You can't keep people in their homes forever while they lose their jobs.

We aren't seeing a rise in cases in states that have been reopening for more than two weeks. The rate of decline may be lower but they are still in decline.

I may or may not cause harm by running a red light in the middle of the night, or speeding on a freeway -- in fact, I know a guy who habitually runs reds at night, "just because" -- yet the constitutionality of ticketing people for running reds or speeding is not, as far as I know, in dispute.

How this maps onto public health in a pandemic, I don't know.

Emergency powers are for emergencies. It is no longer hour four in the incident command tent with a map and radio. It has been, and it may be again. But the steady state "waiting for a vaccine" stage is not that.

The normal mechanisms of government are logistically feasible on the time scale you're talking about, which is years. I hope they will listen to the experts. It worries me deeply that they seem not to be headed that way. But "I disagree with the legislature" is tautologically not a justification for emergency powers in a democracy.

Testing and contact tracing are not novel.

Allowing people to vote and other liberties don't present the obvious yin and yang of freedoms vs public health and etc.

The CDC report key takeaways section is recommended reading

The long transition from FDR to Hoover caused the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to be passed and ratified which greatly shortened it -- it's still too long! One of the reasons the transition from general election to Presidential inauguration is so long is that the Electoral College has to convene, and that legal challenges to electoral results have to be resolved -- all that takes time, and some times (e.g., in 2000) it takes almost all the allotted time. Still, it could probably be made much shorter, but it would require yet another Amendment.

I suspect long transition periods in State governments have similar reasons for being.

Kelly voting with the majority is quite tame.

I remember that a ton of wonky stuff has happened in the "lame duck" period, but it does seem to be standard.

In other words, I think you completely fail to understand the impact this is having on the poorest people. If they close schools again God help the single parents..

Partisan judges felt the need to overturn that bill - despite the legislature retaining the power to override the executive, and to repeal that bill - if they could get 66% of the assembly behind it.

This is the opposite of a democratic process. The democratic process has checks and balances for dealing with a rogue executive - but it requires an overwhelming support of the legislature. Instead, this ended up being decided by unelected career bureaucrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rr9b-HMSS4

A good government is a secretary / janitor, not A CEO.

Modern "Civil Rights" is a parallel legal system in the US that overrides the former Anglo-derived legal system (though both are still on the books) whenever they conflict.

That's why you get people on the Right muttering about "muh Constitution" wondering why Supreme Court rulings that were considered impossible 70 years ago are commonplace today. Civil Rights legislation even overrides the Bill of Rights.

It is what is. But it's 100% anachronistic to being talking about Civil Rights rulings in 1905—that's roughly equivalent to discussing Marxist governance in ancient Rome.

----

To those downvoting, explain the right already lost in the 1st Amendment to Civil Rights: the right to be a racist asshole and choose who you associate with. That was 100% legal under any Anglo-derived system (hell, it's literally in the Bill of Rights!), but it's obviously not legal under a Civil Rights regime. Hence, what was once legal is now illegal, "muh Constitution" and "muh Bill of Rights" or not.

And why didn't it take an amendment to the Constitution to lose that right? Precisely because Civil Rights established its own legal system and justifications, allowing the Supreme Court to re-interpret previously held rights through the lens of Civil Rights whenever convenient. Boom: no more legislation and laws supporting racist assholes.

This is also why things like The Federalist Society and their quote-unquote originalists are so potentially damaging. When they say "originalist", they literally mean the original Anglo-derived legal system (complete with racist assholes) vs. the new Civil Rights-derived legal system. That's what the conflict is about.

Nothing I've written here should be remotely controversial.

[0] Not strictly true, the rulings started in the mid-1950s with Brown v. Board of Education, and you can find various overrides of the Anglo-derived system even further back.... However, I would argue the legal (as opposed to ethical) basis for earlier decisions is dubious, and didn't actually arrive until the mid-1960s.

  executive orders can decide what the law means

>>Also, the U.S. Constitution's requirement that State governments be (small-r) republican

  There is no such requirement

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, ..."

I doubt many in Wisconsin are interested in the constitutional subtleties, just as they're not interested in how the "spontaneous" activism and protests have been coordinated by astroturfing.

The bottom line is that this will be marketed as a blow for individual freedom against oppressive government interference, and that marketing frame will be an expedient and manipulative PR position which will result in many avoidable deaths.

Worse, it will also do very little to keep the economy running, because the real economic problems are going to happen upstream, and states have virtually no influence over what happens there. (Which on its own should be enough to expose the lie that "individual freedom" as a magic fetish against economic catastrophe is even a possibility in this situation.)

> This isn't true for many reasons including: the federal government controls a lot of what happens in the country indirectly and executive orders can decide what the law means (even if that meaning goes against what the law intended). Executive orders can for example suspend immigration. That absolutely affects civilians in an extremely practical way. More fundamentally, this kind of statement totally ignores how the legal system in the US works practically. Yes, there are laws, but laws are vague and must be interpreted. The federal government makes rules that interpret laws. These rules are what the law "is" practically. There is wide disagreement about what rules a particular law allows or doesn't allow. Executive orders can and do change these rules.

The President most definitely cannot promulgate Executive Orders that have the force of law without supporting statutory law from Congress. There is no argument about this in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence.

Presidential power is highest in military and foreign policy, and at its lowest in domestic policy. Immigration falls into foreign policy. Also, there's two plus centuries of statutes that delegate some Congressional powers to the Executive, such as tariff powers.

> > Also, the U.S. Constitution's requirement that State governments be (small-r) republican

> There is no such requirement. This was also not about federal constitutional law, it was about the constitution of Wisconsin.

This was addressed by other commenters.

> > This was a decision by a court, not a question of whether the people support their governments

> Only in the narrowest sense. It was a decision by a party, not a court. Republicans put their judges in power and the Republican judges made a decision. In that sense the US is absolutely unlike any other democracy in the world.

That is an outrageous take. The justices in question are elected, not nominated. (IIRC there's a nomination-then-election system in Wisconsin.)

The U.S. is a republic, which means it has stringent procedural rules. Some aspects of American governance are very democratic, some are less, and some are practically not -- that's how it was setup in 1787-1789, and all of that has remained essentially unchanged since then. None of this is new.

  Republicans put their judges in power

EDIT: And what about South Dakota, which never shutdown? Or Georgia, which has re-opened? Or Texas, which is re-opening? What is so special about Wisconsin?

>Some rights we have voluntarily abrogated in order to meet what we believe to be more important responsibilities

This would be handled by our 10th amendment rights.

So I'm looking for a source of what rights Brits have and it's sort of difficult to understand... This [0] outlines several dates of ratification but I'm not really sure which currently apply. I figure at least these [1] apply but maybe you can give me better information. After looking at some of these articles of rights, I'm not overly impressed, most of these "rights" have asterisks on them. Not to mention how often these say "necessary in a democratic society" when talking about the restrictions, as if they know you're not going to be convinced when reading it.

> Article 10: 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

> 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Notice how the conditions are vague, ambiguous and longer than the right itself? That's going to be a big fat no from me, bob.

An interesting difference with the American Bill of Rights is that it's largely full of implied rights, as it doesn't expressly grant rights to people, rather it's written in the form of "government cannot do xyz".

> Amendment 1: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The end. No asterisks, no vague conditions, no ambiguity.

[0] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-are-human-rights... [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/contents

If you have only "the rights we want" then your rights are subject to the whims of the majority.

In America our tradition of civil liberties protected the Illinois Nazis' freedom of speech as they marched through Skokie, celebrating the enemies of America who, within living memory, had waged war and killed millions of our citizens. The exercise meant as an affront to our nation and everything it values. We celebrated it, because if our worst enemies can have rights we don't like, then everyone can have rights.

In the UK, you can't even tolerate Dankula, and people think it's wonderful and good that he was fined for the nazi pug incident, and no one has really has rights unless they're popular. You'd think incidents like that would wave a few red flags, given that your nations' checkered moral history includes multi-century exercises in the deliberate oppression of your religious enemies.

I broadly agree with your post, but even in countries like France/Italy that have had very strict lockdowns, there's still like a three-week half-life to deaths per day.

Not true, no laws were struck down. They simply overturned Emergency Order 28. DHS can even reissue the order, they just need to submit it to the appropriate legislative committee for approval.

At the heart of the lawsuit was a state law governing communicable diseases that says the Department of Health Services "may close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics," and gives it the power to "authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases."

But the majority found Palm also had to follow another state law that requires regulations to be submitted to a legislative committee that can block them.

- 227.01 and 227.24:

> We conclude that Emergency Order 28 is a rule under the controlling precedent of this court, Citizens for Sensible Zoning, Inc. v. DNR, 90 Wis.2d 804, 280 N.W.2d 702 (1979), and therefore is subject to statutory emergency rulemaking procedures established by the Legislature. Emergency Order 28 is a general order of general application within the meaning of Wis. Stat. §227.01(13), which defines "Rule." Accordingly, the rulemaking procedures of Wis. Stat. §227.24 were required to be followed during the promulgation of Order 28.

- 252.25:

> Furthermore, Wis. Stat. §252.25 required that Emergency Order 28be promulgated using the procedures established by the Legislature for rulemaking if criminal penalties were to follow,as we explain fully below. Because Palm did not follow the law in creating Order 28, there can be no criminal penalties for violations of her order. The procedural requirements of Wis. Stat. ch. 227 must be followed because they safeguard all people.

I.e., Emergency Order 28 is not even necessarily overturned, rather, "there can be no criminal penalties" for violating it. Moreover, rulemaking procedures of chapter 227 can still be engaged and Emergency Order 28 (or a new order) can still come into full force if those procedures are followed.

You are either being ignorant / insufficiently careful (did not read the opinion, did not parse it, did not understand it, did not educate yourself -- one of those) or else you are displaying the "extreme partisanship" that you accuse the Court of. Court opinions that we disagree with, unless they are repugnant like Plessy vs Ferguson, are deserving of a minimum of respect, and even when they are repugnant to you, they may nonetheless be the law of the land for some time, so a more constructive take is to see how to work around a decision you disagree with. In this case the Court not only does not preclude your preferred outcome, but shows you how to get it: follow 227.24 in the process of promulgating the emergency order.

[0] https://www.wicourts.gov/sc/opinion/DisplayDocument.pdf?cont...

  extremely partisan Wisconsin court has now struck down that law in a blatant act of judicial activism

By the way, Supreme Court justices here in Wisconsin are elected on statewide ballots, not nominated for life like Federal judges. Your basis for calling them "extremely partisan" is, what, exactly?

Isn't this the problem, the world over? That no government has actually baked into their stay-at-home orders what the specific metric is that unlocks the lockdown. People with mouths to feed are justifiably terrified as they see lockdown stretching out in front of them with no clearly defined endpoint, knowing that the keys to that lockdown are held by politicians who are very much detached from the hardship on the ground.

This hypothetical "free person" is then also responsible for the results of their actions and for any oversights or vulnerabilities caused by their "free" status.

There are very good reasons we allow ourselves to be part of a society or country - people are always better equipped to survive in groups.

The problem with positioning one's self as a "free person" is that most people advocating this don't comprehend how they benefit from being part of a country or people. Because they don't understand or identify those benefits, they are entirely unwilling to accept the lack of them which is the case if they're entirely "free".

Essentially, they want to have their cake and eat it too - all the benefits of belonging to a modern civilization with no sacrifice of freedom, possessions, or possibilities.

They usually have an ego that allows them to believe they're special for being a person that recognizes the desire to be "free" when the truth is that other people do recognize that desire but also that it's not possible to be entirely free without giving up the benefits of belonging to a group.

Thus,they view themselves as exceptional because they understand that they should be free, when in truth they're exceptional because they're ignorant.

How do you balance that with another person's right to live? If you as a free person decide "F it, I don't want to stay cooped up despite my positive diagnosis." Is that fair to someone you then infect out in public?

If the republican part of the legislature could convince the democratic part of the legislature to vote with them, they could probably pull this off. Since they can't, they are asking partisan judges to force the issue, instead.

Which is literally the court's excuse for the "rulemaking" ruling - that they should have gone through the 12mo+ tradition of regulation-development that legislatively-empowered agencies utilize. Which isn't how public health powers usually work - the public health powers are delineated in empowering statutes and regulations ahead of time, and allow leewey to do things like "order quarantine" within broadly-worded statutes+regs.

Which is why this was phenomenally stupid. Besides ignoring context, this was a ruling that basically boiled down to "agencies cannot exercise the powers developed in the scope of their founding statutes and regulations unless those powers have been very explicitly laid out ahead of time, otherwise, they need to go to rulemaking for every application of their powers." It effectively guts the ability of agencies to do things they are supposed to do, have been doing, and prevents them from acting in time-frames <12months.

The whole point of having an executive is for a single person to act alone and decisively, especially in times of crisis. In the midst of an emergency is not the time for legislative subcommittees to endlessly debate.

> Palm responded that Emergency Order 28 is not a rule. Rather, it is an Order, fully authorized by the powers the Legislature assigned to DHS under Wis. Stat. §252.02.

So the Executive asserted that Emergency Order 28 is not a rule.

> We conclude that Emergency Order 28 is a rule under the controlling precedent of this court, Citizens for Sensible Zoning, Inc. v. DNR, 90 Wis.2d 804, 280 N.W.2d 702 (1979), and therefore is subject to statutory emergency rulemaking procedures established by theLegislature. Emergency Order 28 is a general order of general application within the meaning of Wis. Stat. §227.01(13), which defines "Rule."Accordingly, the rulemaking procedures of Wis. Stat. §227.24 were required to be followed during the promulgation of Order 28.

I.e., 252.02 is not the whole story.

Agree with most of what you say. However, the hospitals were not overwhelmed as evidenced by USNS Comfort leaving NYC after only treating 182 patients [1]. Similarly, Javits center temporary hospital had many spare beds [2]. The governor thought the hospitals would be overwhelmed which is a very different thing.

People that should have used the spare hospital beds and seen doctors didn't due to the lockdown, which makes this fact extra relevant. An overwhelming percentage of people that died from coronavirus in NYC had one or more other serious health conditions. Question is how many people that was classified as also having covid died of other underlying conditions and did not seek proper medical care due to fear of coronavirus.

[1] https://news.usni.org/2020/04/27/hospital-ship-comfort-ends-...

[2] https://abc7ny.com/javits-center-usns-comfort-coronavirus-ny...

Tyranny is where you restrict the movement of healthy people.

While the quarantine order in Wisconsin isn't.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Vaccines.

The government has the right to require your children to have vaccines before they go to school because not doing so has extremely harmful effects on others when we drop below herd immunity.

Smoking.

The government has the right to create anti-smoking laws because the market simply wouldn't produce a non-smoking bar that wouldn't affect the health of the people actually working there.

Shall I go on?

Not likely. The U.S. armed forces would not carry out such an order.

The President has a lot of military and foreign policy power, but not a lot of domestic policy power. This thread is about domestic policy.

> The Republican Guarantee is a commitment of the Federal Government to the States about the States.

I'm not quite sure where the "about the states" part came from. To me, Article IV just reads like a set of promises the federal government must make to the states.

UK deaths per million = 488

US 260 deaths per million

UK 499

France 404

Netherlands 322

Germany (Kudos!) 94.8

The US is not doing badly at all.

Article below is the result of the question you asked - still don't think you're getting it. Thousands will die specifically because of this decision. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/14/...

Also, it's "ok", "OK" makes it seem like you're shouting.

You are actually wrong and there is ironclad proof out there. Dig.

I am all for this! How can we make this happen? Maybe we put tracing in place and if you left your house for no essential reason and without a mask and infect someone else you get shared with manslaughter? Let's do it!

Has anyone taken these laws to the Supreme Court?

252.02 plainly says that DHS can issue orders or rules "The department may promulgate and enforce rules or issue orders". The court said they can only use rules. They made that up.

b) Number of international travellers is irrelevant given that the policy in Australia was to quarantine ALL visitors for 14 days. Same policy that the UK has now adopted and you can’t argue that they don’t have a lot of international travellers. Again it is simply bad policy.

c) Climate is not that different to many parts of the US right now. It’s not like it’s winter versus summer. Fairly mild temperatures in both countries right now.

The "as long as you don't hit anyone" part is going to be hard to guarantee, particularly if this is not just a one-shot event but a repetitive pattern of behavior.

Also, the fact that, if you are lucky enough not to hit anyone, and only cause property damage, and agree to pay for it, the government can't send you to jail in a sane society, does not mean the apartment owner can't take other actions. As, for example, telling everybody they know about your reckless behavior. In a sane society, people who act recklessly like this quickly find that they can't survive because no one will associate with them due to their widespread reputation for reckless behavior.

Unfortunately, we don't live in a sane society.

> What if I kidnap a sleeping baby, but they catch me before the baby awakens or the parents find out. No harm, no foul?

No, because kidnapping the baby is a crime because the baby is not yours, not because some government official thought that doing so "might harm" the baby. I thought we weren't discussing that category of crimes, but only the category where the government's justification for calling it a crime is that it "might harm" someone, even if there is no actual harm.

The strategy was to face more infections short term in favor of quick herd immunity so it’s actually a very positive sign for the strategy that the death rate is not higher than NYC.

Considering that the curve has flattened and herd immunity is projected in a couple of weeks, it is not clear the total deaths in virus lifecycle will be bad.

That's what they currently claim, but it's not what they're supposed to be doing. We made a huge mistake when we allowed the government to morph from "enforce the minimum basic rules that are necessary to have a civil society" to "solve everything that anyone thinks is a problem".

I think it's going to come down to definitions unfortunately. For example, what do we mean when we say

> enforce the minimum basic rules that are necessary to have a civil society

One could argue that Brown v Board of Education had little to do with policy and more to do with basic rules for civil society. For your other examples, I can see compelling arguments for why the federal government took this actions (with a justifiable reason). Many of them fall under the fact that the government is ultimately a forum for resolving large scale organizational challenges that the market is not properly incentivized to tackle.

Yes, these powers can be abused, and while restricting the government from acting in certain ways may be a method of curtailing those abuses, it would be a tradeoff in terms of the government effectively being able to accomplish its purpose.

> But in either case, you're arguing from an implicit assumption that the government is supposed to fix problems, and you're arguing about whether it did a good or a bad job. Nobody ever even asks why the government is intruding in all these activities in the first place, if it's just supposed to be enforcing the basic rules needed to have a civil society.

It builds down to a tension between "fix problems" and "enforce basic rules needed to have a civil society." Even in the situations you cite, the two can be in conflict. I suspect a lot of the people that one perceives as trying to use the government to "fix problems" may very well be seeing themselves as "enforcing basic rules needed to have a civil society."

By looking at everyone's choices, not just the one person you want to pick on.

Suppose Person A is an asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier and doesn't know it. They go to the grocery store without a mask. Person B also goes to the grocery store without a mask, and gets infected by Person A.

You could say Person A is responsible because they should have worn a mask. But you could also say Person B is responsible because they should have worn a mask. Yes, if you know there are a lot of asymptomatic carriers, you should take into account the possibility that you might be one. But you should also take into account the possibility that someone else might be one. So the appropriate rule in this case is that anyone who doesn't wear a mask in a public place where they can't social distance takes the consequences if they get sick. Someone who gets infected because they didn't wear a mask can't pawn off the responsibility on the person who infected them that also wasn't wearing a mask.

In other words, your scenario where "a few people who don't take care not to infect others can kill millions* simply cannot happen unless those millions of other people also don't take care not to get infected. So putting all the responsibility on the person who unknowingly infected someone else, instead of sharing it equally among all the people who didn't take common sense precautions, is wrong. Justifying invasive surveillance and tracking of everyone on those grounds is basically saying you want the government to make sure you don't have to take any prudent precautions or exercise any common sense at all in your daily life in order to avoid having anything bad happen to you. That's not reasonable.

Sweden is one of the countries that have enacted the least strict measures, it's an outlier in strategy, and has therefore attracted a lot of attention from people wishing to use it as an example while arguing for their own strategy.

According to the lockdown aficionados, Sweden is a zombie wasteland whose officials are gleefully sacrificing the elderly, while the nation's youth is cavorting on the streets spreading the virus indiscriminately, and in two weeks the death rate is going to spike, just you wait! Therefore, lockdowns are a necessity!

According to the lockdown skeptics, Sweden is a bastion of freedom and liberty where it's business as usual, not a single restaurant or bar closed, all schools are open, and the streets are full of people enjoying life like normal. Sweden has a death rate similar to many European countries, therefore lockdowns are completely unnecessary!

The truth is of course that both of these viewpoints are wrong, and most importantly, you can't assume that applying Sweden's strategy anywhere else would get the same results. But that doesn't stop people from cherrypicking exactly the stats they like in order to argue for the strategy they like.

Also note that IHME has up until recently been absolutely, fantastically, horribly wrong in their projections for Sweden. Like many other comparison sites, they're using the reporting dates for deaths instead of the actual death dates. If you want better data for Sweden, please check out this site instead: https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/

Autrstial probably didn't have community spread of covid until Late Feb. But America had community spread in at least mid Jan--and probably earlier. But Australia locked down essentially when America did. If they can eradicate the disease, that's a huge win, but if they can't they are just delaying what happened in America.

Just a tidbit: One UCSF doctor that went to help out in New York reported the hospital he was in converted their cafeteria to a ventilator ward.

And New York was relying on a lot of doctors and nurses from other parts of the country. Not to mention pressing doctors and nurses from other specialties.

I just say this because the covid19 deniers are trying hard to normalize things like what happened in New York.

We definitely agree there. However, why do you think NYC is not an example of lockdowns not working and that we should instead isolate the vulnerable populations? Its both the most severe lockdowned place and the place with the highest coronavirus death rate.

Also, most states are now open or are reopening. We are not seeing spikes in coronavirus cases or deaths, and we are instead seeing huge drops in deaths per week directly undermining the heavy handed lockdowns [3]. Also, despite each worker of Wallmart, Target, Whole Foods, Safeways, Wallgreens etc being exposed to thousands a day not a single store was closed due to covid outbreaks. How come that is the case?

Locking down non-vulnerable populations is what I think is unjustified, and the evidence I present show that the heavy handed lockdown doesn't reliably reduce deaths and that targeted isolations of vulnerable populations does reliably reduce deaths. One shared component of sweden and NYC [1,2] is that they didn't properly mitigate for vulnerable populations. Sweden is mitigating by isolating vulnerable populations while NYC isn't [1]. However, NYC somehow managed to have the most severe lockdown and by far the highest death rate.

TLDR; If you have to isolate the vulnerable to significantly reduce deaths in both lockdown and non-lockdown, and lockdown doesn't reliably make a difference. Why not just go with the more effective targeted mitigations and drop the ineffective isolation of all?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sent-recovering-corona... [2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sweden/2020-05-12/sw... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

The key point here is transmission of an infectious disease, so to get a proper comparison, you need to start with approximately the same probabilities of people infecting one another. That begins with proximity. Comparing the U.S. and Australia doesn't work because of that.

Orders prohibiting most gatherings for non-essential purposes (with essential defined by the entity issuing the ruling), shuttering non-essential businesses, etc., very similar to today's shelter-in-place orders were fairly common in the 1918-1919 flu epidemic. They aren't at all unprecedented in the US.

Reading the history about the second and third wave into 1919 as a result of reopening and then re-closing business also makes for interesting and educative reading, recommended.

What’s new here is that people are being ordered to stay at home. But putting an imposition on a whole group of people without focusing on infected individuals is neither new nor unconstitutional.

Most that I'm thinking of didn't actually force you into your home, business was restricted, large gatherings... but it wasn't a situation where you weren't allowed to go outside. Maybe some did but I can't think of any.

I also want to know where are all the other people asking the same question?

There are more recent examples as well from America that house immigrants and prisoners from the Middle East.

Much of what you say simply does not comport with reality. Anyone who's been to a grocery store in a lock down state can tell you that the stores became much sparser. A big part of this is because most people simply go less frequently. Also people don't tend to linger. In general, people make adjustments that all but completely mitigate the imaginary issues you're raising. You can rail on about a bunch of hypotheticals, but that doesn't overturn observable reality.

Likewise, all of your assertions about gloves and the virus living on surfaces, etc. It has not been proven that lingering detectable particles on items are a significant mode of transmission vs direct contact with people. And, in fact, super spreader events are linked directly to people in close proximity: funerals, church services, sporting events, parties and social gatherings, etc. Actively respired particles while in close proximity to other humans transmits the virus. Full stop. It is absolutely ludicrous to assert otherwise.

You also cannot draw the conclusion that masks are completely ineffective due purely to micron size. No, they are not a perfect shield, but they can reduce transmission in that clearly not every particle will fit neatly through a space and make a beeline from one person's mucous membranes to another's. This is just silliness. And, when all parties wear masks, it reduces viral contact even further. Reduction of contact with viable virus particles reduces transmission. Clearly.

These are truly facile statements you are making, and it's asinine to expect that someone will word for word deconstruct them. You take a bunch of random facts, misinterpret them, and suggest that you've made some sort of argument. You then go on to make sweeping statements without any basis in fact.

The other technique you are using is to cherry pick information and draw conclusions without regard to the factors that plainly contradict your points, and you equate correlation with causation. Some of those points I made to you in my last comment, but you chose not to address them.

For instance, I addressed your assertion that reopening states haven't experienced spikes by pointing out that there hasn't been enough time to measure. Additionally, many people are still under voluntary lockdown and most states are only partially reopened in any case. Crickets.

But, then you link out to some NBC news report that actually shows spikes in some states since their re-opening, directly contradicting your claims and supporting my assertion that we have not had enough time to draw conclusions. Did you think I wouldn't read it?

TLDR; your arguments are not actual arguments.

1) N95 effectiveness:

Edit: parent seem correct that it protect others against sneezes as long as it doesn’t leak out through sides due to sneeze velocity. See NIH links below [2,4].

However, if a person have virus particles on mask and touch it before touching other surfaces the mask may be a liability.

Then again, it seems more effective to isolate the sick than put masks on all.

2) I said that the dire scenario used to justify lockdown or the one in NYC, has not been seen in any reopened or never locked down states. I also said isolating the vulnerable seem sufficient.

I never claimed no reopened state will see some increases in covid cases, some do and some don't. I also did not say that the 7 states that never closed down experienced no covid scenario, but that they showed isolating the vulnerable was sufficient.

3) Lockdown measures have deprived rights under the color of law [3], violating rule of law, and enough of us will support each other to take full recourse under the law. The law I cited [3] show that the officials enforcing unconstitutional measures risk jail.

Enough of us will not accept when governors retaliate after loosing court cases [7], or when judges try to enforce unconstitutional lockdowns [8] or take on a prosecutorial role [5,6]. Or fine or jail people for exercising their constitutional rights. This is the definition of lack of rule of law. You are on the wrong side of history.

4) Yes, we will exercise our first amendment right to freedom of speech and if that fails we will exercise our second amendment right/responsibility to protect our liberty. Again, you are the one arguing against how the American democracy works.

[1] https://respiratory-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785820/

[3] https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-l...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10168531

[5] https://twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1260714837316960258

[6] https://www.wsj.com/articles/judges-are-umpires-not-ringmast...

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jowoEFpy-Kk

[8] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/06/texas-dallas-salon-o...

I'm a bit hesitant to compare to either of them because I can't read the local news. That being said, didn't Sweden go with a lockdown-lite policy?

The Sweedes do have the freedom to die from COVID-19 because public health orders are affronts to their liberty.

EDIT And the lockdowns are threatening something like 265 million people experiencing famine [0]. "flag-wrapped know-betters demand Golden Corral reopen for buffet service" is trivialising a serious thing here; the economy isn't a nice-to-have. It is the major generator of all the prosperity that exists in the world. It is too complicated for me to understand causes and effects, but if it doesn't start back up again ASAP the hurt will get worse.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/21/c...

Sweden never closed down, and Germany is in the midst of reopening. As to the safety net—there is no evidence that safety net has made a difference. (I’m part, I suspect, because the Us already has a comprehensive safety net for the elderly population that is mainly affected by COVID-19). The death rate in the US, per 100,000 people, is well below that of Sweden. It’s also far lower than the death rate in countries with well developed safety nets like France and Italy.

I strongly suspect that people in Germany/Sweden, etc., have more trust in their government because the people themselves are simply less far apart. To pick a controversial but illustrative example: in Germany the outside limit on abortions is 12 weeks—shorter than in any US state. (Excepting a few “heartbeat law” states where the laws have not yet taken effect.) But within that period, abortions are generally available. No such compromise is possible in America. The right is currently focused on ending abortion entirely, while the left is trying to extend abortions into the third trimester (which are pretty much unprecedented in Europe). Or take taxes. Many in the right want to dismantle the existing tax system. But on the left, they treat lowering corporate taxes to the same level as Sweden or Germany (and France and Canada, etc.) not merely as bad policy, but as an affront to morality and decency.

The same is true for COVID-19. In every European country, there is a grown up debate about balancing health and safety with the need to reopen the economy. The American left, meanwhile, has condemned even the idea of such balancing as racist, classist, colonialism, what have you. The left greeted travel bans—which countries from Germany to New Zealand to Denmark have imposed to great effect—as manifest racism and xenophobia. They’re not talking about reopening, as Europe is already doing, but sheltering in place through the rest of 2020. The right, meanwhile, is shouting “give me liberty or give me death.” There is no trust because everybody is crazy, and everybody hates each other, and we should give up being one country and disband the union already.

So... in the UK we have the Daily Briefings about covid. Each time I listen to it I hear politicians (they take it in turns) to come out and give us a fucking performance, projecting their voice, projecting (they think) 'calm' and 'competent' and 'in charge of it all' while they spew words for 15 or 20 minutes which could have been given in 5 at the most.

Then it's time for questions from journalists. Which get answered if convenient or if inconvenient they'll answer a question that wasn't asked, all the fucking while spinning to make themselves look like they've not made a series of serious mistakes.

And each time I hear it my confidence in their competence drops further.

And they've no idea why. They don't seem to understand respect is earned.

I recommend talking to some people instead of parroting the pictures you see in the news.

There seems to be a myth going around that Europe is handling this better than the US and the statistics don't really support that claim. If you have to bash Golden Corral to make your claim, you're probably a bit biased against Americans.

That being said, none of these countries are handling this well, it's just annoying to see the double standard.

https://www.startribune.com/even-during-the-pandemic-in-swed...

> "Protect the NHS" ffs.. how about protect the population?

protecting the NHS IS protecting the population. If you have a better idea of how to protect the population - note that we have had nearly 2 months of government-mandated lockdown based on scientific advice (though taken too late) - then suggest it.

> The politicians aren't deferring to experts with evidence

Yes they are, finally.

> They are setting up the experts to be the fallguys

No they're not and they know it wouldn't work anyway.

I tried to make a justified criticism but yours is just plain destructive cynicism.

But I know folks like the ones you met exist as well, and it irritates me to no end that we, as a society, allow this to happen. It is easy to see that such a thing might have lifelong consequences.

1) Stop infected people from entering the country. If you have enough testing capacity, you can allow in those who are clear. Otherwise they have to be quarantined.

2) Track every infection within the country.

3) Test all their contacts.

Of course, those are very hard to do in an airtight fashion. But the smaller the absolute numbers the easier they are to do. Countries not working towards building this capability are just going to keep struggling.

Even NZ has not fully lifted the restrictions yet. They've not even sent kids back to school. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-new-zealand-eases-loc...

I don't claim to know better than local governments what the best decision is -- we're all just making this up as we go along, and I'm glad I don't personally have to make the decision between massive death or economic damage for millions of people.

Despite what you've listed, there are other laws on the books that make operating one nearly impossible - they can't be located within a mile of a school, they need to have admission powers at a hospital, etc, etc.

Some of the failures can honestly be dealt with if there were proper coordination and oversight: Use an accredited program (for example). Require regular meetings with other students: Say, perhaps, PE at the school a couple times a week at an elementary level. Require parents to pass the tests for the coursework they are planning on teaching the next year or two. Include more variety on standardized tests: If you want to teach sex education or how to follow a recipe, include these sorts of questions on tests.

Until some sort of system is in place to catch the ones that don't really get taught anything other than propaganda, yes, I condemn the entire thing.

I'm confused. I was saying people could demand more money instead of going back to work... precisely because the $1200 they got clearly wasn't enough (like you also said) and because clearly going back to work is otherwise riskier. You just jumped from "$1200 isn't enough" to "the only solution is to go back to work"?

Michael Gove said, during the Brexit referendum, that "people in this country have had enough of experts".[1]

-- [1] https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d1...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt

This is not a comment about the quality of the people in the region, but of the challenging circumstances caused by factors largely outside their control.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/opioids/opioid-summari...

At a high level though: surely you understand not everything is equally uncertain here, and that not everything is being flown blindly? We have like 200 other countries in the world to observe and draw conclusions from, both socioeconomically and medically. We have ourselves to draw conclusions from, given the preceding shutdown and its effects. And we have experts who know and analyze quite a bit more than either you or me being quite united in their opinions. You can't seriously be so confident that their opinions are just coin tosses in a vacuum, come on. Especially not when you're the one preaching uncertainty!

It's not a game, and we don't fully understand how this works so maybe we should stop comparing.

When you need those jobs created by reopening to get people back to work and closer to the point of having disposable income again.

This isn't pure chicken & egg, since consumer debt is tightening up while business debt is getting cheaper. Plus the only way we're going to alleviate fear is by opening and seeing what happens.

Even testing vaccines will require that leap of faith at some point. After all, what good would a clinical trial be if the patient quarantined during it?

I can just as easily pick 3 of the least and tell you a completely different story.

OWS protests resulted in zero legislation. Zero.

Open the stores and nobody comes?

I don't see how you can call that ultra leftist. For me that would be introducing a planned economy.

I can't recall meeting many people who get substantially more conservative with age, but I do know many who shift more liberal. I believe there is a correlation with open-mindedness.

And who knows. Maybe now with more companies going remote or encouraging more remote work, fewer people will feel compelled to move to the Bay Area or whatever.

Anyway. My point isn't to get into "x is better than y" because, frankly, it's not that interesting. But combating stereotypes about locations and geographies or peoples is of interest. Calling the Rust Belt area a cesspool, is pretty pathetic, especially when despite all the nice weather California has its own "cesspool" problems to deal with. If you just spend a lot of time reading coast newspapers it's easy to magnify problems in other areas. In fact, why is it that leading population centers like New York, D.C., and S.F. were able to spend so much energy destroying and outsourcing manufacturing at the expense of their fellow Americans? Why did regulators and politicians in D.C., along with our medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies allow so many opioids to be prescribed?

If you're going to destroy the coal industry because of regulation (which I support) why aren't you also advocating for finding meaningful employment for those who are regulated out of a job? Maybe they should move to SF and learn to code? Well, now they might get their chance, and Twitter et al. may be paying them $60,000 year to do tech jobs that were $200,000/year in NYC or SF or Seattle.

The U.S. really needs to get its shit together and start caring about one another. I've never in my life thought that one part of the country was a cesspool or worthy of ridicule, even if I disagreed with politics there.

WRT. "United States of Europe", thanks to the EU, you can often consider the Union as a unit in terms of trade; Europe is also more homogenous culturarly than the states. However, when talking about COVID-19, EU has almost zero influence on how the pandemic is handled (somewhat by design, definitely by vote); it's only meaningful to talk about individual nations, with their own healthcare systems, their own emergency policies, and their own sovereign, locked down borders.

If you include all European countries you get a different story.

And Europe has roughly double the population of the US, it's not surprising that it has more cases in absolute numbers.

An article that really shows that difference is: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lbsbusinessstrategyreview/2020/...

But my point was that picking a handful of countries and calling them Europe isn't very accurate at all.

[1] https://github.com/ronigold/Covid19-Analysis [2] https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd03177682d9061.jpg [3] https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd019c5e89dca42.jpg

Nobody in this thread said anything about that.

"Debt is denominated in our own currency and it's the reserve currency of the world, that debt is fucking fictional."

I studied economics. I can assure you, that's a radical oversimplification of how international debt works.

Are you aware of how US government debt is taken on? I don't think you are. You are acting as if the risk profile remains unchanged as policies are pursued.

I'm not debating Keynesian economics here. If the economy is in a deflationary spiral, then creating money isn't going to be destructive in pure terms, provided it's done correctly.

"We will have to come to grips with the understanding that in many parts of modern America it is more acceptable to have Grandma drown in her own goddamned lungs than it is to just write the checks."

Again, I'm not against writing the checks. I'm against writing the checks if it's not necessary and there isn't a benefit to doing so. The same callousness you highlight in that line could also be said about allowing small businesses to fail (ruining young people's lives) to protect grandma, who had elderly people in previous generations just accept deadly diseases as a part of reality rather than shutting down whole economies to protect themselves.

Glad you, as a small service business owner, are doing fine. But every day, the percentage of business owners who aren't doing fine goes up.

What's the stop criteria for this in your opinion? What is the signal that SHOULD be used for opening back up?

Waiting for a vaccine relies on hope, and that as we all know, is not a strategy.

You are correct. I don't know all of your opinions on this virus response, and shouldn't have characterized it so.

In that note, I certainly don't HOPE to hear anything from experts. I just want to make sure the experts are being consulted on all sides, to better weigh the costs vs. the benefits.

Regarding the NPR article you sent, a rather grim detail that I didn't see addressed in that conversation (but maybe I missed it!!) is how that valuation changes for people when they are near the end of their life.

Is a person's life more "valuable" (putting it in the harsh aspects of policy decision making, that frankly cause me great discomfort) if they are younger, and in prime earning years, than a person in a nursing home who has a rich social life with their grandkids and other patients in their assisted care facility?

It's a horrible thing to try to quantify things that, to me, are objectively valuable, and even sacred. However, our decisions are doing just that, but on the side of people at highest risk vs. others.

I've just come back from my barber after her shop reopened. She's not the owner, just an employee. The visit was very interesting.

I had to wait outside, and a woman (87 years old, but looked MUCH younger) came out of the shop. My son and I both were wearing masks and keeping distant, but we spoke to her and asked how she was. It was her first time leaving her facility since the lockdown, and she told us a good friend of hers had died of the virus. She was a wonderful person to talk to, and had visited my same stylist for years.

My stylist/barber (she is licensed for both in my state) then told me she is leaving the state and moving back to the east coast. Her husband is a mechanic, and they have been financially ruined by this. She applied for benefits right away, but only received them 3 days before the shop was allowed to reopen. She has 3 children, 1 of them special needs. They are good working class people, but they didn't have the savings to weather this shut down, and now have to move in with family on the east coast. Today was my last time seeing her. She'll be gone in 2 weeks.

She expressed frustration at not being able to have the shop opened weeks ago in a controlled manner, with her and the owners radically changing how they operate the business to protect the high-risk populations. She stated that the high cost of housing here also exacerbated the issue, so it's not 100% covid, but the shutdown, she said, was the tipping point. She and her family are all alive, and I'm hoping they do ok on the east coast, but I thought this little visit to the barber shop captured an interesting moment. BTW, when she applied for her unemployment benefits in Colorado, an apalling thing with the legislation: Her tip income, which is 40% of her total, was legally not included with her unemployment payout. So she got a reduced amount of what she normally earns, AND she got it late. Other states probably did a far superior job, but I don't have any ideas if that's the case.

This whole thing is a tragedy, one way or another.