I know of a good number of friends who were unable to continue their jobs that requires substantial in-person abroad coordination since Australia prevented nationals from leaving their own country. I also talked to 2-3 Australians who thought that Australia had messed up pretty badly here.
Sure. I also talked to tens of Australians who thought that they did a great job. In Spain, the country where I am from, I know personally many people who were also unable to continue their jobs, and not because the country forbade their nationals to leave. There is going to be a lot of variance in the individual opinions. The amount of dead people is on the other hand a more objective measure on how successful were countries at dealing with the pandemic
Taking the # of dead people as an objective is biasing the question.
Fundamentally, there is a question of whether the benefits of lockdowns were worth the costs.
Measuring that only by # of dead people is ignoring the fundamental problems with the lockdowns.
Let me explicate.
I think I am in the minority position on this board (and Habryka might be too) in that I feel it is obvious that the relatively small number of elderly people saved counterfactually by lockdowns is not comparable to the enormous mental, economic loss, the dangerous precedent for civil liberties set by lockdowns etc. It is clear to me that a “correct” utilitarian calculation will conclude that the QALYs lost by dead elderly people in the first world is absolutely swamped by the QALYs lost by mental health of young people and the millions of global poor thrown back into poverty.
(Moreover, this ignores the personal liberty aspect that people are free to make their own safety/lifestyle tradeoffs and it should require a superabundance of QALYs saved to impinge on this freedom)
Bolstered by the apparent succes of Taiwan I supported a short lockdown followed by track & trace—but mid summer 2020 it was clear that this was never going to work. Actually, Taiwan had to revert to lockdowns later during the pandemic anyway. It was clear to me that further lockdowns were no longer worth it.
Even if you think the lockdowns were justified, one should note that Australia has gone much farther; it has continued severe COVID restrictions even after vaccination & absence of a long-term plan. It has made it almost completely impossible to go in or out of the country (even if one is an Australian citizen willing to undergo extensive testing) . In my humble opinion this is completely crazy territory.
Speaking about completely crazy territory… If you measure a country’s COVID response by # of deaths by COVID then the “bestest most responsible government” would be the Chinese government.
I hope you will agree with me that this would be a mistake.
My assessment is also that the health costs of the pandemic were small in comparison to the secondary effects of lockdown (which were mostly negative). Any analysis that primarily measures deaths seems to me to ignore the vast majority of the impact (which is primarily economic and social).
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 of a good number of friends who were unable to continue their jobs that requires substantial in-person abroad coordination since Australia prevented nationals from leaving their own country. I also talked to 2-3 Australians who thought that Australia had messed up pretty badly here.
Sure. I also talked to tens of Australians who thought that they did a great job. In Spain, the country where I am from, I know personally many people who were also unable to continue their jobs, and not because the country forbade their nationals to leave. There is going to be a lot of variance in the individual opinions. The amount of dead people is on the other hand a more objective measure on how successful were countries at dealing with the pandemic
Taking the # of dead people as an objective is biasing the question.
Fundamentally, there is a question of whether the benefits of lockdowns were worth the costs. Measuring that only by # of dead people is ignoring the fundamental problems with the lockdowns.
Let me explicate.
I think I am in the minority position on this board (and Habryka might be too) in that I feel it is obvious that the relatively small number of elderly people saved counterfactually by lockdowns is not comparable to the enormous mental, economic loss, the dangerous precedent for civil liberties set by lockdowns etc. It is clear to me that a “correct” utilitarian calculation will conclude that the QALYs lost by dead elderly people in the first world is absolutely swamped by the QALYs lost by mental health of young people and the millions of global poor thrown back into poverty. (Moreover, this ignores the personal liberty aspect that people are free to make their own safety/lifestyle tradeoffs and it should require a superabundance of QALYs saved to impinge on this freedom)
Bolstered by the apparent succes of Taiwan I supported a short lockdown followed by track & trace—but mid summer 2020 it was clear that this was never going to work. Actually, Taiwan had to revert to lockdowns later during the pandemic anyway. It was clear to me that further lockdowns were no longer worth it.
Even if you think the lockdowns were justified, one should note that Australia has gone much farther; it has continued severe COVID restrictions even after vaccination & absence of a long-term plan. It has made it almost completely impossible to go in or out of the country (even if one is an Australian citizen willing to undergo extensive testing) . In my humble opinion this is completely crazy territory.
Speaking about completely crazy territory… If you measure a country’s COVID response by # of deaths by COVID then the “bestest most responsible government” would be the Chinese government. I hope you will agree with me that this would be a mistake.
My assessment is also that the health costs of the pandemic were small in comparison to the secondary effects of lockdown (which were mostly negative). Any analysis that primarily measures deaths seems to me to ignore the vast majority of the impact (which is primarily economic and social).
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