If _everyone_ wore masks and followed very basic guidelines, the virus would be dead in the water and we could go about living mostly normal lives. People could visit their loved ones, say goodbye to the terminally ill, work, have outdoor dining, see drive in movies. Scarce little impact on quality of life.
Instead vast swathes of the U.S. and other countries flout even the most basic precautions making it impossible for the rest of us to live normal lives.
The argument that being safe == poor quality of life presents a false dichotomy. The truth is that we can be safe _and_ have the same quality of life. Instead many have chosen the third option: they believe that their "right" to shop at Walmart without an extra piece of clothing is more important than people being able to say goodbye to loved ones; more important than their neighbor's wellbeing; more important than the economy.
I would further argue that not only would quality of life not suffer if everyone took basic precautions, in many ways QoL would be _better_. As the statistics are showing we've seen a massive dropoff in cold/flu related deaths, even with poorly implemented COVID protections. Less auto accidents and less pollution. A rise in work from home. The list goes on.
Contrary to the doom and gloom of this year, COVID was really a chance to build a better world. We might just yet do it in small ways. But much of the potential good is being squandered, as it always is, by selfish, ignorant, hateful people.
Please keep your absurd conspiracy theories to yourself. You do no good to anyone or anything by intentionally spreading bullshit and false information.
Extripating the virus completely from the population, and keeping it out through total physical isolation of that population from the rest of the world, is a tall task. The question of whether it's an achievable or practical goal to pursue needs to be answered before that is made the objective, and the lifting of lockdown restrictions is made conditioned on the goal being reached.
Anyone advocating that as the goal for society needs to present a plan that has a high chance of succeeding without an unreasonable burden being placed on society. I think maybe the development and mass-deployment of rapid tests for the virus could achieve that, but ironically we don't see much emphasis on this strategy by lockdown advocates. It's almost as if the opposition to the lockdown is all the proof needed to convince some of its advocates that it's the right strategy.
On a side note, we now we see that the lockdown advocates have simply switched their rationale for the lockdown, from "flatten the curve", to "eliminate the virus from the population", once the curve was flattened. For those who believe society is better off being tightly controlled, with heavy restrictions on individuals to achieve larger goals that benefit the public, the coronavirus is the gift that keeps on giving.
> Extripating the virus completely from the population, and keeping it out through total physical isolation of that population from the rest of the world, is a tall task.
The goal is not to erradicar the disease. The goal is to take basic measures so that it's incidence and transmission rate are kept low.
Spain achieved that during the first wave, where in a matter of weeks they managed to get the fatality rate from hundreds per day to the single digits, even achieving days without covid-related deaths.
If the disease is contained, we not only avoid the chance of being infected but we also have a shot at normality.
If the disease is not contained and allowed to ravage the world then all we get is the despair of having people dying left and right while hospitals are saturated far beyond capacity and unable to respond to any need.
>>If the disease is contained, we not only avoid the chance of being infected but we also have a shot at normality.
There is no normality with incredibly disruptive restrictions in place.
>If the disease is not contained and allowed to ravage the world then all we get is the despair of having people dying left and right while hospitals are saturated far beyond capacity and unable to respond to any need.
First of all, the average age of death for the coronavirus is something like 79. For most age groups, the virus is not extremely dangerous - even if it were allowed to spread like wildfire in a population without immunity, far more people under 50 will die from causes other than COVID19 in the virus' first year of exposure to humans. So no, society will not far into despair. 2.8 million people die in the US every year, and people seem to be able to continue to function.
Second, this doesn't go on indefinitely. Eventually people die or recover, with immunity. A population fully subjected to one wave of a virus will be far lessa affected in subsequent waves.
> Extripating the virus completely from the population, and keeping it out through total physical isolation of that population from the rest of the world, is a tall task.
Note that I wasn't arguing for that. My argument is that a few simple, low impact measures would be enough to drop the effective infectivity of the virus low enough that it would fizzle out. There's reason to believe that a simple combination of limiting high-risk social engagements coupled with _strict_, enforced universal face mask requirements would be enough.
That wouldn't 100% eliminate the virus, as it would continue to spread and pool in countries without those guidelines. But for countries that do maintain them it would never gain a foothold.
Keep that up until a vaccine is deployed.
Easy. Low impact on quality of life. That's all I'm arguing.
>>Note that I wasn't arguing for that. My argument is that a few simple, low impact measures would be enough to drop the effective infectivity of the virus low enough that it would fizzle out.
What's the difference between a virus being extripated from a population, and a virus "fizzling out"?
If it's not extripated, then it will immediately start spreading again as soon as those measures are lifted.
>>That wouldn't 100% eliminate the virus, as it would continue to spread and pool in countries without those guidelines.
Note that I didn't say that you argued for eliminating the virus from the entire world. I said that you are advocating extripating the virus from one particular country, and I argued that that would be extremely difficult to pull off and then maintain by physically isolating that country from the rest of the world.
> If it's not extripated, then it will immediately start spreading again as soon as those measures are lifted.
The goal is to maintain measures until a vaccine arrives, eliminating the threat for any said country.
> I argued that that would be extremely difficult to pull off and then maintain by physically isolating that country from the rest of the world.
You don't need the country to be isolated from the rest of the world. If the effective reproduction (R) of your country's population is below 1 it won't spread there, even if the rest of the world is letting it run wild and free.
And it's likely we can get R below 1 for any given population with just strict mask usage and curtailing some higher risk social activities. That's my argument. We don't need to do messy lockdowns, ruin our social lives, etc. If everyone just got on board with those simple measures instead of being selfish.
>>The goal is to maintain measures until a vaccine arrives, eliminating the threat for any said country.
Yes of course, but if the crop of vaccines prove, after more extensive usage, ineffective, or if the virus mutates quickly enough to make the currently developed vaccines ineffective, as many coronaviruses have been known to do, it may lead to indefinite on-off lockdowns.
>You don't need the country to be isolated from the rest of the world. If the effective reproduction (R) of your country's population is below 1 it won't spread there, even if the rest of the world is letting it run wild and free.
That only persists as long as the lockdown measures you mentioned are in place. Yes if you maintain those measures indefinitely, you can keep the virus at bay indefinitely, and that's a different claim than I thought you were initially making.
Instead vast swathes of the U.S. and other countries flout even the most basic precautions making it impossible for the rest of us to live normal lives.
The argument that being safe == poor quality of life presents a false dichotomy. The truth is that we can be safe _and_ have the same quality of life. Instead many have chosen the third option: they believe that their "right" to shop at Walmart without an extra piece of clothing is more important than people being able to say goodbye to loved ones; more important than their neighbor's wellbeing; more important than the economy.
I would further argue that not only would quality of life not suffer if everyone took basic precautions, in many ways QoL would be _better_. As the statistics are showing we've seen a massive dropoff in cold/flu related deaths, even with poorly implemented COVID protections. Less auto accidents and less pollution. A rise in work from home. The list goes on.
Contrary to the doom and gloom of this year, COVID was really a chance to build a better world. We might just yet do it in small ways. But much of the potential good is being squandered, as it always is, by selfish, ignorant, hateful people.