[Gatsky]

The virus can be controlled with appropriate measures to limit the death rate - see Taiwan, SK, Australia, New Zealand etc. If you want to argue that we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives I would probably start there instead of experimenting on billions of people.

[_carbyau_]

While this is true (I live in Melbourne Australia) it did affect a lot of people - financially, mentally etc.

Depending on where in society you sit probably shapes whether you think it was worth it. (Full disclosure, I do but I was also not inconvenienced much.)

As it stands currently, I note that interventions in Australia are much faster now.

Our stand down position was we had to wear masks to the supermarket and on public transport. Everywhere else was pretty close to normal.

But one case detected yesterday in our 4 million population city, means we all wearing masks whenever we're indoors today.

That one case has flicked that switch overnight. So it seems that the main thing is to test well and react quickly.

[peytn]

It likely helps to be a bit remote. That’s why Australia is free of other viruses like rabies.

[eloff]

An island at the edge of the world with more sheep than people is not at all comparable with the US or Europe.

If they'd acted early and decisively like the countries you mentioned, the outcome would likely have been better. But it would still look very different from those countries.

[Gatsky]

Yes, that's my point - the outcome would have been better, less people would have died. Italy was there as a stark warning, to the point where it was obvious that provinces with stricter controls did better than those without.

The USA had the poorest performance. When a country can't attend to basic matters of engaging with reality and protecting its citizens, despite incredible resources, it is defunct.

I am going to rant here. This virus is really an indictment on the state of the world. It seems inevitable now that it will be endemic, and due to the infectivity and presence of animal hosts, will not be eradicable. This is terribly disappointing. Consider that this is the year we gifted an entirely new disease to all the billions of people that will live in the future. We just increased by 1 the number of things that can make you sick and kill you. Think about HIV - if we could go back and stop HIV from spreading, with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, we absolutely would have done that, no question, not for one minute. The economic saving alone is compellingly enormous, not accounting for the amount of suffering that would have been avoided. To me, all this calculus about economic activity and mental health versus stopping the virus is so short-sighted and missing the point entirely. It seems obvious to me that any degree of short term pain is a mere blip compared to how many people will suffer and die of the virus over the next 20 years because we let it out. We had one chance, one moment to stop this virus and we blew it. Everyone, every country, ever politician, blew it. I know it could have emerged in a few years, or there could be another virus next year but that doesn't change the fact that we could have stopped this one.

[eloff]

Yeah, I agree. I also sympathize with your rant and feel our politicians in the West, nearly without exception, let us all down and continue to do so. They failed to demonstrate any kind of preparation or logical science based response and continue to fail at that.

[Clewza313]

China has it under control (yes, seriously, it's not just CCP propaganda) and they have over a billion people. So do many other countries like Vietnam.

[umeshunni]

China (and Vietnam and SK) did this successfully with extremely strict lockdown rules. I'm not sure those would have been accepted in the West.

Arguably the West handled in the worst of both outcomes - arbitrary and incomplete lockdowns - that caused a huge financial toll and a huge human toll.

[eloff]

Unfortunately that only works when there's no guarantee of freedoms by the government. No free country was able to do a lockdown that strictly and effectively.

We do pay a price for those freedoms sometimes in times of crises - but there's no doubt which system we'd rather live under.

[midasuni]

NZ locked down at the point the U.K. was in the 50k new infections a day range.

They had an extra month of warning compared to Europe, that made a big difference.

[eloff]

And a lot less people traveling back and forth between hot spots.

[midasuni]

Even ignoring the tens of thousands of people crossing the uk-france border daily, heathrow alone sees (saw) immense transfer traffic that airports like Sydney and Auckland don’t.