Quote (Black XistenZ @ Sep 16 2021 09:24am)
Okay, I probably did a bad job laying out my line of reasoning. Let me try again:
- Distancing, sanitizing and contact tracing is impossible to pull off to a sufficient degree in the slums of India, Latin America or Africa. Once the virus reached these places, keeping the global case load low became impossible and the risk of breeding new variants increased by orders of magnitude, no matter what the first world nations did.
- To keep cases low, the reproduction factor R_t has to be kept <= 1 for the entire time it takes until vaccines. The relatively mild measures you suggested were barely able to achieve that with the original, less contagious strain and coming from low absolute case numbers. Once a significant amount of cases is introduced into a covid-free zone from abroad, you need lockdowns to get to very low cases again (where contact tracing reaches maximum efficiency).
- Recurring outbreaks in zero-covid countries like Australia and New Zealand sparked by flight attendants, ship crews or just frozen food show how thin the margin for keeping the virus out of a covid-free country really is. Keeping cases low in at least the industrialized world without lockdowns would therefore require international trade and travel to come to a halt for the 12-18 months until vaccines, so that the green zones are not exposed to the virus which is circulating in the developing world. But we already saw last spring what even just a handful of weeks of interruption did to global supply chains, hence, this approach would have come with a very very substantial economic cost.
- Preventing the introduction of the virus would have been exceedingly tough in world regions where industrialized and poor countries share a land border, particulary at the US-Mexico border and in south-eastern Europe. Chances are that the first world would have required frequent lockdowns to stamp out outbreaks triggered by virus introduction from abroad anyway
- Last but not least, the approach of countries like South Korea or Taiwan hinged on digital tracing techniques which would have been without legal basis in the West. Even setting the acceptance issue aside, adopting their model in the West would not have been possible before legislative action is taken, something that requires weeks or months when we could spare, at most, a few days.
So all in all, I just don't think that the idea is realistic that masks, distancing and contact tracing would have been enough to keep cases in the first world low without lockdowns or economic damage. Like I said: once the virus had spread out of China in relevant numbers, it was game over for these approaches. This does of course not mean that we couldn't have done a better job containing the virus, but this idea that almost total containment (in at least the industrialized world) was attainable "for virtually free" is a pipe dream.
every socialist/commie ignores simple real world logistics and human ability to be non conforming or be incorruptible.
They must walk through this world with some powerful rose tinted glasses.
Therefore when debating them you must take into account this major flaw