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> I'd say the answer to that should be determined by the hospital capacity. If a region has sufficient hospital capacity that it would not be overwhelmed by the

> I'd say the answer to that should be determined by the hospital capacity. If a region has sufficient hospital capacity that it would not be overwhelmed by the increase in COVID cases among the unvaccinated go ahead and lift most restrictions. Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. Note that these freedoms were debated and won in an era where medicine was terrible.

Nbox9 5y ago
I’d like to know that if I have a heart attack or get hit by a bus then I’ll have access to top quality healthcare —- not burnt out understaffed hospitals. Sharing limited resources is a major role of the government, and managing hospital capacity seems to fall under “promote general welfare” to me. My $0.02
- enchiridion 5y ago
  It definitely is, but they’re addressing it from the wrong end. If the pandemic could be fixed by the government managing individual behavior we’d be done with it by now. Instead the government should be focused on expanding highly covid specific care capacity. That is by far a better way to spend the covid relief money than distributing it to sustain a nebulous lockdown. As far as I understand from talking with doctors, at no time within the last year have hospitals been at maximum emergency covid capacity, as in hospital beds in the hall ways, cafeteria, etc. This tells me that we are close to the amount of beds we need, and it would be feasible to build out additional capacity quickly, relieve the strain, and get back to normal.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    > Instead the government should be focused on expanding highly covid specific care capacity. That is by far a better way to spend the covid relief money than distributing it to sustain a nebulous lockdown. This is not something the government can do. It's not something anyone can do. What you're asking for (though you may not know it) is for their to suddenly be more nurses and medical practitioners. That's not a thing that can just suddenly happen, or even happen with 2-3 years of prep. You need a decade to actually functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists. Now there are lots of short term fixes the government has done, such as activating the national guard in locations (to reduce non-medical load on nurses) and hospitals can pause elective services to free up space and time, but that has huge downsides since it means people get life saving nonemergency surgeries like cancer removal.
    - coryfklein 5y ago
      > You need a decade to actually functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists. Similar things were said for the vaccine. There is so much gatekeeping in the medical community that is not totally necessary. A doctor or nurse that immigrates to the US from a different country which has better health care than we do cannot practice were without jumping through tons of hoops. That is a pretty straightforward way the government – in a state of national emergency mind you! – could instantly and functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists.
      - mrcrumb1 5y ago
        Are you suggesting that people rely on unprecedented medical advancements as a policy solution?
        coryfklein 5y ago
        :lol_sob: Why can't we have nice things mrcrumb1?? Hahaha. But yes. Yes, I'm advocating that people be just a little bit more open minded and flexible about this issue and, ideally, the so many others like it. Sometimes it's quite depressing to consider the giant gap between how society functions today and how it could function if it operated by different rules.
      - Nbox9 5y ago
        Isn’t the shortage of healthcare workers world wide? How does reducing the friction of moving into the US do anything but shift the problem around?
        coryfklein 5y ago
        Consider the already immigrated medical professionals living in the United States right now that are unable to practice because of the above described licensing issues. To give a couple examples. If a nurse moves to the US and learns he can't practice without going back to medical school, he may opt instead to work a different job and defer his medical career. If a doctor moves to the US and is in the same position, she may choose to remain a stay-at-home mom and let her husband be the primary breadwinner. There's also the arbitrage aspect here: globally we may have a healthcare worker shortage, but it may be more severe in one place than another. Reducing the friction involved in moving the workforce could allow workers that are in relative over-supply to move to an area with relative under-supply, improving the overall efficiency of the system.
- mlyle 5y ago
  > Sharing limited resources is a major role of the government, and managing hospital capacity seems to fall under “promote general welfare” to me. Sure. It's a pretty delicate balance between individual liberties and preventing bad collective outcomes, though. If you lock down 340 million people for a week-- maybe the net effect is stealing 3.5 days of life's "enjoyment" or "quality" from each. That's 3.3 million years of quality life taken. You need to save 20 years of quality life for 165,000 people to break even. In the first wave we probably exceeded that benefit, but it's highly doubtful any subsequent time passes that bar. And, IMO, if there's ever anything close to a "tie", you need to favor individual liberty. Maybe making people mask "costs" 0.2 days per week-- much smaller cost, but also a smaller effect. I think it's still justified, but only barely... It won't be soon.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Okay, then instead of punishing the general public, how about they go build more capacity? They've had 2 years at this point and they are still freaking out about "overflowing hospitals". It's not fair, ethical or moral to push mandates on citizens at this point.
  - azakai 5y ago
    It takes a long time to train doctors and nurses and other relevant staff. Worse, the hard working conditions those people have been enduring since 2020 has led to a lot of burnout and attrition.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      That sounds like excuses. This thing is an emergency, right? Well, fix it! Punishing the public with these awful mandates because “it’s too hard” is a huge failure of our government.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
throwaway6734 5y ago
Are you opposed to laws mandating seatbelts or criminalizing heroine?
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Not OP, but I am. I don't mind laws mandating that cars HAVE seatbelts. But I think it's your choice if you want to wear them. With Heroin, I'm not sure criminalization really had much affect at all on the percentage of heroin addicts. And I'd bet that it had less effect than the rate of prescriptions for synthetic opiates did.
  - Terretta 5y ago
    what about laws mandating cloth triangles on your face^H^H^H^H chest at the beach? what about laws banning second-hand smoke indoors?
    - skeptical3 5y ago
- hbn 5y ago
  Yes to both of those things. The government shouldn't get to take money from me because I endangered myself.
  - Domenic_S 5y ago
    You think not wearing a seatbelt only endangers you?
x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
Especially since hospital capacity is induced scarcity due to government regulation and the AMA.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Or firing doctors and nurses who recovered from Covid and declined vaccination.
- tzs 5y ago
  We'd be having the same shortages right now even in a completely unregulated free market hospital system. A free market isn't going to build and maintain a bunch of extra capacity that goes unused except during once in a hundred year outliers like major pandemics. All that an unregulated free market would change is how we decide who gets treated when there isn't enough capacity to treat everyone.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
vanusa 5y ago
Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. So is letting people die from otherwise treatable injuries and infections so someone else can enjoy their "freedom" to ... you know what I'm driving at.
- enchiridion 5y ago
  Yes, exactly. The world is dangerous and full of risks. Freedom is literally worth sacrificing lives for. This is a fundamental founding idea of the US.
  - vanusa 5y ago
    Other people's lives, you mean.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      Yes exactly. When the lock down and mask mandates resulted in neuroplastic infants and toddlers not seeing as much lip and face movement during critical speech and socialization age (and in many case, daycares and schools being shut down resulting in less critical socialization), you sacrifice younger children in the hopes some others will be saved. So we sacrifice other lives (young children) so our own adult lives can perhaps be saved.
      - theandrewbailey 5y ago
        Also consider that young children are the demographic least affected (symptoms and death) by COVID. It was obvious a few months in, but these debilitating policies continued.
      - vanusa 5y ago
        So we sacrifice other lives (young children) so our own adult lives can perhaps be saved. The lives of their grandparents (and of older folks not related to us), you mean. You know, the ones actually the most vulnerable to this epidemic. I agree that the choices are difficult, no matter what we do. But there's no need to distort the basic equation, and make this particular choice appear to be something plainly selfish (young and mid-life adults snubbing the kids to cover their own asses) when it plainly is not.
e40 5y ago
I hate this casting of the issue as "freedom". It's absurd. My "freedom" to live because I have a medical issue but cannot get treatment will be severely impacted if hospitals are overrun with patients and worn out workers. See, we can both play the "freedom" game.
- laurent92 5y ago
  We don’t owe you the right to live with a deadly disease. You cannot mandate others to perform actions just so you can live, if you wouldn’t live naturally.
  - e40 5y ago
    We do it all the time. You are mandated to get a license to drive a car so that you don't have a higher chance of killing people.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      Not on private property you don't need a license. Similarly, a business on private property should be able to dictate a mask or vaccination isn't required. You shouldn't have a right to dictate what kind of consensual conduct happens on private property. In Texas, I can get hammered, drive a car drunk without a license behind a fence 10 feet next to the highway (property-side). And there's not a damn thing you can legally do about it, despite any fears I may plow through that fence. The suggested (stricken) OSHA mandates were basically forcing non-consensual penetration, or lose your job. --------- >That's not totally true. This Texas-based DWI defense attorney says: You conveniently skipped the top of the page where it explicitly says DWI in Texas must occur in public (a fenced in private property is almost never considered public). Sure a cop can probably find a reason to arrest you no matter what you're doing, if they want to. >Obviously you should be able to be unvaccinated only on private property then... Most businesses are on private property. Given that the fourth amendment protects us from handing over documents except on subpeona/court order or probable cause of crime (a few states do compel revealing your identity, although you don't have to reveal your age if the crime is age-related such as alcohol violation), and you can't tell by looking at someone if they're vaccinated, it would essentially be meaningless to make it a crime to be unvaccinated while walking to work for instance. Controlling vaccination is far easier on private property, where you have no freedom to travel and can thus be stopped and checked before entering.
yibg 5y ago
Freedoms aren’t considered in isolation. Maintaining freedom for some means removing freedom for others some times. In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  > In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it. That's not freedom, that's an entitlement.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it So why not build more capacity instead of forcing the public to adhere to a bunch of toxic and socially corrosive mandates?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Are you not getting timely treatment? Is this your reality?
- xdennis 5y ago
  > the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it. That's not freedom. Freedom is not putting up barriers.
  - yibg 5y ago
    Interesting. In this take, what are the limits to freedom? Your right to swing your fist and all that. If your actions are limiting what I can do, is that not curtailing my freedoms? Edit: to be clear on where I stand. I think you can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't affect me. If it affects me, maybe you should still be able to do it, but then we need some thought and discussion and isn't an automatic right because "freedom".
tzs 5y ago
> Note that these freedoms were debated and won in an era where medicine was terrible. That was also an era when the US was subject to numerous epidemics and pandemics of diseases such as cholera, typhus, yellow fever, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza, and it was debated and found that placing restrictions to try to limit the harm from those epidemics was a legitimate exercise of the state's police power and not an infringement of civil rights.
CWuestefeld 5y ago
Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. You should note that government regulations are designed to keep hospitals running nearer capacity. See "certificates of need", which are (in most places) required to get authorization to build a new hospital. You've got to prove to the gov't that a new hospital really is necessary. And thanks to regulatory capture, the tendency is for existing providers to try to sink such applications.
sanderjd 5y ago
What freedoms are you talking about here?
nlarion 5y ago
I recommend you do some basic research on the history of quarantine and the united states as well as colonial america. You'll quickly see your assertion stands on shaky ground. https://www.ushistory.org/laz/history/index.htm https://www.ushistory.org/laz/history/index.htm

Nbox9 5y ago

I’d like to know that if I have a heart attack or get hit by a bus then I’ll have access to top quality healthcare —- not burnt out understaffed hospitals. Sharing limited resources is a major role of the government, and managing hospital capacity seems to fall under “promote general welfare” to me. My $0.02

enchiridion 5y ago
It definitely is, but they’re addressing it from the wrong end. If the pandemic could be fixed by the government managing individual behavior we’d be done with it by now. Instead the government should be focused on expanding highly covid specific care capacity. That is by far a better way to spend the covid relief money than distributing it to sustain a nebulous lockdown. As far as I understand from talking with doctors, at no time within the last year have hospitals been at maximum emergency covid capacity, as in hospital beds in the hall ways, cafeteria, etc. This tells me that we are close to the amount of beds we need, and it would be feasible to build out additional capacity quickly, relieve the strain, and get back to normal.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  > Instead the government should be focused on expanding highly covid specific care capacity. That is by far a better way to spend the covid relief money than distributing it to sustain a nebulous lockdown. This is not something the government can do. It's not something anyone can do. What you're asking for (though you may not know it) is for their to suddenly be more nurses and medical practitioners. That's not a thing that can just suddenly happen, or even happen with 2-3 years of prep. You need a decade to actually functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists. Now there are lots of short term fixes the government has done, such as activating the national guard in locations (to reduce non-medical load on nurses) and hospitals can pause elective services to free up space and time, but that has huge downsides since it means people get life saving nonemergency surgeries like cancer removal.
  - coryfklein 5y ago
    > You need a decade to actually functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists. Similar things were said for the vaccine. There is so much gatekeeping in the medical community that is not totally necessary. A doctor or nurse that immigrates to the US from a different country which has better health care than we do cannot practice were without jumping through tons of hoops. That is a pretty straightforward way the government – in a state of national emergency mind you! – could instantly and functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists.
    - mrcrumb1 5y ago
      Are you suggesting that people rely on unprecedented medical advancements as a policy solution?
      - coryfklein 5y ago
        :lol_sob: Why can't we have nice things mrcrumb1?? Hahaha. But yes. Yes, I'm advocating that people be just a little bit more open minded and flexible about this issue and, ideally, the so many others like it. Sometimes it's quite depressing to consider the giant gap between how society functions today and how it could function if it operated by different rules.
    - Nbox9 5y ago
      Isn’t the shortage of healthcare workers world wide? How does reducing the friction of moving into the US do anything but shift the problem around?
      - coryfklein 5y ago
        Consider the already immigrated medical professionals living in the United States right now that are unable to practice because of the above described licensing issues. To give a couple examples. If a nurse moves to the US and learns he can't practice without going back to medical school, he may opt instead to work a different job and defer his medical career. If a doctor moves to the US and is in the same position, she may choose to remain a stay-at-home mom and let her husband be the primary breadwinner. There's also the arbitrage aspect here: globally we may have a healthcare worker shortage, but it may be more severe in one place than another. Reducing the friction involved in moving the workforce could allow workers that are in relative over-supply to move to an area with relative under-supply, improving the overall efficiency of the system.
mlyle 5y ago
> Sharing limited resources is a major role of the government, and managing hospital capacity seems to fall under “promote general welfare” to me. Sure. It's a pretty delicate balance between individual liberties and preventing bad collective outcomes, though. If you lock down 340 million people for a week-- maybe the net effect is stealing 3.5 days of life's "enjoyment" or "quality" from each. That's 3.3 million years of quality life taken. You need to save 20 years of quality life for 165,000 people to break even. In the first wave we probably exceeded that benefit, but it's highly doubtful any subsequent time passes that bar. And, IMO, if there's ever anything close to a "tie", you need to favor individual liberty. Maybe making people mask "costs" 0.2 days per week-- much smaller cost, but also a smaller effect. I think it's still justified, but only barely... It won't be soon.
spookthesunset 5y ago
Okay, then instead of punishing the general public, how about they go build more capacity? They've had 2 years at this point and they are still freaking out about "overflowing hospitals". It's not fair, ethical or moral to push mandates on citizens at this point.
- azakai 5y ago
  It takes a long time to train doctors and nurses and other relevant staff. Worse, the hard working conditions those people have been enduring since 2020 has led to a lot of burnout and attrition.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    That sounds like excuses. This thing is an emergency, right? Well, fix it! Punishing the public with these awful mandates because “it’s too hard” is a huge failure of our government.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

throwaway6734 5y ago

Are you opposed to laws mandating seatbelts or criminalizing heroine?

Enginerrrd 5y ago
Not OP, but I am. I don't mind laws mandating that cars HAVE seatbelts. But I think it's your choice if you want to wear them. With Heroin, I'm not sure criminalization really had much affect at all on the percentage of heroin addicts. And I'd bet that it had less effect than the rate of prescriptions for synthetic opiates did.
- Terretta 5y ago
  what about laws mandating cloth triangles on your face^H^H^H^H chest at the beach? what about laws banning second-hand smoke indoors?
  - skeptical3 5y ago
hbn 5y ago
Yes to both of those things. The government shouldn't get to take money from me because I endangered myself.
- Domenic_S 5y ago
  You think not wearing a seatbelt only endangers you?

x3n0ph3n3 5y ago

Especially since hospital capacity is induced scarcity due to government regulation and the AMA.

walterbell 5y ago
Or firing doctors and nurses who recovered from Covid and declined vaccination.
tzs 5y ago
We'd be having the same shortages right now even in a completely unregulated free market hospital system. A free market isn't going to build and maintain a bunch of extra capacity that goes unused except during once in a hundred year outliers like major pandemics. All that an unregulated free market would change is how we decide who gets treated when there isn't enough capacity to treat everyone.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

vanusa 5y ago

Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. So is letting people die from otherwise treatable injuries and infections so someone else can enjoy their "freedom" to ... you know what I'm driving at.

enchiridion 5y ago
Yes, exactly. The world is dangerous and full of risks. Freedom is literally worth sacrificing lives for. This is a fundamental founding idea of the US.
- vanusa 5y ago
  Other people's lives, you mean.
  - notch656a 5y ago
    Yes exactly. When the lock down and mask mandates resulted in neuroplastic infants and toddlers not seeing as much lip and face movement during critical speech and socialization age (and in many case, daycares and schools being shut down resulting in less critical socialization), you sacrifice younger children in the hopes some others will be saved. So we sacrifice other lives (young children) so our own adult lives can perhaps be saved.
    - theandrewbailey 5y ago
      Also consider that young children are the demographic least affected (symptoms and death) by COVID. It was obvious a few months in, but these debilitating policies continued.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      So we sacrifice other lives (young children) so our own adult lives can perhaps be saved. The lives of their grandparents (and of older folks not related to us), you mean. You know, the ones actually the most vulnerable to this epidemic. I agree that the choices are difficult, no matter what we do. But there's no need to distort the basic equation, and make this particular choice appear to be something plainly selfish (young and mid-life adults snubbing the kids to cover their own asses) when it plainly is not.

e40 5y ago

I hate this casting of the issue as "freedom". It's absurd. My "freedom" to live because I have a medical issue but cannot get treatment will be severely impacted if hospitals are overrun with patients and worn out workers. See, we can both play the "freedom" game.

laurent92 5y ago
We don’t owe you the right to live with a deadly disease. You cannot mandate others to perform actions just so you can live, if you wouldn’t live naturally.
- e40 5y ago
  We do it all the time. You are mandated to get a license to drive a car so that you don't have a higher chance of killing people.
  - notch656a 5y ago
    Not on private property you don't need a license. Similarly, a business on private property should be able to dictate a mask or vaccination isn't required. You shouldn't have a right to dictate what kind of consensual conduct happens on private property. In Texas, I can get hammered, drive a car drunk without a license behind a fence 10 feet next to the highway (property-side). And there's not a damn thing you can legally do about it, despite any fears I may plow through that fence. The suggested (stricken) OSHA mandates were basically forcing non-consensual penetration, or lose your job. --------- >That's not totally true. This Texas-based DWI defense attorney says: You conveniently skipped the top of the page where it explicitly says DWI in Texas must occur in public (a fenced in private property is almost never considered public). Sure a cop can probably find a reason to arrest you no matter what you're doing, if they want to. >Obviously you should be able to be unvaccinated only on private property then... Most businesses are on private property. Given that the fourth amendment protects us from handing over documents except on subpeona/court order or probable cause of crime (a few states do compel revealing your identity, although you don't have to reveal your age if the crime is age-related such as alcohol violation), and you can't tell by looking at someone if they're vaccinated, it would essentially be meaningless to make it a crime to be unvaccinated while walking to work for instance. Controlling vaccination is far easier on private property, where you have no freedom to travel and can thus be stopped and checked before entering.

yibg 5y ago

Freedoms aren’t considered in isolation. Maintaining freedom for some means removing freedom for others some times. In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
> In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it. That's not freedom, that's an entitlement.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it So why not build more capacity instead of forcing the public to adhere to a bunch of toxic and socially corrosive mandates?
ipaddr 5y ago
Are you not getting timely treatment? Is this your reality?
xdennis 5y ago
> the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it. That's not freedom. Freedom is not putting up barriers.
- yibg 5y ago
  Interesting. In this take, what are the limits to freedom? Your right to swing your fist and all that. If your actions are limiting what I can do, is that not curtailing my freedoms? Edit: to be clear on where I stand. I think you can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't affect me. If it affects me, maybe you should still be able to do it, but then we need some thought and discussion and isn't an automatic right because "freedom".

tzs 5y ago

> Note that these freedoms were debated and won in an era where medicine was terrible. That was also an era when the US was subject to numerous epidemics and pandemics of diseases such as cholera, typhus, yellow fever, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza, and it was debated and found that placing restrictions to try to limit the harm from those epidemics was a legitimate exercise of the state's police power and not an infringement of civil rights.

CWuestefeld 5y ago

Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. You should note that government regulations are designed to keep hospitals running nearer capacity. See "certificates of need", which are (in most places) required to get authorization to build a new hospital. You've got to prove to the gov't that a new hospital really is necessary. And thanks to regulatory capture, the tendency is for existing providers to try to sink such applications.

sanderjd 5y ago

What freedoms are you talking about here?

nlarion 5y ago

I recommend you do some basic research on the history of quarantine and the united states as well as colonial america. You'll quickly see your assertion stands on shaky ground. https://www.ushistory.org/laz/history/index.htm https://www.ushistory.org/laz/history/index.htm