All of Think Tempest's Comments + Replies

  I don't think I said the opposite (in fact I mostly agree), but a lockdown can also be used to reduce the number of cases to effectively zero (see my post in Australia) I think this is a very common misconception, I just wrote a blog post to better respond to it In fact, I didn't mention the lockdown explicitly in this blog post but the truth is that, if humans were capable of perfect coordination (and they are not), a lockdown would have ended the pandemic early.  There have been countries that successfully managed to suppress the pandemic during long periods of time. Not all lockdowns have to last for months either, in Queensland some of the more effective lockdowns lasted for just a few days. Yes, I am not sure about this in fact, that is why I was asking this question. It can be that you are totally right here I don't think that a lack of power is the main problem. It is more a consequence of the system being inadequate at many levels. E.g. politicians are not chosen by their capacity to handle crises, nor do they have a strong incentive to take measures that are unpopular, etc.   This is a bit paradoxical because China is a clear example of a massively populated country that successfully managed to handle much better this crisis, at least in terms of dead people (and in case you are wondering, I lean much more towards libertarian than authoritarian). It is true that they tried to cover this up until they couldn't do it anymore, but most Chinese have enjoyed mostly normal lives for the last two years, and I really doubt that most people in Europe/USA can say the same. In fact, I know that many Chinese people are horrified at what's going on in the western world. In any case, if you don't consider China an example of how a crisis of this type should be handled you can use democratic countries such as New Zealand or Australia. I never spoke about giving more power but I do think that both the system and its components are deeply flawed