Comment by wizzwizz4 3 days ago
COVID is down from its peak, as I understand. It's just very much not gone, and by no means less nasty. We had the opportunity to wipe it out with a short, synchronised global lockdown, and we squandered it, and now it's like plague.
True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?
The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.
Australia managed to keep COVID out for nearly two years, before they ran out of resources. Stop all non-local travel, identify where it's spread to, establish a buffer zone, wait to see if we drew our buffer zone large enough… two weeks later, and most of the world can be business as usual (minus globe-hopping); two months later, and COVID-19 is as dead as smallpox… assuming everything went right. Realistically, it might take four or five months for everyone infected to recover (or die): but it's a lot easier to enforce a quarantine when there are a hundred cases in the whole world.
This would be expensive, but as expensive as what we did was? Surely not! So, other regions providing funding and resources to the regions taking on the burden would be a strictly rational move.
You might say "oh, but people didn't know about the spread!"… but that's a ridiculous claim. The Less Wrong crowd tracked it in near-real-time from open source intelligence, and governments had access to more intelligence than that. The number of governments giving nonsensical advice, like "masks don't work because the respiratory disease is not spread via aerosols", and "replace your soap with dilute alcohol", lampshades a broad coordination problem. (We're not much past the "sweet-smelling herbs will protect from the plague" advice of yore, it seems.)
The things we needed to do were done – but for ridiculous political reasons, nearly everyone waited until after the disease had reached their regions to close their borders: internationally and intranationally, at every level! (The algorithm in Pandemic II's easy mode was more sensible than that.) So much of that effort, that psychological torment, was wasted. Even if the whole world had taken Australia's approach, we still would've brought the disease to manageable levels within a year. But there wasn't the political will… and so it goes. I think we're less prepared for the next novel disease outbreak, now.
New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.
It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.
What it requires is authoritarianism. It requires to do things that are wildly unpopular. I'm happy every time wildly unpopular things fail. It does not matter to me that those who want to implement authoritarianism think they are right. Even if they are, we have to have agency.
Equality among races was wildly unpopular across the entire western hemisphere for a while there.
Forcing business owners to allow people of all races into your business was both unpopular and cited as an example of authoritarianism.
An American example: MLK never had popular support during his life. His approval rating around the time of his assassination was in the 30s or so. It would not be unfair to say that in the places that mattered most, he was wildly unpopular.
Doing the right thing is frequently unpopular at the time that you do it. There is a balance, but if you give everyone agency, you have to figure out how to keep the assholes from using their agency to infringe on another's agency.
A short global lockdown? China pursued the zero COVID policy for two years. Even highly restrictive measures weren't enough to stem it.
COVID is no longer a novel virus and its deadliness has vastly decreased. Yes it is by any reasonable understanding of the phrase, COVID is "less nasty". At its peak, 20,000 people were dying each week due to COVID in the US. Presently that figure sits around 200.
From all accounts, it appears to be "less nasty". Espically with the advent of vaccines.
COVID is also nothing like the plague, that is a major illogical jump. Early pandemics, such that in the Sasanian Empire, had a 25-50 million deaths (depending what century you draw the line). The Black Death was particularly deadly, with an estimated mortality rate of 70%.
How you can suggest COVID is now the plague is just absurd. You also make a very unfounded conclusion that if we "just stayed in doors a little bit more guys!" we would of solved it. Delusional.
Not more: sooner (and, as clearly stated in my previous comment, less). By the time most countries were doing lockdowns, it was to prevent their local health systems from completely collapsing, not to contain and eliminate the disease in any real sense.
I think the comparison to plague is accurate, since quarantine and social distancing were effective in reducing mortality during the Black Death, as were plague vaccines.
We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.
The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."