> Japan never had lockdown and is doing fine without it

Japan does have an emergency lockdown, it's just that it's not legally enforceable. However, people who have disregarded the lockdown have and will be subject to intense public shaming and bashing.

Additionally, the Covid situation in Japan is far from being okay. The government and IOC's insistence on proceeding with the Olympics despite the slow vaccine rollouts have resulted in a surge of new cases and is continuing to put strain on the health care system [1]. The situation is so bad that the current prime minister is quitting over this.

https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/

17,000 deaths may be a lot better than some other countries, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "doing fine" compared to the near-zero death counts in regions that imposed fast and strict lockdowns.

I do not. The cost of fast and strict lockdowns is very minimal. It's when you wait to enact a proper lockdown that it becomes very very expensive, because it suddenly takes six months to finish instead of six days.

> More people die every year from making those choices [diet, exercise] badly than anything else.

Yep, which is most countries tax things like sugar more heavily than they do vegetables, and why your health insurance is cheaper if you're in good physical health. We already have restrictions to incentivise good habits there.

> If you believe liberty is important on any level, then you would believe people should generally be able to decide for themselves what risks they want to take with their lives.

I'm fine with people deciding what risks they want to take with their own lives, I'm not fine with them deciding what risks they want to take with the lives of anyone who happens to come into contact with them.

I also think that the argument you’re putting forward here shows close to zero regard for the welfare of other people. Perhaps the lockdowns are inexpensive to you, but they are life-changingly devastating to others. Perhaps you have a comfortable living arrangement, and the ability to work from home. Perhaps you haven’t had to attend a parents funeral over FaceTime. Perhaps you haven’t lost your career. Perhaps you haven’t been confined to a dormitory for months on end. Perhaps you haven’t been stuck at home with a domestic abuser. Perhaps you haven’t had to liquidate your business. Perhaps you haven’t been driven to suicide by having your entire life taken away. But many people have. Surely we must be allowed to debate the indiscriminate costs of the measures you demand to increase your own personal safety.

Your argument for controlling others to protect your own safety can also be extended without limit. Most of the things that can kill you outside are the decisions of other people. Why should they be allowed out for non-essential purposes when they are clearly imperilling you for their own leisure? I’m going to cook dinner tonight, why should I be allowed to do that when I might burn my house down, and your house too, killing both of us and our entire families? Surely some laws are necessary, but surely we must be entitled to debate them to figure out which ones are reasonable.

So let's minimise how devastating they are by doing them hard and early, so that they don't end up lasting for months.

Or is your proposed alternative not doing them at all? Because dying is a hell of a lot more devastating than a lockdown is.

> Perhaps you haven’t had to attend a parents funeral over FaceTime.

Letting thousands more parents die so that someone can attend a funeral seems rather counter-productive.

> Perhaps you haven’t been stuck at home with a domestic abuser.

Even the harshest lockdowns I'm aware of have explicitly allowed for accommodations in these types of situations, and I've never seen a single person arguing that they shouldn't.

> Perhaps you haven’t been driven to suicide by having your entire life taken away. But many people have.

Bullshit. Here's a direct quote from the AIHW:

"Since 2020, suicide registers in Victoria and New South Wales have regularly published data on suspected deaths by suicide in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The Suicide in Queensland: Annual Report 2020 (Leske et al. 2020) included data on suspected deaths by suicide from January 2015 to July 2020. In all cases there is no evidence of any increase in 2020 or 2021 relative to previous years."

Source: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/co...

This is an extremely common blatant lie perpetuated by the exact kind of disinformation merchants this thread is about. COVID-19 related restrictions and lockdowns have had no effect on suicide rates.

> Surely some laws are necessary, but surely we must be entitled to debate them to figure out which ones are reasonable.

You're absolutely entitled to debate them - you're doing that right here. No-one's getting banned for posting "I think this lockdown is unnecessary". They're getting banned for spreading false information and advocating for people to actively break said laws, creating major health risks in the process.

Having a loose association with groups that promote civil disobedience, or even directly promoting it is clearly not the reason that Facebook is banning these accounts. Because Facebook doesn’t do this with any other cause that promotes or associates with the promoters of civil disobedience (in democratic jurisdictions at least).

You also can’t make the case that civil disobedience during the pandemic is disallowed. Because the promotion of civil disobedience and mass gatherings was very clearly allowed, depending on the cause that was being promoted.

I also find the suggestion that one of the least trusted companies in the world should be entrusted with the authority to police “false information” to be completely laughable. Your own interpretation of what constitutes “false information” is clearly rather inadequate. I made the claim that people who would not have otherwise committed suicide did as a result of the lockdown. Something I know for a fact to be true. Your claim is that this is not true because you claim that the total number of suicides hasn’t changed. Which, even if true, doesn’t refute my point in any way. Which demonstrates perfectly why preserving democratic principles is so important.

Which is about half the japanese population. Or are we comparing apples to jetskis here?

There is more to death than numbers. 16.000 genocidal industrialized slaughterings or 16.000 targeted kindergarden assassinations are certainly something a free society cannot tolerate, while 16.000 dying of old age is something a free society has to tolerate because it is part of nature.

Now that we are clear what kind of deaths a free society has incentives to prevent for sure (genocides, assassinations) we can move on into murkier territory: Preventable pandemic deseases. Note the pandemic in there, it is the thing that makes the difference between "you lead an unhealthy lifestyle and now it comes back to haunt you" and "you did everything right, but your neighbour caughed in your face today". Being in a pandemic situation where everybody can potentially become another ones killer is a delicate situation for any form of society, but especially for a free one. But compared to the times of the black death it is much, much easier if you know what is killing you, how it is doing it and how to prevent people from getting it, either by organisational changes (lockdowns, mask mandates, home office) and/or by medical means (vaccinations).

Now any free society usually also values life itself. Preventable deaths are bad. Preventable pandemic death is worse, because it is not a fixed number ("x people get struck by lightning a year"), but a partially exponentially developing one.

I think it is totally rational for any kind of free society to:

- do more to avoid preventable death than unpreventable death (the easier this prevention is the bigger the moral duty to do sth)

- do more to avoid preventable pandemic death than preventable non-pandemic death (because logistic function)

The easier and the less side effects this prevention has the more moral mandate there is to do it.

Of course measures can go over the top as well. Politicians/corporations can abuse the situation to extend their powers and these are legitimate concerns.

Sadly nowadays they are filled with very un-nuanced, self-lying fundamentalist people ("My freedom to not wear a mask is more important than your freedom not to die") that are quite frankly right now the reason why this pandemic is still rolling.

It is hard to form reasonable criticism in companionship of people who do as if a piece of cloth in front of their mouth is the most fundamental breach of human rights ever.

“X number of people will die” is an equally un-nuanced argument, and in the comment I was replying to above, it was the entirety of the argument they put forward.

It is possible to have a nuanced and properly considered discussion or debate about the intricacies of this topic. But on Facebook, you’re only allowed to do this if your perspective is on the list of approved perspectives. It’s the same for a lot of other social media outlets. Even if you don’t necessarily get banned, the idiots who are only capable of seeing black and white tend to do their best to drown out any opinions they don’t like.

I live in Adelaide, a city of over a million people that has done two strict lockdowns (at 17 and 6 cases respectively), and neither of them lasted more than a week. Both of them completely eradicated the virus from the state, and we've had 0 COVID-related deaths in over a year. Looking at the absolute disasters happening everywhere else that doesn't react as quickly (even just over in Sydney) shows exactly how well those have worked.

> Closing borders before there is community spread, a la Australia and NZ, is a separate issue.

For the record, we actually didn't do this - borders we only unilaterally closed after community spread had occurred. It was only after eradicating the virus from the community in early 2020 that it became a primary line of defence against further spread.

> Those were not "fast". The borders to those countries have been closed since early 2020.

By "fast" I meant reacting quickly, not that the lockdown was over quickly. However usually those are the same thing - it's a hell of a lot easier to eradicate the virus when you start at 10 cases instead of 10,000.

Conflating closed international borders with a lockdown is somewhat confusing. Australia and New Zealand closing their borders to countries that couldn't successfully restrict COVID spread has had virtually no impact on anyone's day-to-day life.

> There is currently no end in sight to their "fast and strict" lockdown.

Only 2 Australian states are currently locked down (Victoria and New South Wales), and describing NSW's as "fast" or "strict" would be downright laughable.

When does this end? "Until Covid goes away" isn't an answer if Covid never goes away.

Right now the magic number for Australia is getting 80% of the population vaccinated, at which point the current COVID-zero approach will be abandoned.

I believe New Zealand has a similar approach, although I'm not sure on the exact number they're targeting.

My source shows them at 64.4%, where are you seeing 80%?

> Had the world's highest daily infection rate last week.

And the world's ~50th highest death rate.

The point of the vaccine isn't simply to prevent you from getting the virus, it's to prevent you from getting sick or dying. Ideally it makes transmission harder too (a less severe infection means less viral load to spread), but that's just a secondary benefit. The primary thing is to stop people from being hospitalised.

Israel has among the world’s highest levels of vaccination for COVID-19, with 78% of those 12 and older fully vaccinated, the vast majority with the Pfizer vaccine. Yet the country is now logging one of the world’s highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people.

More than half are in fully vaccinated people, underscoring the extraordinary transmissibility of the Delta variant and stoking concerns that the benefits of vaccination ebb over time.

I think that 60% figure is the percentage of vaccinated and hospitalised. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/nearly-6...

For months we were confined to our homes. The lockdowns began in March, just like they did in Australia.

We wore masks (after our health agencies recommended them in late March/early April), we didn't go outside, we didn't go to work. At least those that were lucky enough to not be in one of the essential groups I mentioned above.

Your international border was completely shut to non-citizens (correct?). You live in one of the most remote places on Earth, surrounded by the South Pacific and Indian oceans. You control your entire continent.

In the U.S., we are unable to prevent millions of people from entering the country via our southern border, that stretches many thousands of miles, in any year. Many who are otherwise very serious about the pandemic are indifferent to this issue. Even if we had been able to eradicate the virus in the lower 48 states, it would have been instantly reintroduced into the country.

I'm only discussing closed borders because, from what I can gather, that's the only meaningful, discernable policy difference.

I'm curious which restrictions you believe were implemented in Australia, aimed at reducing community spread, that were not in the U.S.? What did you do that "eradicated" the virus that we were unable or unwilling to do? This is an honest question.

I've never been to Adelaide but judging by the map, and your response, it's a more remote area of the country. Those that lived in mega-cities like Sydney had much more community spread, before the seriousness of the issue was known, due to their global interconnectedness. Those of us who live in such places might wish they had the type of advanced warning that others did. But we didn't. Once the virus was widespread within the community, it was not possible to stop it. I say this as someone who spent the pandemic in New York City.

So maybe you are right that "fast and strict" is the way to go (if you define fast by meaning, before uncontrollable community spread). But if that's the case, can't you understand how that was never an option for many places? While Adelaide/Australia as a whole was dealing with its 10 cases, NYC alone likely had many more than 10,000. This is why many Americans were furious at the endless, largely pointless restrictions that occurred after the initial 2-3 month lockdown.

It's really hard to buy this notion. 3 days is not long enough for symptoms to manifest after infection. There seems to have been a great deal of luck that this was all that was required. And like you said, it started from an extremely low basepoint. One that's basically impossible for more densely populated countries or cities given the situation.

A 3 day lockdown would have done nothing for NYC. Monitoring and enforcing the goings on of the 9 million people in the city itself (20.3 mil in the metro), given the size of the police force, would not have been possible.

When I speak of "the situation", I mean that it would have been nice if China had been more forthcoming about the pneumonia that developed late in 2019, rather than censoring and imprisoning their own public health professionals and front line workers, but that didn't happen. So here we are. It's easy to forget that conservatives were the ones sounding the alarm about a "Chinese virus" in January 2020. Trump wanted to end travel from that nation. He was told in no uncertain terms that he was a hysterical racist and that sensible policy never materialized.

> I wouldn't really describe it like that, but I suppose it depends on your definition of "remote". It's definitely heavily urban, and travel between different major cities is still high despite the large distances involved.

I looked at the aerial photographs. Chinese, Europeans, coastal Americans, would have a hard time thinking of such a place as "dense" or "urban". Certainly it's one of the most remote metros over 1 mil on the globe.

> "COVID is a hoax"

Covid isn't a hoax but it certainly was cynically exploited for political gain by Democrats who sensed this as their opening for the 2020 election. After the March lockdowns (the ones Trump agreed with at the time and helped implement), Democrats then encouraged the most destructive riots in American history (measured in dollars) for more cynical political gain. "White supremacy is the real virus", mass demonstrations all over the country during a pandemic. After we had all been locked in our homes. Insanity. Totally irresponsible.

This absolute nonsense, and the subsequent finger wagging and blame pointing at Trump, despite how widespread the virus had already become in March before we were able to react to it, was the breaking point for most conservative Americans, myself included. The hypocrisy was too much.

When American conservatives say "covid is a hoax", they largely mean the cynical response to it that I just described, and the effect it had on the American election, not that it literally doesn't exist. There are some absolute crazies on the far right who post nonsense about "5G", and unfortunately that spread to Australia, I'm sure. But I've never met such a person, and I have many connections to conservative states.

> If China managed to eradicate the virus in Wuhan, then it should have been possible for any developed country.

They're lying. The West used to not be so quick to take the word of authoritarian regimes, especially those so obsessed with the concept of "saving face". Covid still kills people to this day in China despite their unwillingness to be honest about cases and deaths.

So in your previous comment you alluded to the idea that infections can creep in to a community where it has been previously eradicated. The virus wouldn't really be dangerous at all if we knew that this was happening in real-time, because we could just isolate every case. The reason the virus is dangerous is because it rapidly spreads undetected, and by the time we find out things could already be pretty bad.

The point of the immediate lockdown isn't that it will inherently prevent spread for long enough the virus dies off - it's just to give the contact tracing teams enough time to find every single person who has interacted with any single person that has interacted with any known case. Then all of those people have to do a proper quarantine (usually 14 days) and get tested regularly. Once you've done that, you wait a couple of days to see if any other seemingly random cases appear out of nowhere, and if they don't, everyone else can be assumed safe to go out as they'd please.

> I looked at the aerial photographs. Chinese, Europeans, coastal Americans, would have a hard time thinking of such a place as "dense" or "urban".

The trick here is that no-one lives in the areas that no-one lives in, so they're not really relevant. Yes, the desert 100km away from Adelaide is empty. But people travel by plane to Melbourne or Sydney, not by wandering around the desert - Australia has one of the most urban populations of any country on the planet.

You wouldn't say that Malé isn't dense or urban just because it's surrounded by water, and indeed that characteristic has not helped the Maldives at all when it comes to COVID-19.

> They're lying.

About having (previously) eradicated COVID in Wuhan? Definitely not. Just ask anyone who actually lives there - life returned to complete normal after a couple of months. If COVID was still present in a megacity with absolutely no restrictions, everyone in the city would have stories of friends and relatives dying. That was happening in February. It wasn't happening in May.

New Zealand is currently around the 10-20/day cases mark contained to their largest city which remains in hard lockdown. The rest of the country has eased restrictions.

The delta variant has proven very difficult, the state of Victoria in Australia which really pushed the lockdown strtategy has given up. They're now pushing for vaccination in hopes of easing restrictions further. They remain in lockdown as a larger outbreak would overwhelm the healthcare system.

Similar case for New Zealand - they have a capacity of less than 250 ICU beds for COVID for 5 million people. The risks are much, much worse if the outbreak spreads.

NZ has had sustained mass immigration for years, and the population grows incredibly fast. All the infrastructure is designed for a country with 80% of the population level we have now, and I don't see it getting better.

Someone else defying lockdown, test & trace, mask, or vaccine mandates can affect me, especially prior to when I was able to get the vaccine.

That's the difference.

Death toll would be way higher than 17k especially with the more older population in Japan compared to other countries. Not to mention hospital overcrowding leading to higher fatality rates compared to now and even highet non covid deaths due to lack of emergency medical care.