So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
Where you're located when a disease hits gives you either an advantage or a disadvantage, fair enough. But it doesn't explain away repeated and continuous inability to act. If NZ had acted like the UK, they'd look just the same. Once you've got community spread the virus doesn't care if you're on an island.
> So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
Exactly. If the US population (for instance) had the community spirit to voluntarily comply with virus control measures, and the social cohesion to support those who couldn't work during that time, we probably would have gotten it under control and life would be something close to normal.
The people who make lockdowns necessary (and the subsequent economic damage) are the ones that fight them tooth and nail.
>So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
not taking health precautions. Not following guidelines. Politicizing the response to the virus, putting individual interests above the interests of society, not listening to health experts, politicians not following their own rules, the list of dysfunction goes on.
If there was actual compliance with relatively modest rules, that just demand that everyone acts with some sense and makes some small concessions, life could have gone on normally, with a lot of people still alive.
This sounds like the thoughts of someone recently born.
This was inevitable in atomized western societies with relatively high rates of health issues like obesity and diabetes. And how were you to muster people in these fractured societies to "comply"? There is no national identity or Philia. Consumerism only brings us so close. Diversity is our strength, remember?
>If there was actual compliance with relatively modest rules, that just demand that everyone acts with some sense and makes some small concessions, life could have gone on normally, with a lot of people still alive.
You can add Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to the list, none of which are surrounded by ocean.
As for China, I don't think anybody trusts their figures, but it's also quite clear that they do have the outbreak well under control. If their ICUs were full, we'd know about it.
Vietnam got it under control quite well despite a land border with China. Key to success likely were:
- a population that had experience with prior pandemics and was thus willing to play along
- a strong centralized government (this is a guess, and I'm not just talking about the power, but specifically the centralization - other nations that have states/provinces each implementing their own policies showed the dangers of that approach, e.g. USA, Switzerland, Germany)
- extremely aggressive contact tracing and enforced quarantine (for high risk cases, they were put in hotels or barracks, not told "please stay home"). Not just contacts but also contacts-of-contacts (the latter were only ordered to home quarantine).
AFAIK they didn't even have much of a shutdown, because the quarantining was so effective.
So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
Where you're located when a disease hits gives you either an advantage or a disadvantage, fair enough. But it doesn't explain away repeated and continuous inability to act. If NZ had acted like the UK, they'd look just the same. Once you've got community spread the virus doesn't care if you're on an island.