Not having advanced medical equipment or doctors is one way to have a health system that doesn't work. Not hiring a programmer to write you a script to connect two systems during the worst unemployment event in almost a hundred years is another one. As are so many of the other reasons here. We are finding out that our healthcare system really isn't up to par not only because we don't have equipment, but because due to lack of regulations that benefit profit seeking, the system barely works. If only we had some sort of over arching entity that could force all these disparate systems to work together based on a set of rules ... you know, a government and specifically a government that works not one that's constantly being dismantled by idiots who think the corona virus is a hoax. In the end, the crisis always boils down to not having an effective, functioning government and leadership. This would be unacceptable in many places, but the US has extremely low standards in general so it's business as usual.
Take that with a pinch of salt, things aren't clear yet, but:
Well, I read today we have a problem like that in Belgium: it seems small bio labs aren't allowed to test even though they adapted their equipment and workflow. Only big pharma are lined up.
I live in nyc and have a brother who lives in Vietnam. When a person in my brother’s building tested positive for the coronavirus the government quarantined the building, tested every single person who lives and works there, stationed police outside to enforce the lockdown, and delivered food for two weeks. If someone had tested positive they would be relocated to a hospital facility for treatment. When the tests for everyone else in the building came back negative the government let them all resume the normal social distancing rules and going to the grocery store again.
Contrast this with nyc where the virus is outta control, few tests are being done outside the hospital system, and there is no sense of a comprehensive presence of government effort other than the police harassing people who quarantine together when they take walks in public.
Quarantine and testing is the way to fight the virus and be able to return to the normal as soon as possible. Western countries fear it’s not possible to do this and regulate the people much more than they usually do. But the problem is, without quarantine the virus is going to spread and shutting down the economy like they did now will have much bigger consequences over the long run. Too many people live from paycheck to paycheck.
Australian here - we're under a lock down of sorts, seems to be working, the government is spending big time on keeping things going - lots of payouts to people to pay their rent, food etc. New Zealand is going even further. It seems to be working so far. We do have an ocean to close our borders, so that helps I suppose. It can work in a western democracy though
> Quarantine and testing is the way to fight the virus and be able to return to the normal as soon as possible.
What you are describing is a way to handle flare ups and it only works in police states. At the current time the only way to fight viruses is with vaccines. It is extremely unfortunate that even during this pandemic our experts keep avoiding repeating this.
Oh come on, please stop this “it only works in police states” rhetoric. It’s not true, nor is the slippery slope argument.
Asking people to undergo testing and voluntary quarantine is perfectly within democratic bounds of civic duty and anyone with a iota of ethic is more than willing to collaborate. It’s also fair for a democratic society to compensate for any economic loss incurred.
It’s not necessary to use the iron fist except for the most egregiously anti-social deniers, but that’s the same as with the neighbors that refuse to turn down the volume of their music after 24:00
> Oh come on, please stop this “it only works in police states” rhetoric. It’s not true, nor is the slippery slope argument.
Vietnam is a police state. Singapore is a police state. South Korea is a police state. China is a police state. HK is a police state.
> Asking people to undergo testing and voluntary quarantine is perfectly within democratic bounds of civic duty and anyone with a iota of ethic is more than willing to collaborate.
Asking for a voluntary quarantine is different from quarantining people. US states have asked people to voluntarily quarantine. The argument that is being offered is that voluntary quarantine is not enough.
> It’s not necessary to use the iron fist except for the most egregiously anti-social deniers, but that’s the same as with the neighbors that refuse to turn down the volume of their music after 24:00
> Vietnam is a police state. Singapore is a police state. South Korea is a police state. China is a police state. HK is a police state.
Taiwan is not.
I'm not Taiwanese but one sentence I used to hear when I was little was:
"The extent of your personal freedom goes as far as it starts endangering other peoples personal liberties"
The reason why the US and Germany are resorting to police state techniques is because:
1. The countries have been pushing there boundaries for at least a decade now and this is the perfect opportunity to use.
2. Even though Germans are happy to police you crossing a red light in the middle of the night, there is no sense of communal unity in society and there is even less trust in Government because there is zero transparency in communication. Basically the Government assumes everyone besides them is an idiot. Social shaming is the weapon of choice in Taiwan.
Vaccines might not work. There are four at this point being studied in humans (everything else is preclinical), with three of them just in phase 1, that means testing safety, and not yet efficacy. We don't yet know whether they will work, or if the immunity will last long enough.
We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs.
That's not the point I am making. The only solution to virus spreading is immunity. It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves. This virus falls within a virus category.
Should the population not be immune to the virus, the flare ups will occur.
> We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs
That's managing flare ups. Look at measles in non-vaccinated pockets of NYS:
The immunity rate (mostly via vaccination) for measles in the US is over 91%. The immunity rate for COVID-19 in the US would be a percentage of people who were infected since there's no vaccine.
> It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves
It is unclear whether Covid-19 confers SARS-CoV-2 immunity. There are conflicting data, with some for future immunity out of China and Germany and some against out of Korea [1].
The fact that this is how you decided to respond is further proof of the country’s dysfunction. The winner will not be your perspective; we are all losing it together.
It's not a matter of perspective. NYC was clearly not prepared for a crisis, and is still not handling it on par with the rest of the country. Their dysfunction does not reflect the rest of the country, of which the majority is not handling the crisis in a dysfunctional manner.
I haven't been following all the numbers but one ironic thing about this is that it might be that a city like New York that ordinarily does pretty well in terms of public health has fallen down, but California's cities, which are a medieval nightmare of public health in a lot of ways, seem to have locked things down fairly well.
(I have some suspicions about that, like cases in the homeless population being underrepresented in the data at this stage, but we'll see)
The cities that can lay claim to being the greatest city in the world without getting laughed out of the room can - unless I'm missing a few - be counted on one hand. I wonder what other cities in the United States you believe qualify.
Most communities don't aspire to be the "greatest city in the world", especially given the criteria upon which NYC would win such a contest. Most people are more interested in living a peaceful secure life than having the prestige of hosting Wall Street or having the most fusion restaurants per square mile. The best cover ever put out by the New Yorker was on the March 29, 1976 issue that showed just how myopic the city can be in regards to the rest of the world.
> Most communities don't aspire to be the "greatest city in the world"
Undeniably true, but honestly, what's your point? The OP's words were "the best America's got." I think in the context of the conversation we were engaged in, a suggestion as to what is the greatest city we have in general, or the greatest city we have in terms of public health, might both be interesting. I'm surprised by these "who cares about how good a city is, mannnn?" comments.
I dunno, I liked living in Tucson, AZ better than New York. Yes NYC has a unique grandeur but different people like different things; it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale.
(That said, I don’t endorse GP’s flippant dismissal of NYC either.)
> it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale
I think very old, classic measures like economic activity, the number of great works of art that come out of a place, the influence of a city on its surrounding region and its world, and the progress toward better public health and safety measures (highly relevant here) are a lot more quantifiable than one might at first believe.
Yeah, NYC is better than Tucson on all those metrics. Tucson is better on metrics like "I subjectively think the landscape looks nice", and "I like the sort of people who live there". What's your point?
As of this moment America has a little less than 17,000 dead from this.
We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.
You know, if the condition for giving up your rights is "the government says they have a good reason," then you never really had any rights at all. We're all smart, maybe there's a way to solve this without eliminating civil liberties - a way that we'll never discover if at the first sign of danger we yell "take our rights, oh wise rulers!" to the politicians who, of course, are willing to take them.
But it is also completely impossible to discover countermeasure methods that are highly efficient in "effect per loss of freedom" if every single change to the status quo is indiscriminately rejected as a slippery slope towards police state.
You're talking about "refusing to discuss" rejections, I'm talking about "refusing to implement" rejections. You're right that the former would prevent us from discovering good solutions, but the latter would only stop us from implementing bad ones.
Not saying any of these are going to happen, but some possibilities include: (To be clear, I'm just spitballing some fiction for parable use only.)
1. Police taking biological samples as a matter of course, even after the crisis. A sneaky politician or official manages to turn this in to DNA sample collection, maybe by sequencing swabs on the side to "catch criminals." Nobody stops it because everyone is focused on the virus.
2. Local governments end up with expanded power to shut down businesses, this eventually gets abused for some kind of extortion in a small town somewhere.
3. Police gain generalized "indefinite detention" powers instead of specific "court-ordered quarantine" powers in some jurisdictions, creating a ticking time bomb set to explode the first time a mayor wants to get rid of a protester.
4. Efforts to stamp out counterproductive conspiracy theories result in legal and bureaucratic infrastructure which sits around and is eventually used to suppress a very productive conspiracy theory.
5. Playing on the above, Google builds a system to delete every video that says 5G and COVID-19 are linked. This is eventually used to delete every video that suggests Darkriver Mercenaries Inc. and the scandal in Kumran are linked.
All of these cases share one thing in common: a bad, over-generalized law gets passed because legislators are panicking and not taking the time to think about civil liberties. The virus spreads fast, but not so fast that you can't take the time to legislate effectively.
The idea that freedom depends on tens of thousands dying from needless incompetence is very demonstrative of why America is such a mess in general right now.
Here's the thing - you really don't know until you're asked to give them up, and it's usually implied that you will only be giving them up for the duration of the crisis, but in reality you hardly ever get them back. This is how they get chipped away over time, so an abundance of caution must be used when deciding what you're will to give up, even during a crisis.
I can't demonstrate that I have the right proposal, but I can demonstrate that one's imagination can run beyond what's presently being considered. Since we're talking about liberty, let's start with he Libertarian canned talking point: "liability and torts." Making individual people liable for spreading the virus would only really work with our imperfect court system for knowing super-spreaders and corporations with unsafe practices, but it might help. Instead of shutting down offices, you could make them liable for any damage cause by disease spread on-site. It's possible that if you pursued corporations and a small number of individual defectors with the liability system and asked normal people nicely, you would be able to handle it.
I know it's common for Americans to assume everything their government does is a false-flag pretext for a fascist power grab, but to assume the government never has a good reason for drastic measures even in the midst of a global pandemic seems more cynical than necessary.
That's the kind of thinking that leads people to believe in FEMA death camps.
>I know it's common for Americans to assume everything their government does is a false-flag pretext for a fascist power grab
History does not support the most hyperbolic speculations, but it does support the idea that the USG files away at the base of lady liberty every time the public's back is turned. Remember the Patriot Act and 9-11?
And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu.
Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
Yeah....no. Funny how this line of thinking goes. Serological studies starting to come out and they are showing rates above 25% of the population being infected. Study out of Germany reports that CFR is 0.3%. Theres a news article out of Chicago where the drive thru testing reported more people had the antibodies than tested positive.
> And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu.
We're past the seasonal flu peak and coronavirus is still on the upswing and hasn't peaked, it's not only killing more people per day than the flu, but it's actually now reached the status of leading cause of death in the US.[0]
Even with countermeasures, covid-19 is, short of a literal miracle, going to kill far more people in the US than the flu this year.
And it's also going already contributing more to deaths by other direct causes by clogging hospital systems, consuming resources like ventilators, etc.