No, but I do find it likely that our death rate could be similar to Germany’s, which is approximately 1/3rd of ours.
It’s not true that there is only one right answer to how this should be done. It is a balancing act that involves policy decisions. Certainly locking down hard initially would have saved lives. But there are trade-offs. Loosening restrictions when things are less bad can be a way to mitigate other problems.
I say that as someone who complies with restrictions and thinks what’s been done is a fiasco, but part of why it’s a fiasco is that a sound policy choice was not made and adhered to. The response has been a lack of action rather than policy-directed actions.
Your linked article is clearly labeled “opinion”.
OP here - my point wasn’t about policy per se but how people can’t seem to make a smart decision based on the known science rather than simply blindly being led by policy which is often inconsistent and guided, to varying degrees, by political expediency.
Are the hard numbers they reference regarding other countries a matter of “opinion”?
You can read all about the stringency index they use here:
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker
Because politicians aren’t being factual. They are being political. When they say one thing and do another or excuse groups that are politically important from behaving responsibly it sends the message that the political leaders are not to be trusted.
At last, a post I can agree with!
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Meters, eh? I answer your OP from the American side. Because Freedom, dammit. Gold fringed freedom. The freedom to keep a pandemic alive! The freedom to make people you don’t know sick! The freedom to believe that just because you didn’t get sick, you’ve outsmarted this thing! (Not YOU you, you know.) The freedom to believe that because you fit into a certain demographic, even if you get sick, it’ll probably be a mild case! The freedom to shout ME! ME! ME!
Because just as in your two paragraph example, you have highlighted how the politicians have said one thing while the actual thing was the other one. And many people understand that, which has caused criticism of the politicians with the moving targets.
If things are as you say in your second paragraph, why are politicians putting out the faux mandates in the first one posing as science? We are also so used to overregulation that if a politician says that we are permitted to have 10 people at our house, then we are conditioned to think that 10 is absolutely safe with a 0% chance transmission of Covid, that 20 is probably okay too, and that things don’t really start getting dangerous until around 50 people.
Only half-jokingly, I blame warning labels on products. If the warning label tells me not to operate a table saw while drunk, then it must be okay to use the drill while drunk because there was no warning label. The idea seeps in that if you see such silly warnings, then any behavior less dangerous than that in the silly warning must be okay.
There are many people that think warnings, safety instructions, and legal limits are written for idiots and not for regular people like themselves, because, in many cases, they are. You can’t blame people for doing exactly what you trained them to do.
Speak for yourself - this seems like utter nonsense, not a valid way for an adult to behave as part of society.
Not to mention there’s a big difference between “you might cut your finger off” and “you might contribute to the deaths of thousands of your countrymen if not yourself and those you care about.”
One involves you so matters, one involves other people so can safely be ignored? /Maskhole
You mock, but I have (now former) friends who are throwing parties throughout the pandemic with just this sort of reasoning. If they want to take the risk, that’s their decision and they owe it to no one else to mitigate that risk, including my wife and me. It’s up to everyone else to protect themselves.
Why didn’t you cite the stringency index itself, instead of someone else’s OPINION about it?
Because there is something that has changed, which you appear to not get. The projections of the spread.
Let’s put this in a form that is easier to see. There is a hurricane that may hit your area, but it’s pretty far out at sea. You get a warning from a model, there is a small chance it’s coming to you. you get a warning that it may. Another model comes in and shows you are in a direct line then you may get a stronger be prepared to evacuate warning.
And as more covid statistics come in and trends are better known, plans can change. Not that Covid has changed but our knowledge of it has.
This. And the fact that people are notoriously bad at calculating risks. Add to that the fact that a lot of measures, at least in Holland, are not just health-driven but also political, and economic, which makes them inconsistent. In Holland churchgoers are still allowed to congregate because the ruling political party isn’t going to risk pissing off that demographic what with elections coming up and all. But the virus doesn’t care for what reason you’re congregating, if you do it ‘ll spread, or at least you’ ll increase the risk of it spreading. It’s really not that hard. However people seem to be stupid both sides of the pond in that respect.
It would be nice if people could do that, yes, but we also need buy-in from the government. I as an individual can’t just decide to stay home from work until the pandemic has been brought under control. We need some kind of government order to allow me to keep my job or get unemployment benefits under such conditions, or I’d be out on the street. Individuals could easily do things like wear masks and social distance without government orders, but almost entirely re-organizing our economic system needs coordinated society-level action, and that’s exactly what government is for.
They’d probably be blown away by the idea of 60 million Americans, or that 11 million of them live in just 1 state. In 1776 the 13 colonies had a combined population of 2.5 million.