Quarantine for what? That's what you do with sick people. Whatever is going on in Australia has long ago left the realm of sane quarantine procedure. It will be 2022 soon, and the Australians are trying to prevent interstate spread of COVID-19. It's madness.
Precisely. It is the best cover up for global domination while distracting populations with concern trolling around a virus that is not all that significantly worse than the flu given the level of risk across all age groups.
Heart failure and car accidents claim a higher risk.
There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.
> we need to close everything for years on end?
Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
China, the most populous country on Earth, has no community transmission.
I don't know what went wrong in Mongolia, because I haven't been following that country, but China and New Zealand have demonstrated that with a good public health system, elimination is possible and sustainable.
China also didn't have official community transmission in December 2019 yet we were seeing people coming out of airplanes sick constantly, which allowed us to calculate their infection rates, which were then released publicly when they couldn't be hid any longer.
Today there are no flights out of China and we have to trust the same government when they say they have no transmissions.
Need I point to the centuries long history of communist regimes hiding mass deaths?
> China also didn't have official community transmission in December 2019 yet we were seeing people coming out of airplanes sick constantly, which allowed us to calculate their infection rates
No, this did not happen. Infection rates weren't calculated until January 2020. Nobody even knew there was anything like SARS spreading in Wuhan until 27 December 2019.
Within 72 hours of the first test result indicating a SARS-like virus, it was all over Chinese social media, and even CCTV reported on the outbreak. And of course, it only took a few weeks afterwards for the hospitals to become overloaded with sick patients.
> Today there are no flights out of China
This is simply untrue. Just to take one example, yesterday alone, there were 9 flights from Shanghai Pudong Airport to LAX.
The situation in China right now is obvious: the virus is gone. Just ask any of your friends/colleagues who live there.
> There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.
Do you know what AIDS is?
Unlike Covid which kills something under 1 in 100 people it infects AIDS until the mid 90s was a death sentence for anyone who got it.
I remember being in an emergency room and the nurse asking for people to give blood because their blood banks were tainted and the doctors could either let patients die from from blood loss or in 10 years from AIDS.
I have no idea why that whole pandemic has been pushed down the memory hole. It's like everyone born after 1985 doesn't even know what it is, let alone what it was like to see people you know just wilt and die.
>Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months. NZ is the most successful and they are currently in their 5th national lockdown.
What kind of a question is that? It's a horrible disease, and it shows how important it is to have a good public health system.
> Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months.
China hasn't had a widespread lockdown since early 2020. In recent outbreaks, lockdowns have been very geographically limited. For example, the Guangzhou outbreak in May-June 2021 was ended without locking down more than just a few districts of the city. Mass testing, contact tracing, and testing requirements for people leaving the city were sufficient.
I'm in Western Australia. I'm delighted with prevention of interstate Covid. The freedom to do whatever you want is pretty enjoyable to be honest, and not worrying that family members will die of Covid is even better.
I wish this was a joke, or fake news. But no, once they control where you can go, when you can go there, etc, it's not a big jump for them to demand control over what you put in your body. It's for your own safety, after all.
Of course it did, exactly because there was a lockdown that prevented many COVID deaths.
If there hadn't been a lockdown, many more people would have died from COVID than now died from drinking. Sweden for example, famous for its non-lockdown, suffered 10 times as many COVID deaths than neighboring Norway with lock-down (and alcohol).
Quarantine has never been strictly for sick people. It is for people who might possibly be infected. You can see this in the etymolgy of the word "quarantine": it refers to the forty days (quarantena in Venetian) that people arriving by ship were required to wait on board before disembarking in Venice during the time of the plague. The whole idea is to wait for the full incubation period of a pathogen, to make sure someone is not infected, before letting them out in the general society.
In contrast, when someone is separated from society because they are known to be infected, that is called "isolation."
I'm familiar with the etymology. This makes a lot of sense for the bubonic plague. Frankly the Venetians would scoff at what we've done to our societies over a disease so tame (measured by overall rate of survival, individual circumstances can be tragic). It was also an era when people had few rights, no vaccines, no access to treatment.
Surely, we should aspire to be better than 14th-century Venice. To not treat people as if they are nothing more than viral vectors. Instead many would trade away what little control over our own lives we still have in exchange for imagined safety from a virus we will all contract eventually. That the vast majority of people have no issues recovering from.
It's not the plague. It's not Ebola. It's not the worst case scenario we were rightfully concerned about in early 2020. How this hasn't sunk in yet for most people is just baffling to me. Then I look around and see lots of motivated reasoning and state-sponsored propaganda about a permanent transition to remote work, increased government surveillance, curtailing the movement of citizens, and other social initiatives various coalitions were already working towards, that are of course suddenly "absolutely necessary" because of a "once in a lifetime pandemic", and it becomes a little clearer.
Spot on, and once the endless waves of variants no longer convince the submissive within our populations that all of these massive changes to life are necessary, the same measures will be used during a questionably endless "climate crisis" to justify the retention of this newfound power they've gained.
You said that quarantine was only for sick people. That's simply wrong.
It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone.
Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even people who do not appear to be sick be quarantined.
You may argue that China, New Zealand et al. should not have pursued a zero-CoVID policy (and in that case, you should be prepared to argue that the 4 million deaths that would likely have resulted in China would have been acceptable), but given that they've pursued this policy, they need to quarantine international travelers, even if they appear to be healthy.
People die. My loved ones and I have made peace with that. Life is not about avoiding death.
10 million is frankly a drop in the bucket. We don't shut down society and hand over control of our lives over car accidents, heart failure, or anything else that kills hundreds of millions.
The behaviors that lead to those deaths are absolutely a form of social contagion and in no world are they less important or relevant because they're not caused by a communicable disease. People could choose to stop the world for those, too. It would probably work. That we choose not to, or rather, that we understand there are tradeoffs involved, does not make us callous murderers.
I feel truly sorry for people who believe that "zero Covid" is a possibility. We have documented evidence of animal reservoirs for the disease. You can vaccinate every single person on the planet and it will not eradicate this virus.
Particularly now that we are aware that 1) our vaccines are not sterilizing and 2) we have evidence of a vaccine resistant mutation on the horizon.
If you want to play whack a mole with restrictions and injections your entire life please do so of your own accord and stop trying to force the rest of us to live in this dystopia with you. I have a short life to live.
Humanity has lost its tragic sense. That there are things outside of our control. This reality does however tend to catch up with each and every one of us.
As New Zealand and China have shown, it is within our power to avert almost all deaths from CoVID-19. They have gotten through the pandemic with orders of magnitude fewer deaths per capita and far greater everyday freedoms than most of the world. Quarantine for international travelers is one of the tools they have used.
"People die" as an excuse for letting millions of people die of preventable causes is a terrible attitude to take.
China is lying and New Zealand is one of the most remote places in the entire world.
I hate to be this blunt but you're kidding yourself if you think this was ever an option for the United States.
With respect to "preventable causes", I already responded to that point. Most death is preventable. Or at least delay-able. That does not mean everyone agrees with your scorched earth campaigns to prevent it.
Here on HN, there are plenty of people who live in China, or who have family/friends/colleagues in China. They can tell you what the situation in the country is.
For more than a year, bars, restaurants and most other things have been open, mass gatherings have been allowed, etc. In densely packed cities with Guangzhou and Shanghai, what do you think R0 would be under those circumstances? Any community transmission would quickly grow into a major outbreak, just like in Wuhan in December 2019.
Yet there's no such outbreak. And no, there's no conceivable way the government could hide such an outbreak.
That's why it's simply not credible to claim that there is any substantial community transmission in China.
The other thing is that you can look at how rigorous the reaction is to every new case of community transmission. There have been small outbreaks in China over the last year, but they've been contained using contact tracing, mass testing, and lockdowns (usually only of individual neighborhoods, but sometimes of cities).
Responding to your edit: still madness