normal (other than half the local businesses appearing to be out of business). There are basic measures like hand sanitizer everywhere, and needing to put it on to say enter a shopping mall. 2 weeks ago I was in the U.S., and I never really even saw that. I was in a post office, and I had to ask the cashier if they had sanitizer and she took a little bottle from the back, after which I'd imagine she put it back behind the counter as if hiding it from customers. When I took an Amtrak train nobody offered hand sanitizer or checked my temperature. I'm not saying that having hand sanitizer available is the cure to containing COVID, I'm saying that these are the absolute easiest to implement measures that even third world countries have managed to implement, and the U.S. is not even capable of that. The U.S. seems incapable of doing anything other than telling restaurants they need to shut down, which is absurd (yes there are things being done behind the scenes and I'm hand-waving a bit, but the point is that even compared to third world countries, the U.S./west appears to be immensely incompetent despite being the wealthiest countries)
    - wvenable 6y ago
ekianjo 6y ago
Where exactly are hospitals beyond capacity ? Please provide sources for extraordinary claims.
- lukebitts 6y ago
  How is saying hospitals are full extraordinary? My country is going through it right now, we just had our first death from someone who could not find a hospital bed. Im sure a google search on this subject would be very easy.
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    Because it's extremely location dependent, and not true for most hospitals. Full hospitals are in the minority.
- wvenable 6y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/09/us/covid-hospitals-icu-capacity.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/09/us/covid-hosp... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/944379919/new-data-reveal-which-hospitals-are-dangerously-full-is-yours https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/10/933253317/covid-19-hospitalizations-are-surging-where-are-hospitals-reaching-capacity https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/10/9332533... https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospital-icus-running-space-due-covid-19-surges/story?id=74169792 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospital-icus-running-space-du... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/diversions-transfer-delays-plague-hospitals-overwhelmed-covid-19-cases-n1248014 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/diversions-transfer-del... https://patch.com/us/across-america/its-bad-hospital-over-capacity-nurses-have-coronavirus https://patch.com/us/across-america/its-bad-hospital-over-ca... https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/valley-hospitals-are-over-capacity-with-covid-19-patients/ https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/valley-hospita... https://homehealthcarenews.com/2020/03/over-capacity-challenges-loom-large-as-us-covid-19-hospitalizations-projected-to-reach-4-8m/ https://homehealthcarenews.com/2020/03/over-capacity-challen... https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/st-louis-leaders-warn-of-over-capacity-hospitals-a-reality-for-some-illinois-families/63-75eabc7e-d930-4169-b26c-95d80f396c4c https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/st-l... And good news: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/12/30/covid-19-hospitals-over-capacity-searchable-database/4066765001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/12/30/covid-19-hosp...

MattGaiser 6y ago

> which by the way is unique to the west The idea came from China and was considered unthinkable here when they did it. India also locked down. Friends in Ghana also told me that they locked down.

JSavageOne 6y ago
Ok I stand corrected and should've been more explicit. What I meant was that the east Asian countries hailed as role models - South Korea, Taiwan, etc - never had to resort to lockdowns. Meanwhile Europe is practically shut down, the U.S. had very harsh lockdowns, etc.
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  Taiwan has temperature checks to get anywhere and very effective contact tracing to segregate all potentially infectious individuals in quarantine. Coughs and fever, even if unrelated to covid, result in the individual having to spend some time in a hospital room. Its borders are almost fully closed to outsiders. Not only that, a culture of mask wearing has been normalized throughout east Asia for ages. Do you honestly, honestly believe that Americans or Europeans at any level would have been able to transition to and adhere to such strict restrictions?
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    > Do you honestly, honestly believe that Americans or Europeans at any level would have been able to transition to and adhere to such strict restrictions? Of course. Why would that not be possible? This is another common response I see, this defeatist attitude that the west is not capable of implementing the same smart common sense policies that the east did. With this pessimistic attitude it's sure as hell not possible, and will be the west's downfall.
    - ilikehurdles 6y ago
      I admire your optimism. I agree to the extent that our pessimistic attitudes are a cancer that will lead to our downfall. I do not believe we can overcome them as they permeate up and down the spectrum of influence and political power. I realize the irony in taking a pessimistic stance and recognizing the harm in that pessimism, but I don’t really know what else to say or how to change it.

clairity 6y ago

don't give up. there's plenty of us who actually have assessed the risks and weighed them apropriately, using our own brains rather than relying on others to assuage our fears. almost none of the publicly pronounced mitigations have much mitigative effect. the most reasonable mitigation is sensible distancing when you're going to spend extended time with non-household members in tight quarters, but that's not big enough or visible enough for many, so we get the extended security theater to deal with the fear externalized onto the rest of us. combined with light masking in situations where prolonged indoor closeness (not incidental closeness, like in a grocery aisle, but rather among friends hanging out) is unavoidable, we could have kept most businesses and institutions open and had essentially the same results. we didn't need lockdowns, school/office closures, curfews, outdoor masking, incessant handwashing/disinfecting, or any of that other stuff that didn't really have any substantive effect.

chii 6y ago
> didn't really have any substantive effect it did, but the effort was not sustained, nor done consistently enough in the USA to have had return on the investment/cost. I would argue that a bigger, more stringent lockdown, for at least 1-2 months, would have produced vastly better results. It's not like you can half-mitigate the pandemic with a half-lockdown.
- tjs8rj 6y ago
  I mean, that’s life? Sure, doubling my money in every investment is great, but unrealistic. Plenty of strategies work as long as every does it and everything works perfectly. The problem is finding a strategy that works in the real world. Lockdowns failed because they weren’t the right solution, because reality is what it is and they weren’t calibrated for the reality that locking down everyone’s lives for a month simply isn’t realistic at all. I think this was obvious to everyone on some level even early in the pandemic, but the politicization of the pandemic meant safety theater and then blaming the noncompliant was the play, when a winning strategy was probably more like: protect the vulnerable, be completely transparent with the people about the dangers, make accommodations to minimize unnecessary risks (no sit in dining, close non essentials, sanitize often), then let people make their own risk calculations based on the available evidence and their own situation, taking steps to ensure their decisions don’t affect others as much as possible. A realistic strategy should have been the go-to, not some ideal strategy that only works in dreams.

tobasq 6y ago

Do you really imagine a USA that didn't lock down doing as well as South Korea and Taiwan? Look at our numbers with the lockdowns. The Asian countries were only able to do what they did because they were prepared, culturally and logistically, for a viral epidemic before one arrived.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
It certainly DOES appear that when lockdowns go in place in a state or country, the new cases start to go down - usually dramatically. At this point, we probably have well over 100 examples of this. I'm interested if there are any counter examples. Are there? But on the same hand, there's not any controlled experiments going on. Has this actually been statistically proven? For example, major populations centers in Florida and Texas had lockdowns for different parts of their spikes. But the states in general were much more lax. And yet, they seemed to have fared similarly to California and New York - which had much more strict local and state-wide measures.
- nl 6y ago
  Exponential spread means small mistakes in containment are difficult to distinguish from an endemic infection - except in the time dimension. You can see the difference pretty clearly looking at the time series. But as soon as you open up again infections go up unless you have suppressed the virus completely. Countries that took it seriously did this.
- logicchains 6y ago
  There have already been studies that found lockdowns don't help with mortality (which is what matters, not cases), like https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full#SM6 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
- rhino369 6y ago
  I don't think you need much evidence to believe that lockdowns are temporarily effective. But I'd be curious to see evidence on whether they are effective at reducing overall infections over a longer period. Because it seems like they just delay (for only a matter of weeks) what is going to happen anyway. Most of the United States really had two significant waves. NY and other early hotspots never had the summer peak. The summer peak states never had a huge outbreak in spring because they locked down two months. The states that managed to not have several outbreaks until fall (California and the Planes states) all got hit much worse. It all seemed to even out.

nl 6y ago

Korea (and the other countries mentioned) reacted hard and strongly at the start of the pandemic, and kept numbers low. In Korea the worst day had just over 1000 new cases in the whole country. They had forced quarantine for those infected and very strong (legally enforced) contract tracing[1]. Meanwhile in the US and Europe they seem to have abandoned contact tracing completely (unsurprising given how widely spread it is now). Lockdown (or vaccine) seems the only alternative in that case (or lots of deaths of course). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Korea#Containment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Kor...

JSavageOne 6y ago
It's sad that the U.S/Europe is not capable of implementing contact tracing. I don't want to be spied on by Big Brother more than anyone else, but I'll take that over the government telling me I'm not allowed to leave my house.
- nonford150 6y ago
  Maybe people just want the freedom to make their own decisions while taking proper precautions. Lockdowns in the US haven’t had any positive outcomes versus the freedom to live with masks and social distancing.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    > Maybe people just want the freedom to make their own decisions while taking proper precautions. This is basically the argument from anti-maskers (the ones against mask mandates, not the ones arguing masks don't work): Don't treat us like children.

NorthOf33rd 6y ago

Critiquing lockdown policy because you can’t live your “nomadic lifestyle” is selfish. Critiquing lockdown because there are better alternatives is not. You chose to frame your argument in the former.

brighton36 6y ago
If you don't believe the policy is legitimate, then, it's altruistic. (Because you're justly defying tyranny) There is no objectively good determination here.
JSavageOne 6y ago
That's why I brought up countries that handled the pandemic extremely well without lockdowns. My critique of lockdowns goes far beyond not being able to live a nomadic lifestyle. Notice how I said that life isn't the same no matter where I am. I could write a whole essay, talk about how all my friends are depressed, etc., but that's outside the scope of my comment.

sk5t 6y ago

You want it to be one way—but it’s the other way.

irrational 6y ago

> life has become a miserable shadow of what it once was Eh, I think it depends on your personality. As an introvert, I’ve never been as happy as this past year. It has been fantastic and I am dreading having to work in an office again, social distancing going away, perhaps masks going away. I try not to think about the end of the pandemic since it just makes me depressed.

JSavageOne 6y ago
Oh I hate offices too, but I was already working remotely prior to the pandemic. For what it's worth I consider myself an introvert too. But introversion is definitely a spectrum, and if I'm alone all the time then I'll feel depressed (I wish I didn't though).