NZ, UK, US, Sweden, Poland & Cheese eating surrender Monkeys approaches to Covid-19

[myboyblue]

@Raylan

DANIEL FINKELSTEIN
Were we too ready to surrender our freedom?
The past year’s experiments in curtailing civil liberties have set a worrying precedent for handling of the next crisis
Daniel Finkelstein
Tuesday March 16 2021, 5.00pm GMT, The Times

Well, this has been fun. Shall we do it again?

Next week marks the first anniversary of a vast social experiment. For almost a year now we have been under virtual house arrest, a policy that has, extraordinarily, commanded broad assent and high levels of compliance. It’s the first time we have done anything remotely like it. But I wonder whether it will be the last.

A few days ago, the former Supreme Court justice Lord (Jonathan) Sumption gave an interview to the website Unherd setting out his latest view on Covid. I’ve found his previous remarks on the topic wayward but he’s always worth listening to. And so it proved. Sumption made three arguments, two of which I found flatly wrong.

The first was that we have got the whole Covid thing out of proportion. I can’t agree with that. In the absence of preventive measures, it is clear that hundreds of thousands more people would have died. There are, of course, trade-offs but the impact of Covid is so severe I’m not surprised that almost everywhere, national governments have made a similar choice.

His second point is particularly relevant. Sumption anticipated that people would begin to break the law: “Some laws invite breach and this is one of them”. People would tire of the emergency restrictions on freedom of movement and stop complying. He may have seen Saturday’s vigil for Sarah Everard as vindicating this view. And certainly some people’s reaction to this event was a little odd. Should I be able to invite all my family to my wedding? No. Should I be able to go to my friend’s funeral? No. Should I be able to attend a large demonstration? Yes!

So the vigil could be represented as a fraying of the consensus about social distancing, with a whole new demographic joining the sceptics.

Yet this would be a misreading. The organisers of the vigil decided not to go ahead when a court ruled that it would be in breach of coronavirus regulations. And those who proceeded anyway, and then resisted the police request to disperse, were a small number. They also did not enjoy majority public support, according to opinion polls.

All of which brings me to Sumption’s third point, on which he is strongly and importantly right. Having locked down the country for the best part of a year and suspended basic civil liberties once, we are far more likely to do it again. We have crossed a line and it will stay crossed.

To read the scientific advice or revisit the debate about Covid a year ago is to appreciate that much of it was based on an assumption that proved to be incorrect. We weren’t like China, the thinking went. The state couldn’t just order people to stay at home.

In an interview with The Times before Christmas, the epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson described the dawning realisation that this wasn’t right. The government’s scientific advisers had been reviewing China’s approach last March. “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

We could “get away with it” is a revealing way to put it. The pandemic has taught government that in order to feel safe, we are willing to put up with much greater sacrifices of our liberty than it had previously imagined. This lesson will not be forgotten.

At every stage of the pandemic, there has been a tendency to underestimate the public craving for safety, and support for tough measures to protect it.

Conservatives have been bewildered to find themselves making passionate speeches about liberty that have no resonance. Liberals were surprised, after the weekend, by public support for the Metropolitan Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick over her force’s handling of the vigil. It took quite a while for the prime minister to realise that voters preferred certainty and security to early but precarious liberation.

We will start the next health emergency in a very different place from last March. The assumption next time will be that severe measures can readily be countenanced because public compliance can be relied on.

Which is why it matters that we haven’t attempted to measure the trade-offs between saving lives and saving our way of life. The case for Covid restrictions seems so strong that few people have thought it worth pressing for a proper assessment of everything that we’ve sacrificed. Especially since it is a complicated calculation: if we had let the virus rip, that too would have affected education, the economy and social life. The calculation is also an awkward one: it involves trying to determine how valuable a life is, getting us into all sorts of trouble comparing, for instance, the death of a 90-year-old with the value of someone being able to complete their GCSEs.

While we may not think such calculations are worth bothering with given the scale of this pandemic, we will wish we’d made them when the next crisis comes, involving a slightly less infectious disease, perhaps, with a slightly lower but still marked fatality rate.

A bad flu season might take the lives of 20,000 people. What if it threatened, say, 10,000 more than that? If that happens, the authorities may not react as they have done in the past. Now they know we might be willing to isolate, or wear masks, or cancel mass events or even lock down again. We need to discuss how many deaths we are willing to tolerate before we do those things.

Because it will come up. Not just with infectious diseases, either. A more aggressive approach to obesity — bans and taxes on certain types of food — might commend itself to public health practitioners now they know we are prepared to put safety above liberty. And it may apply to preventive measures against terrorism, for instance, or the threat of a dirty bomb.

Those of us who value liberty more highly and who have a higher appetite for public risk, a group in which I include myself, need to appreciate the precedent that has been set.

Ensuring that the powers the government has granted itself are abolished rather than kept for a future occasion is going to be hard political work. As is ensuring that we set the bar very high for renewing such powers in the future.

And we can start by insisting that any public inquiry into the pandemic isn’t just an inquiry into the advice proffered by Dominic Cummings’s optician and the hospital gloves and masks we were sold by a bloke in a pub. It also has to include a full analysis of the choice we made and the circumstances in which we would consider making it again.

Has this been fun? Not really. Shall we do it again? Quite possibly.

Einhorn?

[carryharry]

@Arthur

Can anyone explain this??

You are a tick?

[LionelRitchie]

@Arthur

support in opinion polls

Polls being manipulated maybe? Dunno but not beyond realms of possibility

[Biff_Egan]

Or people wanting to give the “right” answer and not admit that they’d throw their granny in the Liffey for a chance of a creamy pint.

[flattythehurdler]

@Tierneevin1979

The country (excluding small places like Gibraltar and San Marino) with highest death rate in the world is the Czech Rep, followed by Belgium, UK, Hungary, Italy and Portugal, before the US. Where did they all go wrong? Far right governments? Putting economy over people? Didn’t lock down hard enough or long enough?

Old, infirm, unhappy unhealthy population played the biggest role imho.

[flattythehurdler]

@Raylan

it is clear that hundreds of thousands more people would have died.

This is bolloxology. It is far from clear. I’m not reading the rest.

[flattythehurdler]

@Raylan

Professor Neil Ferguson

I read on, despite myself, and landed at this uucoam. A spoofer, bluffer, Liar and hypocrite of the highest order.

[mikehunt]

@Tierneevin1979

Look mate, you are a simpleton if you can’t comprehend what I’m saying, so clearly I’m wasting my time here. When I use the term lockdown, I mean ordering people to stay at home and the knock on effect of closing businesses bar those that are deemed “essential”. That is the commonly understood definition of lockdown in these conversations. It obviously doesn’t impact you so perhaps that’s why you can’t comprehend it.

I am not opposed to restrictions, like border controls, cancelling events and large gatherings, educating the public on social distancing, wearing masks indoors in shops and public transport, sensible measures that work to reduce spread. These measures don’t do much long term damage, relative to shutting down businesses, denying children an education, not allowing people to go to parks, beaches, etc.

You continue to ignore the evidence against lockdowns, which is that countries (and states in the US) that either never had a lockdown or abandoned lockdowns in early summer last year have had the same outcome as those that kept them in place.

Only seeing this now, lolz, making up your own definitions now, wonderful levels of baseless arrogance. The evidence is quite clear, your refusal to accept reality is understandable because to do so would deflate your significant ego. If you were as clever as you think you are you wouldn’t be spending most of day trying to impress randomers on the other side of the Atlantic with pearls of wisdom like “done with Covid”.

[Raylan]

@mikehunt

Only seeing this now

Nobody is going to believe this

[mikehunt]

I pride myself on not telling lies on the internet.

[mikehunt]

, did you even read the definition on that hilariously random blog?

[mikehunt]

Interesting that a group whose primary concern is the living standards of low to middle earners believe that OIUTF without the vaccine has had dire consequences in terms of fatalities (27,000, which mentallers are admittedly apathetic about) but that there are negative economic consequences also.

“…allowing extra deaths did not limit economic impacts, but rather increased them, because it only precipitated longer and more onerous lockdowns.”

Delaying England's winter lockdown 'caused up to 27,000 extra Covid deaths'

[Tierneevin1979]

Web MD is not a random blog you stupid cunt.
Their definition of lockdown agrees precisely with mine, you know, that thing you say isn’t a lockdown.

[mikehunt]

Sure it does Cleetus

[TheUlteriorMotive]

So you accept they are lockdowns now?

[mikehunt]

No it’s just a misused generic term for restrictions. @Tierneevin1979 helpfully provided a random link to a definition. Not sure why he didn’t link to a dictionary but anyway the definition clearly states that lockdown prohibits non essential travel. People have been free to enter and exit this country since it started. Not sure if the UK have introduced mandatory quarantine but if they have it’s only been very recent so there has never been a full lockdown here.

[Batigol]

@Batigol

How long until we see the massive explosion in cases in Texas and Mississippi?

Nothing yet…

[Tierneevin1979]

With the exception of Norway, no other western country imposed the kind of border controls you are on about, you stupid cunt.

[mikehunt]

Yet you continually say lockdowns don’t work even though very few countries have implemented lockdowns as per the definition. You’re tying yourself up in knots again.

[Tierneevin1979]

Strict border controls are a separate category of restrictions to lockdowns, just as voluntary measure like social distancing, self isolation, mask wearing, etc. are also a separate category. Every commentator on the pandemic uses these distinctions. You and I actually are agreement on one thing, lockdowns without strict border controls are next to useless, and the evidence for that is everywhere you look. The curves for cases and deaths look exactly the same for US states that had strict lockdowns, states that never had lockdowns, or abandoned them in May of 2020.

Obviously if the western world had adopted a zero Covid strategy from the beginning (January 2020) there would have been no pandemic. That means every border closed, every airport closed, every port closed, and the military and police in every country enforcing the closure. With the exception of the very few (NZ, Australia, Norway) no countries pursued this approach. Arguing for strict border controls now is like arguing for the 2001 AIF to be replayed.

What such a strategy would have done to the global economy is another discussion, along with the fact that once you shut your borders you can never open them until the virus has been completely eradicated everywhere. It only took 200 years to eradicate smallpox, I’m sure a man of your patience would have no issue with that.