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I've been studying this since March, and the main issue is that lockdowns, in a capitalist economy, don't work nearly as well as one might expect. That's why, as the article notes, Brazil and Peru had lockdowns but still got ravaged by the virus... and the US and UK did poorly as well. The problem isn't "lockdowns bad". It's poverty. Sweden is a bit of an outlier. They're a socialist country (by 2020 standards) that screwed up for non-economic reasons. They just got it wrong. What most people who are middle-class or higher don't understand is hustle. People fetishize that word in Silicon Valley, but hustle is the principle of needing money to live and doing whatever it takes to get it. It isn't pretty, but it's how the other half lives. These people don't have savings because their wages are too low, so when they have an unexpected expense, it fucks them up. Hustle is: Pawning possessions. Odd jobs. Short cons. Gig labor. Petty crime. Panhandling. Whatever it takes, in truth. These people aren't morally worse than us middle-class salarymen and -women. They just have shittier options. Hustle is a force that governments can't really control (unless they go hard core, like China) because these people are usually quite good at evading authorities. Hustle keeps afloat the people the system has failed. It keeps them from dying. It also, in a pandemic, spreads disease. It's why compliance has been so atrocious in the US and UK and Peru. Do you need to "lock down" sufficient to get R below 1? Unless you want a humanitarian catastrophe, the answer is yes. Unfortunately, if your economic system runs on the "don't work, don't eat" model, you are going to see so much hustle (noncompliance, to use a more distant bourgeois word) that even your most ardent efforts are likely to have only moderate results. That doesn't mean they aren't working, and it doesn't mean you don't need them. It's still better to have R at 1.1 than at 2.5. But the fact is that an economic system like US-style extreme capitalism isn't built to handle anything out-of-context like a pandemic. |