I know this is a sensitive topic and I probably won’t change your mind but hear me out for a second. Re. China, I do agree with you that the response of the CCP (now) is not really a model of what an exemplar government should do. I also agree that up to a certain point you shouldn’t measure exclusively the number of dead people to judge how well a country fared. But it certainly is an important variable that we shouldn’t discount either. The number of dead people is closely correlated to other important factors such as the number of people suffering long covid or even the human suffering in general. I do agree with you that lockdowns in many places have caused potentially more harm than they should. The problem is that not all lockdowns are the same, and people keep them treating as equivalent. Another problem is that I see that many people are rationalizing that things couldn’t have been different, which is super convenient especially for those in power.
So let me talk a bit about Australia (I was living there during the whole pandemic period).
USA sits right now at 3015 dead people per 1M. Australia’s casualties are 364.
I can guarantee you, that to everyone I spoke with who was living at the time in other places (I have many friends in different European countries, Spain, Italy, France, England, etc) would have swtiched places with me without thinking about it for a second.
I follow very closely the news in the USA and I know how extremely biased the coverage was (including some famous podcasters, I am looking at you, Joe Rogan). They focused a lot on the Australian border restrictions / lockdown in Melbourne and very little on the fact that for almost two years, most Australians enjoyed a mostly normal life when people abroad were facing repeatedly absurd government interventions/restrictions. It is not totally true that the borders were completly close either: I have a friend who was allowed to leave the country to visit her dying father in Italy. She came back to Australia and she had to do a quarantine, true, but she was allowed to be back.
The lockdowns in Australia (at least in Queensland where I lived) served a purpose: buy time for the contact tracers so that COVID cases can really be taken down to zero. In Queensland we have a long one at the beginning (2 months maybe?) but then we have a few more (don’t rememeber how many, maybe 3?) that lasted only a few days. They understood very well that dealing with COVID should be a binary thing: Either you have no cases, or you are facing repeated waves of covid. This must continue until everyone has an opportunity to have two shots of the vaccine. Once that everyone had a chance, the borders were opened again and most restrictions were lifted. So in this regard, I do think that the harsh Chinese government measures AT THE BEGINNING (i.e. closing the national borders, PCRs, selective lockdowns, contact tracing, etc), made much more sense that everything that was happening in most of the Western world. Talking to a few Chinese friends, they considered utterly outrageous the fact that we were justifying the death of people saying that they were old anyway or that we shouldn’t stop the economy.
I still remember that at the very beginning of the pandemic, the POTUS was given a press conference and he showed a hesitancy rarely seen on him: he swallowed and took a few seconds to say, stuttering a little bit, that he hadn’t taken measures, there could be a hundred thousand American dying. Today the tally sits at more than 1M. Things could have been different.
Fair enough. Thank you for explaining where you are coming from.
I do agree that if an island is able to close the borders and thereby avoid severe domestic lockdowns this can be justified.
I know this is a sensitive topic and I probably won’t change your mind but hear me out for a second. Re. China, I do agree with you that the response of the CCP (now) is not really a model of what an exemplar government should do. I also agree that up to a certain point you shouldn’t measure exclusively the number of dead people to judge how well a country fared. But it certainly is an important variable that we shouldn’t discount either. The number of dead people is closely correlated to other important factors such as the number of people suffering long covid or even the human suffering in general. I do agree with you that lockdowns in many places have caused potentially more harm than they should. The problem is that not all lockdowns are the same, and people keep them treating as equivalent. Another problem is that I see that many people are rationalizing that things couldn’t have been different, which is super convenient especially for those in power.
So let me talk a bit about Australia (I was living there during the whole pandemic period).
USA sits right now at 3015 dead people per 1M. Australia’s casualties are 364.
I can guarantee you, that to everyone I spoke with who was living at the time in other places (I have many friends in different European countries, Spain, Italy, France, England, etc) would have swtiched places with me without thinking about it for a second.
I follow very closely the news in the USA and I know how extremely biased the coverage was (including some famous podcasters, I am looking at you, Joe Rogan). They focused a lot on the Australian border restrictions / lockdown in Melbourne and very little on the fact that for almost two years, most Australians enjoyed a mostly normal life when people abroad were facing repeatedly absurd government interventions/restrictions. It is not totally true that the borders were completly close either: I have a friend who was allowed to leave the country to visit her dying father in Italy. She came back to Australia and she had to do a quarantine, true, but she was allowed to be back.
The lockdowns in Australia (at least in Queensland where I lived) served a purpose: buy time for the contact tracers so that COVID cases can really be taken down to zero. In Queensland we have a long one at the beginning (2 months maybe?) but then we have a few more (don’t rememeber how many, maybe 3?) that lasted only a few days. They understood very well that dealing with COVID should be a binary thing: Either you have no cases, or you are facing repeated waves of covid. This must continue until everyone has an opportunity to have two shots of the vaccine. Once that everyone had a chance, the borders were opened again and most restrictions were lifted. So in this regard, I do think that the harsh Chinese government measures AT THE BEGINNING (i.e. closing the national borders, PCRs, selective lockdowns, contact tracing, etc), made much more sense that everything that was happening in most of the Western world. Talking to a few Chinese friends, they considered utterly outrageous the fact that we were justifying the death of people saying that they were old anyway or that we shouldn’t stop the economy.
I still remember that at the very beginning of the pandemic, the POTUS was given a press conference and he showed a hesitancy rarely seen on him: he swallowed and took a few seconds to say, stuttering a little bit, that he hadn’t taken measures, there could be a hundred thousand American dying. Today the tally sits at more than 1M. Things could have been different.
Fair enough. Thank you for explaining where you are coming from. I do agree that if an island is able to close the borders and thereby avoid severe domestic lockdowns this can be justified.
(364 Vs 3015 is two orders of magnitude?)
Oooops! Corrected, thanks