[ehnto]

You're extrapolating the pandemic situation out to the rest of societies problems and rules and we just can't have a good discussion like that.

There are ways in which I agree with you about Australia's future and reducing freedoms, especially around technology and tracking. But the pandemic is not trivial, look at countries like India and America that essentially had it run free, that is a lot of death, and it wasn't just covid patients. A health system full of covid patients can't help anyone else either.

The thing is that we have a plan and a path out of this, and it relies on controlling outbreaks until we are all vaccinated. To make that happen, people have to quarantine for 14 days. People thought their happiness was more important than the community and the community disagrees so we had to enforce it.

The community also thinks you can't let rodents live in your restaurant kitchen, and that you can't drive while drunk, etc. Laws often protect the community from the selfish and that is what happened here too. We tried to let people be adults but they left the hotel and caused untold damage to the community, so now they get babysat.

[syshum]

People need to look alot closer to the data in America before they simply blame individual freedom for the deaths

A HUGE percentage of the deaths in the US are from people institutionalized in government facilities. They had no freedom..

Another HUGE percentage of the deaths were people that were already unhealthy, and what I know about Australia you guys do not have them levels of general unhealthy people.

America also has a much high percentage of the population over 65, a group that makes up the majority of COVID Deaths

There is more to the story than simply "American did not impose enough tyranny on the citizens to combat COVID"

[ehnto]

I do agree, the last paragraph wasn't quite what I was suggesting. I honestly doubt you could ever have controlled American citizens enough to curb the spread anyway, much like India had no hope either. I feel it was inevitable. But for whatever reason it was able to spread, the result was that it was deadly to hundreds of thousands of people.

I don't think we gain anything by trying to qualify exactly who it killed, since over 65s are still people, as are institutionalized individuals.