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My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the popu

My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

roenxi 5y ago
With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government. Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked. Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.
- alsetmusic 5y ago
  > even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed. A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all. Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors and assumptions about how effectively community care could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6% might even be a country where the hospital system fell apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country#Table_of_total_cases,_deaths,_and_death_rates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
    - radicalbyte 5y ago
      The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.
      - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
        If you want to see how the virus correlates with death you ought to look at rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, not wealth.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.
      - roenxi 5y ago
- riedel 5y ago
  The argument I think was never any concrete number of deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life difficult (epidemiology can still inform political decisions). Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system. Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since. I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government. Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either. I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules. It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
  - bsaul 5y ago
    The thing happened everywhere. French prime minister met with mayors and had political meetings unmasked, shaking hands and stuff, at the peek of the pandemic, got covid, then blamed his 11 yo daughter for it. Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions. The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.
bsaul 5y ago
I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?
- microtonal 5y ago
  so why do you care ? Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries. E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1] [1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënten-in-het-ziekenhuis-bijna-20jaar-jonger-dan-gevaccineerde https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
  - bsaul 5y ago
    We had this statistic in france too, but it happens that ICU saturation occures every winter, for flu and such. it’s been on the headlines for almost a decade every year. Mostly due to population getting older, and hospitals poorer. I wonder if it isn’t the same everywhere.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    Here in New York Andrew Cuomo spent the last decade closing hospitals and reducing hospital capacity at the behest of HMOs, for-profit hospitals, health insurance companies and associated banks and Wall Street investors. It is expensive to maintain hospitals and have enough spare hospital capacity in case of a crisis, and officials at the state and federal level chose profits over capacity. For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab). 1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people 2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559 https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hospital-beds-in-the-us-since-2001/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...
Bancakes 5y ago
It was never going to be 10%. The virus is too localized on the elderly, who isolate and vaccinate themselves well anyway.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

roenxi 5y ago

With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government. Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked. Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.

alsetmusic 5y ago
> even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed. A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all. Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors and assumptions about how effectively community care could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6% might even be a country where the hospital system fell apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country#Table_of_total_cases,_deaths,_and_death_rates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
  - radicalbyte 5y ago
    The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.
    - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
      If you want to see how the virus correlates with death you ought to look at rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, not wealth.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.
    - roenxi 5y ago
riedel 5y ago
The argument I think was never any concrete number of deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life difficult (epidemiology can still inform political decisions). Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system. Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since. I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.
tentacleuno 5y ago
> Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government. Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either. I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules. It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
- bsaul 5y ago
  The thing happened everywhere. French prime minister met with mayors and had political meetings unmasked, shaking hands and stuff, at the peek of the pandemic, got covid, then blamed his 11 yo daughter for it. Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions. The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.

bsaul 5y ago

I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?

microtonal 5y ago
so why do you care ? Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries. E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1] [1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënten-in-het-ziekenhuis-bijna-20jaar-jonger-dan-gevaccineerde https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
- bsaul 5y ago
  We had this statistic in france too, but it happens that ICU saturation occures every winter, for flu and such. it’s been on the headlines for almost a decade every year. Mostly due to population getting older, and hospitals poorer. I wonder if it isn’t the same everywhere.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  Here in New York Andrew Cuomo spent the last decade closing hospitals and reducing hospital capacity at the behest of HMOs, for-profit hospitals, health insurance companies and associated banks and Wall Street investors. It is expensive to maintain hospitals and have enough spare hospital capacity in case of a crisis, and officials at the state and federal level chose profits over capacity. For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab). 1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people 2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559 https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hospital-beds-in-the-us-since-2001/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...

Bancakes 5y ago

It was never going to be 10%. The virus is too localized on the elderly, who isolate and vaccinate themselves well anyway.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]