Cutting off towns is what the founding fathers sometimes did for disease. Quarantine applies to not just sick people, but people who are at risk for spreading disease. There is no in principle difference between the laws and powers in Australia and the US on this topic.
Nope. The widespread and indiscriminate COVID lockdowns do not have any historical precedent in the US, and I doubt if they have any real precedent in world history in peacetime. If you think there is some specific example that contradicts that please feel free to point it out.
Just like you didn't actually read the link you posted earlier about US quarantine history (which did nothing to support your assertions, by the way), you're continuing to confidently make false statements to try to support an untenable position.
The difference in Covid rates isn’t because of the legal frameworks, it’s because people mostly understand the benefits of eliminating Covid and comply. Enforcement is possible because if that compliance and democratic endorsement of the rules.
I have already agreed that there is a greater general acceptance in Australia of their rules due in part to their cultural history. Remember getting all huffy about my remark about Australians being descendants not only of convicts but of their jailers? (Which was actually paraphrased from Katy Barnett, a law professor at the University of Melbourne, by the way.)
However, as I've said before, lockdowns and PPE do not eliminate COVID in any way except locally and temporarily. They are strictly delaying tactics. Local herd immunity - if that is even possible with COVID - produced by a combination of vaccination, natural immunity, recovered COVID cases, and whatever prophylactic treatments are effective is the only way to enduringly eliminate a disease that has spread to such an extent. I have mocked China for their heavy-handed reaction to COVID, but as extreme as it was that response was too little too late to prevent COVID escape ... assuming for the moment that they were actually intending to extinguish it.
That was the only time and place a lockdown even had the possibility of "eliminating Covid". Australia and New Zealand can only eliminate it until it escapes again, then they have to lock down again. And again. And again. And if COVID mutates fast enough, even regular vaccination updates may be insufficient to prevent it in the long run, which means locking down every time it rears its head forever.
Large swaths of people in the US consider this totalitarian not because they wouldn’t endorse the same for say, Ebola, but instead because they don’t believe the science on COVID, or, as below, don’t think it’s worth inconveniencing themselves for a few weeks to save old and sick people.
You're right, the relative severity of COVID does play a huge role in to how accepting people are of the response. That is as it should be, I think.
But let's play this out for a second. Exactly what "science on COVID" do you claim that I don't believe? Please note I'm not talking about Bogie, or some other strawman.
Well, Bogie’s viewpoint doesn’t seem to be uncommon among the Covid deniers and those who say public health measures that have been on American books from the founding of the nation are totalitarian.
I guess I'll have to let you argue with Bogie about his beliefs.
... just a sign of being willing to decide for other people when it’s okay for them to die.
Okay, at what level of death is quarantine an acceptable response, and how did you arrive at that level?
Very good question. As above, if you don't lock down countries to prevent the flu (which kills a large number of people every year that is not 2020), aren't you just deciding for other people when it is okay for them to die? How many grannies are you willing to kill each year by not locking down for every disease that might kill them? Why do you hate grandma?
Why wonder about a theoretical quarantine and its effects, when real life systems have achieved zero Covid and got everyone back to normal life in a limited amount of time?
I'm not insensible to the significant benefits of zero COVID. As I've said from the beginning, the various costs of having a government that can and does impose and maintain the kind of lockdowns necessary to achieve zero COVID as many times as necessary to maintain zero COVID indefinitely is the problem.
