[adw]

Lockdowns, social distancing and masking – done consistently – do work. Even the half-measures lockdowns the US has gone through has stopped the entire medical system from collapsing, and at times it has been very close. In NYC in the first wave, it did.

But that isn't what has happened in the US, largely for political reasons.

There are no good options, only less worse ones, and aggressive lockdowns have got Australia, for example, back to work. The cumulative cost of the US's failure to grasp the nettle and just shut everything down for two months properly back last March is enormous.

[wernercd]

and yet states that didn't - and aren't - locking down - like Florida - are doing fine. Or better than states that have extensive lockdowns like New York, New Jersey and California...

> Political reasons ... aggressive lockdowns in Australia

Locking down a small country like Australia is much different than locking down a country like the US. Australia is only 20% smaller than the US yet has 10% of the population. The layout is different. Temperature. Density. etc.

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/united-states.au...

Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states - not only does the President not have the ability to do it - he's a President not a King... but locking down the country make zero sense for a virus with a 99%+ survival rate.

again... we can take precautions to protect our hospitals and to "flatten the curve" (which we are loooooong past) and to protect the vulnerable (old, existing conditions, etc)... but locking down America? Coast to coast? No chance this side of turning the President into a Dictator - which was never on the table for Trump and definitely not for Biden.

[adw]

> Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states

This is very wrong. Australia is very, very dense, where people live: it just has a lot of absolutely uninhabited land. Functionally Australia is almost entirely urban.

[zwaps]

Didn’t a person literally get arrested for trying to publish the real numbers of deaths in Florida?

[ryandrake]

Yea, Florida is not "doing fine" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that they don't want to report numbers that show them not doing fine, as the entire state is funded by tourism.

They seem to be doing a pretty good job with vaccination though, so there's that!