[toshk]

I think you think to highly of Spanish government and culture. This is purely a pressure mechanism. They are a very young democracy and their authoritarian instincts are still very fresh. For instance their first lockdown was extremely rigid and enforced with heavy policing and also neighbors were eager to enforce it on each other. Experiencing the first days there and then going back to my home in the north of Europe, the difference was night and day.

[commonsenseplz]

> For instance their first lockdown was extremely rigid and enforced with heavy policing

You seem to think that's a bad thing? I had built a life in northern Europe over the past decade, then I decided to leave when I realised neither the government nor the people seemed actually inclined to lockdown. Now for the past 6 months I live in a country with single-digit local contagion cases and the street I used to live in Berlin is the hardest-hit in Germany... Go figure

The country I now live reached its status by closing borders for non-essencial travel, extremely rigid fines for breaking quarantine on arrival, and heavy police enforcement of those fines.

[yomly]

I have been splitting my time between a covid-free country and a covid-ridden country and it is very VERY hard to get peers from the so-called "free" nations see how their individualistic obsession with personal rights and privacy are completely self-destructive under the current environment.

They can't even fathom that living in a covid free nation isn't even that onerous in the day to day. Contact trace and socially distance. Wear a mask and actually DO quarantine.

They're more ready to make up excuses:

- China and Vietnam are faking their numbers

- New Zealand is a low density remote island

- Australia became an authoritarian state

- Taiwan were already prepared

- Singapore is a dictatorship

Meanwhile these nations have only had to protect their entertainment industries (domestic tourism is clawing back some of the lost tourism income now) but all these other free countries like the UK have lived with restrictions most of 2020 now and have ALSO torpedoed their economy AND had the most casualties.

At this point I'd almost rather go full cynic and just appreciate covid as an agent of natural selection rather than collectively ruin the prospects of the future generation, but of course that is also politically untenable. So given that dichotomy of choice I will gladly cede some human rights to empower my government actually do their job.

[Tainnor]

None of these (except maybe the "faking their numbers" one) are just "excuses". It is easier to control immigration if you're on an island vs. if you're smack dab in the middle of Europe with lots of people crossing the border on a habitual basis (e.g. workers, friends, families, etc.). It is true that Asia is better prepared because of the Sars epidemic that never really reached other parts of the world (at least not Europe, to any significant amount). It is also true that certain constitutional rights, as well as matters of political structure such as constitutionally enshrined federalism, make centralised decision making much harder than in some other states. And you also can't deny the difference in mentality between different kinds of cultures. You have to understand things in their cultural, political and geographical context.

I live in Germany, the country that GP moved away from. Now I don't want to make any excuses for the myriad failures that Germany, and its 16 individual constituent states, have made, not the least of which was inadequately using the time in summer when the numbers were down to prepare for the inevitable second wave. But Germany is still doing better by far than any of its direct neighbours on basically every metric, and also better than the vast majority of European countries in general.

Now do I wish we'd learn more from other countries, that some people took the virus more seriously, that we'd have incidences below 50 (or even 10) cases per 100k people? Yes, of course. But it's not as if nothing is being tried and you do have to balance different aspects. Germany went into a stupid, pointless semi lockdown in November that had basically only negative effects (closing down everything that is nice, such as theaters, while keeping open shopping malls), while not really helping much at all, but it has since been corrected and we're now in a second lockdown which I hope will be kept in place until numbers are sufficiently low again.

People here are listening to scientists and they do eventually do things not too badly considering everything, even if it's not perfect.

[hef19898]

The connection between open economies and harsh Covid measures is somehow lost on a lot of people. As a result, the se people are out and about for keeping everything open, Covid is spreading and the economy has to be closed down (at least parts of it anyway). Which prompts more "open up" activism, and the cycle starts again.

[torcete]

Being from Spain and having lived in other EU countries, I must agree with you.