Regarding Government measures to “flatten the curve”
I originally posted the following to Facebook on April 8, 2020 (early within the COVID-19 pandemic):
Between the different state and national governments trying different methods to contain the viral outbreak, one thing is clear, each of them lack vision, focus, and any identifiable goals.
The only reason a lockdown “should” possibly be implemented would be to completely eradicate the virus in a short period of time (the amount of time needed for all the currently infected people to begin showing symptoms and fully recover). But to do that while keeping “essential” services active completely defeats that purpose. The virus will still spread among workers of those active services, allowing for a new wave of outbreaks after that time period is over.
If the goal is to simply flatten the curve, many people have naturally been contributing to that without any government coercion whatsoever by practicing practical social distancing measures (keeping at a distance, wearing masks or gloves, abiding crowds, etc).
Currently many people are locked down without any specific end goals identified. This makes it impossible for people and businesses to plan for the future. Each person needs to ask themselves, “What is the role of government?” Is the primary role simply to keep people alive? If so, the government’s eagerness to fight war after war shows that it fails miserably at that. Many of America’s forefathers would’ve claimed that the only role of government was to protect the rights of it’s citizens (well, at least some of them anyway). If you agree with them, how’s your government doing at that right now?
December 2022 retrospect
To my knowledge, any local governments that were initiating lockdowns never did broadcast any particular goal for ending those lockdowns. But they did end as infections rates naturally reduced. To that point, they seemingly reduced equally among areas locked down and not locked down. Statistically, there was little-to-no difference in infection rates or deaths between areas locked down and not locked down.
To my point about completely eradicating a virus, it played out exactly that way in China. China attempted to enforce a zero COVID policy, strictly locking down entire cities and building concentration camps to house the infected. Ultimately, they failed to achieve zero COVID and now they’re dealing with protests from their citizens. I believe this best illustrates that centralized management of such things does not work.
