Quote (Thor123422 @ 6 Oct 2020 18:57)
Contact tracing, testing, mask wearing, and social distancing can all be implemented without having an economy wide shutdown.
South Korea is the gold standard to this day, even when they have outbreaks they quickly get on top of it and as a result they haven't had to have a massive shutdown, despite having a much higher population density, greater proximity to the source, and being a comparably wealthy country to the United States and Europe.
If you do things right you don't have to shut down. Shutting down is the last-ditch-effort to stop the spread when you've fucked up.
Like I said, economy wide shutdowns are the option of last resort when all else has failed. There is still catastrophic economic damage even without such blanket shutdowns. Even in South Korea, bars and clubs are closed (they tried opening them, instantly lead to superspreading events, who would have thought...), mass gatherings are still severely limited, people are not in shopping mood, stores miss revenue etc. And of course their exports also collapsed, but this part could perhaps have been avoided if the whole world had done as well as SK.
Anyway, even all the European first world countries with competent governments who listened to the experts werent able to replicate what South Korea (and Japan and Vietnam btw) have done to contain the virus. Our western societies are probably just too individualistic and stupified.
Quote (thesnipa @ 6 Oct 2020 18:36)
i'd say that's a strawman, no one thinks it can truly be stopped. and if they do its trump voters who think a vaccine is a miracle drug that will destroy covid. the rhetoric from the start was "flatten the curve", not "eliminate all cases".
To be fair though, a lot of governments' messaging changed from "flatten the curve" to "we should do everything to bring cases down as far as humanly possible". But that's perhaps more an EU thing, in the US, Trump stuck by his yolo attitude all the way. (And it's gonna cost him his reelection, and deservedly so.)