[kingkawn]

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.

America is finished if this is the best we got.

[rmetzler]

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.

[chadcmulligan]

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

[kingkawn]

We’ll learn one way or another

[notyourday]

> 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.

[eecc]

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

[notyourday]

> 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

It is a civil and not a criminal violation.

[rjzzleep]

> 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.

[notyourday]

For practical purposes Taiwan is a police state which is rather understandable considering that its neighbor thinks it is a rogue province.

Neither US nor Germany resorted to police state techniques. In a set of the Western democracies only France is getting close to it.

[lbeltrame]

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.

[notyourday]

> Vaccines might not work.

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:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measl...

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/coronavir...

[agumonkey]

In France it's slightly better but not smart in any sense.

It's as if the heavy infrastructure and "modern" tech blinded the common sense..

[pharrington]

"America is finished if this is the best we got"

I am 100% sure the Donald Trump administration's nation-scale coordination is not the best we've got.

For example, see the CDC's Ebola response in 2014 https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html .

[stronglikedan]

> America is finished if this is the best we got.

Thank goodness NYC isn't America, or even the best America's got.

[kingkawn]

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.

[stronglikedan]

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.

[justin66]

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)

[justin66]

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.

[Mountain_Skies]

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.

[justin66]

> 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.

[alistairSH]

The two largest metro areas in the US have 10% of the total population.

The top ten metro areas have about 25% of the total population.

So, not a majority, but an absolutely massive number of people.

And that myopia goes both ways.

[umanwizard]

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.)

[justin66]

> 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.

[umanwizard]

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?

[justin66]

I was engaging with the grandparent post about "the best America's got," which is an interesting topic generally, but also specifically in terms of public health. And then I corrected your statement it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale by naming a number of very reasonable - and I think, important rather than silly - objective scales by which a city can be measured.

I mean, if you don't think a city's economic output is an important objective measure, congratulations on never having lived in an area with a serious economic contraction (or read about one, apparently). If you don't think a city's rate of cholera cases (to use a classic example) or, more to the point, COVID 19 cases, is important, I don't even...

(I wouldn't want to live in NYC either, but I think that's uninteresting and not what any of this is about.)

[mc32]

I agree with the testing regime; I don’t agree with having police in every building.

That's at least three people per day watching over the comings and goings of a building. You can only do that when you have a near police-state.

[thomk]

Why? Who else would enforce the quarantine?

[whatshisface]

Police outside the buildings.

[kingkawn]

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.

[whatshisface]

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.

[usrusr]

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.

[whatshisface]

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.

[EarthIsHome]

What civil liberties are you afraid of eliminating in a crisis like this?

[whatshisface]

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.

[kingkawn]

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.

[stronglikedan]

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.

[kingkawn]

17,000 dead Americans in this circumstance is not a pittance of caution let alone an abundance

[amiga]

Those willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither.

[krapp]

>Those willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither.

That's a thought terminating cliche, not a response, as well as a complete misinterpretation of Ben Franklin's intent[0], thus not even a valid argument from authority.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

[koolba]

Both the right of assembly and the right to bear arms have been repeatedly infringed.

For example in CA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-24/l-a-coun...

[ThePowerOfFuet]

No rights are absolute. Your right of free speech famously has limits; "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" is prohibited.

Temporarily closing gun shops, like shops for anything else not required for daily life, is absolutely reasonable.

If you claim that guns are required for daily life, that says more about your country than any other point here (and not in a good way).

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> maybe there's a way to solve this without eliminating civil liberties

Maybe, but I've yet to see any plausible proposals. Do you have one?

[whatshisface]

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.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> 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.

So, this doesn't seem like an approach that has a materially different desired effect from what we're already doing. The policy's goal is to achieve temporary shutdown of businesses and prevent transmission of the virus. You're just using a more convoluted, less effective route to get there. As an added drawback, limited liability almost guarantees that many companies would cease respecting the rules (since their value will be zero if they respect the rules, due to bankruptcy, it costs nothing to go about business as usual and just shut down if you get unlucky).

I guess what I was asking was whether you have any ideas that have any likelihood of being more effective than current approaches. I can think of dozens of things that would be less effective than what we are currently doing. That doesn't really help us very much, though.

[krapp]

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.

[whatshisface]

>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?

[krapp]

It can be true for some cases, but not all cases. Closing businesses, stay at home orders and quarantines are good ideas and, I believe, necessary for the public good. I'm also willing to believe they're temporary measures, if for no other reason than a permanent state of police-enforced quarantine would destroy the country and do no one any good, least of all the government.

[whb07]

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.

[ceejayoz]

“It only killed as many as the flu” is a weird talking point.

It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.

[whb07]

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.

[umanwizard]

Got a link?

[scottlocklin]

Do you think the flu doesn't respond to the measures taken against corona-chan?

[ModernMech]

Surely it does, but the CDC estimates that there have been 24k-64k deaths so far this season from flu [1]. That's over a 5 month span so that averages 4.8k - 12.6k deaths per month. Lockdowns really only started going into effect in that last month of the 5, so most of this time the flu was running around unmitigated by social distancing.

Now compare to coronavirus, where we were late to start but eventually locked everything down, and we still have 17k deaths in less than a month, and we know that's a lower bound. We're not even a month past the first 100 deaths. The death rate now represents infections 2 weeks ago, which we measured at 14k. After that we started measuring 30k+ new infections daily, so the death rate is likely to get worse by the time we hit 1 month.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

[ceejayoz]

The point: Comparing annual flu deaths when we don't shut down the whole world to COVID-19 deaths when we do (especially to make the claim they're similarly dangerous) is insane.

If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/coronavirus-bec...