This is where culture really matters. Almost every jurisdiction in the western world has faced this issue. Governments are issuing orders that, when push comes to shove, might not be 100% legitimate in the eyes of a court. In most countries that hasn't mattered. People acknowledge the covid problem and are obeying the "orders" despite them, perhaps, not having legal teeth. This requires trust. Like the current politicians or not, most populations respect their governments and are willing to support emergency measures in the short term. Whether they voted for them or not, they trust that their leaders are not evil.
But what about the US? If all government is corrupt, if all taxes are sin, if all leaders on the other side are traitors to the cause, the people will never respect those in charge. The people don't obey the "orders" nor follow advice. Then they wrap themselves in the flag and actively work against the measures in the name of freedom. That cultural chicken has now come home to roost.
This state supreme court could have delayed. Cases take years to get to state supreme courts. They could easily have pushed this case until after this disease has come and gone. Instead they pushed this through in order to get a quick victory over a governor with whom they disagree politically.
> But what about the US? If all government is corrupt, if all taxes are sin, if all leaders on the other side are traitors to the cause, the people will never respect those in charge. The people don't obey the "orders" nor follow advice.
This is a rather extremist take on the issue. You can be against unlawful orders while still obeying the scientific advisories. Take MA for example, where we have a stay-at-home advisory, not order. This advisory has reduced the average number of close contacts of diagnosed COVID-19 people from 10 to 2, while still respecting civil liberties.
The model you preach, one of trust, starts with the government trusting its citizens. Otherwise you end up with tyranny.
They're all "advisories" in practice, though. No state in the US is even remotely taking enforcement seriously, and people are out horsing around everywhere. It's kind of silly to call them "orders" at this point. We're lucky that (for now) the vast majority of Americans are wisely choosing to stay home voluntarily. It's a very small number of jerks out there running around potentially becoming super-spreaders just so they can put on a show of flexing their freedom to go to eat waffles in a handful of open restaurants.
Also just anecdotally, here in Ontario people seem to want to avoid catching and spreading the disease, more than to avoid clashing with the law (who can't really tell if you have a legitimate reason to be somewhere anyway); and the people who don't care about one don't care about the other either.
For the handful of people I see clearly flaunting the restrictions here, I feel like more often than not they have decent personal reasons for doing so, and I don't think it's my place to stick my nose in that.
A free person does not take orders from the state, nor from anyone. A free person has a right to weigh advice and conscience on his own terms, and negotiate his externalities with society.
>A free person does not take orders from the state, nor from anyone. A free person has a right to weigh advice and conscience on his own terms, and negotiate his externalities with society.
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.
This sounds like an extremely high resolution description of a group/category of people that likely numbers in the millions. If you encountered someone doing the same but based on a different categorization, you'd likely see the obvious epistemic problems involved, but seeing the same in oneself is difficult, especially when criticizing your personal out-group. That's just one aspect.
> 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.
Is this a two way street? Are the authoritarians and experts who decide policy on highly uncertain data, at best, going to be held responsible for the fallout of their actions? I see little historic precedent for this in the US, and plenty of counter-examples.
> 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.
Does the group have to consent to authoritarian rule? How about we try transparent & honest, evidence-based reasoning and negotiation first. Maybe people would be a little less resistant then.
> They usually have an ego that...
Be careful when discussing matters involving the ego, they can be very mischievous and deceptive, often leading one to believe things like they possess extraordinary abilities in perception, when the exact opposite is actually the case, just as one example.
> ...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".
> ...they want to have their cake and eat it too...
> They usually have an ego that allows them...
Well just because you can think of a hypothetical selfish and entitled person who isn't willing to suffer for liberty, doesn't mean everyone who advocates for freedom is that person, and if anything it makes the case that these people should be brought to put their money where their mouth is.
> A free person does not take orders from the state, nor from anyone. A free person has a right to weigh advice and conscience on his own terms, and negotiate his externalities with society.
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?
no, it's not fair, but that's the inherent risk of freedom. people might not do what's best for you, or even themselves. under this model, the government actually has to cultivate a position of trust/legitimacy rather than just compelling people to do (or not do) things.
it's easy to forget that most people act with consideration and respect towards each other most of the time, whether or not there is a credible threat of punishment. we tend to notice bad behavior more in our day-to-day lives precisely because it is not the default. you never notice all the dog walkers that dutifully clean up after their pets, but you'll surely remember that one piece of dog shit you stepped in on the way to work. the news almost exclusively covers outliers.
in my state, we have mandatory shelter-in-place under threat of fines/imprisonment, but the police don't really have any way of knowing whether you are violating the order. people mostly follow it anyway, because they are convinced of the severity of the issue.
>it's easy to forget that most people act with consideration and respect towards each other most of the time...
I think consideration here is extremely subjective. If what you say is even true, that most people are considerate, what defines considerate here? People think they should leave their shopping carts wherever since that's the job of the cart attendant. Are they considerate because without them, that person may not have a job since all the carts are just pushed back to the store?
of course it's subjective. it depends on local norms (many of are unwritten and/or implicit) which vary a lot from place to place. a lot of it just boils down to treating other people the way (you think) they want to be treated. do you think there are a lot of cart attendants that are grateful for people scattering carts all over the parking lot?
No, I can't imagine a single cart attendant would appreciate the extra work. What I am trying to say is: yes a good portion of people probably do follow the rules, despite the possibility of not having any negative consequences but that doesn't mean we should get rid of the rules. There are people who "just want a haircut despite my cough, what could possibly happen" and will infect people along the way. Sure, they were considerate because they considered staying home but that barber needs the money. Maybe they think it is considerate, but I have a feeling a lot of other people won't.
I don't necessarily think we should get rid of the rules either, but for a somewhat different reason. I do believe that free citizens who a.) trust their government officials and b.) can do so without severe economic stress will generally follow official recommendations without the threat of force. at least, enough of them will follow it that the outliers don't really matter.
unfortunately, we don't have a good system to support barbers, who would prefer not to risk catching/spreading the virus but need the money, or barbershop owners, who would prefer to stay closed but need to pay rent. so I do actually support the lockdown as a somewhat dirty hack to trigger benefits for these people.
The idea of living together in a society/city is believing that your neighbour does not wish you ill intent. The question your should ask yourself is if you got it, do you trust yourself to self-quarantine.
It's funny you have no clue that the state used to run Tuberculosis sanitariums. Hint the imates didn't have a choice. New York had a sanitarium where they sent people with infectious diseases unless they had a physician to vouch for their care. Public health authorities would quarantine families for scarlet fever. They'd put as a red notice on your door.
> The people don't obey the "orders" nor follow advice. Then they wrap themselves in the flag and actively work against the measures in the name of freedom. That cultural chicken has now come home to roost.
That cultural chicken is still a massive net win; I'd still much rather live in America and get coronavirus rather than live in China and get black-bagged someday because of my refusal to take authorities seriously.
Pretty much no crisis since the founding of America has "these people have too much personal independence and power" been more of a problem than part of the solution. Indeed, most of the times independence was diagnosed as a problem the solution was worse than the disease. The government-coordinated response to 9/11 remains substantially more damaging than any other aspect of that fiasco.
> I'd still much rather live in America and get coronavirus rather than live in China and get black-bagged someday because of my refusal to take authorities seriously.
At the risk of potentially misunderstanding what you meant, there's a yawning chasm between "freedom to die from COVID-19 because public health orders are affronts to liberty" and "extra-judicially kidnapped by one's own government."
I'd much rather live in Sweden or Germany, where people have sufficient trust in their government and a massive social safety net to catch employees who have to be out of work for health reasons--ANY health reasons, but COVID specifically in this instance--and we're able to trust that our fellow residents will act reasonably without forcing others back to work, than in America where the least-powerful and least-well-off of us have the cover of unemployment payments ripped away because some flag-wrapped know-betters demand Golden Corral reopen for buffet service after getting a haircut.
> I'd much rather live in Sweden or Germany, where people have sufficient trust in their government...
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.
There appears to be much hand-wringing over what a upper level government may do. Why not cede such power to lower level jursdiction where those conditions are mostly closely monitored?
Locally, I see city and county governments taking a tack of making slightly differing decisions regarding what to open and keep closed. For example, my city is keeping parks and playgrounds closed; the county is doing the opposite? Why? each other's data shows the historical use trends and such data plays a large part in making reasonable, responsible descisions.
BTW, I'm in Georgia (US state); while the national media makes it out like we're backwoods country idiots, our local governments are very effective in making reasonable choices. Plus the vast marjority of folks are wearing masks and self-distancing. Most people aren't stupid. They only want the freedom to start their lives back up, plus not depend on the state and national governments for their very survival.
Demand isn’t going to go up magically because of reopening. I’m not seeing much evidence for pent up demand outside of hair cuts, which are not exactly essential
I'm not sure about that. I'm ready to go to the gym, go out to restaurants, and just yesterday they took the caution tape off of the school playground and lots of kids were there.
I don't think demand will immediately return to 100%, but I think quite a few people are itching to get out and spend money and enjoy life. Maybe not in some areas, but most of the country is probably ready to go.
Here’s one example. Restaurants will likely be operating at 50% capacity or below for the foreseeable future. Their business model does not work at 50% capacity. Many, many jobs are not coming back.
I think this is an argument for lack of money to be spent since a hefty portion of people have lost their jobs and paychecks don't happen instantaneously and unpaid bills probably come first.
Sure, but it's circular logic to suggest that there's no need to rush reopening since demand will be low anyway... (As others have said)
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?
Consumer confidence is being eroded more and more every single day, and the savings rate of an American has almost doubled to 13% in the past 2 months. Purchasing power of an average American has most likely decreased somewhat, if not significantly, given the unemployment numbers. All of those things don’t just bounce back like a rubber band when the country is “ready to go”. It will be years before we get back to the GDP numbers we were seeing pre-Covid and that’s probably considering that everything trends upwards from here on out, which is highly doubtful.
Sure,the Swedes technically have had the freedom. But comparatively, they've also had more disease than countries with a mandated lockdown. Honestly, though, it is scarier doing this in the US: Sweden has a robust health care system and a safety net. Which means that folks that do get the virus aren't going to get hit with an expensive ICU bill after having lost their job, even if they work at a small business that would not be covered under FMLA regulations in the US.
Not to mention that they've been heavily criticized for mishandling the lockdown.
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.
> : 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 Americ
You seem to forget that in France & Germany, people go to the Netherlands or Spain for abortions after 12 weeks. It’s not a « compromise », it’s just a 1970s law that hasn’t been changed because conservative groups are annoying.
For the American audience: the limits are 12 weeks in France, 14 weeks in Spain, and 24 weeks in the Netherlands.
For the European audience: the shortest abortion period that is currently in effect in the US is Mississippi’s at 20 weeks: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/922-3.jpg. Shorter ones have been proposed but have been stayed pending litigation. Most of the deep south is close to the Netherlands line at 22 weeks. Most of the blue states limit up to viability, which can be up to 28 weeks. 7 states have no limit whatsoever. (Note that I’m not taking a position in what’s right; I’m just describing how various countries have addressed a divisive issue.)
As to “conservative groups” being annoying—that makes it sound like something the majority agrees with but they just haven’t gotten around to updating the law. In fact, the dominant party in both France and Germany has opposed lengthening the current periods. The woman Angela Merkel hand-picked to be her successor as leader of the CDU is against abortion entirely, like many in the CDU. Merkel has maintained the status quo precisely as a compromise between her party and the more liberal parties in Germany.
In practice, regardless of what that law says, you can't get an abortion in the deep south. There are fewer licensed clinics than there are letters 'i' in Mississippi.
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.
Well, that’s a major overstatement. The abortion rate in Mississippi (i.e. abortions performed in the state) was 1,000 per million people. In Germany, there were 1,200 per million. Spain is about twice as high at 2,000 per million. (It’s also not clear that difference can be explained by differences in access. People might be less likely to seek an abortion in a state where 60% of people in Mississippi self-identify as “pro life.”) There are definitely restrictions; I’m just pushing back on your assumption that those restrictions are so effective in practice that “you can’t get an abortion in Mississippi.”
Apart from that, those restrictions are part of my point. Germans have achieved a compromise, involving fairly high paper requirements for getting an abortion—including limiting most abortions to the first trimester and requiring counseling and a waiting period. German state-sponsored health insurance also generally does not cover abortions absent medical necessity. But the other side of the compromise is that, once those requirements are met, the procedure is relatively accessible.
In the US, the German compromise would be unthinkable to both sides. Here, the battleground for the right is laws limiting abortions to six weeks and abusing zoning laws to shut down clinics. The battleground for the left is things like public funding (not universal in Europe), making third trimester abortions a matter of discretionary medical judgment (highly unusual in Europe), and eliminating medical providers’ rights to refuse to perform abortions for conscience or religious reasons (a right that is nearly universal in Europe).
I will judge a thing on it's merits. I will judge a government by how it behaves, not by my preferred political party.
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 think the daily briefings are good. It's not just a politician talking; it's a politician flanked by two scientists or public health experts. The politician explains what is going on and the experts explain why, with data. This is the first time in my life I can remember politicians so publicly deferring to experts with evidence.
I didn't mention the scientists because I'm not criticising them.
The only reason politicians are deferring to experts is they've realised experts are actually useful whereas before they didn't like them (something about the time for experts is over, something like that, can anyone recall?)
Conversely you haven't touched on the fact that the buggers are constantly spinning, deferring blame for not getting enough PPE, plain deceit about the number of tests done etc.
The UK has not done well. That was avoidable. If you defend that, you let the responsible ones off the hook and they will do it again.
I don't like Gove, so it feels strange for me to "defend" him, but this is an interesting quote that keeps coming up.
In a later interview [1] he said this:
"When I was being interviewed on Sky by Faisal Islam, he put it to me that there were a number of economists and organizations of economic prestige that questioned the arguments for leaving the European Union and said that it would be a mistake if we did. I countered it by saying people have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms that have got things so wrong in the past. And Faisal Islam, as a skilled interrogator, cut me off half way, so while I completed my sentence he took the first half and said ‘people have had enough experts?’ and used that as a fencing posture in the interview itself."
Although I wrote the original comment criticising the UK daily briefing, I really disagree badly here.
> "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.
Most people I’ve talked to pushing for government to reopen things have lost jobs and businesses... or are about to. Their basic survival needs are being threatened. Show a little more compassion.
I recommend talking to some people instead of parroting the pictures you see in the news.
So at the risk of asking a dumb question: why aren't protesters demanding e.g. more economic aid instead of a reopening? It's not like giving money to people in this crisis is a taboo anymore... it was one thing both the Congress and the White House agreed on for once. And it's not like if everything reopens then they're going to be instantly back in business. A lot of people will still stay home anyway. Wouldn't it be a lot more logical to demand payments or some other form of direct aid so that they can actually survive both economically and medically? Instead of making it a zero-sum game demanding everyone trade off a dubious-at-best chance at economic survival for a far more certain chance of a public health crisis (if not worse)?
I don't believe this. In fact I can't even make sense of it. You're saying when families' and people's lives are at stake in the US, they'd legitimately rather risk dying than just getting handed checks that their own leaders approved of practically unanimously during a crisis? Isn't this completely at odds with the sheer demand there has been for the economic aid so far? And also at odds with how politicians have been trying to claim credit for the aid? You're saying the protesters are somehow so deeply tied to these values and so morally offended by being paid "unearned" money during a globally acknowledged crisis that they're willing to go out to protest this repulsive act while packing together within 6 feet out of spite(?) and then... take the money ASAP and continue to support the politicians who are giving them the money? What?
Is the quantity of risk identical to all populations?
The answer is no. But people like you never mention this.
I'm curious:
What is, in your opinion, the trigger for reopening? What metric? Is that metric at a city, county, or state level?
I'd like to hear specifics, because I have yet to hear them from the cowardly ass covering politicians who say there is no cost that can be put on a human life. The same people who choose not to put a guardrail on a dangerous rural road because the cost isn't worth the number of lives lost per year on said road.
Well ask me something about it and I'll answer it (or tell you if I don't know). There are a million things I haven't mentioned. Just like you. We're not writing dissertations on COVID-19 here. I can only address so many things that I find relevant to the discussion.
What are you even expecting me to say about this? Of course the elderly and the vulnerable are worse off. How is that against anything I was saying? I was suggesting we make more economic impact payments rather than pack together into a crowd and protest. Does it look like there was some obvious connection between that and people's age that I somehow deliberately omitted and that would've hurt my argument? If so please enlighten me and I'll address it.
Meanwhile the one thing I don't hear from "people like you" (since you like painting people with one broad stroke like that) is a single acknowledgment that the experts might know more than you (and me), and this isn't about your opinion vs. mine. Which is funny, though not in a humorous way. To you nobody knows what they're doing. To us, there are people who know what they're doing somewhat better than us laypeople, so we're trying to at least give them and their opinions that much credit and weight.
> What is, in your opinion, the trigger for reopening? What metric? Is that metric at a city, county, or state level? I'd like to hear specifics, because I have yet to hear them from the cowardly ass covering politicians who say there is no cost that can be put on a human life
Well that might be because you haven't been listening to them. I know Cuomo has answered your question quite precisely... same guy whom you're mocking for saying every life is priceless. He said (and this is not his opinion or mine, this is the opinion of the experts advising him) that when the infection rates become constant (i.e. when the derivative reaches 0), you can start to reopen. That is the trigger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyOnfK_UMV4&t=4m38s
Also, FYI, experts have put costs on human life and they have come to the conclusion (sorry if this isn't what you're hoping to hear) that it's very much worth it to shut down the economy. If you're interested, listen here. I imagine you'll disagree anyway (the experts are blind etc.) but at least you can't accuse them of not having tried to do the analyses that you appear to believe you have done. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
Apologies for my verbiage. I should not have done the "people like you" crap. Wrong and uncalled for.
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.
> 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.
Yeah you did miss it. The question is asked directly ("Did we factor in the age...?") answered quite directly ("Valuing people differently was kind of tried once in 2003..."). I would suggest listening to the whole thing. It's quite eye-opening.
> She expressed frustration at not being able to have the shop opened weeks ago in a control+the owners radically changing how they operate the business to protect the high-risk populations.
It must be incredibly frustrating. I do imagine if she'd gotten checks in the mail to keep life her going, she'd have appreciated that at least as much as having to come to work in the middle of the pandemic, if not more.
> 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 is yet another reason why we need to get rid of tipping and just pay people better instead. And why we need to just mail everyone a check for the pandemic instead of having them rely on unemployment benefits.
> This whole thing is a tragedy, one way or another.
It is definitely a tragedy. However it doesn't need to be this much of a tragedy. If they sent people payments and changed laws accordingly then at least the only thing ruining lives would be the virus, not the economy. It's very tough to say the alternatives people are fighting about are all equally awful with equal certainty here.
I don't think you're accurately representing what the protesters are angry about. The choice of staying home and dying is a false dichotomy, and many see the lockdown as a unjust assumption of power by governments that don't have the right to take such actions.
Earning a living vs being provided one isn't even really the issue.
>> Many people in the US want to earn a living, not be provided a living.
> I don't think you're accurately representing what the protesters are angry about. Earning a living vs being provided one isn't even really the issue.
I'm sorry, I was just replying to what you wrote, and you were telling me that the issue is earning a living. Now you changed your argument entirely. So you're saying this isn't even about making a living then, given that paying people would clearly solve that problem? That means you're concluding it's really a political protest then? Isn't that a pretty strong, rational reason for everyone else to actively ignore the protesters in that case? Rather than "show a little more compassion" for something they're not protesting about?
Most people who actually work for a living have probably worked while ill at least once in order to keep the paycheck coming for their family. They do not perceive the "risk of dying" as deadly as you do.
And it's not only about the paycheck/stimulus check. Its also about going out to eat, going to the movies, enjoying life. A stimulus check doesn't compensate for this.
Fair enough. But if "earning a living" includes unprecedented risk to their community then priorities may need to be reconsidered. During world wars great sacrifices were made for the greater good, even when it disrupted ones plans for "earning a living".
Many people in the US want to be alive rather than dead. We're not talking perma-welfare for all non-billionaires.
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.
I'd posit it's the business owners who feel like they want to earn a living, not a small number of them by forcing their employees to come to work and create value for them. The vast majority of people in the US don't own a business, they work for a wage, or are living off retirement. I'd be interested to see the breakdown of people who don't support the lockdown vs the people who own a business that's been closed. I'd imagine there would be a strong corollary.
Wanted to reply to your response - the 1200 USD suppliment payment per person MIGHT pay for one months' costs. The US is oging on the third month of shutdown. The only way for many to survive IS to go back to work.
In addition, for the most part, folks in the US want to return to work. The vast majority find pride and comfort in work, even if they bitch about. They know eventually the payouts will come back out of their pocket.
The mixed signals from the CDC and governmental agencies add to the confusion (everything is fine/stay inside until a vaccine is available, don't wear masks/cover up you face once you step outside, etc.) only add to the feeling the government really dosn't have a clue.
> Wanted to reply to your response - the 1200 USD suppliment payment per person MIGHT pay for one months' costs. The US is oging on the third month of shutdown. The only way for many to survive IS to go back to work.
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"?
If the country has shelter in place orders, transportation has ground to a halt, and everyone is economically challenged, how would they assemble in DC to protest at the Capital Building? This is where you would have to protest for additional economic relief from the federal government.
I would not be opposed to constituents showing up at the personal homes of Congressional representatives to protest, but that requires resources as well.
You don't need to show up in front of the US Congress to protest. Thankfully if there's one thing the US knows how to do, it's for people to protest wherever they find standing room, and still get their attention. I'm not sure about you but I vividly recall this happening during Occupy Wall Street. People protested (even overnight) in all sorts of settings around the country that had no obvious relevance to Washington (or NYC).
Yes, it's very funny isn't it? OWS wasn't about an emergency, it was about a long-term chronic problem with no obvious immediate solution everybody could agree on. OWS also wasn't in the middle of a pandemic demanding something Congress had already, practically unanimously done in a heartbeat. So funny that it didn't result in any legislation.
Maybe because the protesters don't want handouts from agencies which have done a very poor job dispersing said handouts already.
I can go to a superstore which is deemed essential because it sells groceries and buy all sorts of items that specialty stores aren't able to sell me because they're closed. any member of the public can enter these superstores with no screening whatsoever. The small business owners would screen customers much more effectively than a large store would.
It's almost like we've taken steps that are arbitrary in nature and aren't actually scientifically valid because we don't have enough data on this virus and how it actually spreads. these arbitrary measures are then doubled down upon by the local governments in the name of preserving their authority and looking good to the press.
what really bugs me is the level of certainty that people seem to have about this. I'm coming from a position of uncertainty. Anyone being honest right now is doing the same.
Look at your comment: you are absolutely certain that a dubious at best chance of economic survival for small businesses is being traded against a certain chance of a public health crisis. I don't think you're being honest with yourself with a level of certainty like that. You're just like the rest of us flying blind, but you are just positive that you are right and that businesses should be closed to support your preconceived notions.
It's real easy to do that when you have a job that allows you to work remotely. It's not costing you anything just let those Walmart shopping losers go out and deal with the unemployment system. In the meantime a percentage of all of our tax dollars goes to paying off interest on the national debt and that percentage is going to have to increase as a result of this.
I'm not a moron or a science denier. I'm fine with taking on debt to the degree necessary to maximize public health. But there are multiple dimensions to public health not just this virus. My brother's business is in jeopardy and it was growing fast before this pandemic hit. Now I'm deeply concerned that he's going to fall back to an addiction that he beat 10 years ago. That's a tiny story that represents something that's going to happen in this country when young people who would otherwise be unaffected by the virus or going to suffer economic calamity.
By the way my brother always voted Democratic. Due to the false partisan positioning of opening versus reopening pushed by the media, he is now never going to vote Democrat again and plans to vote for Trump in November. He voted for Clinton last time think about that.
In the meantime people on keyboards who were going to vote for Biden anyway are now pushing policies that are going to hand this election to Trump. Maybe the elderly will carry Biden since many appear to be switching their votes. But when they're dead in a few years the young people who have lost their businesses will still be voting. It's not going to go well.
I can't tell if you're ranting or just upset at all this or at the fact that HNers commenting are on topics that you feel they're disconnected from (though I'm sorry about your family's situation), but your reply is quite incoherent. I can't reply to every point, but I can't even make sense of the fact that you're calling me out for being so certain that reopening proposal comes with a lot of... uncertainty in giving people their income? Especially compared to just handing them money? So your position is I should be less confident in the uncertainty? Because you yourself are absolutely certain about... the uncertainty? What?
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!
Sorry if I came off as incoherent. I'm definitely tired of seeing keyboard warriors comment on things that they are obviously not connected to.
"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. "
Yes, you are 100% correct, and I appreciate you taking a charitable view of my comment.
The issue I see here is that the 200 countries we can observe provide a massive stream of data that then gets applied through a tribal filter.
Those who advocate for continued, strict shutdowns look at Sweden and compare it to Finland/Norway negatively. Those who advocate for moderated, easing shutdowns for economy look at Sweden and compare it to other countries with internationally connected economies in Europe in a positive framing.
I see this constantly playing out, with endless justifications/explanations for why "I'm still right."
"They had more testing, and they are better people and can be trusted to wear masks, so no, we're not like South Korea"
"The Swedes are culturally less individualist, and can be trusted more"
"Georgia and Texas are going to be disasters. It hasn't been a full 2 weeks, but just wait, the incubation period..."
The cost of the shelter in place order is doing more harm than good. When the dust settles, I am convinced that more people will have died as a result.
I'm on pretty solid ground here. The costs of poverty and economic collapse are arguably better researched than pandemics.
And it is hard not to be disgusted by the attitude of many people on HN, who are least affected by this.
Having some relatives in that part of the country, I would compare this to the dust bowl. A complete economic collapse that will over the next year require millions of people to flee to cities, as they have absolutely nothing left. What are people supposed to do when every single business has gone from their town?
But people here like to sneer at these "stupid rednecks" that are clearly not as smart as us, right?
> When the dust settles, I am convinced that more people will have died as a result. I'm on pretty solid ground here.
> But people here like to sneer at these "stupid rednecks" that are clearly not as smart as us, right?
Wow. You're putting a lot of words in people's mouths.
That's also quite a bit coming from someone who just claimed such confidence in his own prediction of the future. I assume this means you're more of an expert in this than the ones in the government we're all familiar with and who are predicting the opposite?
But in case you're actually interested in what actual experts (not me) think about the whole "minimizing harm" thing, you might enjoy reading/listening to this, which evaluates at what point it's worth shutting down the economy. It might shake your solid ground: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
"Economic collapse" is, one, overstated, and two, not likely with functioning economic policy. The answer to this one really is actually simple. Just write the checks. "But but but debt--" Debt is denominated in our own currency and it's the reserve currency of the world, that debt is fucking fictional. Just write the checks. "But but but undeserving poors--" No. Just write the checks.
I realize, of course, I am shouting into the wind. I understand that it isn't actually about the economically underprivileged, because we'd write the checks. And it isn't actually about the Small Business Owner--service industry small business owner checking in, doing fine, thanks--being threatened, because we'd write the checks. It's about something much darker and much more mendacious and the rhetoric that is so readily adopted by useful idiots who want their haircuts or whatever.
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.
And that is the downfall of civic society before all else.
I'm not even against these checks, but as far as the debt concern goes: doesn't it require paying interest? At which point when you can't pay the interest, you'll have to print money, resulting in massive inflation? I never understood why people say it's fictional. Is it somehow fictional under the assumption of playing by the rules? Or under the assumption that when the US is demanded to pay it'll just say "make me" and then erase the debt that way?
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that these debts do not begin at "fictional" and go from there (and this is a viewpoint I don't personally hold, so long as reserves are denominated in the U.S. dollar its motion and not the numbers on a balance sheet are what actually matter): spending creates money, taxes destroy money. If you're worried about inflation, tax better. Which is not merely "higher", but involves effectively targeting those taxes too for more returns.
This is a generality and of course it's more nuanced than just this, but "spend in bad times, tax in good times" is a reasonable place to start. Where we have problems is that the "tax in good times" side of this keeps getting dropped for one reason or another. Cynically, I notice that this "for one reason or another" coincides strongly with a particular political party being elected once good times are back so that they can proceed to drive it off the nearest hillside yet again and somehow blame "government" for it.
> If you're worried about inflation, tax better. Which is not merely "higher", but involves effectively targeting those taxes too for more returns.
I mean, I'm not arguing about how to avoid inflation. My question is about the debt being fictional. When you say "debt is fictional" that means that you can rack it up endlessly without consequences, but this clearly means there are consequences that you have to mitigate in another way. To argue that it's fictional you'd need to argue those problems don't come up at all. Otherwise you might as well say heart attacks are fictional because we can treat them, snake bites are fictional because we can treat them, etc...
" "But but but undeserving poors--" No. Just write the checks."
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.
The shelter in place order mostly hits around the margins. Most people are staying home on their own volition - government orders notwithstanding. I started staying home a few weeks before the official lockdown went into effect.
The economy was going to collapse no matter what - that's not because of government giving an order to stay home, it's because the reality is that the virus infects everyone and leads to horrific health deterioration. Furthermore, our government has provided our economy nearly zero safety net to account for something like this.
Pandemics are scary. Suffering severe health deterioration or maybe even dying are existentially scary. No amount of shutting our ears and screaming "HOAX!" is going to change how most people view the risk - it only increases the chaos and lengthens the crisis. You want the economy to come back? Then figure out how to make people feel safe, which means getting rid of the virus, because no amount of weird charts or saying "it's just the flu" is going to work now that people realize how bad it really is. Ignoring the problem isn't a solution.
Agreed, I already cancelled my business travel two weeks before our state issued its first guidance on WFH. OpenTable's data showed the significant drop in reservations weeks before official orders as well.
In an ideal world, the shelter-in-place orders would have done a few things:
- Slowed the spread of the virus, so it won't overwhelm the capacity of a nation's healthcare system
- Build up testing and tracing capacity to track future spread.
In the US, the SIP orders are an overwhelming success on the first point, and cases are slowly starting to drop off.
On the second point, the US is still far, far behind on testing. For a nation the size of the US, there needs to be something on the order of 2 million tests per day, compared to the the current capacity of roughly 300,000. I cannot overstate how important this testing failure is; without it, businesses will be closed for longer, more jobs will be lost permanently, and the citizens get frustrated that they're stuck at home without any income.
If there was adequate testing capacity, businesses could reopen with precautions, and the government could sustainably offer benefits to those testing positive so they can afford to stay home and not spread the virus any further. If there isn't adequate testing capacity, even with precautions, future waves are more likely, and any of those waves can overwhelm the healthcare system.
People's basic survival needs have been threatened before this when they would get laid off.
The entire rust belt became a cesspool of opiate and heroin addicts and no one cared when companies moved manufacturing offshore. No one cared that healthcare is tied to jobs.
I've talked to a lot of people who said yea I need to work, but I don't WANT to work, I have to. And that is not a failure of the lockdown. it is a failure of this very nation to take care of its own so that the rich can get richer.
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.
Perhaps the wording is a bit harsh - not everywhere is a cesspool, a lot of places have bounced back, but the rust belt is particularly bad in area of opioid abuse - that is fact and very accurate.
People still want to live in those locations, evidenced by the fact that there are still people living there and getting along ok. Maybe you're a doctor and want to work at one of the two best hospitals on the planet, then you'd move to Cleveland, for example. Maybe you want to go to the #1 CS program on the planet, so you go to CMU.
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.
Honestly, given this and your other replies, it just seems you have an axe to grind, because you're essentially agreeing with my point: none of the regulators, wall-street investors, or people clamoring for the economy to reopen cared when the manufacturing industries collapsed here. And now all of a sudden, they care about people working? They didn't back then. They do now because THEIR pocket books are hurting.
I'm not from the valley - born and raised, and live currently, in Pittsburgh. My father was a steel worker, my grandfather on one side an ironworker, the other a steelworker as well. I've seen the downfall, and some of the comeback, and it's a great place - but there are so many areas that are really bad and haven't recovered, and you say "people still live there" - well, look at their population 50 years ago, and try living there now. Because if you did, your tune would damn well change in 5 minutes.
My axe to grind is with people calling other parts of the country 'cesspools'. It's a terrible mentality to have, and untrue. I'll also add that even though lots of people have left some of these cities, they're still getting along just fine.
You don't have to be the size of Chicago to be successful.
That's false compassion. What you're effectively arguing is for those people to increase their family's exposure in a last-ditch attempt to save their business (and probably still lose it anyway), rather than directly addressing the economic problems facing them.
The cognitive dissonance comes about because it's not very American to expect or ask for help. Even though we're mainly in this position because the government itself mismanaged economic policy for decades, resulting in us being collectively overleveraged.
Sweden has 342 COVID deaths per million. The US has 254 deaths per million. Germany is doing better, but the rest of Western Europe has much higher rates of death than the US.
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.
Norway and Sweden are in other measures very similar countries. We lie right next to each other, we have quite similar political environment etc. Our societies are in general quite similar. We had a very different response to the corona virus though.
I'm completely aware that there are different countries in Europe that have different strategies for containing this thing. But so do the states in the US.
But New York has over 1400 COVID deaths per million [1]. New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachussets are all more than double of Sweden's deaths per million, and still climbing steadily. The US only looks good next to Sweden because there are big areas of the country that are way more spread out.
I think each area can and should take the local situation into account. My understanding (as an American living in the UK) was that they are doing so, to a large extent. From what I can tell from friends and relatives on FB, restrictions in Michigan came on hard and strong after being probably one of the worst hit early on; restrictions in Ohio started earlier and never got as tough. The anti-lockdown side of my FB feed seems to think that South Dakota never had much of a lockdown to speak of at all.
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.
As I keep saying, comparing to "Europe" is almost meaningless because of the diversity of governments and cultures. It may also be unreasonable to talk of the US as a whole in this case.
Infections are inherently locally clustered. There seem to be all sorts of factors affecting spread, and there's no clear picture of what they are. Eastern Europe isn't very heavily affected and nobody seems to know why. Belgium is a disaster; why?
The UK made a number of big mistakes; the first cases were appearing at the end of February, but the Cheltenham Festival still went ahead in mid-March putting 250,000 people close to each other. We're now relaxing the lockdown and putting people back on packed public transport despite still having thousands of new cases per day.
In a month's time, the best handling countries will be almost entirely out of lockdown with weekly COVID deaths below 10. The worst handling countries will still have lockdown and weekly deaths in the hundreds. It looks like that will include the UK and New York state.
Genuine question: how will these countries keep deaths below 10 a week while being completely out of lockdown? Doesn't that rely on a treatment or vaccine?
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.
Why do you compare almost an entire continent to one country ? why not compare Sweden to NYC ?
Sweden is handling it, not great but not terrible and so is the US and many other countries.
On top of that there is a lot that we don't understand, for example why do many Mediterranean countries has low death rate even though the sick count is not low ?
Wisconsin has a large Swedish immigrant population (immigrants 5 generations ago, not first generation), so that rules out genetic factors to a small extent.
If we're talking about efficacy of government lockdown policies, universal healthcare, etc., then we absolutely should compare. And a cursory glance at the data suggests that government lockdown policies have minimal effect on the spread of the virus, there seems to be little to no correlation between severity of lockdown and cases/deaths
That’s a really weird conclusion to draw looking at what’s happened globally and in local pockets. Look at Singapore and South Korea — full lockdown and great control, and then outbreaks in places where the lockdown put people in close quarters (immigrant labor in Singapore) orwhen restrictions were lifted (bars in South Korea). Look at Wuhan itself, where it took time to establish a lockdown and contact tracing, then they got control of the situation and had better outcomes, then a secondary wave once they lifted restrictions. Look at Italy, where the lockdown means Northern Italy has had a very different experience from the rest of the country. Sweden has had a mostly voluntary lockdown and high death rates compared to the rest of Europe and other very similar countries (Norway, Denmark, Finland) have had stricter lockdowns and better numbers.
Also let’s look at the fundamentals. This virus is spread through contact with viral laden particles, either in an aerosol or on a surface. It is obvious that to get the disease you need to come into contact with the virus. Limit contacts and you limit exposure, this is so basic I hesitate to call it science.
You have a tough row to hoe if you’re going to try and prove no correlation between lockdowns and cases.
The data is here [1], that's [2] Europe's correlation between death rate and restriction and that's [3] worldwide (I didn't collect the data nor did the analysis)
Sorry, but there is so much confounding an analysis of this sort that I can take a 30s look at it and blow holes a mile wide through it. For instance, there is no correction in there for density. There is also the fundamental problem of attributing cause and effect -- if the lockdowns reduce transmission, then no correlation in the outcomes could be exactly your goal. Put another way, I'd like NYC to have the same case load per capita as rural Utah. If lockdowns achieve that, you would evidentially tell me that rural Utah, with no lockdown, is the same as NYC and therefore the lockdown was useless. That is not a sound analysis.
The way to do an analysis of this sort is to find very tightly constrained natural experiments. Sweden and Norway (or Sweden and Finland) is an interesting example. Germany and Austria (picking them randomly, I don't know how well-coordinated their lockdown policies are). Or you can pick city twins, like NYC and Mexico City and compare the results each got from their approach.
IOW, in order to say something meaningful about effect of lockdowns, you have to go narrow, not broad.
The cases/deaths per million stats by country (and by state in the US) are everywhere. The US is doing decent compared to most of Western Europe, especially Italy and Spain. Though Germany is doing far better than the US. Sweden isn't taking any significant measures to restrict their populace and while they're doing worse than their neighbors like Norway, they're still better than a lot of Europe.
> 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.
Do you mind showing your work? What do the statistics say about Europe vs. US? I see you mentioned Sweden and Germany but Europe has many more countries than those two.
I am simply stating there are more deaths in Europe than in the US. I can prove that with only 3 countries. Please don't interpret my statement as a comment on each individual country. There seems to be miscommunication here.
You picked a handful of countries that fit your argument and called them Europe. Italy, Spain and UK aren't "Europe" just like California, NY and Florida aren't "The United States of America".
Sort by deaths/1M. You’ll see the US doing better than UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, etc.
And in absolute terms, there’s still more cases and deaths in Europe as a whole (I find it funny that when it comes to GDP, we like to think of Europe as “United States of Europe”, but when talking about corona deaths, not so much).
You have to take into account that Europe is much more densely and uniformly populated than the United States, and had outbreaks start earlier than the US.
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.
> You have to take into account that Europe is much more densely and uniformly populated than the United States, and had outbreaks start earlier than the US.
Now take into account that these countries have supposedly superior healthcare systems, a healthier population, and leaders not named Trump. I’d say that negates those factors.
Why is it so difficult to stick with the same terms and definitions? Just in this thread Europe has been defined in like five different ways, all of which are various subsets, presumably picked to suit each argument as needed.
Those numbers shouldn't be taken at face value and should certainly not be compared. For example, here in Belgium every death at a nursing home is counted as a Corona casualty. Which increases the death by Corona massively in comparison with a country not doing that.
> For example, here in Belgium every death at a nursing home is counted as a Corona casualty. Which increases the death by Corona massively in comparison with a country not doing that.
New York City recently reclassified 3K+ deaths as “likely” due to Covid, despite none of those people having been tested. And our CDC’s guidelines state that anyone who died WITH Covid is assumed to have died FROM Covid. I would say we’re definitely not being conservative with the reporting here...
I mean, put ALL European countries together and there’s way more deaths in total than the US, and I suspect the deaths/1M figure is very similar if not slightly higher than the US. Slice it however you want, the US is not doing that poorly relative to its peers in Europe.
Yep. But Sweden is run by an ultra leftist government, so if course it is not criticised.
But the same lies about "the US is doing worse" are told here in Europe as well. Just need to look to the stats, do the sum, and suddenly the US and EU are about the same.
Oh well, modern journalism is about clicks, not facts, unfortunately.
Care to be any more specific? Last I checked Sweden has been ruled by the the Social Democrats for most of the 20th century, yet Sweden still has a working capitalist economy and more billionaires per capita than the United States.
But if anything the problem with German Social Democrats (and European left-wing parties in general) is that they've moved too far away from left-wing politics and more towards a neo-liberal financial policy.
I don't see how you can call that ultra leftist. For me that would be introducing a planned economy.
I have absolutely read articles, in the NY Times, comparing Sweden’s approach to other countries. Initially they were positive and then they turned negative when the death rates started climbing.
It's not much of a chasm, trust me. Once the ends justify the means, the state can build up in a couple decades to doing basically anything. It didn't take long in Venezuela.
Sweden is not all roses in terms of personal liberty either. You must send your children to public schools, at the risk of losing them; even during a pandemic. In the United States, home schooling is an option if you do not want to send your children to public schools.
First, no, you don't have to send your child to a public school. There are private schools to choose from. A proper education is a right in Sweden, and unfortunately, so many parents do a poor job at homeschooling that it isn't feasible and puts the person at a lifelong disadvantage.
It is a shame that we (Americans) stand for this - the right for a parent to under-educate or mis-educate their children. If one allows for homeschool, there should be robust oversight, which in most states, there isn't.
I grew up in Virginia, and any of the home schooled kids were hyper religious and profoundly ignorant.
I bumped into a few of them at a community college after I got out of the military. The USMC indoc'd me hard with the groupthink, and that took a while to get past, but I could at least do high school Trig and had basic history. I remember one girl who didn't believe the Holy Roman Empire existed and despite her extensively Christian background, didn't know a damn thing about the Crusades.
I knew one family that homeschooled to different degrees: The oldest was until 8/9th grade, though the younger ones went to public school sooner. They weren't bad off, though obviously conservative and pretty much any friends were also homeschooled or were through church or boy scouts. The oldest really had issues adjusting to the other students.
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.
many (ie, as an absolute number) parents may do a poor job of homeschooling, but I don't think this is enough to condemn the practice overall. although an imperfect measure, american homeschooled students actually have significantly higher average scores on standardized tests than public school students.
If a decent percentage do poorly (15-25%), then it is enough to condemn the practice overall - at least in its current form. There aren't nearly enough controls to eliminate this sort of thing, and I think it is probably more expensive to do so. I also think that - apart from test scores - these kids are less likely to be forced to deal with folks different from themselves and a bit less likely to be introduced to concepts their parents disagree with.
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.
> “ also think that - apart from test scores - these kids are less likely to be forced to deal with folks different from themselves and a bit less likely to be introduced to concepts their parents disagree with.”
This is precisely why “homeschooling” is so dangerous.
It is also precisely WHY the majority of Americans who “homeschool” chose to do it. It is usually religious families, and they explicitly do it to isolate and “protect” their children from outside influences.
this is certainly the stereotype, but do you have any data to support this? none of the broad studies I can find collected info on religious affiliation (let alone how seriously the family actually takes it). anecdotally, the homeschooled children I know had somewhat eccentric atheist/agnostic parents.
> If a decent percentage do poorly (15-25%), then it is enough to condemn the practice overall - at least in its current form. There aren't nearly enough controls to eliminate this sort of thing, and I think it is probably more expensive to do so. I also think that - apart from test scores - these kids are less likely to be forced to deal with folks different from themselves and a bit less likely to be introduced to concepts their parents disagree with.
as always, the relevant question is "compared to what?". lots of american public school systems are still deeply segregated and produce astonishingly poor outcomes for their students. the part about being exposed to concepts parents disagree with is a good point, but certain homogeneous christian communities have had some success getting divine creation presented at least side-by-side with evolution (see "teach the controversy"). many public schools still give very watered down versions of slavery and dealings with native americans as well. the high school I went to (in an east coast city and not too long ago) only covered abstinence in sex ed. we were never taught about condoms or other contraceptives. the potential for propaganda in public schools is the same, just at scale. in a democratic system, it's hard to teach things that parents don't want. I guess the most extreme views probably cancel out a bit as you scale up the system, but this has the tradeoff of baking in the status quo even more thoroughly.
implemented correctly, I don't think oversight and coordination would be a bad idea (although if it worked, we might consider applying it to our public/private/charter schools as well). I don't agree that all homeschooling should be banned until such measures are in place.
As seen from Switzerland, yours is the typical "us vs them" US reaction the OC was complaining about. The world is not only US and China and putting it in a black or white setup ignores other hundreds of governments, hundreds of countries and hundreds of approaches to pandemic and life in general.
I feel like there are a lot of pandemic relevant factors that are pretty different. 25m people vs 300m. Island nation, less international travelers, very different climate during the opposite season.
a) Is Canada and Mexico affecting or is somehow responsible for the disastrous way that the US is handling COVID-19 ? Otherwise it’s a moot point.
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.
Similar in what ways? Aus is an island country whose societal composition and Constitutional rights are nothing like ours. I wouldn't say they're very similar at all.
I'd say they are pretty similar in most respects. But geography is a big difference that is relevant to Covid-19.
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.
Aus is an island. The US boarders two countries and has an illegal smuggling problem. The size-to-population isn't even remotely similar, and neither are the rights allowed to the citizens.
Why don't you choose one that has approximately the same population and same population density -- that's why choosing an individual U.S. state might be a better choice because the U.S. is large and has a wide range of population densities.
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.
Australia has its seasons shifted by half a year, so even if Australia had taken similar measures, I'd expect them to have a lot lower transmission rates because respiratory disease peak in winter.
https://www.mja.com.au/sites/default/files/issues/210_10/mja...
Because a large number of those cases are NYC, which is already on the downside of its curve by a considerable degree, while the US as a whole is still trending upward, meaning that the country outside of NYC is doing pretty poorly.
Sadly people can’t look past the big absolute number of deaths and attach proper context to it. Like deaths per million, or ignoring that ~half of cases and deaths are restricted to a single metropolitan area.
If it makes you feel any better, the lockdowns probably don't matter in the limit.
1) Individual behavior changed prior to the lockdowns (people don't want to die)
2) The government appears generally too incompetent to figure out how to lower R0 low enough to eradicate the virus
3) Since everyone can see that the govt is fucking this up, the marginal utility of hard lockdowns becomes less than the marginal pain. Some people will socialize, go to restaurants, etc. but...
4) It probably won't be more than a 50-75% return to normality because people don't want to die, and risk preferences vary so some will remain cautious. This will, crush small businesses, restaurants, bars, leisure, etc.
So since the govt is too incompetent to bring the virus to actual 0, then formal lockdowns don't matter because you're not getting rid of the virus anyway and raising them doesn't matter much either, because you're not going back to normal.
Points #1 and #4 are evident in states who have already re-opened for business: Restaurants are seeing 80% reduction regarding in-room dining year over year, SIP orders being lifted be damned.
Point #1 was reinforced by looking at OpenTable data as well. de Blasio told people to go to restaurants, and on that same day he urged people to congregate in close quarters, reservations were down 34% year over year and had been trending down for 2 weeks.
People aren't stupid despite what the media reports, picking out groups of people to prove a point they want to push.
Furthermore, the lockdowns moved the Overton window for a lot of people, hammering it in their head that they need to practice social distancing. It's not likely going to get any stronger with government-mandated half-measure lockdowns continuing.
Your 2nd and 3rd points illustrate the cultural problem the parent comment mentioned. The “the government is incompetent” trope contributes to the distrust that’s making it harder to deal with the virus.
Like when you say the government is fucking things up, what are talking about here. Federal, state, city level? Because they each have approached the pandemic very differently and it’s unfair to put them all under the same umbrella. I’m pretty happy with the way my local government has responded. It hasn’t been perfect, but I also don’t expect them to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic without hiccups.
I know at least here in the US it’s common to paint “the government” as incompetent, and overpaid. But when parts of the population are angrily protesting that they can’t get haircuts and flying to FL to party during spring break, it’s no wonder it hasn’t been easy to get this under control. I don’t envy the positions of some government officials.
That's just an irrational position. Of course it matters as now companies can tell workers to come or be fired. All irresponsible people can go out, spread the virus further, overwhelm healthcare and kill thousands more.
And the way it is done just showd how the US is going bananas:
> Republicans who brought the lawsuit had asked the justices to side with them but to stay their ruling for about a week so legislators and Evers could work out a new plan to deal with the pandemic.
> The justices declined to do that and had their ruling take effect immediately. ...
> With no COVID-19 policies in place, bars, restaurants and concert halls are allowed to reopen — unless local officials implement their own restrictions. That raises the prospect of a patchwork of policies, with rules varying significantly from one county to the next.
"The government appears generally too incompetent to figure out how to lower R0 low enough to eradicate the virus"
There is no universe where that was ever going to happen absent herd immunity. It was never a declared goal by any major government and I doubt you could find a single quote from a qualified professional suggesting that is a realistic approach.
There's a lockdowns-are-destroying-America echo chamber and a republicans-are-killing-people echo chamber. These are probably both mostly wrong, but on the plus side things must be getting better because we're back to tribalism.
Here is what I don't understand. (I seriously don't, and would honestly appreciate some explanations or ideas. And keep in mind I am 100% on board with following any and all recommendations of the CDC.) When we were all sent to sit at home back in March, the word was "flatten the curve." The idea was that containment was no longer an option, as declared by the CDC/WHO. Epidemiologists were predicting that somewhere between 40% and 70% of the world's population were going to catch COVID19, at one point or another.
So the paramount need was to ensure that the health systems did not get overrun. We socially distance and stay at home until we're sure the health systems are in the clear, and then we return to some mixed approximation to 'normal,' with the understanding we'd probably have to return a few weeks at a time at some points in the future as case counts climbed again.
But at some point, almost every one I know has switched to believing that the real goal is eradication, that we need to be extremely socially distanced until case counts are near zero, or until a vaccine arrives. People now seem terrified at the thought of catching it, despite having no risk factors. What I don't understand is why this switch occurred. I think we have been seeing a lot of sensationalized headlines and statements from scientists taken out of context somewhat, but I don't think that in and of itself is enough to explain the switch.
Since about early March, we have known or strongly believed that the virus was mostly harmless to most people, with the extreme vast majority of serious cases occurring in people with high risks factors. So I have trouble understanding the extreme pushback against moderate reopening I am seeing out of a lot of people I know. People say "but we need to keep case counts low." Yes, I agree, but I don't know how in the world we get them to zero. Containment was broken. If we're going to be angry, let's be angry about the fact that nothing was done to attempt full containment until it was far too late, not the fact that places are ready to fulfill the statements they made in March.
We can't even count on a vaccine to ever come, because there are issues with some coronavirus vaccines. For instance, the vaccine for SARS become not recommended after research showed that, while it prevented future infections from SARS, it made infections from other coronaviruses more damaging. The last thing we want to do is rush a vaccine through human trials that ends up causing more harm than good, but that's what's going to happen if we believe we're all trapped in our houses until one comes.
Anyways, I'm just not sure where the switch happened. Why are so many people I know now frantically talking about how they need to stay home through September or later, after being told just a mere 2 months ago that the goal was curve-flattening? In most areas in the US, it seems the curve has been flattened. Where I live (a mid-sized city), the health system was never remotely close to being stressed. Yes, case counts will increase if you reopen a bit, but remember, 40%-70% of the pop is going to catch it at some point. Those people are going to catch it whether they catch it now, or six months from now.
If you can't tell from my comment, I think (as is usually the case) the right approach sits directly in between the "open now" and "keep everything shut down" camps. The virus is an extremely serious event, a terrible tragedy, and one that we need to ensure we keep from overwhelming hospitals. But where hospitals are not in any danger of being overwhelmed, I just don't know what good having everyone indefinitely locked at home is doing. Taking what seem to be unreasonably conservative stances now does not fix the bullshit actions by our governments 3 months ago; that ship is gone.
There is a Presidential election in six months. That means there is a major element of politics in everything that happens between now and then.
The incumbent candidate wants to reopen. Because the election is near, it's especially important for the other side to portray whatever he does as wrong and incompetent and life-threatening. So you then have a major political apparatus pushing the argument that reopening is dangerous and publicizing any instance of any authority saying anything negative about it. They don't benefit from a nuanced or moderate position.
Some of the people you hear pushing this are the partisans themselves, but most of them are just the people who only listen to the media from one side and then repeat what they're told. Meanwhile if you listen to the President the economy is doing great and everything is fine and we'll all be back to normal in a month or two.
The truth is, as always, complicated, and somewhere in the middle.
> The incumbent candidate wants to reopen. Because the election is near, it's especially important for the other side to portray whatever he does as wrong and incompetent and life-threatening. So you then have a major political apparatus pushing the argument that reopening is dangerous and publicizing any instance of any authority saying anything negative about it. They don't benefit from a nuanced or moderate position.
This same debate is happening in every country in the world, including ones that don't have an election in six months.
So, no, this is not just a bunch of political wankery that's aimed at making Orange Man look bad. It's a very clear consequence of what the two parties value.
> This same debate is happening in every country in the world, including ones that don't have an election in six months.
They get CNN in more than 200 countries.
> It's a very clear consequence of what the two parties value.
So it's normal for the Democrats to be the conservative party banging the "save American lives at all costs" drum and the Republicans to be the ones worried about blue collar workers and people living paycheck to paycheck, is that it?
The democrats have always banged that drum on domestic issues, and the republicans have always prioritized businesses over public and worker safety, so, yes?
> The democrats have always banged that drum on domestic issues
So the Democrats are usually the ones in favor of authoritarian War on Drugs measures to prevent domestic overdose deaths? Mandatory employee drug testing? Having the police arrest inconvenient/"unsanitary" protesters?
> the republicans have always prioritized businesses over public and worker safety
Walmart, Pfizer and Netflix are doing fine. The airlines are screwed, but that's already done, they can't go bankrupt twice at once and people aren't going to want to get on a plane for recreational purposes anytime soon even if we reopen.
It's workers who are suffering the most from continuing to not have a paycheck. If you look at what labor unions are saying, it's more along the lines of "here's how we think we should reopen" and not "we don't want to reopen" -- is it normal for Republicans and labor unions to be on the same page?
All of the stupid, cynical partisan bullshit that America's press comes up with to try and kick Trump out of office is spilling over to other countries and screwing up our ideas about our coronavirus responses, though. For example, early on the CDC screwed up its coronavirus test, delaying the rollout of wider testing. The press saw blood and started blaming all the American deaths on the Trump administration failing to test for coronavirus. The trouble is, this was fixed some months ago, so in order to keep this narrative going publications like the New York Times took increasingly massive levels of testing that no country had managed, such as testing everyone with symptoms or testing 10% of the population a day, and made them sound like things all countries had achieved but the US had missed due to Trump. This worked on a massive scale - the narrative spread, and people in every Western country became convinced that their government is failing at coronavirus testing compared to the rest of the work due to not being able to manage those things, and that it was killing people.
I even had a discussion with a couple of Germans on here the other day who were convinced their coronavirus testing was abysmal, despite them having one of the biggest programs out there and being the country that the US and UK media currently point to in order to convince us that our governments are failing on testing.
To make matters even more stupid, the US actually passed mass testing success story South Korea - the country which supposedly proves all those deaths could be avoided if you just had proper coronavirus testing - quite some time ago, and people didn't realize because the media carefully avoided updating people's beliefs since this changed. I keep seeing people point to the US supposedly having less per-capita testing than South Korea in HN comments as proof they should be able to do better, even now. Astoundingly, when Trump debunked this widespread, false belief in a recent press conference, this is how the New York Times summed it up in a headline "Trump Misrepresents Testing Record". (The "misrepresentation" was that even though what he said was true it wasn't true two months ago, and also the US hadn't beaten every single country on the planet on coronavirus testing. Seriously.)
Also, the sides certainly aren't the same in all countries when it comes to the legal legitimacy of lockdowns. For example, in the UK our right-wing party is currently in power, which means that arguments that their lockdown rules are illegitimate and exceed their powers mostly come from supporters of the other, left-wing party. The justifications for why they're exceeding their powers actually look similar in many ways to the ones in this lawsuit.
> For example, in the UK our right-wing party is currently in power, which means that arguments that their lockdown rules are illegitimate and exceed their powers mostly come from supporters of the other, left-wing party. The justifications for why they're exceeding their powers actually look similar in many ways to the ones in this lawsuit.
Not convinced you’ve even been following British politics then. The main criticism coming from Starmer is about late decision making and inaction. I haven’t heard anything about abuse of powers or a clamour to reopen from them.
Indeed British [and especially English] politics is indeed a good example of the lockdown itself being depoliticised. The UK politicians who want to end the lockdown sooner rather than later sit on the right of Johnson's party, so they make their arguments quietly, in economic terms, and mostly behind closed doors. Johnson's natural political instincts might be sympathetic to them, but he's also sympathetic to the arguments of his scientists against opening up. The left overwhelmingly supports the principle of a lockdown, so their criticisms of Johnson focus on the details of his decision making and communication. Public support for the lockdown isn't as universal as political support for some sort of lockdown, but only a handful of people turned up to London's anti-lockdown protests and nobody influential saw any political benefit to encouraging them.
As I said, this is mostly coming from supporters of the party. Though Starmer has been pushing for firm reopening plans sooner than is perhaps advisable, he has indeed mostly been doing risk-free back-seat driving that demonstrates how much easier life is when you don't have to actually pull of the things you're calling for. (For example, his latest thing is expecting the government to have information on what exactly is causing excess deaths that actual scientific experts reckon they won't be able to pin down any time soon.)
I think you're missing a few aspects that explain the change in attitude pretty well:
- While most people have almost nothing to fear personally from this virus, the vast majority of people have close ones that do have a lot to fear from the virus
- We have all found out since March, and took to heart, that you may get the virus, feel well, pass it on to loved ones who are at risk, and only later start having ANY symptoms
- the time required until 40-70% of the population will catch this virus while never having so much people infected that hospitals are overwhelmed is YEARS - the popular flatten the curve article omitted this little piece of math
- and obviously, everyone was probably pretty moved by the scenes from Italy and Spain, which brought it much closer to home than similar scenes in China or Iran ever could
So overall, most people are understandably reluctant to go on vacations or visit too many restaurants and concerts, and this will likely continue for a good long time. It is going to be devastating to these industries, but it's going to help keep the curve flat, and I'm sure that we'll see plenty stimulus packages in the months to come. Keeping things forcefully shut down is not going to help in places that are in good shape. However, the alternative must still be social distancing and careful screening and perhaps even enforced quarantine for people coming from hotspots, whether internal or international.
So since March we've seen multiple countries (Korea, China, New Zealand) largely contain the virus, and start re-opening the economy. The way you do it is to get R<1 (where R is the reproduction number - the average number of people that an infected person infects). When R is smaller than 1, then you have an exponential decay curve, where there are fewer new cases each day.
The way that these countries have been able to get R<1 is a combination of social distancing, hygiene (masks), and test-trace-isolate system. So that's the endgame now. The shelter-in-place orders gets R<1, then we keep it at <1 by getting everyone to wear masks, and by getting a tracing system in place so that anyone who comes in contact with an infected person can quickly get tested and self-isolate.
That at least is my understanding, and it's been largely informed by this webpage, which I found incredibly helpful. https://ncase.me/covid-19/
A lot of people do present that understanding, but it's inaccurate. China and New Zealand don't have an R < 1 strategy; they believe that harsh lockdowns must be maintained until local transmission stops entirely. (Which is obviously infeasible for most countries at this point.)
> I think (as is usually the case) the right approach sits directly in between the "open now" and "keep everything shut down" camps.
At least in my country, there's already been a lot of complaints about repeated changes to advice and rules.
I'm pretty sure the government's science advisers would ideally like to do a gradual, multi-stage re-opening with the option to roll things back if they need to. You know, reopen some schools next month with teachers under the age of 45, if death rates rise shut them down again, otherwise reopen more the month after, and so on.
The fear is that message is too complicated, and people who are told "here is a schedule for reopenings on a trial basis and subject to change" will hear "lockdown is over, I can finally visit my friends and loved ones" - and we'll get a second peak even worse than the first.
I think the real underlying justification for the lockdowns wasn't "we need to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed" so much as "hospitals might be overwhelmed and we need more information to see the tail risk exposure." People weren't distancing before the lockdowns because of fear of hospitals being overwhelmed, they were distancing because they did not personally want to get sick.
I agree that the goals seem to have changed. We have never contained a widespread respiratory virus without a vaccine and the fastest vaccine ever developed was Mumps and that took 4 years. I guess the best hope now is that by slowing it down, we have more time to develop better treatment options. Or maybe with how much effort is spent on vaccine development, we can develop one in a year? The optimistic estimates for vaccine development seem to put the timeframe at around a year at the earliest? Are we expecting to contain this for a year via social distancing?
"But at some point, almost every one I know has switched to believing that the real goal is eradication, that we need to be extremely socially distanced until case counts are near zero, or until a vaccine arrives. People now seem terrified at the thought of catching it, despite having no risk factors. What I don't understand is why this switch occurred."
Tribalism and politics. Edit: This comment was downvoted, which just proves my point.
The bad orange man said open up, and the responsible looking people who are good at looking serious as they stare into cameras and repeat information that they have no expertise in decided that they had to oppose him to be a voice for their viewers who didn't vote for him. (That is literally what CNN and MSNBC producers tell their on air anchors)
You, like me, will find that whenever you ask this question you will immediately be condemned as a follower of the bad orange man who cares about money more than human life.
Never mind that you didn't vote for the orange man, or that you supported the lock down to flatten the curve. You are questioning the tribe's decision. And boy do the tribal elders know how to scold.
Remember, if you don't toe the line, you are a bad person who sacrifices the poor workers to the volcano God.
Not that the tribe asked the workers what they want or need. The tribe all sit at desks for a living, and don't actually know any of the workers. But they are supremely confident that they speak for them.
Am example of the tribe at work:
I'm getting a haircut today. My governor is a Democrat. He has responsibly reopened certain kinds of businesses. Not much different than Georgia's governor. But nobody in the media talks about my state, because the narrative they have pushed is GOP are reopening, and Dems aren't. As if this is a partisan issue. It's not. It's a class issue.
Lockdown can't last forever and so countries or US states need a plan to transition away from lockdown back to a new normality.
That plan includes massive testing and tracing. It includes science and data. It includes sensible triggers for further action -- if we start seeing more infections in the community we slow down the transition to normality.
I don't know much about the US but it feels like a lot of this is really hard to do.
It's literally unprecedented as a method for trying to deal with a respiratory infection, as far as I can tell. Test and trace worked for SARS and MERS, but they were much easier diseases to contain for various reasons and didn't require massive-scale testing and tracing as a result. It is not in any way, shape, or form part of the normal playbook for dealing with a pandemic like this.
The problem is that nobody in the history of medicine have ever solved an pandemic once it left a containable area, but as most epidemics follow an bell curve you get a lot of people thinking some action or another solved the problem.
Add to that the story driven way we get out version of the truth and there is now an irresistible pressure on the politicians in charge to do something and to claim that something was effective the data be damned, and that real science is never 100% sure and tend to take years if not decade to come to any kind of conclusion.
I have to agree. Downvotes are there but they don't censor the comment outright, you still can see them (and IIRC you can still upvote or vouch if it has not died dead yet)
However I don't remember a comment that died that wasn't a crapfest.
Everybody gets downvoted sometimes, most of the times I was downvoted it was either because I failed to convey my thoughts correctly (well, sometimes I don't have the time or will to go into detail) or just ended up ranting. Opinionated comments (but worded ok) sometimes gets downvoted and that is fine.
Ever since the pandemic started to ramp up, downvotes and hidden comments did as well. I'll see more greyed out comments in a single thread these days than I used to see all day just a year or two ago. Even I've gotten into a bad habit of using it, and I'm trying to avoid it.
If a person posts something intentionally inflammatory or clearly just wants to pick a fight, the flag button works just fine.
The most ironic instance of this was in one of the free speech discussions where at one point basically every comment in the whole thread was greyed out.
Presumably because the anti-speech contingent is all too quick to downvote their opponents (consistent with their deleterious pro-censorship views), but then everyone who believes in speech sees every comment defending it greyed out, which makes them angry that their anti-censorship views are not being respected and unwilling to let the other side have an asymmetric weapon even if it goes against their principles, and the next thing you know every comment in the thread is grey.
And that's the danger of censorship. Nobody is going to let the other side do it but not them, but then everybody does it and and then what are you left with?
HN should require a reply in order to downvote, and downvoting should cause multiple lost points for the down-voter....and maybe down-votes should be publicly visible.
I come here primarily to read discussion and to provide my unfiltered critical thought....but what I'm seeing recently is petty downvoting with little discussion or replies.
We're not going to do that because it would lead to an explosion of bickering, nitpicking, and other low-value comments. You can't force people to do things like give good reasons.
The downvote system has its disadvantages to be sure, but HN would be far, far worse off without it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is underestimating the need for anti-dreck measures on the internet.
The key word in what you wrote is 'seeing'. You notice the cases you dislike, but the other ones in some sense go unseen:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... In other words you count the cost of the system but not its benefits. I don't mean you personally! we all do this. It's a cognitive bias that strongly (I mean extremely strongly) affects people's perceptions of HN.
In reality, the ability of this site to support your intention ("I come here primarily to read discussion and to provide my unfiltered critical thought") depends utterly on the downvotes, just as the body depends on its white blood cells.
100% agree that human confirmation bias is VERY strong and impacts HN. This is partially the reason why I'm so concerned with (human) moderators having the ability to impact visibility of stories/comments[1].
Also, definitely agree that HN would be worse off without downvotes. I just think the system badly needs improvement. Below is a previous related comment of mine:
I think "downvoting for disagreement" generally works on discussion related to non-sensitive topics, but starts to break down once discussion enters the political realm. It turns into a numbers game. Since the dev community tends to lean to the left, the "downvote" numbers are skewed in that direction. It leads to non-left users getting frustrated and possibly no longer visiting the site (including myself), creating an echo chamber and eroding the overall quality of HN.
Why not set a max of 3 downvotes a day? Or subtract 5 karma points IF you don't include a reply with your downvote? There's gotta be a way to improve this.
I see it as top comment, where is the echo chamber?
I think downvoting unhealthy positions doesn't necessarily cause an echo chamber. Is it really necessary to address every irrational, stupid, inciting, ... posting? Is really every opinion worth being respected? I don't find the op offensive but it's been repeated here many times over - does each copy need a rebuttal or response?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion but I don't believe in the mantra that everyone's opinion matters equally.
The problem is leaders had insufficient authorised powers. The solution to that isn’t to ignore the law. It’s to change it. Have the debate about who can activate quarantine under what grounds and in which circumstances, pass the bill and enumerate those powers.
Playing devil’s advocate, the precedent of a single leader having the power to place millions under effective house arrest with limited checks or balances is ripe for abuse.
> Have the debate about who can activate quarantine under what grounds and in which circumstances, pass the bill and enumerate those powers.
How’s that working out for terrorism via the PATRIOT Act? People are rightly suspicious of granting sweeping powers to the government in “special circumstances.” There’s ALWAYS the threat of a pandemic, it’s not stretch to assume these “emergency powers” become activated indefinitely, sorta like how these lockdowns are continuing indefinitely.
>But what about the US? If all government is corrupt, if all taxes are sin, if all leaders on the other side are traitors to the cause, the people will never respect those in charge.
>The people don't obey the "orders" nor follow advice. Then they wrap themselves in the flag and actively work against the measures in the name of freedom.
I'm strongly against big government, disagree with most R's and D's, will gladly wrap myself in the flag and I'm still quarantining for the most part. Just because you support freedom doesn't mean you're ignorant to this pandemic or methods to reduce spread. It just means you're protective of your rights because government has a very long history of using these kind of opportunities to infringe on them.
The other countries you speak about have already lost their rights, or never had them to begin with.
Brit here. By and large we have the rights we want. Some rights we have voluntarily abrogated in order to meet what we believe to be more important responsibilities. These are legitimate decisions for a democratic nation to make.
That's a unanimous opinion? You're speaking for all 66M of your citizens?
>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.
As I pointed out in my post, we are a democracy. Off the top of my head, I'm not familiar with any forms of government that require unanimity. Do you really think that's a necessary requirement?
>So I'm looking for a source of what rights Brits have and it's sort of difficult to understand...
Rich coming from someone in a country that has blatant civil forfeiture, practices extraordinary rendition, still has the death sentence, has courts which have ruled that "Innocence is not sufficient grounds for appeal", that has appalling systematic gerrymandering disenfranchising millions of citizens at the heart of the electoral process, in which monstrous levels of vote buying are routine, oh good grief I could go on and on.
Theory is great, but practical results matter. In theory a written constitution sounds great, but I'm really not impressed at all with how it seems to work out in practice. Don't take this too closely, I love the USA and have visited many times, youre is a safe, prosperous and largely free country I admire very much, but the problems you do have are so deeply ingrained into the culture and society and frozen in place by partisan interpretations of technical language that I do despair sometimes. In practical terms I genuinely feel vastly more confident in my liberty, safety and freedom over here than in the US.
True that! Thankfully our Supreme Court frequently sides with the people and their rights against the government.
You wanna know something that I think a lot of people don't really understand about America........ we're a really young country. One of the youngest. And one of the best! We haven't had much time to settle into our new diggs, ever since we fought your terrible government- and won. Our country is still settling while many other first-world countries, such as Britain, have been settled for centuries. You may not understand this but our government isn't federal top-down. The organization isn't Feds > State > Local > People. That's not how rights work in America (see A10.)
>In practical terms I genuinely feel vastly more confident in my liberty, safety and freedom over here than in the US.
I get the feeling you don't excersize contentious liberties. In which case, you're not the right person to ask if they feel confident in their liberty.
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 agree the Dankula issue was a mistake. I’m not saying our system is perfect, is yours? But by and large there is actually a pretty strong consensus, even across political lines, on our system of civil liberties and protections and I don’t see anything like the same level of consensus in the US.
It is regrettable that we do not have a consensus in favor of rights, and that so many people are seeking to use the law to make their critics shut up, in a variety of arenas — whether Trump-huggers trying to revoke the license of critical news media (such a "license" being a concept that doesn't even exist) or state run school districts disciplining kids for wearing a MAGA hat, or any one of a number of university speech codes.
But in that respect, at least, our law is working as intended, the founding fathers' forethought centuries ago still supplying a recourse in the courts when the politically weak are oppressed by the powerful. In the UK, the courts are an official apparatus of the powerful's oppression, and the consensus is that this is how it should be.
You're allowed to teach your pug to do Nazi salutes. You're not allowed to film yourself saying "gas the Jews" 20 times while showing your dog doing Nazi salutes. [EDIT...and then broadcast this to your YouTube channel]
He went to court and he could have tried a freedom of speech defence but he chose not to.
I think I'm missing some context. Filming isn't the issue then, broadcasting is? Seems like another asterisk on supposed "rights" that exist in countries that pretend they have them.
An article 10 freedom of expression defence was available to him, and the judge even asked him to make that defence, but he and his legal team chose not to use a freedom of speech defence.
> I'd like some source material on your claim about freedoms
Let's start at the bottom then:
>> The other countries you speak about have already lost their rights, or never had them to begin with.
>and New Zealand is a tiny island, very easy to control
What you're saying here is basically: "even if you back it up with source material, I'm going to claim the US is more diverse/different so it doesn't really apply."
In other words, it's US exceptionalism both ways around, that is, circular reasoning. Why should anyone bother to try and have a good faith argument here?
> In other words, it's US exceptionalism both ways around, that is, circular reasoning. Why should anyone bother to try and have a good faith argument here?
I've assumed good intent with my reply and included size examples of Australia and Canada referring to my linked paper, so I suppose we will find out.
Here is a well thought out analysis of different attributes tha constitute "free-ness" that breaks down many kind of freedom[1]. Obviously Americans get full marks for "freedom of movement and assembly" but there are other types of freedom. The USA doesn't even break the top 10. If your interest is genuine I recommend further research starting with "why does the USA have the highest incarceration rate in the world", "prison industrial complex", "victims / incarceration by race" (given freedom in the USA is unevenly distributed).
I'm not saying the USA isn't generally a free place (it obviously is and has many good parts), but comparatively it's not the most free.
Also to reply directly to your point about size, Australia and Canada are both higher in the paper I provided, which are (equal sized / slightly smaller) but more sparse, so I don't think size is the issue.
While I am not going to say the US is an undemocratic hellhole, after all a score of 86 is respectable, saying that countries that score significantly higher "lost their rights" is unlikely to be correct.
All such measures are subjective. What rights the reviewers see as important will change ratings. There is no fair way to compare countries that everyone will agree on. If you really want to compare rate countries we first need a crittera discussion which will take a long time (and most people probably don't actually care enough to complete it)
How much of their concept of "rights" enters into the "positive vs negative" rights debate? Depending on one's perspective, this could heavily skew things in one direction or the other.
I've heard this broadly expressed as America being focused on (abstract) rights, when most of the rest of the Western world focuses on justice (of outcomes).
A pointed example of this is the criminal justice system, where people in the US have the right to stay silent, talk to a lawyer, etc, but still get screwed sideways with profoundly unjust outcomes due to plea bargaining, mandatory minimums, etc.
It's in the nature of the US as such Rights are part of the first governing document (Constitution). The beginning says it all: "We hold these rights to be self-evident". The US was founded on opportunity, not outcomes (we can talk about all the people who were left out of that but it's a discussion for another time).
If I understand correctly, the winning side asked for a delay (in a different form than you're thinking). They wanted the case decided, ruled on, with the ruling to take effect a week after the decision, so that the governor and the legislature would have time to work something out. That is, they wanted the governor to have to follow the proper procedures to continue the stay-at-home order, and wanted the court to give time for that to happen, because they didn't actually oppose the stay-at-home order, just the way it was done.
The court didn't do that. It revoked the stay-at-home order, starting right now, not a week from now. That's something neither side asked for. That's either the court following its own agenda, or the court being stupid. I'm not sure which.
It's like a grudge match - there's no love lost between these two opponents, two go in, only one comes out. Everyone has picked a side and they want destruction of the other, which they'll probably get.
Nonsense. You say that as if the 50 States' legislatures have been wiped out by covid-19 and can't convene (or be convened, as the case may be) and pass laws.
In the U.S. executive orders simply don't and can't have the force of law without the support of statutory law, not relative to civilians[0]. If you want a law, it needs to be passed as a statute by the appropriate legislature and must become law via all the usual mechanisms.
It's not that hard to pass emergency laws with sunsets in the very near future. So even if a given State's legislature is skeptical of covid-19's severity, they might nonetheless be amenable to a brief grant of emergency powers and see what happens.
Governors or the President acting alone to impose emergency statute-like law? That's not well received in the U.S., whether by people or courts, and there are very strong precedents in this regard[0].
That has nothing to do with corruption or taxes, and everything to do with long-established, well-thought-out, constitutional law. Yes, we're talking about constitutional law based on past skepticism of government, but that does not imply current skepticism (though it's true there's plenty of it). Also, the U.S. Constitution's requirement that State governments be (small-r) republican almost certainly extends the constraints on the President's EO power to the States' Governors. (Though, admittedly, the Supreme Court has ruled the Republican Government Guarantee clause non-justiciable, that was during the 19th century in a case that was clearly for Congress to decide, and the Court erred in saying that the clause was simply non-justiciable as opposed to certain cases not being justiciable. In a case about the validity and enforcability of gubernatorial EOs, the Court might well rule that the clause does mean that Governors cannot impose emergency rules without statutory support. Certainly that seems like a reasonable interpretation.)
> ... the people will never respect those in charge. ...
This was a decision by a court, not a question of whether the people support their governments. This state high court decision tells you practically nothing about how the people of Wisconsin feel about the measures that the Court struck down.
Wisconsin's legislature passed a law that gives the Department of Health the authority to issue orders in the face of a public health emergency. It is because of extreme partisanship that the extremely partisan Wisconsin court has now struck down that law in a blatant act of judicial activism to get the political result they wanted.
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.
Ok, they rewrote the law. The law [1] says "The department may promulgate and enforce rules or issue orders" but the court just said that they cannot issue orders, they can only promulgate rules.
The Court did not rewrite or invalidate 252.02. The Court held that the order in this case was a "rule" which means that "the rulemaking procedures of 227.24 were required to be followed". There's nothing about that statement that precludes an order like Emergency Order 28 from coming into force provided that its promulgation follows those rulemaking procedures. There is no rewrite. 252.02 does not exist in a vacuum -- the Court simply recognizes that other parts of Wisconsin statutory code also apply.
We can debate whether the Court was right, but not whether its position is a reasonable one. Clearly, deciding that statutory rulemaking procedures apply is a reasonable position. Clearly, also, deciding that they don't apply might well also be reasonable.
| 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.
> The Court held that the order in this case was a "rule"
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.
The court said that this, specifically, is a rule, because it introduces new criminal penalties for violating it. There is an emergency rulemaking power available in Wisconsin, but these rules were not submitted in compliance with the statues which authorize them.
The court also said that while there is authorization under other statutes to take "all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases," insofar as these statues are used in this way, they violate the state constitution, because this is a fundamentally legislative power given to one (unelected) member of the executive branch. That is not Constitutional in Wisconsin, and the justices write, "In issuing her order, she arrogated unto herself the power to make the law and the power to execute it, excluding the people from the lawmaking process altogether."
A concurrence went on to quote _Ex parte Milligan_, an 1866 case in which civilians were being tried by military tribunals, ostensibly due to the exigencies of the US Civil War, about why this matters: "No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of [the Constitution's] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism..."
Are you saying I incorrectly quoted the decision? Did you read the decision?? It says the order is a rule, not that they can only use rules. It described the rationale for why it has to be considered a rule and not an order given the context. It's all quite reasonable.
The decision invents a new law that says that DHS cannot issue an order that applies to the whole state, if it applies to the whole state it has to be a rule. Even though 252.02(04) says "Any rule or order may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state, or to any vessel or other conveyance."
No, this decision does not invent new law (though courts do in fact make law, and it is seen as appropriate for them to do so, both under common law and since Marbury, so inventing new law, had they done so, wouldn't necessarily be innovating). The decision specifically cites the parts of Wisconsin code that apply to rulemaking and why Emergency Order 28 is a rule and not an order. Simply quoting from one part of the Wisconsin code ignoring the other parts that apparently apply (certainly, according to the Wisc. S.C.), is not enough to win an argument.
I don't think it's tortured. I think it's a reasonable reading of Wisconsin statutes. Maybe you're torturing your reading of the decision. Or maybe I'm a shill. Any readers that stumble onto this sub-thread will just have to figure it out for themselves, and I suggest they read the opinion because it speaks for itself.
Admittedly I've not read it -- I assume it's reasonable, as I find the majority opinion to be. That's the thing with these court decisions: often you can justify either outcome in reasonable ways. There's no need to vilify anyone here -- it's truly distasteful what's been on display regarding this decision.
Your view displays no nuance and no understanding of the decision[0], which clearly does not invalidate 252.02 and does not deny the Department of Health the powers it has been granted by the Legislature. All it does is recognize that other parts of Wisconsin code also apply:
- 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.
extremely partisan Wisconsin court has now struck down that law in a blatant act of judicial activism
"Extreme partisanship" is more evident in your complaint about a "striking down" that didn't happen of a "law" that doesn't exist. The Court upheld existing law and struck down executive actions that violated it.
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?
The Court does not deny or rewrite that. It simply asserts that 227.24 also applies. Seems reasonable to me, since "227.24 does exist".
> 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.
> 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.
Everything about the comment above is totally incorrect when it comes to the law in the US. Just to give you a taste of how wrong this is: the case isn't even about an executive order by a governor! It's about the rulemaking of the Secretary of the Department of Health Services. Not only is the parent wrong, the opinion actually goes out of it's way in the first paragraph to say this! "This case is not about Governor Tony Evers' Emergency Order or the powers of the Governor."
> In the U.S. executive orders simply don't and can't have the force of law without the support of statutory law, not relative to civilians[0]. If you want a law, it needs to be passed as a statute by the appropriate legislature and must become law via all the usual mechanisms.
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.
> That has nothing to do with corruption or taxes, and everything to do with long-established, well-thought-out, constitutional law. Yes, we're talking about constitutional law based on past skepticism of government
This is completely and utterly false! You shouldn't say these things without reading the opinion. Neither side made this argument at all and the court narrowly ruled that the rulemaking process had not been followed correctly.
> 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.
> extends the constraints on the President's EO power to the States' Governors.
Absolutely not. Each state has its own constitution, the federal constitution says no such thing at all. Also this case was not about an executive order!
> the Court might well rule that the clause does mean that Governors cannot impose emergency rules without statutory support
Again, please read the opinion before you say such things. The main argument was that some details of the law had not been followed.
> 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.
You should tell the SCOTUS that. They overturned 55% of Obama executive directives that reached them, and his administration had the most overturned unanimously (yes, even Ginsberg and Sotomayor) of any Presidency.
>>Also, the U.S. Constitution's requirement that State governments be (small-r) republican
There is no such requirement
Dude. This is literally in Article IV:
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, ..."
> "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, ..."
Perhaps it’s my imperfect understanding of English here, but to me this reads more like a guarantee to the states that the federal government itself will take the form of a republican government, not that the states themselves must be republics.
It’s like a shopkeeper saying “My store shall guarantee to every shopper prices that are no higher than that of a competitor’s.” The guarantee is on the shopkeeper’s part; no obligation is required of the shoppers themselves.
The Constitution clearly sets up a Republican Form of Government for the Federal Government. Clearly, the Republican Guarantee clause's only meaning would be to limit future Amendments' scope if it were only to apply to the Federal Government. But look at more of the Article:
| The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; ...
That makes it pretty clear that this is about the States.
The Republican Guarantee is a commitment of the Federal Government to the States about the States. It means that the Federal Government will tolerate no State monarchies.
Perhaps I just don't understand something, but I'm still not seeing anything that would imply any restrictions on the type of government a state chooses to implement. To me, the additional clause you showed just says that the federal government shall protect the states against invasions.
> 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.
The key word in my comment is "additional", which was intended to indicate that I was replying to "and shall protect each of them against Invasion".
I have to admit it's also partially my fault since I didn't notice at the time that you are not the same person who made the original comment I replied to, so I left out some context.
Otherwise I agree that it is just a list of commitments.
Law is what should happen, politics is what does happen.
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.)
> > In the U.S. executive orders simply don't and can't have the force of law without the support of statutory law, not relative to civilians[0]. If you want a law, it needs to be passed as a statute by the appropriate legislature and must become law via all the usual mechanisms.
> 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.
I think we all believe that there are rights that should Never Ever be done away with, no matter what the cost. And if the government asked to violate it, that's a sign that they are inherently being untrustworthy. Suppose that a government said that it was necessary to knowingly inflict a cruel and unusual punishment in a particularly egregious circumstance. I think you'd agree that it is insufficient to let the government do this, and let the courts sort it out in a few years, well after the fact.
It could be a mix of culture, trust in government, and trust in the media. I wouldn't put it all in the "culture" bucket, because it lets government officials and media outlets completely off the hook.
yes, many people agree that there is a covid problem. But they do not agree on what to do about it. This ruling reminds us that we live in a democracy and not an autocracy where decisions are made unilaterally by a single individual.
Postponing this ruling until years down the line would render it meaningless. It's a distinctly unamerican stance you're espousing, as our system of checks and balances is central to our governance and our way of life.
> This requires trust. Like the current politicians or not, most populations respect their governments and are willing to support emergency measures in the short term. Whether they voted for them or not, they trust that their leaders are not evil.
Wait, in France and Belgium, the police is coming after your during lockdown. Think: road checkups, city patrols, etc. Fines are being sent left and right and people ended up in jail for breaking the lockdown too many times.
It is not just the US. Strange enough, around the same time (give or take a couple of days), the protests started in the US, people in germany started protesting as well. Turned weird rather quickly, all the common conspiracy theories are present. Over here, this stuff is pushed by "celebrities" online, mostly from the fringe. Left and right wing nuts seem to agree. There were also court challenges.
We also see various politicians to take up opposite positions regarding restrictions. Mainly between two state prime ministers, Söder in Bavaria and Laschet in NRW. The former pushed restrictions hard early on, the latter alsways took the approach. Both want to become chancellor during the next elecetions. Söder profited in popularity from his restrictions, he changed course, to a degree, as soon as public opinion started to "shift". At least the loud part of public opinion.
Similarities between the US and Germany, I see are
a) federalism, making central ction more difficult
b) upcoming election making Covid-19 as much a political question as it is a medical and economic one
c) multiple, opposing politians (Germany, even from the same party) or parties (US), aggravating point b)
As much as I hope that we can lift restrictions, I have the feeling that we might regret it. Hope I'm wrong.
It is not the culture, it is the legislation. Based on a bit of a research USA is the only country that has a Constitution that grants real rights, like freedom of speech, religion, etc. while in the others there are almost zero rights by Constitution, they are privileges that can be suspended or retired. For example, UK or Australia don't have a freedom of speech as such; in Australia the Supreme Court "interpreted" in a decision that freedom of speech is a right, but not because it is in their books, just because they gave that interpretation. Such ruling can be changed later like it sometimes happen.
For example in Romania, where the number of cases and deaths per million is low, there is no right; by Constitutional text there is a freedom of speech that cannot be infringed, but in practice we have laws that infringe it and they were not considered non-compliant with the Constitution. For example, anyone saying there was no Holocaust will go to prison, even if that is an opinion protected by the free speech article.
All other articles have a formulation "in the limit of the law", that means any law can limit any right. At the same time, one of the first measures of the Government when the lockdown was instituted was to announce the European Court for Human Rights that Romania is suspending human rights. Plain and simple, we have no rights, stuff that can be changed, suspended or taken are not rights, but privileges. Including the right to live, patients with chronically diseases were restricted to get medical care during the lockdown.
Therefore comparing USA with the rest of the "Western world" (Europe and eventually Australia, it is not about geography but culture) needs to take in consideration the situation of fundamental rights in the legislation: USA has fundamental rights, nobody else does.
In no way does it make sense to blame the courts for doing their job. The authority for these stay at home orders is by and large derived from temporary emergency powers granted by legislative authority in the first place. If the legislatures want the governor to have this power, they will grant it. It is trivial to do so. Legislatures are not doing their job, blame them.
In fact, blame the governor as well for not acting within the clear boundaries of their power. By trying to cloak themselves in authority they know is not legitimately theirs, they are actively contributing to the problem. The one party blameless in this is the courts.
If only they would just have set aside these annoying civil rights. Clearly the bill of rights should just be tossed because the horrors of Corona overrule any kind of rule of law.
You are wrong when you think that is just the US and everywhere else people trust their govs. Here in Germany, courts have ordered state govs to loosen certain restrictions too.
Also interesting how you lament the divide, and then go ahead and only blame one side for everything. Oh well.
The executive branch in Wisconsin took the approach of “By Any Means Necessary”. That has consequences as we have now seen. The Governor couldn’t prolong his lockdown order so he had a subordinate issue an order doing so. In doing that he ran aground on legal niceties such as the legislature having to be involved for much of the subordinate’s order to be legally effective.
As for the court just ignoring the matter as an exercise of discretion that too would have been an abuse. The ends do not justify the means. We won’t last under that innovation.
> Like the current politicians or not, most populations respect their governments and are willing to support emergency measures in the short term.
This is certainly the facade presented by the international media, but it’s absolutely not true. I have family in some of the more media-celebrated countries, and their citizenry is absolutely not united in the way you’re presenting. Some of them have had their lockdowns legally challenged, legal analysis has absolutely not been favourable in regards to the legality, and attempting to pass zero-scrutiny emergency legislation is a pretty common theme. They’ve also prosecuted between hundreds and thousands of people for movement violations in most jurisdictions.
I remember browsing the international section of a certain large media organisation recently, they had one article ruthlessly condemning the measures implemented by the president of Poland, right next to one singing high praise of the measures implemented by the prime minister of New Zealand. I looked into the details, and the measures implemented were almost exactly the same, the only difference I could find is that police in Poland seem to generally be armed, while police in New Zealand seem to generally not be. I absolutely would not suggest anybody rely on the general tone of the reporting as some sort of gauge for how people are feeling/behaving in any particular place.
Being from one of those "celebrated" countries myself, I can confirm. Though our media too is mostly celebrating our own gov and trashing the US with all sorts of unfounded (and easily verifiable as unfounded) claims. Pretty sad what has become of journalism.
“If a forest fire breaks out, there is no time for debate. Action is needed. The governor could declare an emergency and respond accordingly. But in the case of a pandemic, which lasts month after month, the governor cannot rely on emergency powers indefinitely,” Roggensack wrote for the majority.
Refreshing to see some pressure for democracy to resume.
The legislatures have not been wiped out by covid-19. Elections are still being held too. If the legislatures wish to pass laws requiring various establishments to close down, they can pass them, and if Governors wish to have such laws on the books, they can request them of their respective legislatures. Similarly for the Federal government: Congress is still sitting, and they call their own sessions -- it can pass whatever laws are needed, and even override the President's vetoes if he does.
In the U.S. it's well-accepted, long-established constitutional law that presidential executive orders simply do not and cannot have the force of statutory law without connection to an enabling statutes. The Republican Guarantee clause of the Constitution means that the States have to have separate legislative and executive branches of government, and by extension that gubernatorial EOs also can't have the force of statutory law without the support of statutes -- otherwise Governors could rule without legislatures, as kings, which would be decidedly not a republican form of government.
Yes, obstructionism is just as much a part of democracy as passing legislation, there's no part of democracy that says legislatures have to pass anything presented to them
What are you talking about. The constitutional system we have is that legislatures are Sovereigns and Executives are Heads of State. I don't care if the Wisconsin legislature is led by one party or another -- it has powers and prerogatives that it has to be jealous of. The governor is not being held hostage, rather, the legislature has to be consulted and may not be ignored.
I'm hopeful that more states will follow this lead. At the outset the shutdowns have undoubtedly helped prevent a massive tide of sickness that would have overwhelmed the healthcare system. Let's not forget that this was always the point of the shutdowns. It was never about preventing people from getting sick at some point -- it was about limiting a crush of sick people all at once.
As Powell said yesterday, 40% of households making $40K or less lost their jobs in March. This is crushing those most vulnerable, economically.
That is short term assistance, it won't be free (taxpayers will have to help cover this), and when it runs out then what?
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..
The federal government should extend those payments until there is a national return to normal operating conditions. A deferment of rent and mortgages would solve a lot of problems that businesses/land lords/renters have.
Yes. Courts do that a lot in case you've not noticed
(EDIT: Though not in this case! From the opinion: "This case is about the assertion of power by one unelected official, Andrea Palm, ..."[0].)
But in this case the issue is that a governor cannot impose law without the legislature. Wisconsin's legislature still sits -- if not in session, perhaps the governor could call it into session -- and can pass legislation.
This line of thinking is very close to Bonapartism as interpreted by Napoleon III. I am the democratically elected emperor; my mandate comes from the people having elected me; I may do whatever I deem in the interest of the people who have elected me.
Yes, in a dispute filed by the democratically elected members of the legislature? With the end result being that a democratically elected legislature with more than one person will have the opportunity to talk about the tradeoffs involved, make the case for constituents, and decide things like whether the response must be uniform between the dense cities and the rural countryside.
So, an undemocratically appointed partisan official nullifies legislature passed by democratically elected officials, and that is called a victory for democracy?
The legislature passed a bill that granted this power to the executive in past decades.
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.
> legislature passed a bill that granted this power to the executive
The legislature granted specific emergency powers to the governor. Based on the decision, I don’t see the scope of those powers being met. (Specifically, the criminal consequences and open-ended timeline.)
And it’s the legislature, today, bringing the case against the executive.
> democratic process has checks and balances for dealing with a rogue executive - but it requires an overwhelming support of the legislature
This is true in no system with the rule of law. The judiciary also checks the executive.
Both sides: courts are supposed to apply the law to the facts. Lawyers guide judges in their arguments, and the court weighs each one, resolving conflicts through tests and precedent.
Read the text of the decision before bringing politics into it.
IANAL, but browsing the text:
- The ruling cites the Wisconsin constitution.
- Governors can issue emergency orders (and maybe rules?) effective for 150 days.
- There's a distinction drawn between orders and rules. It doesn't matter if it's declared as an order, if it invokes the powers reserved for rules, it's a rule.
- Some reasons the court found it to be a rule: it applies to a general class (all residents), and defines new crimes (non-compliance)
- Criminal penalties can only be invoked for properly-promulgated rules.
- Therefore, it's a rule, not an order.
- Can it be a valid emergency rule? The court cites an example of a forest fire, there's no time for deliberation.
- The end date is ambiguous and this emergency is long-lived, therefore it could be brought for deliberation like a normal rule.
Then there's lots of handwringing about "an unelected official imprisoning whoever she sees fit", which is very handwavey and makes me suspect:
- The emergency rulemaking machinery of Wisconsin is vaguely defined, so there's not a specific rebuttal.
- There might have been some judicial activism here.
Ideally, the court would grant a stay on the enforcement of the decision, to give her time to properly promulgate the rule.
If the legislature resists, or the court doesn't grant the stay, that sucks, the bars and restaurants will open, people will get sick and die. Or maybe the Republicans will turn out correct and everything is fine.
It may be a boneheaded decision, but there's no legal recourse for bad policy correctly followed.
>Ideally, the court would grant a stay on the enforcement of the decision, to give her time to properly promulgate the rule.
The ruling explicitly addresses this: the case has been in deliberation for longer than the originally requested stay already. During this time, why has the government not ALREADY promulgated the rule?
> Republicans who brought the lawsuit had asked the justices to side with them but to stay their ruling for about a week so legislators and Evers could work out a new plan to deal with the pandemic.
> The justices declined to do that and had their ruling take effect immediately.
This is ignoring reality in favor of principle||partisan positioning (choose your preference).
Nothing rational or legally sound in throwing the situation into chaos.
Yikes, I didn't know they did that. That sucks, and is more indefensible.. there's no rational reason why the court shouldn't grant a stay when even the plaintiffs want it.
Did the court justify their decision in denying the stay?
> If the legislature resists, or the court doesn't grant the stay, that sucks, the bars and restaurants will open, people will get sick and die. Or maybe the Republicans will turn out correct and everything is fine.
This assertion needs a citation. If this should be true either hospitalization must be so high that it overwhelms the health system, which was the original justification for the lockdown, or death rate must be high.
The 1.5 week old CDC report [1] shows same hospitalization rate as the flu for the vulnerable 65+ population, and less for the vulnerable <18 year population.
Stanford study [2] shows same death rate as flu.
At this point most states have partially reopened [3] and we are not seeing a surge in COVID cases.
But we’re talking about Wisconsin, not New York. The death rate in Wisconsin is 1 in 14,000. Flu is about 1 in 4,000-5,000 in a typical year. New York is such an outlier in terms of death rates that it should be a totally separate conversation.
It spread much faster in New York so we got to see the devastation it can cause. Same will eventually happen everywhere else if the measures to slow the spread are lifted. I don’t get why you’d want to exclude the data from New York when it’s our best example of what a full-scale outbreak looks like in the US.
Even with restrictions, the virus will eventually spread to most of the population. The question is time scale. In New York—thanks to its density and reliance on public transportation—even a full lock down couldn’t avoid a brush fire that left the hospital system overwhelmed. That hasn’t been true in the rest of the country. In nearly states, the death rate is elevated less than 10% from normal levels. In 14 states, the death rate is lower than normal levels. That means that less restrictive measures could be implemented in those states while keeping the excess death rate to some acceptable level.
South Dakota never fully locked down, and the COVID-19 death rate there 4.5 per 100,000. That’s 1/3 the average for the country minus NYC and 1/30th the rate for NYC. And that’s a 5% increase over what the baseline death rate would have been in the state over that time period.
It’s also worth pointing out that nowhere has really “locked down.” Most people are still going to work and leaving the house. Minnesota has found that the stay at home orders reduced contact only by 55%: https://www.minnpost.com/health/2020/05/minnesota-has-update.... Under various scenarios, Minnesota projected a “do nothing” scenario at 57,000 deaths over the course of the pandemic, versus 26,000 deaths if the stay at home order were extended to September. But lifting the order on May 18 results in only a few thousand extra deaths compared to leaving it in place until September.
> couldn’t avoid a brush fire that left the hospital system overwhelmed
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.
No other city in this country is anywhere close to NYC in terms of density. The R0 for NY is going to be naturally much, much higher. It's absolute lunacy to apply the same measures in Wisconsin as NY.
The higher R0 means it spread throughout the city in two months, with a lower R0 it will take more months to reach the same level in other areas. Same devastation, it just takes longer to get there. Why is that acceptable?
Suggestion to parent from someone that agree: find some evidence to counter claim or support another story.
Share this evidence and direction to better path, and then each individual will choose if they want to put together the evidence to form their own opinion.
“Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.” 1 John 2:6
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” Buddha
“If he comes to me walking, I come to him running” the Hadith
“Human beings should walk the right path humbly” rig Veda
Show a direction to a path and whom will walk walks. Where each individual will walk is not for us to choose.
As shown on my first parent in this thread you will still risk being downvoted with no argument in the virtual or real sense, but that doesn’t matter as those are at any rate not useful opponents in truth seeking so ignore them.
Don’t argue with anything but a person as you would then throw pearls to swine. The loving father did not join his son in the pig pen after his fall, he waited until the son walked away from the pig pen and welcomed him with open arms.
He is responding to your comment about the New York scenario. The original justification for the shutdown was that we would run out of hospital capacity.
New York always had ample capacity in hospitals, and the USNS comfort and Javits center hospital were almost empty. Governor projected a lack of capacity which certainly caused fear, but it’s a very different thing.
In terms on NYC deaths there has been many stories of incompetence and mismanagement. Almost all that died had other serious health conditions, so it’s a question if lack of proper care for a non covid preexisting condition or they not seeking care out of fear is often the true cause of death.
Normally death cause is well investigated. However, CDC issued highly unusual guidelines that said doctors should classify all deaths as covid if they have been diagnosed to have covid instead of doing doing the normal extensive look into each case. This may mask people dying from other serious health conditions due to lockdown.
It's still unrelated to my comment. In fact, to the extent that you're trying to tie them together, it proves the opposite of the claims you're making.
My original parent was contrasting the two states, with the following:
>New York is such an outlier in terms of death rates that it should be a totally separate conversation.
My point was that NY shouldn't be a "totally different conversation", but that we should look to NY as a cautionary tale WRT potential outcomes without sufficient mitigation. The fact that hospital capacity was not overrun in either state underscores the validity of the comparison.
>many stories of incompetence and mismanagement...it’s a question if lack of proper care for a non covid preexisting condition...not seeking care out of fear is often the true cause of death".
This and the rest of your comment are, frankly, pure conjecture that seems to start with your conclusion. However, we know the virus is deadly and that COVID would likely be a serious contributing factor to deaths, even in the presence of pre-existing conditions. It's no secret that pre-existing conditions are a prime COVID risk factor and, as it happens, this country has a high incidence of pre-existing conditions. This was an openly stated primary force in our mitigation efforts. But, here you seem to be presenting it as some previously hidden revelation over which we should dismiss these deaths.
In sum, it's disingenuous to parse out all of the knowns and unknowns into an overall conclusion that lockdowns were somehow unnecessary. We know enough to know that stopping the spread of the virus prevents large numbers of unnecessary deaths--even (and especially) among at-risk populations.
> The fact that hospital capacity was not overrun in either state underscores the validity of the comparison.
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.
Agreed. These people aren't really interested in the facts or science. They have a conclusion. Everything else is a pseudoscientific veneer that gets them back to that conclusion.
Further down on this thread (after much goalpost moving and mischaracterization of facts), asabjorn has all but completely abandoned his/her initial assertions: that he/she opposed lockdowns because they are ineffective. It's now about "freedom, 1A and 2A".
Old asabjorn: >most states are now open or are reopening. We are not seeing spikes in coronavirus cases
New asabjorn: >I never claimed no reopened state will see some increases in covid cases, some do and some don't
I had to push really hard through all of his/her contortions to extract this and other concessions.
But, remarkably, this person just kept right on moving as if his/her entire argument wasn't based on the effectiveness of the lockdown. Then, went on to talk about tyranny and fighting for our freedom.
> My point was that NY shouldn't be a "totally different conversation", but that we should look to NY as a cautionary tale WRT potential outcomes without sufficient mitigation. The fact that hospital capacity was not overrun in either state underscores the validity of the comparison.
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?
Foremost, it's far too early to make the call on the effects of "re-opening".
Another misleading assertion is the idea that our "re-opened" state is anything like the state of affairs pre-lockdown. That is, many, many people are still virtually locked down--voluntarily.
Yet another issue your analysis overlooks is the measures we actually did take prior to full lockdown, wherein we in fact suggested that vulnerable populations self-isolate. This was not effective in slowing the spread; hence, the lockdown escalation.
Still another issue is your somewhat facile assessment of Walmart and other retail scenarios. The relevant metric here would not be closure of stores but transmission of the virus, as many people would be asymptomatic including, likely, workers. Yet, they may still have transmitted the virus.
But the real problem is that you omit the fact that measures we took to limit store hours, numbers of concurrent shoppers, in-store distancing, etc. and the resulting behavior changes (including fewer trips) meant bodies per store were dramatically reduced, helping to undercut transmission. And, the point there is that accommodations for essential trips to the store under such prescribed conditions were provided as part of the lockdown. So, you are trying to use the lockdown design itself as proof that the lockdown was unnecessary.
TLDR; This is frequently the story with these anti-lockdown claims: a revisionist look back at why the lockdown was "unnecessary", using precisely the design and benefits of the lockdown itself to make the case.
Your criticism does not make sense at all. I wish you addressed my questions and criticisms of your argument instead of bringing up new points, but I'll address your new points as well.
> Another misleading assertion is the idea that our "re-opened" state is anything like the state of affairs pre-lockdown
You have a faulty assumption that spread factor was reduced due to lockdown. 7 states did not close down (Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming), and many states that locked down has been open for weeks now [1]. We have not see a spike in neither of these scenarios relative to the still locked down states.
Again: there is no correlation between being locked down and reduced spread factor. Quite to the contrary NYC and other places under heavy lock-down has been the worst affected.
> Still another issue is your somewhat facile assessment of Walmart and other retail scenarios. The relevant metric here would not be closure of stores but transmission of the virus, as many people would be asymptomatic including, likely, workers. Yet, they may still have transmitted the virus.
You honestly that all those workers are symptomatic in a high exposure scenario at a lower rate than the general population?
And you honestly claiming that a highly contagious virus that you claim has such a high likelihood of hospitalization and death that we all need to be on lockdown, somehow doesn't have this effect to the same degree on grocery workers that are exposed more than anyone? All ages work in grocery stores [3].
Grocery store workers are heroes, but I didn't know they were superheroes.
> But the real problem is that you omit the fact that measures we took to limit store hours, numbers of concurrent shoppers, in-store distancing
That doesn't make sense if the desire is to reduce peak traffic. Limiting store hours with a similar amount of shoppers increase people per hour of shopping, and limiting concurrent shoppers cause huge lines outside. Arguably this may increase virus exposure.
In-store-distancing: covid is transmitted on and can stay alive on metals, plastics as well as other inside surfaces for an extended period. Up to a day on cardboard.
* scientific facts on ineffectiveness of major lockdown measures
N95 masks work: mask to filter out 95% of particles larger than 0.3 microns. Coronavirus is between 0.06 and 0.14 microns.
Social distancing doesn't stop you from being exposed by:
- virus suspended in droplets smaller than five micrometers can stay suspended for about a half-hour
- virus stays alive up to a day on everything in a grocery store (or any other store or delivery container); cardboard, plastics, metals
Wearing gloves: virus actually lives longer on plastic gloves and gloves in general worsens spread [2]
TLDR; Only highly targeted and managed approaches has worked in limiting deaths, such as isolating the vulnerable. The lockdown measures and protective gear people wear are not stopping the virus spread due to virus size as well as how it spreads, but it is an excellent signal of obedience to nonsense measures.
Again, your comment is riddled with errors, and you draw conclusions from data that cannot be drawn. I have directly addressed your comments and the thrust of your argument, but I cannot address each and every error and misstatement. So I just choose some of the most egregious and deconstruct them as examples.
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?
That is absolute nonsense. Did the 7 states that never locked down or the ones reopening weeks ago actually do so without it turning into the dire scenario the models predicted? Wasn’t the self directed mitigation’s and targeted quarantine in those areas sufficient?
Is the size of the coronavirus 0.06 to 0.14 microns, while the N95 masks we use filter 95% of particles larger than 0.3 microns? Will a chain link fence stop mosquitoes? Does the virus survive on cardboard/plastic/metal inside surfaces for extended periods making them spread vectors?
There was nothing voluntary about these lockdowns of people and shutdown of businesses. That is a pipe dream on your end. Quarantine is when you restrict the movement of sick people. Tyranny is when you restrict the movement of healthy people.
Regardless of if tyrants that share your viewpoint want it or not enough of us in the few remaining locked down states will use our constitutional rights to move on to cause a tipping point. We will open our businesses, go to work, hang out with friends and live life. We will fight alongside fellow Americans that are facing tyrants when exercising these rights, and we will work tirelessly to identify and remove tyrants in power.
I wish you and your loved ones good health. May God protect us both from tyranny and injustice.
@asabjorn, can't reply directly either, so will wrap up here.
In short, you move the goalposts when your arguments are deconstructed. It's exhausting and never-ending because you appear to be determined that this is about tyranny and will force the data to reach that conclusion.
The pseudoscience veneer has all but completely worn through. You're just lobbing it in now.
1) Your N95 mask arguments are sliding. You've now allowed that even normal breath droplets are larger than the 0.3 "threshold" you'd previously set in your simple mosquito-fence comparison. So, now you're just frantically shoveling in more numbers. It's gotten cartoonish. I won't continue to correct your storm of never-ending misinterpreted data. Bottom line: while obviously imperfect, N95 masks afford protection.
2) >I never claimed no reopened state will see some increases in covid cases, some do and some don't
Unbelievable. You're walking back the entire thrust of your argument across multiple comments and acting as if you still have a point. You initially claimed lockdowns were proven ineffective so all of our energy should've been put into protecting the vulnerable. That's what started this. The words came out of your mouth. It's right up there in your GP posts.
You just gave up the entire basis for your argument and kept typing like nothing happened. This is either willful delusion or bad faith.
Previously, it was this so-called ineffectiveness that was your basis for calling for an end to unnecessary lockdowns. Now, we see that was never the point.
All veneer.
3) You're now doing to the law what you did with science. But, I won't engage in a philosophical legal discussion with you, given your mischaracterization of even hard facts.
4) Those of us who still believe in the rule of law take you seriously and we take seriously those who've gotten in your heads to push our nation towards collapse for their own benefit. But, we will not be terrorized. What the 2A "revolutionary" drones fail to see is that they've been wholly manipulated and the unrest they seek will be met with a response that renders their assault rifles useless.
We're getting to the point where I'm having to argue that water is wet, so I can't tell if you're being serious or trolling me at this point. And, now that you've played the "tyranny" card, it's easy to read your mischaracterizations as deliberate pseudoscientific pretense in the service of something else.
Still, I will answer in good faith.
Are the droplets on which the virus is carried all exactly .06 to 0.14 microns? No. They are as large as 5 to 10 microns. If you really aren't understanding how you're misinterpreting some of this information, then it's why I am unable to persuade you. I could point you to more info, including back to some that you linked, but you don't suffer from a lack of info. Your errors are in interpretation.
The report you linked shows increases in some reopened states. Where's your explanation for that? Just compare them to NYC? Of course every locale is not NYC, with its density, etc. Using that as some sort of benchmark is a strawman.
I never said the lockdown was voluntary. I said many are still voluntarily staying at home in states that have reopened, which will skew the numbers towards the lockdown numbers, depending on degree. So, here you're simply putting words in my mouth. Another strawman.
I also pointed to the fact that many are only partially reopened, which you yourself acknowledged. But, you just gloss over the limiting impact of that on the numbers. So, where's the line between "tyranny" and common sense here? How "partial" is OK? And, do you get this angry and threatened over vaccines, seat belt laws and helmet laws? Did you grab an AR-15 and head downtown to "fight" over those?
Every one of the arguments in your comment is based on an error in interpretation or outright misrepresentation. Every one.
Look, I don't like being stuck at home, but I understand it. If there's a "fight" here, it's against ignorance and fear-mongering over some make-believe tyranny, starring Fauci as some sort of devious, Palpatine-like deep state operative gunning for our freedom, while posing as a concerned septuagenarian scientist who happened to also lead the charge against HIV. It's pure fantasy. You see this right?
If you'll allow just a little daylight, step back and consider the outright absurdity of this tyranny narrative and see it for what it is, then you have to ask where this narrative is coming from, who benefits from it and what's the effect?
Because, I submit to you that what's far more frightening is the war on facts and Americans with assault rifles in our streets with the idea that they are some kind of freedom fighters in resisting public servants--and threatening them with death--who are simply trying to keep Americans safe. Someone's getting into the heads of some of our fellow citizens and pushing them toward the brink of something truly catastrophic here. These are nothing more than thugs in the streets, deployed in the service of something or someone, and made to believe they are heroes for threatening violence and disobeying any laws with which they disagree.
That is the end of rule of law, and it is the only real danger to our freedom here.
You accuse me of misrepresenting while doing it yourself and provide outliers to justify your point:
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.
On #1: I continued researching after the interesting evidence from parent.
To anyone interested this is an overview of multiple studies of N95 usage and it’s efficiency in stopping covid spread [1].
TLDR; The results for flu studies show no conclusive efficiency, there are no covid studies, and many studies show negative health effects of the healthy using masks; breathing in virus through nasal passage causing infection to spread where it otherwise wouldn’t, hypoxia causing lower immune response and other negative health effects, etc
The baseline mortality rate for an 80 year old is about 0.5% per month. The mortality rate for an 80 year old with coronavirus is about 15%, with nearly all deaths occurring within a month. So treating all deaths in coronavirus patients as being caused by coronavirus would only overstate the true case fatality rate by 3% or so. The ratio is similar for younger ages. Not sure why Joe Rogan or Elon Musk’s opinion would be relevant here.
Pre-existing conditions are not omitted from the 0.5%/month mortality rate. They just aren’t as impactful because most 80 year olds don’t have immediately life threatening medical conditions. For every 80 year old who will die this month from cancer (or Bubonic plague, sure, why not) there are 199 others who won’t. But if those 200 people all have COVID-19, it will kill another 30 of them. Attributing 30 vs. 31 deaths to COVID-19 just doesn’t matter that much.
80 year olds have better coverage than younger Americans on average because of Medicare, despite Medicare’s generally lower reimbursement rates compared to private insurance, simply because so many younger Americans don’t have insurance at all. And I think you’re dramatically overestimating the strength of the incentives at play if you think medical professionals are defrauding the federal government en masse to line their employers’ pockets.
You probably don't want to rely on that last statement. Having worked in the hospital sector, they in fact do and are proud of the fact (I've literally sat in presentations about the software and automation employed to do so as well as all hands meetings touting this as competitive advantage) that they upcode as much as possible without risking jail time to maximize revenue. The existence of all those specialty centers around hospital networks are specifically to support this model as well.
You seem to not know how covid works (or medicine and/or medical examination) and that's fine, but please don't use your ignorance to sway others on subjects you have no knowledge in.
Dr Birx on the coronavirus task force says government is classifying all deaths of patients with coronavirus as 'COVID-19' deaths, regardless of cause. See video-proof in [1]. This is due to the highly unusual CDC guidelines on how to classify coronavirus deaths.
This is what parent refers to, and is not a knowledge-free comment.
Can't reply directly to Ikiris: It seems unfair to ask me another question without addressing my reference to Dr Birx statement. She is the one who's credentials this claim rest upon.
Edit: reply to Ikiris child comment. Innuendo is not a valid argument against evidence and does not change what Dr Birx said. You have the video of her saying it, so your claim this is some lone voice saying something is not a valid argument.
It's pointless to respond to the statements of anyone supporting Trump in his employ as a primary criteria for his employ is on its face the willingness to say anything he wishes.
More generally, it is not the burden to disprove a lone voice, it is the burden to state that expert consensus is wrong and why, with data. You've done neither and instead relied on single confirming source instead of trying to falsify your position and failing.
> It's pointless to respond to the statements of anyone supporting Trump in his employ as a primary criteria for his employ is on its face the willingness to say anything he wishes.
Innuendo is not a valid argument against evidence and does not change what Dr Birx said.
> More generally, it is not the burden to disprove a lone voice, it is the burden to state that expert consensus is wrong and why, with data.
Dr Birx is on the coronavirus task force and if she is not a recognized expert in your eyes I do not know who is.
You have the video of her saying it, so your claim this is some lone voice saying something is not a valid argument.
> You've done neither and instead relied on single confirming source instead of trying to falsify your position and failing.
You have no grounds for this claim. Please refrain from unfounded personal attacks in lieu of a reasoned argument on this forum, this is not reddit.
Exactly what kind of death due to covid do you think shouldn't be classified as a covid death, and what are your medical credentials or evidentiary basis to justify such a stance?
Even the Fox news comment doctor said it's a reasonable stance, because the examples given about kidney and heart problems which are supposed to seem obviously unrelated to general public are clearly not to someone with medical background.
You're not providing any evidence to back up your statement, except the opinions of Rogan and Musk; to my knowledge neither is an expert on health statistics. Could you provide a source to back up this claim?
You're saying coronavirus mortality figures are fabricated by state and hospital personnel, adding it to death certificates when it was not the cause. What's led you to that conclusion?
That isn't what I said. I'm saying that coronavirus is being listed as the primary cause of death in bad-faith.
According to the CDC guidelines[1]: In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.”
My conclusion is based on the broadness of that statement alongside the fact that hospitals receive $13k-$39k per Covid death. Plus my wife works at a large hospital and I'm getting the inside-scoop.
He is saying that as Dr Birx on the coronavirus task force says [1] the government classify all coronavirus patient deaths as ‘COVID-19’ deaths, regardless of cause.
This is due to a highly unusual CDC guideline that stipulates this, and it may mask collateral deaths due to lockdown measures that could be avoided if we like normal looked for the true cause.
The reason why this is relevant is that an overwhelming percentage of coronavirus deaths also had other serious health conditions.
> Stanford study [2] shows same death rate as flu.
Oh you mean the article whose title is "Study challenges reports of low fatality rate for COVID-19" and adds that " data scientists estimate that the fatality rate in New York City and Santa Clara County in California can be no less than 0.5%, or one of every 200 people infected."
>The 1.5 week old CDC report [1] shows same hospitalization rate as the flu for the vulnerable 65+ population, and less for the vulnerable <18 year population.
Is the hospitalization rate based on how many got the disease or among the general population?
So why would the rate of hospitalizations be comparable if we are having lockdowns that reduce cases of covid a lot?
In fact, the fact that the rate of hospitalizations is similar even with broad lockdowns is proof that covid is much more dangerous than the flu. Imagine the rate if there were no lockdowns.
I believe far more people are going to die over the next few years from the economic collapse than the pandemic would have killed had we used the Swedish model.
For most readers of HN, this has just been like a vacation. Our investments have lost some value. We will have to lower our expectations for our next jobs. Maybe we can't buy a second car.
Most countries have burned down the village in order to save it.
Sweden benefits from being very moderate in density compared to NYC. Stockholm is comparable in size and density to Washington, DC. The death rate in Stockholm is about 5 times higher than DC.
3,3k has so far died in Sweden and the population is 10 million. I believe 22k has died out of 8.3m in NYC, so NYC seems clearly worse.
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.
NYC is clearly worse, but NYC is also vastly worse than any other place in the US. In terms of density and scale of international travel (or the lack of both), Sweden is more comparable to Maryland or Virginia. Virginia, with 8.5 million people, has had less than 900 deaths. DC, which is only a bit smaller than Stockholm and similar in density, has had just 328 deaths, compared to over 1,200 in Stockholm
Correct about Sweden. We can compare Sweden to Switzerland (8.5 million vs 10 mil pop in Sweden). Switz has 1870 deaths, Sweden 3460. Sweden is far worse per capita than it's small northern euro neighbors too (actually deaths per million, Sweden, then Norway, Finland, Denmark are (343) and (42, 51, 92). IHME [1] estimates Sweden will have 5760 deaths, Switz 1935. Correcting for relative populations (10/8.5) Switz's 1935 * 10/8.5 = 2275 roughly expected.
I'm not sure why people have seized on Sweden as doing it right, but they will kill about 3.5k extra people compared to Switz (excess deaths). Compared to their northern neighbors they about 8x worse.
> I'm not sure why people have seized on Sweden as doing it right
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/
Norway has an order of magnitude fewer deaths than Sweden, despite otherwise being very similar countries. Yet randomized tests of citizens in Oslo, the capital and one of the hotbeds for COVID-19, show only ~2% had antibodies[1].
So we went into hard lockdown unlike Sweden, probably saved a lot of people initially, but what will happen now that we're opening the country again?
Density in Sweden is 64 per square mile while in NY state its 421 per square mile. However, much of the population live in cities such as Stockholm that has population density 12,800 per square mile compared to 66,940 for NYC.
If the dire high hospitalization and high death rate theory underlying lockdown was true, you would without lockdown expect worse than NYC death rates in Stockholm because it is very dense and we don't see that.
Moreover, wouldn't number of social contacts rather than population density be a better metric here? Population density is normally a proxy for number of social contacts, but NYC is in lockdown while Sweden is not.
But Swedish were self-isolating, companies allowing flexibility, all citizens have affordable access to great quality healthcarez etc. It's a functional country with high trust. The obligation to stay at home is not necessary when society and even economic actors respond reasonably.
What’s your metric? I can’t find a country doing worse than Sweden. Even the US has slowed its growth rate by a large amount more than Sweden. Just look at the plots, dude.
As someone who grew up in WI, I can say it's disgusting to watch the state get ransacked, from the gerrymandering to the pillaging of the UW system, to the rejection of universal collective bargaining rights and evicting of citizens off their own land for a Foxconn factory. It makes me ashamed.
Hey don't feel bad, you're in great company. In NC we've also got the gerrymandering, anti-trans bathroom-bill, state-legislature-hates-the-governor partisanship (state R's would rather burn the state constitution than let the D's participate), and pro-Republican election fraud to top it off. Just think how many other states can still join in!
The Republicans who brought the lawsuit argue that, in part, continuing the lock down isn't appropriate because deaths from covid19 are going down. They don't connect the declining deaths to being locked down. You would think they would notice.
The question is, if deaths going down isn't the end condition, what is? Surely there has to be some point soon where the legislature gets to determine the laws of the state again.
Well, for example, deaths being down instead of going down. Get the active cases down to a manageable number, then switch to test and trace while gradually opening up as advocated for in The Hammer and the Dance [1].
> Get the active cases down to a manageable number
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.
Thanks for clarifying. I was only aware of government-level announcements over here in Europe. From what I've seen here any conditions are more along the lines of "x, y, and z must all be improving" and those values have been left deliberately ambiguous.
It depends on your overall strategy. If you want everyone to get the disease but at a rate that hospitals can handle, then hospital capacity vs case count will be a very important piece of data for making decisions. If you want to control the cases using test and trace, then you instead care about case count vs test and trace capacity, which is different from your hospital capacity.
Deaths going down is only one thing that needs to occur.
And, by the way, deaths going down is doing so soooo slowly because we really didn't get the R0 much 1.0. If people had actually locked down PROPERLY, deaths would be dropping much faster.
In addition, you need testing and contact tracers. You also need abundant personal protective equipment in your health providers for if you get a spike.
The problem is that the US federal government squandered 60 days in which it should have been filling those other criteria.
> And, by the way, deaths going down is doing so soooo slowly because we really didn't get the R0 much 1.0. If people had actually locked down PROPERLY, deaths would be dropping much faster.
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.
I don't see why all those things need to happen before the Wisconsin legislature is allowed to have a say. The state can still have a stay-at-home order if the legislature thinks it's needed.
Surely the Wisconsin legislature, if it desired to direct these efforts, could muster a plurality of the state legislature to override or overrule the Governor, could they not? If it's truly a case of gubernatorial overreach, it's not like they don't have a wide variety of options at their disposal. I'm hardly a legal scholar, but I have yet to hear of a state that hasn't been able to override a governor's decision making process if they really felt the need.
I'd buy Wisconsin Supreme Court's justification if we weren't talking about a fucking pandemic, but here we are.
Typically, the override processes require 2/3rds of the legislature.
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.
Ultimately: risk. Scientists can model infection and suggest whether it makes sense to continue restrictions or not. In fact, they do just that and executives like Governors consult experts for matters like this one.
Risk can go down if: (1) much of the population becomes immune [after vaccination or recovery from infection e.g.], (2) treatments arrive that mitigate the impact of sickness, (3) some novel isolation equipment/methods arrive that reduce the spread of disease.
The presence of risk doesn't short-circuit checks and balances. Governments manage risk all the time.
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.
I can tell you're a smart guy, but it reads like you're buying into the politicization of an apolitical problem.
The end condition is a therapeutic/vaccine, and since that is not available yet, the next option is a national testing and contract tracing plan. Every successful country has a good one, every country that's seeing mass casualties doesn't have one. There is no political aspect to this. The science is pretty clear here (like climate change clear, meaning there's always a few contrarians for the sake of being contrarian, everyone else agrees). Herd immunity is not feasible, and millions will die.
I'm ignoring politicians, every annoying tech bro (always dudes...) who led "Growth" for a SaaS startup and therefore a are an expert in "virality" and "k-factor". Ignore Elon, this isn't his zone.
Everyone is bitching about the stay-at-home. IF THERE IS A CONTACT TRACING PROGRAM, HEALTHY UNEXPOSED PEOPLE WILL BE ABLE TO LIVE THEIR LIVES. This point seems lost on the people protesting. There's an exit strategy that their leader (protesters are largely Republican) doesn't want to do because testing reduces his re-election chances (?!??!?!). However, they have a testing and contract tracing program FOR THE WHITE HOUSE RIGHT THIS SECOND.
I've spoken to American friends in Hong Kong and they're so happy they live in a functioning autocracy. They're going out normally and enjoying their lives. Getting dinner with friends, going to beach, going out in LKF. (With occasional issues like the Seoul club superspreader). The only reason we are not having fun right now is because of the lack of testing and tracing.
It's expensive, intrusive, and people who get sick will be pissed and not follow the rules - but I don't see another option on the table, and none of the experts I've read or listened to (Fauci, Yaneer's team below) have another solution. This is not a poltical problem.
Yaneer Bar-Yam has been doing great work on supporting countries figure out the best plan, as well as preparing societies for the inevitable fallout of all of this. You hedge for risk.
https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam
In the playbook left by the previous admin, the 3rd (5th in the domestic part) question in every stage of pandemic response, after "How bad is the virus and how quickly is it spreading?" is "Does the government have tracing and testing set up?". When it was a credible threat (January if not earlier), according to the extremely clear and again, NONPARTISAN, document below, we should have started setting up a testing/tracing program.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-...
Caveat is that 15% of our nation lacks empathy and is completely detached from reality, and think wearing a mask is communism, so we'll never get to full compliance. However, 90% in a testing/contact tracing environment is better than what we have now.
In summary - if you want to end stay-at-home, you should hope the Trump admin magically becomes competent. Blue states will try to do it, but because of interstate commerce and conservative governments who think they're invincible for some reason, it's 100x harder.
Otherwise we'll be like this for what feels like forever and ~200k disproportionately lower-income, older and minority people will die. If he's re-elected in November, I'd put significant money on 500k+ deaths in the next 4 years. It won't go away completely and anti-vaxxers will feel vindicated by his re-election.
I generally lose respect for people who think caps-lock is an acceptable way to type messages to others. You should try looking for more descriptive words to get your point across.
At some point we have to decide which is more important - all caps discourse on the internet or 85,000 lives lost in a tragedy exacerbated by incompetence.
You're right, caps lock is the real enemy. How could I have been so wrong? Let's ignore everything because of that. Bars should open, as long as everyone whispers we're fine.
You don't understand.... the quality of conversation goes down dramatically with caps-lock and erratic speech style. And that makes the rest of us lose interest, and respect.
A plausible plan for actually solving the root problem, namely a realistic strategy for mass testing, contact tracing, and non-voluntary quarantine; or a functional vaccine. Right now we have neither, so getting people back out simply puts us back into the same situation we were in before initiating the lockdown.
Contact tracing has had poor rates of people opting into it, vaccines are quite a ways out and it's pretty hard to legally mandate and enforce quarantines.
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.
This case is not about covid-19 facts but about constitutional law in Wisconsin. The various legislatures and Congress tend to be jealous of their powers and prerogatives. Executive orders in the U.S. can't have statutory force without supporting statutes.
The solution then is that the legislature flex their powers and prerogatives to solve the covid-19 problem. Have they signalled that they plan on doing that? Or is this a matter of hubris?
They can. They can also decide not to. It is their prerogative. If they don't pass the laws you want and disaster ensues, well, maybe Congress can quarantine the entire State. There is plenty of recourse.
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?
Which doesn't answer the question if they
have. This isn't some partisan bill but a force of nature, and if they are flexing their powers for the sake of posturing then more Wisconsin citizens will die if there isn't a plan presented by the "powers and perogatives" of legislature.
Nonsense. See South Dakota, Georgia, etc. If just one State not doing what you think they should be doing spells disaster for the U.S. (and the world), then we've already crossed that Rubicon.
That is not in the slightest what the Republicans argued.
And if you think it was, please cite where the article says that.
To me it sounded like they argued that now that the urgent emergency condition ended, continuing lock downs need to be done in coordination with the legislature.
There's a couple centuries of common law precedent that the government can compel behavior for public health crises. The state supreme court here grossly violated legal precedent, and will have its ass overturned in a heartbeat if anyone has the time, resources, and will to escalate.
Yes, but there's much less support for Executives acting alone. We have a republican form of government where only the legislative branch can pass criminal statutes. In this case the Wisconsin Legislature sued to preserve its powers and prerogatives, as well it should. That does not mean that it won't be amenable to passing supporting statutes.
Which this wasn't - this was the executive acting in concert with public health officials, which are empowered under a founding public health statute, making their exercise of power one delineated by the legislature.
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.
> this was the executive acting in concert with public health officials
That is still the Executive. Those are all executive branch officials. The Executive branch is headed by a singular Executive official (Governor, President), but all of its officials form the Executive branch and power.
> making their exercise of power one delineated by the legislature
> Yes, but there's much less support for Executives acting alone.
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.
The US president has the power to unilaterally order a nuclear strike on any point on the planet at any time they choose, regardless of how anyone in the other branches feel about it at the time. So 'limited,' maybe, but also able to end life on Earth as we know it on a whim.
That's an aside, however. I'm talking about the general concept of an executive office, not specifically the US president. And sure, there can be limits, but the whole point of an executive is to avoid endless deliberation in the appropriate situations. Perfect example: Congress had the constitutional power to manage tariffs, and they surrendered that power to the president willingly because they weren't able to be decisive enough with it.
The process in Wisconsin isn't endless debate - just submit the rile to the legislative committee, and they have the power to negate it. It is affirmed by default.
> The whole point of having an executive is for a single person to act alone and decisively, especially in times of crisis.
Within the confines of the powers granted to the executive by law. The legislative branch grants such powers to the executive to act. Where th executive goes beyond that, the judicial branch rules against the executive branch. Checks and balances.
> In the midst of an emergency is not the time for legislative subcommittees to endlessly debate.
Man I hope Trump doesn't read this and get ideas. You are essentially saying that the executive branch should be given dictatorial powers now. Do away with checks and balances? Is that what you really want? Historically emergencies and crises have been used to justify tyranny and it's scary to see how the fearful yearn for it.
*> government can compel behavior for public health crises
You do recognize the difference between "government, acting according to established procedures with proper involvement by all branches of government" and "one single person, acting on emergency authority that was never intended to last this long", right?
Plagues gave way to public health, and some would argue, modern plagues formed the State as we know it today. Of course back then ministries of health burned people alive in their houses, but today, they give us clean water and safe food:
The ministry of health doesn't give me clean water and safe food. At best, it makes and (to some extent) checks for compliance with regulations about those things. But it doesn't produce them. At least, not in any country that actually has sufficient quantities of either.
> There's a couple centuries of common law precedent that the government can compel behavior for public health crises.
The issue that was cobtrolling here was compliance with proper administative procedure, not the authority of state government to compel behavior. So precedent on the latter is immaterial.
> The state supreme court here grossly violated legal precedent, and will have its ass overturned in a heartbeat if anyone has the time, resources, and will to escalate.
It's a state law claim that has been adjudicated by the highest state court, there is no place for the case to be escalated to.
How did they "grossly violate legal precedent?" Nobody challenged the governor's order, they challenged the authority of the health services secretary to extend the order. Conservative judicial interpretation of the constitution is that power not explicitly granted by congress is not lawful. Even though I'm not a conservative, I'm glad that opinion won.
Why is the ruling stupid? It seems like an entirely reasonable check on the power of the governor. The health department and governor can order a binding shelter in place, but the elected state representatives have the power to overrule it.
Shouldn't the majority be able to revoke such an order if they want?
Of course they can. Public health agencies' powers derive from founding statutes. A legislative body can always undertake an act of legislation to change the founding statute and, in so doing, change the powers of the public health agency as they see fit.
They didn't do that here. They wanted a direct check on the agency's decision, rather than executing the power they actually had.
To quote my other response, on why this was a stupid ruling:
>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 (edit: specific manifestations) 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.
All in the context of a legislative body that had a legal remedy afforded to them, but that would have been too slow. So for political purposes, they've now gutted the ability of emergency agencies to respond to emergencies, so that legislatures don't have to legislate changes to legislation.
They can make you pay your taxes, but can't restrict your movements in a disease outbreak. I live in Japan, and the government here also does not have the power to legally lock us down (which is why there are only recommendations here -- luckily most people seem to be following them). It strikes me odd, though. There are so many things that the government can legally make you do, many of which seem much less important to me than this. I'm sure there are many people who disagree, but having a conversation over whether or not the government should have this power is not unreasonable IMHO.
Like they could suspend rent, mortgages, interest of any kind. In the UK, people get 80% of their pre-layoff wages. In the United States, the Payroll Protection Program ran out in days!
If America is going to close the State, it also has to freeze the economy and give people ideas, goals and hope. The American government, at all levels Federal and State, and failed at doing this to a tragic degree. I wrote more about this: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
It’s more about having your representative government voice the voters concern than anything. Not that this is important or that the government doesn’t have the power to implement this. It’s just the branch of government which has the power to implement is in question.
> When our actions can harm others, the government absolutely has the right—and the obligation—to step in.
No. When our actions have harmed others, then the government has the right to step in--because we delegated that power to them.
But the government does not have the right to step in just because some government official things our actions "can" harm others. That's not their call to make. We are adult human beings and don't need keepers or nannies. We make our own choices, and if those choices do harm others, we take the consequences. But if they don't, the government needs to leave us alone.
> We make our own choices, and if those choices do harm others, we take the consequences
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!
> 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?
Who says what counts as "no essential reason"? How do you know whether I infected anyone else? Not everyone without a mask is an asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier.
If you're basically arguing that the government needs to have invasive surveillance and micromanagement powers to ensure that every possible way someone might harm someone else is captured, then no, I don't agree.
So how does your "if those choices do harm others, we take the consequences" get enforced in practice and doesn't turn into a situation where a few people who don't take care to not infect others will kill millions?
> how does your "if those choices do harm others, we take the consequences" get enforced in practice and doesn't turn into a situation where a few people who don't take care to not infect others will kill millions?
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.
That's not how masks work though. Masks mostly protect others, not the wearer. I of course wear a mask on the very rare occasion that I leave the house and rubber gloves and disinfect my hands and everything I touched asap. However, that doesn't give me full protection from the a-hole who almost ran me over at the UPS store the other day who wasn't wearing a mask and was keeping no distance whatsoever.
If we all could take proper precaution this whole thing would be over much quicker and we could return to something that's close to normal. We could get to a place where we have few enough cases that we can test and trace. Other countries are on their way to accomplish this.
> that doesn't give me full protection from the a-hole who almost ran me over at the UPS store the other day who wasn't wearing a mask and was keeping no distance whatsoever
Nothing will give you "full protection" in the sense of guaranteeing that nothing bad will happen to you. But you were a lot better off wearing a mask in the situation you describe than if you hadn't been.
Also, you were wearing a mask, and the other person wasn't. That puts more of the responsibility on him if something bad happens.
Indeed, in what you describe, the issue isn't just that the person wasn't wearing a mask. It is that he took no precautions whatsoever to keep distance, and showed no sign of even being aware that he ought to be taking such precautions. That puts even more of the responsibility on him, since there are other prudent precautions besides wearing a mask that a person is expected to take in a situation like this, and keeping distance is one of them.
exactly this. Somehow a large proportion of people only want to focus on a hypothetical infectious person going out and infecting high risk people. But if the high risk people are not out they cannot get infected. In fact, everyone who is out has agreed to the shared risk. I plan to continue to minimize my outings, but Im fine if everyone who is out shares the risk of getting infected.
I do think that people who are at risk should be able to get unemployment so that they are not forced to work.
> Has anyone taken these laws to the Supreme Court?
No, but that's because we live in a legal regime where the government assumes the power to punish people with jail time even when no actual harm is caused, based on a government official's judgment of "possible harm". But the fact that we live in such a regime does not make it right.
In a sane legal regime, what would happen if you were driving drunk, but had not caused any actual harm, and a cop saw you and stopped you, would be: cop determines that you are drunk (breathalyzer, let's say); cop makes sure your car is safely parked off the road, locks it, and takes the key; cop says "sir, I really think you should let me drive you home, since you're too drunk to drive safely; you can get a family member or friend to bring you back to get your car tomorrow when you're sober". Then, either the cop drives you home and gives your car keys to whoever is there; or, if you resist, the cop puts you in the back of his car and drives you to the police station instead, and calls a family member or friend to come take you home, and gives your car keys to them.
In other words, the cop has a perfect right, when he sees you're obviously impaired, to stop you from driving. Indeed, anyone would; if you were at a friend's house and you were clearly too drunk to drive home, the friend would have a perfect right to hide your car keys and either drive you home himself, or have you crash in his spare bedroom or on the couch. But the government does not have the right to throw you in jail if all you did was drive drunk, and caused no actual harm. It only has the right to punish you if you caused actual harm.
> I can shoot into an apartment as long as I don’t hit anyone. Just pay for the property damage — if any?
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.
Yes, at the expense of individual liberty. Traffic laws are an obvious and rights-restraining example of this.
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.
Can you be more specific? It's the nebulousness of what "can harm" that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Taken to one extreme, there's almost nothing you can do that doesn't potentially harm others. For example, I could leave my stove burner on and burn down the entire apartment building. So many things come with risks to others, and those things are just part of existing in society.
> In United States constitutional law, police power is the capacity of the states to regulate behavior and enforce order within their territory for the betterment of the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of their inhabitants.[1] Police power is defined in each jurisdiction by the legislative body, which determines the public purposes that need to be served by legislation.[2] Under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the powers not delegated to the Federal Government are reserved to the states or to the people.
Yes, in the 10th amendment the bill of rights gives the states power to make their own laws. Each state has a law concerning what is considered DUI and the BAC limit for drivers who are considered to be driving legally.
It comes across as bad faith to ignore my question and expect me to answer yours. What is the definition of "can harm" that excludes activities like leaving my stove burner on?
In that scenario there also would be an investigation. It would find you left the stove burner on and you might be charged with arsen or similar. If we put tracing in place and if you left your house for no essential reason and without a mask and infect someone else and they die you get charged with manslaughter, that would certainly work. If we can overcome the practical problems and actually enforce this, I think it would be a great practice that I think would make all the freedom over community people happy as well. But is it realistic that we can do this in practice?
I think there is a bit of a difference of opinion and a lack of conclusive evidence (but no shortage of questionable evidence), on the degree of risk involved in various activities involving this pandemic.
Now I'm not marching in the street or anything like that, but the more I'm told we must follow authoritarian orders without significant compelling evidence, while dissenting voices are being censored, the more appealing the idea is to me, just as a matter of principle. Favor force over reason, and you might get the same in return.
Fine. I doubt you're arguing in good faith, but let's go there ...
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.
You should, because you'll quickly realize that there are far, far more activities that potentially cause harm to others than there are laws that prohibit them. Also, vaccines and smoking have a history that are peppered with lawsuits about their legality, so as far as examples go, they are not the ones I would hold up as evidence of laws that people clearly think are constitutional.
The flu killed ~50,000 last year in the USA. Do we require all non-essential businesses to shut down and everyone quarantine? Is there some magical cutoff number between 50,000 (flu deaths) and 80,000 (COVID deaths) where we decide to shut down the entire country?
Also you're conflating "the government has the right" with "there exists a law." The government has the right to enforce the law, but there is no innate right in that law itself. If we overturned smoking laws tomorrow, it doesn't remove rights from the government, it removes laws that the government enforces.
The government does not have to protect its ability to ban potentially harmful actions by banning every possible harmful action. The purpose of the legislative representatives is to make judgement calls about which things have enough potential harm to warrant restriction. I really don't understand the argument here that because not all harmful actions are banned, that banning harmful actions is not constitutional. Am I just not understanding what your argument is?
> The purpose of the legislative representatives is to make judgement calls about which things have enough potential harm to warrant restriction.
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".
Do you have any specific examples that aren't the latter?
That sounds facetious, but I'm being serious. Go read the United States Code, or the Code of Federal Regulations, and tell me how many of those laws and regulations you think really are within the limited powers granted to the Federal government by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Go read Supreme Court decisions like Wickard v. Filburn or Kelo v. New London, or for that matter even Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade, and tell me whether those decisions really are in accordance with the limited powers the Federal government is supposed to have.
Yes, you can argue that some of those laws and regulations and decisions were good from a public policy standpoint. (Although it would be hard to make a case that our public schools are really any better more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education than they were before. And not everybody agrees with current jurisprudence on abortion.) You can also argue that some of them plainly weren't. (Is it really a good idea to restrict what a farmer can grow on his own land, for his own use, in the name of regulating "interstate commerce"? Is it really a good idea to have the government artificially manipulating the market for food in the first place, especially when it's being done at the behest of large corporations and their lobbyists? Does evicting people from their homes and handing the land over to a private development company really count as a valid use of the government's eminent domain power?)
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.
Thank you, I was genuinely curious as to what you had in mind -- I came up with a lot of possible examples, hence the question.
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."
> The government has the right to require your children to have vaccines before they go to school
Only if the school is run by the government. The government has no right to enforce vaccination on children who go to private schools or are home schooled.
In other words, the government's right in this case stems from owning the school, not from a general right to micromanage every aspect of people's lives.
> The government has the right to create anti-smoking laws
No, it doesn't. It was allowed to pass such laws because smokers had become obnoxious enough in insisting on their "right" to smoke everywhere (which didn't used to be the case--houses and other places once had special rooms for smoking, precisely because smokers had enough manners not to obtrude their activities on non-smokers) that non-smokers picked the lesser of two evils and allowed the government to overreach its power rather than have practically all public spaces be unlivable.
>> 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.
This is not entirely accurate.
>> 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.
This was likely due to market failure, not due to health reasons.
1.6+ million deaths YEARLY are directly caused by diabetes[1]. According to your logic, shouldn't the government mandate that all restaurants only be allowed to sell healthy foods? Better yet, let's have Google and Apple build an app that tracks everyone's blood glucose, so we can only purchase foods that keep us below our daily blood glucose allotment. And while we're at it, let's have Twitter/Facebook/Google/Etc censor any searches for cheeseburgers/milkshakes/butterfingers. Oh and Bill Gates wants to help, so he's working on a sugar vaccine (but will require 50% of the vaccine patent royalties paid in advance).
A government cannot violate its own rules by declaring an event unprecedented and that is what many officials have been doing.
I am all for lawful precautions but you have to give the people some credit. The lock downs and restrictions are incredibly arbitrary and in many cases nonsensical. you can have similar businesses and one is non essential or one has rules applied that don't apply to the other. this is what frustrates people the most, the vast majority know what to do. those who don't have always been there and always been a problem but it was easy to ignore them prior
Doesn't look like the Wisconsin Supreme Court really ruled on that, according to its purpose in Wisconsin, if you read the article.
But it doesn't matter since overruling those kinds of courts is almost impossible, so yes if you wish for a court to overturn such an order that is what happened here!
[...] In the majority opinion, Roggensack determined Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm should have issued regulations through a process known as rulemaking, which gives lawmakers veto power over agency policies. [...] GOP lawmakers who brought the lawsuit have said the legal challenge was necessary to get a seat at the table where Evers and state health officials make decisions about how to respond to the outbreak [...]
This is a fairly narrow decision, it only says the legislative must be involved into this.
Alas it did not address the question I had hoped it would - do sheltering rules violate the Bill of Rights?
That's been ruled on in Jacobson v. Massachusetts:
> The Court's decision articulated the view that the freedom of the individual must sometimes be subordinated to the common welfare and is subject to the police power of the state.
There weren't any "Civil Rights" rulings (note capital letters) prior to the mid-1960s, as the legislation and legal system supporting it didn't exist prior to that.[0]
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.
Not a downvoter, but you may have missed nearly a century of US history. The first Civil Rights Act (note the capital letters) was enacted in 1866 and there is loads of caselaw prior to the 20th century dealing with Civil Rights. Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, is one of the many landmark fuckups where the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation, for example. It is cases like this that the prior comment is addressing, I imagine.
> The first Civil Rights Act (note the capital letters)
Title Case :P. I stand by the idea that modern "Civil Rights" began in earnest after WW2 and was primarily encoded in legislation in the mid-1960s (though some decisions were earlier—Brown v. Board of Education for example), and that modern Civil Rights (as a broad concept) supersedes the Anglo-derived legal system the US was founded on and replaces it with a different (and at times conflicting) set of principles.
Do you actually disagree with any of that? I'm genuinely curious to find someone who thinks that the law didn't fundamentally change in favor of modern Civil Rights after WW2, vs. what came before…
> Nothing I've written here should be remotely controversial.
I agree it shouldn't be, but apparently it is, given the downvotes you're getting. I've upvoted you to try to compensate a little, for what it's worth.
> But orders for everyone to stay at home are pretty much unprecedented.
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.
And unfortunately, neither is lying about things being 'unprecedented' because you don't like them.
Unprecedented doesn't mean bad..it just means new. The last truly national pandemic we had predated the model T and approximately aligned with the first commercial airboat flight.
Not only is such action not unprecedented, but mislabeling it unprecedented repeatedly is a form of propaganda.
Internment camps and limiting who had the right to vote weren’t unprecedented at that time either. That doesn’t make either acceptable by modern interpretations of the constitution.
Are they issuing orders for internment camps to battle covid 19? Then how is it not a red herring to the question about there being zero precedence for stay-at-home during a pandemic?
That there were internment camps in the US? There's a long history of moving first people into concentration camps in the US, and FDR moved Japanese Americans to concentration camps during WW2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066
There are more recent examples as well from America that house immigrants and prisoners from the Middle East.
I think the challenge is for evidence that the broad principle (either internment camps or limitations on the franchise) conflicts with current application of Constitutional law, rather than that the practice occurred in the US.
> There are more recent examples as well from America that house immigrants and prisoners from the Middle East.
Yeah, that's a weakness of the claim, not evidence for it.
Weird how the same people most interested in limiting who has the right to vote today are the same people who are most interested in overturning these shelter in place orders...
The claim was that they were unprecedented, not that they were unconstitutional.
OTOH, states (unlike the federal government) have general police powers, so their legislation is constitutional absent an express constitutional prohibition, whereas the feds need specific constitutional authority.
Not at all. The 1918 pandemic was very similar; stay at home, no gatherings, wear masks in public. Some of the articles from then read as if they were written last week.
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.
Arguably true, but not as far as I believe you’re implying. The ability of the government to quarantine entire towns and counties has been tested and upheld in the courts over the centuries.
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.
I wonder how many orders actually forced anyone to stay at their home?
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.
It outright says you can go outside for activities, the type of activity you can do depends, largely on the number of people it would seem. It doesn't mince words about that ...
That was not at all a dishonest response. And, no, the exceptions don't diminish the gravity of the order. But the exceptions, which I believe every such order has had, do diminish the severity of the restriction. It is a huge stretch, actually dishonest, to imply that any of these orders prohibited people from leaving their home. Many of them were accompanied with language that in fact encouraged people to get outside to clear their heads. I will eat my hat if you can find a single one that prohibits people from going outside simply to exercise.
You've fallen victim to a widespread disinformation campaign. There were orders to close restaurants, ban public gatherings, etc., but general orders to stay at home were not issued during the Spanish flu. (It is true that many cities required people to wear face masks in public, and I agree that's almost surely constitutional.)
There is no substantive difference between prohibiting most of the things people can do outside of the home and prohibiting leaving the home except for things that wouldn't be on that list of prohibitions. The framing of today's shelter-in-place orders is different than the orders issued in the 1918-1919 epidemic, the substance (in outline, details differ because the scope of options available to address is different) is not.
There's been widespread misinformation that similar orders were implemented during the Spanish Flu, which I think has defused a lot of the curiosity about it.
I mean where are "people who are either well-informed or resourceful enough to explore the subject", and why are they not raising the obvious question of violation of the consitution.
They are. William Barr had a whole letter about how he was watching carefully, and many personalities (Matt Walsh is the first example that comes to mind) have been very vocal that they think the Constitution's being violated and lockdowns must end immediately.
For great many Supreme Court rulings there was an opposite ruling in the past. It used to be that the black did not have rights, the gays could not marry, the women could not vote, and speaking up against war was treason.
Most certainly. All the things I have enumerated have turned around completely.
Most (all?) of these arcane laws were presented in their time as justified curtailing of individual freedoms for the common good. You could not oppose war without going to jail - one could, and did, argue that such any such opposition was detrimental to resolve and ultimately the victory itself, leading to untold casualties. And yet here we are - oppose all you want!
Every oppressive law is introduced with justification of needing to protect the public, but finding the balance is not as simple as saying "yep, this might help in our fight against blah". The balance needs to be found in accordance with the Bill of Rights, in particular the 4th amendment.
uhhh some of those things became constitutional by modifying the constitution, overruling the Supreme Court by making unconstitutional things constitutional
What is up with this website? I loaded it on my phone, it requested location permission, which I denied, redirected, requested location again, and then crashed.
There seems to be a deep unawareness on the part of some of these officials that stupid draconian restrictions undermine their credibility and activate the latent "fuck you, buddy" attitude that is a core part of the American psyche.
We're already seeing just how much enforcement of any of these decrees ultimately relies on the consent of the people to go along with it. Deploying jackboots over closing beaches or not letting people buy seeds at Walmart chews up legitimacy that will be needed as this thing goes on.
> The legislature may have buyer's remorse for the breadth of discretion it gave to (the Department of Health Services). But those are the laws it drafted
So although every state is different, Wisconsin isn't that different and its Supreme Court did not rule on the law and only on feelings.
The majority opinion was across the ideological spectrum, the dissenting opinion was across the ideological spectrum as well.
4-3 decision
One member of the court had just left the court, could have easily been 4-4 or another combination
> One member of the court had just left the court, could have easily been 4-4 or another combination
The incumbent (Kelly) was voted out of office about a month ago, and the winning challenger (Karofsky) won't fill the seat until August 1, 2020. Kelly sided with the majority opinion in this decision.
Lame ducks (Congresses, Legislatures, Governors, and Presidents) often do things that they should not. Republicans and Democrats have done plenty of lame duck things they shouldn't have. It's a fact of life in the U.S. system that mostly derives from long transitions having been necessary in the 18th century due to the slowness of communications and travel back then.
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.
Given that the stay at home order is unlawful and democracy has now been restored, I am sure the court will be open today, all judges present and hearing arguments in front of a packed public gallery. I also look forwards to the republicans who brought the case attending the senate building and sitting for extended hours to sort out this issue.
The way the United States has handled this has been awe inspiring in its incompetence. We had our first identified case on the same day as S. Korea. Our death rate is currently 254 / million vs S. Korea's rate of 5.
Our federal leadership is saying that we should both open up and not open up at the same time. Its encouraging protesters that are protesting for the disobedience of the guidelines that it released. We refused functioning tests from other nations that worked in order to produce our own. This cost valuable time and resulted in a first round of testing that did not work, costing more time.
Businesses are shuttered by government edict forcing them to furlough or lay people off. Those people are now forced to sit at home without income or any job prospects while the government that required it continues to get paid and states that no further stimulus or funds to individuals is really needed while stating that the $1,200 some limited subset of people got should last 10 weeks. At the same time this government is actively working to reduce food subsidies and health care options not tied to employment.
We have state governments using their national guard to protect their ppe from seizure by the federal government. The federal governments response has been rife with cronyism and self enrichment. State level unemployment has been a massive failure.
We now have the federal government stating that citizens are warriors and encouraging us to willingly fight and die with a virus? Scientists whose job it is to provide public information and policy are actively derided. Talking heads are actively calling the number of deaths a hoax and panning a reasonable response.
We could have just shut down in the beginning, the government could have use the DPA to mass produce PPE and the existing tests while providing people with at least a minimum UBI. They could have quickly reached a point where we are able to test people each day as they walk into the office if in person work is required. If the test is failed the individual must self isolate for x days and can return to work once they test negative. Federal government guarantees the persons job while they are sick and pays the salary so the employer does not suffer. We could have had this thing fully contained and been back up and running in a couple of months.
Instead we appear to have seen the stock market fall, thrown our hands up in the air and cried that it is too hard.
Rant over. I am just very frustrated that it appears we may have endured all of this for nothing due to terrible management.
actually people are sitting at home getting paid more to sit than they were to work, and the government is not getting paid --- it's losing massive tax revenue.
If you are. Curious about the actual hearing that led to this, which I read as more intellectually honeston the part of the jurists than the ruling, slate has a nice summary with extensive quotes.
It is shocking to me that someone like this could be appointed to and then elected to a state Supreme Court:
Bradley's homophobic writings that she wrote in the Marquette University student newspaper in 1992 while an undergraduate stirred controversy during the race.[8][9] She had written letters to the editor and a column for the Marquette Tribune, in which she stated she held no sympathy for AIDS patients because they were "degenerates" who had effectively chosen to kill themselves. She also referred to gays as "queers".[10][11] She called the plurality of Americans who voted for Clinton "either totally stupid or entirely evil".[12] She blasted supporters of abortion as murderers, and compared abortion to the Holocaust and slavery.[10] She attacked feminists as "angry, militant, man-hating lesbians who abhor the traditional family" and defended Camille Paglia, who had written in a 1991 column that "women who get drunk at frat parties are 'fools' and women who go upstairs with frat brothers are 'idiots'."[13] Bradley wrote that Paglia had "legitimately suggested that women play a role in date rape."[13] Bradley apologized for her student writings in 2016, shortly after they had stirred controversy.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Bradley_(judge)
is there some secret info only New Yorkers are privy to?
In case it wasn't obvious, Wisconsin is not New York. People drive cars rather than packing onto crowded subways. The transmission rate for the virus is going to be much lower there. The curve is naturally flatter.
If (not debating the one in Wisc here just generally) a government tries to enforce a power they don't have or didn't go through the actual process to use it ... there's not much sense in debating it's constitutionality as that's sort of moot as the context is all lost at that point.
I imagine if you didn't stop there it would just be constitutional precedent setting left and right for things you didn't need to do that for.
Granted there are exceptions, I have seen decisions in extreme cases where the decision does say "even if you had gone through the process... you probably still couldn't do that".
"Without legislative review, “an unelected official could create law applicable to all people during the course of COVID-19 and subject people to imprisonment when they disobeyed her order,” the majority wrote. "
Sounds like legitimate reasoning for their decision, no?
But what about the US? If all government is corrupt, if all taxes are sin, if all leaders on the other side are traitors to the cause, the people will never respect those in charge. The people don't obey the "orders" nor follow advice. Then they wrap themselves in the flag and actively work against the measures in the name of freedom. That cultural chicken has now come home to roost.
This state supreme court could have delayed. Cases take years to get to state supreme courts. They could easily have pushed this case until after this disease has come and gone. Instead they pushed this through in order to get a quick victory over a governor with whom they disagree politically.