I've lived to see this kind of thing enacted in a good portion of the Anglosphere and my visceral reaction is to engage in a combination of civil disobedience and a determination to undermine every overstep made.
With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of having to deploy all available police resources just to see if people are submitting to the whim of the government every 15 minutes. Bonus if you opt to answer the door naked and claim you were busy showering/having sex/aligning your chakras/whatever.
Any bureaucracy will naturally follow the path of least resistance. It is your job to make it more painful for them to pursue their goals than it is to leave you alone.
You seem to be referring to the South Australia Home Quarantine app [1]. There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about this app recently. I'd just like to clear up some things:
The app only applies to people that need to quarantine, not the general population.
The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
It is a way for authorities to make sure people are quarantining correctly, and to follow up cases of contact if people break their isolation bubble. Police are not arresting people for failing to check in. (My guess is that they would reset your isolation duration, follow up contacts and/or move you into a managed quarantine).
>> rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
Download the app or we send you to a camp? That isn't much of a choice. I'd say it is about as non-choice as possible while still meeting the literal definition.
If you want to present an argument against quarantine being needed or warranted, please go ahead. Checking in on the app is the least intrusive of the three options - quarantine under guard (usually in a hotel, like the one I'm in right now), quarantine at home with police visits tio ensure compliance, or quarantine at home checking in to the app once or twice a day.
In this context, getting hysterical about the least intrusive option is weird.
Not from Australia, but as a citizen the precaution I would take is not to get tested while such a quarantine policy is in effect.
Don't know, my country does some checks like calling people on the phone, the rest relies on trust. Seems to work just as well.
So I see a lot of room to criticise "the least intrusive" option as well. This is security done wrong. Not slightly wrong, detrimental towards the goal of security. If people get uncompliant, no such measures will be efficient.
Curious what country this is where things are working "just as well" as Australia?
The only major places I can think of in the "developed" world faring similarly* to Australia statistically (deaths per capita) are South Korea & Taiwan; both have had similar citizen monitoring.
* leaving out NZ here obvs which is faring significantly better
I live in NZ, and after a recent exposure to Covid, I experienced said daily check in calls from the government that really relied on trust (honesty) more than anything, as far as I’m aware — I suppose it’s possible they were tracking my phone in some way to ensure my location stayed contained/consistent? Seems highly unlikely though.
I will add that if I’d been caught leaving the house, outside of a short daily workout, I’d have been liable for a fine and/or jail time.
Japan for example. Also an island, South Korea is too for all practical purposes. Australia isn't even half an Italy, although the population is admittedly mostly concentrated. Still, you have to compare it to countries which can only be reached by ship or plane.
There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case, what NZ did relatively successfully. But admitting that it failed is hard to convey politically.
> There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case
This seems quite absolutist; why the all or nothing binary of "any case"?
There is merit for harsh policies, to a degree, if you can reduce fallout, to any relatively significant degree.
This may be subjective, but fwiw if Australia were actually monitoring the population via app, requiring check-in every 15 mins & deploying authorities otherwise (a conclusion some commenting here did seem to jump to at first, despite the otherworldly logistics that would entail), then of course questions would need to be asked about authoritarian escalation.
But enforced mandatory quarantine explicitly for those choosing to travel (something that's even been done in some European countries too), given the stakes at hand, really doesn't seem like an overstep relatively speaking.
It's also worth noting that travel in Australia is extremely restricted anyway, so the number of people who are subject to this is pretty tiny.
> There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case, what NZ did relatively successfully. But admitting that it failed is hard to convey politically.
Note that the South Australia app under discussion is in an Australian state which, like NZ, is relatively successful at preventing “any case”. It seems like the last case necessitating a 7-day lockdown in SA was almost 2 months ago and before then they hadn’t instituted a lockdown since Nov 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Aus...
In terms of vaccination coverage, they're doing poorly (just a few ranks below Brazil). They're also currently in lockdown, dealing with their first true spike of cases and struggling to contain it.
That's true. But it is also true that, in some of those countries, people fail to follow those rules. For a worst-case example, the Delta variant in Argentina was traced down to a man [1] who ignored the self-isolation rules and visited shopping malls and a restaurant.
I can be probably persuaded that some specific regions can do well with voluntary quarantine. But I'd rather trust the local authorities to know what the best approach for their people is.
Even Norway had lots of cases tracked to people breaking quarantine, after which police started checking up on them. I’d say an argument for not enforcing the quarantine in the hottest phase of a pandemic is in effect allowing such events to compromize things. Maybe you can argue for that, but we need to at least be clear on this detail.
Indeed, there are countries that have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with their policies. But I can't think of a country off the top of my head that has applied laissez-faire Covid controls but also recorded very low numbers of deaths.
Japan, with a population of around 126 million, only had 16,471 deaths so far from covid, a death rate of 0.013%. As a point of reference, there are around 20k suicide deaths annually in Japan. Japan didn't use harsh/legally enforced lockdowns; almost all their measures have been voluntary: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/covid-19-cases-su....
The New Deal occurred before WW2 as a way to simulate things out of the Great Depression. Turns out war is even a bigger economic stimulus package than social programs.
I think you're possibly confused about what we're talking about here - those weren't restrictions on personal freedoms. A better analogy is blackout laws, which people railed against in the exactly the same way as lockdown laws. But obviously those powers went as soon as possible - literally the day Hitler died in fact.
a blackout law keeps an enemy bomber from dropping a bomb on my house. IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea."
While in modern times, if you say "shut down the economy, increase alcoholism, suicides, mental health issues, homelessness, poverty, and inflation to defeat a virus with over a 99% recovery rate that really only effects old and unhealthy people" a rational person would raise their eye brow and say "that sounds suspicious and a great way to cover the fact that the last 12 years of money printing is about to implode"
> IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea."
Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.
> Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.
That's his point. He's drawing a contrast to blackout laws,by claiming that an individual sees direct benefit from compliance (not getting bombed) while breaking lockdown doesn't create a lot of risk for the vast majority of offenders.
Ie, if a hypothetical person was 100% optimizing for self-interest, they would not break blackout laws but would break lockdown laws. This is a dramatic difference in dynamics when seeking to understand differences in compliance.
> Ie, if a hypothetical person was 100% optimizing for self-interest, they would not break blackout laws but would break lockdown laws.
Yes… except that’s the other way around from what happened in reality. People did break blackout lockdown rules but they generally didn’t break COVID lockdown rules.
You said "breaking lockdown rules", not "breaking blackout rules", specifically when contrasting policies that heretofore in the conversation were described as "blackout" and "lockdown".
Though it sounds like you're saying you misspoke, and intended to say that people broke the blackout rules. That makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarifying
In the first six months of lockdown in the UK 6500 prosecutions were undertaken by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). These included non-lockdown flouting crimes which were simply flagged as 'Corona Virus related', such as threatening to cough on somebody whilst 'infected' and stealing items deemed essential for dealing with the pandemic.[1]
Your assertion that a million people were prosecuted seems far fetched.
This is a tangential interesting point, not a disagreement with your comment. But despite the mental health costs of the pandemic and associated policy, there's a growing body of evidence indicating that suicides do not appear to have risen, across many countries. Eg https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n834
Honestly, that was mostly our government being incompetent. If our PM wasn't bumbling from one disaster to another, he probably would have tried to implement something similar to what Australia has proposed.
When it all started in February 2020 that's exactly what Australia was doing, but a minority could not be trusted and broke quarantine and consequently COVID started spreading. At that point the model changed to mandatory quarantine in a government facility. There was broad community support for that change. In an ideal world people would have liked to have stuck with the voluntary approach, but most were realistic enough to see that an untrustworthy minority were wrecking it for everyone.
This comment is revealing and truthful. It's almost been 2 years and most people have suffered. They blame and identify a minority for their suffering.
It's one way that if you look at history minorities have also been identified.
Scapegoat behaviour from the crowd is a response to senseless suffering and pain. It actually makes those who scapegoat others feel better and people want to feel better. Why would anyone volunteer to feel worse? Most people don't have empathy for those who scapegoat others but the pandemic is a great way to see this happening at various stages in real time across the world. Some countries don't have any, others more, some loads, some vary according to lockdown severity, others don't.
How can one blame an invisible virus or an abstract political decision when humans traditionally blame each other?
What's the end result if you buy into scapegoating as a personal psychological tactic? We will find out.
The important take away from these sorts of restrictions, though, are such state powers set to end when the pandemic is controlled or terminated? I'm not from Australia, so I can't speak to their power systems, but almost every time our federal institutions take a more broader domestic power towards spying, restricting speech, restricting movement, etc. etc. those powers don't come back at the end of the panic, whatever that panic may have been. Some of those expanded powers (PRIZM) we have to find out about through leaks, to the detriment of the people who leaked the information for the greater good.
I guess I don’t understand this concern, because it doesn’t seem historically accurate.
There have been many pandemics in the past. Governments have responded in the past with aggressive quarantines. Yet, before this current pandemic, no country had aggressive quarantines in place.
These kinds of restrictions imposed by governments have historically disappeared with high reliability when the situation calling for them has ended.
Maybe, but in the past no government has had access to the tracking data we are freely allowing them to have to us.
I sound like I'm an anti vax conspiracy theorist, and I don't want to put that across, but there is a strong precedent for abuse of power in every government across the globe. A lot of draconian measures ease when the panic is over, but shadows of them seem to remain in place, at least in the U.S. (again, I can't speak for Australia).
EDIT:
Here's an example of how anti Covid measures are being used to stop protests.
> A lot of draconian measures ease when the panic is over, but shadows of them seem to remain in place, at least in the U.S
I'm not sure I fully buy that. What authoritarian powers were left in place as a hangover from the Spanish Flu emergency powers that governors wielded at the time? Historically, the executive of governments have had _incredible_ emergency powers during infectious diseases crises, but I don't know that I've seen those powers extended indefinitely.
I'm absolutely wary of handling governments unlimited and unchecked power, even in emergencies. I generally agree with your concerns about governments being reluctant to return powers once they're granted. But I do think it's important not to overact and refuse to allow any government action on the other side of the equation.
In the given Australia example, the state is exercising quarantine powers to stop an infectious disease. That sounds...not that novel or expansive to me. Nor does it seem like something the government will have an interest in beyond the pandemic. Quarantines, I think, are a really strong example of an _extreme_ limitation on liberty and expansion of the state's powers that are tolerated during a pandemic but absolutely abhorrent outside of one. It's also an example of powers that almost never are extended indefinitely beyond the pandemic.
> Here's an example of how anti Covid measures are being used to stop protests.
Turning to the cited article, I don't think it supports the position you're stating. The author appears to be discussing legislatures using the COVID emergency as a _distraction_, but doesn't present any anti-COVID measures being used to stop protests.
I'll admit that each of the bills passed and signed are an abhorrent restriction on the right to protest and the right to free speech and assembly. Accepted and granted. But none of those bills appear to be anti-COVID measures in any way. As far as I can tell from reviewing the legislation and reviewing contemporaneous articles, the only connection to COVID was the fact that the public was distracted.
The South Dakota bill for example (https://mylrc.sdlegislature.gov/api/Documents/69887.pdf) doesn't mention "COVID", or "pandemic". The only mention of "disease" is in the definition of intoxication (to explicitly say it is not a mental disease).
The Kentucky bill is similar (https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/20rs/hb44.html). It doesn't mention "COVID", "pandemic", or "disease", and doesn't appear in _any_ way to be designed as an anti-COVID measure.
The only anti-COVID measures discussed in the article by the author are praised as a measured and reasonable response. The only "use" of the pandemic by the legislatures was as a distraction.
I do agree that anti-COVID measures targeted at public protest should receive significantly more scrutiny than many other anti-COVID measures.
Your comment conflates two meanings of the word "minority". The first meaning relates to a group with a shared inherent property, such as race, and is irrelevant here. The second meaning, which I used, simply means a small number of people.
It's not an invisible virus. With the right tools we can see and track it. Up until the recent delta outbreak, COVID was being accurately tracked and contained in Australia, with the source of almost all transmissions known. Under these conditions, quarantine is pragmatic, not abstract.
These are probably good/important points in a totally different context, but in this discussion, talking about how the virus has been transmitted, and the effect of infected individuals to quarantine or not, it feels a little strange. problematic moral impulses notwithstanding, the virus does indeed transmit person to person
you forgot number 4, be treated like an adult and just stay home for 2 weeks and not have the government check to see if you're at home like you're on house arrest while not having committed a crime
This a certainly an option but not a realistic one. Culturally speaking it's impossible to trust anyone (adult or otherwise) to comply with something like this.
People have been getting sick literally since the dawn of man. I knew many co-workers who'd come in with a cold or a fever and get the rest of the office sick. Now, there's a virus that's so dangerous you need a test to know if you're even sick with it but people are demanding everyone stays home so nobody catches it. If you don't want to catch it, stay home, but don't ask myself or others to change their behavior
Did you just say you are under guard, being forced to stay in a hotel? And this is acceptable? Do you have covid, were you exposed to one person who had it? Did they provide proof of this or just tell you and cart you away?
Bound to repeate history looks more and more valid everyday.
I don't. My comment was to the nature of the "choice" not whether or not the mandate was warranted. Let's not pretend that people have options when they really don't. There is no need to dress it up. In times of disease, governments do sometimes order people to do things. Let's not kid ourselves. Personal choice, personal freedom, is set aside.
If you already understood that the quarantine is what is limiting people’s choice and not the app then why did you bring it up as an issue with the app?
I didn't say anything about the app. My comment was about the choice between app and being sent to a facility, about how that isn't much of a choice. I would make the same comment if the "choice" was between a facility and a vaccine, or a drug, or counseling sessions, or paying a fine. Nearly anything is better than being sent to a camp and so any such binary alternative isn't much of a real choice.
You have the choice to nose dive off the Burj Khalifa, sign over all of your assets to me, or record a chicken dance video and put it on YouTube.
OP's point is giving a set of all undesirable options which under normal circumstances and given freedom, you would decline all the options. "Choice" tends to imply you have at least some desirable options or at least have the option to refuse all of the choice options (not choosing has to be an option in the proposed choice).
If you're given a set of constrained options where you must choose and none of the choices are desirable, you're really given highly constrained freedom to the point no one considers it freedom. It's even worse when it's clear that most the constraints (choice options) point to only one option for any sane "chooser."
Sure, you could jump off the Burj Khalifa but is that really a viable option? Pretty much everyone would record a chicken dance video and choose minimal public humiliation over the other options. I gave options but they're not really options, not from any sane decision making perspective. That is the illusion of choice to make people feel like they have control over direction. We have a lot of this going on in society these days, where people have options but the options lead to one obvious path, meaning they have no viable alternative options.
Quarantine in a hotel isn't scalable. You can't suddenly quarantine the whole population. Phone tracking is just a pen and paper away from that. The leap from 'tracking the infected' to 'tracking everyone because ~reasons~' is tiny, especially given the pace Australia is running towards stuff like that.
The "least" intrusive option is still a massive government overreach. They love doing this. We could just let you go back to normal if you only show us your papers please.
This a is a mind game they're playing. Show you all the horrible things they could mandate to make the less horrible one sound better.
I'll present an argument against quarantine being warranted: Covid-19 is an endemic virus for which there are no sterilizing vaccines and hence "zero Covid" policy frameworks are an insane and hopeless attempt to turn back the tides. You will either live under these restrictions for the rest of your lives, or give them up and eventually be exposed to the virus.
Consider, however, that being exposed to the virus after being vaccinated reduces your risk of death and/or hospitalization by a factor of 10-20x. The assumption that there are “no sterilizing vaccines” is a little questionable too - even against Delta, the FDA approved vaccines are showing 40-50% immunity against infection, i.e. sterilizing immunity.
Zero Covid countries like NZ and Australia that re-open to the world once their populations hit 80% vaccination will have prevented many deaths among their population.
The real least intrusive option would be to just ask people to quarantine and trust that they do it as their civic duty. You could also offer a small support check at the end if they completed the quarantine without being seen out of the house or offer payment if they download the app and allow location permission. There are so many ways to run a quarantine program without resorting to locking people away or making them use the equivalent of a house arrest bracelet. It's concerning that you don't even see how totalitarian this is. These people weren't convicted of any crime, they caught a highly contagious virus that we will never eradicate and will be living with for the rest of our lives.
Become like what? Do you have an argument against quarantine? Would tens of thousands of deaths been better than asking travellers to check in for a couple of weeks on arrival, during a pandemic?
I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make.
I'm British by the way. The UK also has guarded quarantine centres in hotels for people coming in from what it considers “red zones”
It's absolutely insane to see young, Australian people completely embrace the Covid propaganda and totalitarian nonsense.
Say what you want about boomers, but at least they used to be somewhat cool in their 20s, during the 70s. Having unprotected sex, doing drugs, having long hair, listening to rock'n'roll, protesting the wars.
In Australia we have 25-year-old boomers, scared of absolutely everything, and cheering on the government to govern us even harder. A complete nightmare.
Quarantine for what? That's what you do with sick people. Whatever is going on in Australia has long ago left the realm of sane quarantine procedure. It will be 2022 soon, and the Australians are trying to prevent interstate spread of COVID-19. It's madness.
Precisely. It is the best cover up for global domination while distracting populations with concern trolling around a virus that is not all that significantly worse than the flu given the level of risk across all age groups.
Heart failure and car accidents claim a higher risk.
There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.
> we need to close everything for years on end?
Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
China, the most populous country on Earth, has no community transmission.
I don't know what went wrong in Mongolia, because I haven't been following that country, but China and New Zealand have demonstrated that with a good public health system, elimination is possible and sustainable.
China also didn't have official community transmission in December 2019 yet we were seeing people coming out of airplanes sick constantly, which allowed us to calculate their infection rates, which were then released publicly when they couldn't be hid any longer.
Today there are no flights out of China and we have to trust the same government when they say they have no transmissions.
Need I point to the centuries long history of communist regimes hiding mass deaths?
> China also didn't have official community transmission in December 2019 yet we were seeing people coming out of airplanes sick constantly, which allowed us to calculate their infection rates
No, this did not happen. Infection rates weren't calculated until January 2020. Nobody even knew there was anything like SARS spreading in Wuhan until 27 December 2019.
Within 72 hours of the first test result indicating a SARS-like virus, it was all over Chinese social media, and even CCTV reported on the outbreak. And of course, it only took a few weeks afterwards for the hospitals to become overloaded with sick patients.
> Today there are no flights out of China
This is simply untrue. Just to take one example, yesterday alone, there were 9 flights from Shanghai Pudong Airport to LAX.
The situation in China right now is obvious: the virus is gone. Just ask any of your friends/colleagues who live there.
> There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.
Do you know what AIDS is?
Unlike Covid which kills something under 1 in 100 people it infects AIDS until the mid 90s was a death sentence for anyone who got it.
I remember being in an emergency room and the nurse asking for people to give blood because their blood banks were tainted and the doctors could either let patients die from from blood loss or in 10 years from AIDS.
I have no idea why that whole pandemic has been pushed down the memory hole. It's like everyone born after 1985 doesn't even know what it is, let alone what it was like to see people you know just wilt and die.
>Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months. NZ is the most successful and they are currently in their 5th national lockdown.
What kind of a question is that? It's a horrible disease, and it shows how important it is to have a good public health system.
> Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months.
China hasn't had a widespread lockdown since early 2020. In recent outbreaks, lockdowns have been very geographically limited. For example, the Guangzhou outbreak in May-June 2021 was ended without locking down more than just a few districts of the city. Mass testing, contact tracing, and testing requirements for people leaving the city were sufficient.
I'm in Western Australia. I'm delighted with prevention of interstate Covid. The freedom to do whatever you want is pretty enjoyable to be honest, and not worrying that family members will die of Covid is even better.
I wish this was a joke, or fake news. But no, once they control where you can go, when you can go there, etc, it's not a big jump for them to demand control over what you put in your body. It's for your own safety, after all.
Of course it did, exactly because there was a lockdown that prevented many COVID deaths.
If there hadn't been a lockdown, many more people would have died from COVID than now died from drinking. Sweden for example, famous for its non-lockdown, suffered 10 times as many COVID deaths than neighboring Norway with lock-down (and alcohol).
Quarantine has never been strictly for sick people. It is for people who might possibly be infected. You can see this in the etymolgy of the word "quarantine": it refers to the forty days (quarantena in Venetian) that people arriving by ship were required to wait on board before disembarking in Venice during the time of the plague. The whole idea is to wait for the full incubation period of a pathogen, to make sure someone is not infected, before letting them out in the general society.
In contrast, when someone is separated from society because they are known to be infected, that is called "isolation."
I'm familiar with the etymology. This makes a lot of sense for the bubonic plague. Frankly the Venetians would scoff at what we've done to our societies over a disease so tame (measured by overall rate of survival, individual circumstances can be tragic). It was also an era when people had few rights, no vaccines, no access to treatment.
Surely, we should aspire to be better than 14th-century Venice. To not treat people as if they are nothing more than viral vectors. Instead many would trade away what little control over our own lives we still have in exchange for imagined safety from a virus we will all contract eventually. That the vast majority of people have no issues recovering from.
It's not the plague. It's not Ebola. It's not the worst case scenario we were rightfully concerned about in early 2020. How this hasn't sunk in yet for most people is just baffling to me. Then I look around and see lots of motivated reasoning and state-sponsored propaganda about a permanent transition to remote work, increased government surveillance, curtailing the movement of citizens, and other social initiatives various coalitions were already working towards, that are of course suddenly "absolutely necessary" because of a "once in a lifetime pandemic", and it becomes a little clearer.
Spot on, and once the endless waves of variants no longer convince the submissive within our populations that all of these massive changes to life are necessary, the same measures will be used during a questionably endless "climate crisis" to justify the retention of this newfound power they've gained.
You said that quarantine was only for sick people. That's simply wrong.
It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone.
Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even people who do not appear to be sick be quarantined.
You may argue that China, New Zealand et al. should not have pursued a zero-CoVID policy (and in that case, you should be prepared to argue that the 4 million deaths that would likely have resulted in China would have been acceptable), but given that they've pursued this policy, they need to quarantine international travelers, even if they appear to be healthy.
People die. My loved ones and I have made peace with that. Life is not about avoiding death.
10 million is frankly a drop in the bucket. We don't shut down society and hand over control of our lives over car accidents, heart failure, or anything else that kills hundreds of millions.
The behaviors that lead to those deaths are absolutely a form of social contagion and in no world are they less important or relevant because they're not caused by a communicable disease. People could choose to stop the world for those, too. It would probably work. That we choose not to, or rather, that we understand there are tradeoffs involved, does not make us callous murderers.
I feel truly sorry for people who believe that "zero Covid" is a possibility. We have documented evidence of animal reservoirs for the disease. You can vaccinate every single person on the planet and it will not eradicate this virus.
Particularly now that we are aware that 1) our vaccines are not sterilizing and 2) we have evidence of a vaccine resistant mutation on the horizon.
If you want to play whack a mole with restrictions and injections your entire life please do so of your own accord and stop trying to force the rest of us to live in this dystopia with you. I have a short life to live.
Humanity has lost its tragic sense. That there are things outside of our control. This reality does however tend to catch up with each and every one of us.
As New Zealand and China have shown, it is within our power to avert almost all deaths from CoVID-19. They have gotten through the pandemic with orders of magnitude fewer deaths per capita and far greater everyday freedoms than most of the world. Quarantine for international travelers is one of the tools they have used.
"People die" as an excuse for letting millions of people die of preventable causes is a terrible attitude to take.
China is lying and New Zealand is one of the most remote places in the entire world.
I hate to be this blunt but you're kidding yourself if you think this was ever an option for the United States.
With respect to "preventable causes", I already responded to that point. Most death is preventable. Or at least delay-able. That does not mean everyone agrees with your scorched earth campaigns to prevent it.
Here on HN, there are plenty of people who live in China, or who have family/friends/colleagues in China. They can tell you what the situation in the country is.
For more than a year, bars, restaurants and most other things have been open, mass gatherings have been allowed, etc. In densely packed cities with Guangzhou and Shanghai, what do you think R0 would be under those circumstances? Any community transmission would quickly grow into a major outbreak, just like in Wuhan in December 2019.
Yet there's no such outbreak. And no, there's no conceivable way the government could hide such an outbreak.
That's why it's simply not credible to claim that there is any substantial community transmission in China.
The other thing is that you can look at how rigorous the reaction is to every new case of community transmission. There have been small outbreaks in China over the last year, but they've been contained using contact tracing, mass testing, and lockdowns (usually only of individual neighborhoods, but sometimes of cities).
It's a third of Australia that's gone insane. The rest have checked out and completely ignored it. It's like a long holiday where you get paid to pretend you work.
But you can't say that in polite company so you just have ~40 percent compliance with whatever insanity is going on now. Hilariously enough the compliance from police is lower than from the general population so basically we have politicians and the terminally online talking about masks, jabs and sign ins and the people who are supposed to enforce it not being bothered with it.
Standing in front of the super market something like one in three pull out their phone, unlock it, point it at the check in qr code and not log in.
I'm reminded of the latter days of the USSR where no one took anything the government said seriously and just did whatever they felt like. Which does not bode well for the current incarnation of Australia long term.
I mean to say the modern courtiers of the decrepit political class are the problem and warrior-kings at the head of barbarians are the solution. Hoppe would call this natural order.
It’s a consensual decision on behalf of the individual - when you travel from a high risk region to another it’s understood by all parties you will need to quarantine for a period to prevent unknowingly spreading the virus on untold others. Which to me just seems you know, ethical and responsible?
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility.
> Nobody is being forced to use the app.
If there’s a cost difference, I’d say that “forced” is an unfairly neutral word to use.
SA is charging upwards of $3000 (for 1 adult, plus $1000 each additional adult, plus $500 per child) for hotel quarantine [1], and though I can’t find a definitive source, your link does say it is intended to be a “cost effective alternative to medi-hotel quarantine”.
So for a family of 2 adults, 2 kids, being charged $5000 to avoid using the app isn’t real freedom. If it means the difference between putting food on the table or not, it’s no choice at all.
My guess is you didn't read there are three options. In most countries of the world (including mine) you get only two options, yet in Australia three. Two of them being free of cost: at home with human checks, or at home with app checks. Please take down your costs strawman, it's not helping the debate.
Even if it's "just" for 2 weeks of quarantine, being able to check-in within 15 minutes seems unreasonable. What about taking a nap, taking a bath, cooking, etc.?
Many other countries trust their citizens enough that such draconian measures weren't required even at the height of the pandemic. Not to mention now.
I'd be curious how violations to check-in are handled in practice.
> What about taking a nap, taking a bath, cooking, etc.?
If you fail to check in, they try again a bit later on, if you fail again it falls back to the non app-enabled method of a police check at your home.
The app is voluntary and allows you to be at home rather than in a facility, and to not have random police checks. It's a convenience, not an imposition.
> Many other countries trust their citizens enough that such draconian measures weren't required even at the height of the pandemic.
In some like the UK, that trust was misplaced, and compliance with isolation rules was under 50%.
> I'd be curious how violations to check-in are handled in practice.
By a second request and then a police visit, the same police visit you'd get if you opted not to use the app at all.
> In some like the UK, that trust was misplaced, and compliance with isolation rules was under 50%.
More like, people in the UK more correctly assessed the risk of COVID. While is a dangerous disease, it's not so dangerous that it is worth giving up all of your civil rights to avoid it. In Australia the cure seems to be worse than the disease.
I've had to do a 14 day quarantine in the UK at home, and frankly, it was a bit of a joke. Literally no one has ever checked we were actually at home, the amount of trust in the population is insane over here. We actually stayed at home the entire time, but I know people who didn't, they had to go to work to make a living and the fine was like a £100.
In contrast, in Poland if you are told to quarantine you will get occassional and random visits from the police to see if you are actually at home, and the fine for breaking the quarantine is insane, it's like 30k PLN(about $10k USD).
I've been to Poland for a private b-day party over a long weekend in April this year (Thursday--Monday). When this country was marked red.
I came by train from Berlin. The rules were to have a negative test not older than 24hs and to quarantine after arrival. No one ever checked. Go figure.
This happened: Thursday evening, just after I arrived, my host said: let's go to tango (we are social tango dancers).
We drove to a (previously) regular event which is in a park in Warsaw, close to the center, that weekday. It was on as if nothing had ever happened.
I know the tango scene in Warsaw a bit. Everyone was there. All the familiar faces. About 80-100 people. And even some people who live like 100km away. I couldn't believe it.
Dancers I talked to there told me this was going on for months. "Basically there never was a lockdown for social dancers." they said.
"At the beginning you had to register for 'classes' but as soon as the doors were closed it was a normal dancing event. No masks, no distancing etc."
Restaurants were not allowed to open at the time. So what happened Friday was straight out of a movie.
We drove to a brand new residential building in a side street. Approaching it the door opened and woman in a black mini dress welcomed us. Immediately checking our names on a list.
Once she had found us two thugs in tailored suits who would befit the extras list of any action summer blockbuster appeared behind her; out of nowhere.
Inside they escorted us to an entrance next to the building's elevators that led through a narrow hallway, past a busy restaurant kitchen into a top notch Italian joint.
No one wore a mask but amazingly only every 2nd table was being used. There was a DJ in the middle and my friend told me: "This turns into a private club from around 10:30pm."
The front side windows had blinds that were tightly shut. From the outside the restaurant must have looked completely shut down.
After dinner, at around 11pm, my friend suggested we go to a (real) club. But we had to wait for at least 30mins, he said.
Because the police were blocking the back door through which we entered -- waiting for their cut. As they did every night at 11pm.
I asked him how he'd know. He said: "I spoke to the owner when this happened before and we couldn't leave."
The owner and the head waitress were pulling together the evening's proceedings on a tablet. Then they stuffed an envelope. My friend told me he had asked the owner and the police would expect to pocket 10% of the evening's earnings.
And they they wanted to see the proceedings on the tablet.
When we exited the building through the side street entrance again, at around 11:30pm, the police car just pulled out in front of us.
The club we went to afterwards was also in an old residential building in the center. Through a narrow old door into a wide, low ceiling hallway leading to the yard. Stuffed with rubble and old bicycles.
In the middle of the side of the hallway a narrow stairway leading down to the basement.
About 300 young guests, seemingly drunk, in a space of maybe 300sqm -- minus bars & toilets. It was so crowded you couldn't drop to the floor if you lost your balance.
I wasn't ok to enter there so went to my friend's house instead but I saw it for maybe 30 secs.
So Poland, yeah. Maybe someone got fined 30k PLN for breaking some COVID rules. Maybe.
Literally nothing that you wrote surprises me :P Sounds absolutely on par for Polish approach to these kinds of "problems".
The main key point here is that you arrived by train - and indeed, trains are not really checked at all. But if you came by plane, you'd absolutely be entered into the system and you'd have police coming over every other day to see if you're actually there. You were just lucky because of your mode of transport. I've heard similar stories from people crossing the border by car - also no hassle at all.
And to add to that - if you were actually diagnosed with Covid, your name would also be entered into the system and police would be checking if you are at home. I know my entire family were checked every day when they got ill.
I didn't mention Poland as some sort of great foolproof implementation - just that if you are actually "in the system", police checks if you are doing the quarantine or not. In the UK we were very much "in the system" and literally no one cared - we didn't even get a phone call to ask if we're actually at home. Literally nothing. Again, I'm not surprised you escaped the whole thing if you arrived by train.
Rather have the country focus on a mass vaccination drive than trying to do a full China style lockdown.
In hindsight the unlimited money spent on healthcare and a collective willingness to take the corona pill works better than whatever Australia is trying to do.
>Rather have the country focus on a mass vaccination drive
Which is a bit difficult in a lot of places due to international demand.
>than trying to do a full China style lockdown.
Tbh the seemingly extreme chinese lockdown ended with them having less overall restriction in the long run from what i've seen.
it's too late to try that here now but i probably would have preferred it.
People are much less impacted by severe limitation on international travel than a severe limitation on social and personal life.
I live in Victoria. We have certainly given up all of our freedom. Our Premier has suspended parliament and now rules by decree. Citing fabled 'health advice', which is never made public nor provided when queried, to justify anything he does. That's why we have a 9PM curfew that has done nothing to stem the spread, punitive 'alchohol must be drunk through a mask' rules and playground closures. Those were not legitimate public health measures, but punishments for Victorians risking his re-election strategy of 'beating the virus' after spending the weekend outside in the sunshine.
Police harass citizens for the crime of taking a rest on a park bench while on their 1 hour of allowed outside time per day. I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents. I have had friends unable to travel interstate to see their dying parents. My own grandmother died in our lockdown so the last 12 months of her life were spent locked in her own home.
This is not a successful strategy, and anybody reading Australia's low deaths and case numbers need to realise this. We have myopic politicians who are suffering from an obsession with a particular metric, neglecting everything else enabled by a population of unthinking zealots who genuinely believe a single death is a policy failure.
Locking down this severely is neither clever nor demonstrates a particularly high level of consideration. It is the most blunt and basic response to the virus and it's only possible in a country of docile livestock who are content to cede every right if the person they're ceding it to promises it will make them safer from a virus, or in the case of these new national 'security' measures pedophiles or terrorists.
All of your freedoms and rights? I imagine someone will be along to arrest you for sedition shortly then?
That sounds horrendous but honestly little different to what we went through in the UK at various points in the last year and a half, and the death rates are very low in comparison.
> I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents.
Im somewhat neutral on most of Australia's restrictions: my opinion is that theyre unnecessarily draconian, and that some of them are not in accordance with pretty well-established science (1 hour of outdoor time is ludicrous).
But this is a relatively low-confidence belief, as I don't have a strong rebuttal to those championing the minimal-Covid-until-vaccinated strategy and its relative success. I wouldn't pick the same spot on the freedom/safety spectrum, but I have no basis for claiming those who do are "wrong".
But how on earth do the restriction apologists justify forbidding _leaving the country_? It has, by definition, zero safety justification. Plus, forbidding people yo leave a country is quite reasonably considered a violation of international human rights law. With respect to this specific policy, what on earth are policymakers thinking?
Yea of course, but it's trivial to just ban returning without quarantine. This policy also has the advantage of not potentially violating international law
has there ever been anything remotely resembling justification for nighttime curfews? I've tried to find any reasoning for it and completely failed to do so.
You're not allowed to leave your state or your country with the permission of some bureaucrat, and you're claiming that you haven't given up any civil rights?
I guess no-one had given up their civil rights in East Germany, or the Soviet Union then either.
Always so hyperbolic. The state border controls are for quarantine.
In states that have covid under control, that means filling out a form stating you're not sick. Rather sensible requirement during a pandemic
The banning of country exit visas is far far more controversial and doesn't have wide spread support. It seems okay as a sensible precaution at the start of the pandemic in order to ensure quarantine places were available for people who want to return to Australia. The fact that it's gone on so long without any real effort to find a better solution is poor government.
Border controls in Australia, are widely popular. Much like in the US.
The border controls will be removed once the country reaches a steady state of vaccination levels and things are as back to normal as they will get. All other controls have been removed immediately once they were no longer required.
This mass surveillance is far more concerning, and people constantly talking about temporary quarantine controls are muddying the waters of an important topic.
UK Covid deaths 133,000 vs Australia Covid deaths 1054.
That's some cold-blooded calculus to say that Australia would have been better off with another 50,000 people dead rather than having some restrictions in place while they wait for vaccination targets to be reached.
> UK Covid deaths 133,000 vs Australia Covid deaths 1054.
Looking at all cause mortality and just eyeballing, it looks like in most cases Covid19 is reducing some lives by a few times while the fact that no one lives forever stubbornly persists.
Given the UK quarantine period was reduced by the chief medical officers "After reviewing the evidence" to 10 days from 14 by the start of 2021, it probably didn't make a difference.
How many will die from the economic fallout and how who will pay for this insane government debt accumulated over the last 2 years. The kids, thats who, the kids who don't get a vaccine and get the privilege of paying the bill for us to sit at home.
What happens to a country that stops people working and starts living on the government credit card? It's all great now when everything is paid in debt. What happens to health, education and infrastructure? What happens to peoples wellbeing and prosperity in the future? Australia's health care system was already at breaking point pre covid. Education was already at breaking point pre covid. They bullshit us that the numbers are fine, and being the fools we are we believe them even though it makes no logical sense. How will people work and pay tax when there are no jobs? How many will die you think?
Covid is not the only thing that can kill you. Poverty has killed infinitely more.
Not sure how temporary the safety gained by those tens of thousands is, nor how essential the liberty to enter a country without two weeks of quarantine is.
In fact, having just a few minutes ago come out of two weeks confined to a hotel room, into a place where there is effectively no coronavirus, I’d say not very essential at all.
1. Stay in a quarantine centre for two weeks under guard (which you pay for)
2. Quarantine at home with police visits
3. As above but check in with the app
In that context, getting pissed off about the app is ridiculous.
You want to argue quarantine is unnecessary or wrong? Go for it, make those arguments. But what you’re doing is pissing and moaning about the easiest and least intrusive option. It’s not a good look.
As someone who is coming to the end of two weeks in a quarantine centre (actually a Novotel, and there’s no app or home quarantine for international arrivals), that app option looks mighty good. And as I am about to enter a state with no coronavirus, quarantine is looking like it’s been a great plan.
Is this an official option, or do you have to install the app then turn your phone off, with the potential of this turning to 1 if they don't like you doing that too often?
I believe this is an official option, at least in WA where there is already an app, it's up to you which option to take.
AFAICT there is no "we're sick of visiting you, off to a quarantine centre" potential at all, effectively you're doing them a favour by using the app, the default would be police visits.
Unless you're found to have breached quarantine the conditions I guess. Not sure what happens then.
See the argument for having a high transmission also justifies this. It's win-win. If you have low transmission, we need to enact these laws to keep it that way. If it's a high transmission, we need to enact these laws to lower the transmission.
I'm amazed people have this much trust in their government officials. I mean they're just people with the same ethical flaws as everyone else, they just have a lot more power.
Hang on, the 15 minute interval requires constant human action, it's not enough that the phone itself is reachable? How does that even work? If that's true (which is sincerely hope it's not) being woken up every 15 minutes during the night for two weeks constitutes torture under most definitions.
It goes off once or twice a day, and you have 15 minutes to check in once it does. If you miss one, it'll try again a bit later. If you miss the retry, the police visit to check you're home.
You have to respond within 15 minutes with a geotagged selfie as I understand it. Given that one cannot know when one's chain is going to be yanked, it still sounds like torture.
The historical ignorance around Covid and other pandemics, and the way people act as though it was some unprecedented event that justifies the unprecedented reaction, is really stunning.
Quarantines and lockdowns were used against previous pandemics such as the 1918 flu pandemic.
American Samoa, for instance, was entirely unscathed by the Spanish flu because they instituted a strict quarantine at the border, the same policy Australia/NZ did for Covid-19.
See this pre-covid article from 2018, for instance.[0] Sound familiar?
> “These communities basically shut themselves down,” explains Howard Markel, an epidemiological historian at the University of Michigan who was one of the authors of the study. “No one came in and no one came out. Schools were closed and there were no public gatherings. We came up with the term ‘protective sequestration’, where a defined and healthy group of people are shielded from the risk of infection from outsiders.”
One might perhaps imagine that those concerned with the lessons of history would not overlook the lack of precedent for a pandemic taking place in a time of ubiquitous and nigh instantaneous global travel. Such a one would be disappointed in this case, certainly, but the expectation could be considered reasonable nonetheless.
No, this doesn't actually make the definitive difference you think it does. Many earlier pandemics had no problem spreading throughout the almost entire world in relatively short order.
It's not people quarantining because they have the virus, it's related to the mandatory quarantine for international arrivals. Previously you needed to complete 2-weeks of hotel quarantine when you arrived in Australia. This new compromise allows people an option to complete that quarantine period from their own home instead. It's part of a move to increase overseas arrivals while minimising transmission.
funny, if it’s not even for having a virus then what’s the point? I can’t help but think this is just the next step in evolution of the surveillance state using the existence of cold viruses as an excuse, it is not going to go well for the quality of care if the state becomes this embedded in the healthcare system, this is one of those times when a slippery slope is a very valid argument, if they start pushing unvaccinated people out of society bit by bit all based on data and science that is blessed by the state then this becomes a way of eliminating people who mistrust the government from society by force, it’s all well and good until the system is in place and the even more wrong people become in charge and suddenly at the helm of it
“people that need to quarantine” also happens to be based on something only a tiny fraction of people have the means to verify, I can’t think of anything in modern times more prone to tyranny than invisible requirements only the chosen state mages can bless
>My guess is that they would reset your isolation duration
You do know that quarantine isn't supposed to be a punishment, right? Resetting your isolation duration is punitive and has zero relationship to your ability to spread covid.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app
Weird. In Canada we're allowed to isolate at home without a wildly intrusive app, or police visits or anything like that.
We get a fine if we are caught out when we are required to isolate, that's all.
Personally if my government was proposing this kind of quarantine tracking, I'd be looking to move somewhere sane.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
Wait. So if I refuse to be tracked by the government, the government will take me by force to a detention camp?
Did someone accidently ran a search and replace for Cuba and Australia before publishing the article?
what prohibits them from quarantining at home in the first place? Is there a difference between not leaving my room for 2 weeks (except to use the bathroom) and staying in a hotel for 2 weeks?
The phone check in thing is for enforcing the two weeks home quarantine for returned travelers and close contacts of confirmed cases. While there are certainly slippery slope arguments to be made, let's not act like we've already slid down it.
> The phone check in thing is for enforcing the two weeks home quarantine for returned travelers and close contacts of confirmed cases.
So the government can effectively just inprison you in your own house, with no proof, no recourse and no due process, because they suspect you were near some guy at some particular time some days ago. They don't even ask to get tested first! How can people on hacker news of all places not see this as a massive threat to civil liberty is beyond me.
Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post WW2, the same.
Korea and Vietnam didn't leave behind any long term repression that I remember.
War on drugs and terror, ok.
Covid is a disease. We have vaccines, we'll have treatment. Just get vaccinated. We've had pandemics before, they always end and I can't remember any rights still taken away abusively after the Spanish Flu or SARS or HIV.
You are mistaking extending special rights to minority groups with citizens rights. We have been increasing minority rights as fast as possible with removing all the protections from dictatorships in the name of, I don't even know what.
>Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post
And on and on. There are libraries written about this, but no one cares because there has been a bi-partisan consensus that citizen's rights need to be curtailed.
Yes, it's hard to keep track of which act was used to curtail what freedoms.
The Sedition Act was used to silence opposition to conscription and gave us the immortal quote of "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
Which seems like an extremely level headed question about conscription in the US given that involuntary servitude should only be a punishment for a crime.
We are way past temporary here. Australia is not as far along in vaccinations as other countries, but at this point the most vulnerable have had ample chance to be vaccinated. The virus can't be eradicated, will continue to mutate, and herd immunity by vaccination alone is not likely. At some point, Australia, New Zealand and China will need to join the rest of the world in the new normal, unless they want to become virtual prison states.
Yeah, and that point is when we have enough people vaccinated. Which should be done by December. Then we can join the new normal. I would classify that as temporary.
The death rate for Covid in even a fully vaccinated population is somewhere between 2 to 8 per million per day given Israel's current figures. Which means from 700 to 3000 deaths per million per year.
Unless the exposure site is identified as a low-risk one where contacts are directed to isolate until they get a negative test, no. You have to do a test when going into iso and you have to get a negative test on day 13 to leave it. There have been plenty of cases where the day 13 test is positive, even when the test at the start was negative.
The right to bear arms also seems to fit your framework quite well. If the police knocking on your door has to fear that you appear naked that is unpleasent but merely a nuisance. If you could be armed they will probably think twice if it is worth the risk.
And this is the foundation of the Second Amendment despite the intense opposition to it. The Second Amendment creates lines that even the government will be unwilling to cross.
And yet government agents shooting unsuspecting non-criminals in their own home, after mistaking the address or responding to a malicious fake emergency call, is a line that is only crossed in the country with the Second Amendment.
Yeah, plus they're practically the only country that hasn't had serious government threatening civil unrest for 160 years and they still brag about guns.
Heck, the only real recent unrest of that magnitude, the takeover of Capitol, was without guns as far as I remember. As in, no standoff.
>Yeah, plus they're practically the only country that hasn't had serious government threatening civil unrest for 160 years and they still brag about guns.
Half a million people protesting out of ~18 million or so. For reference, that would mean 10 million people protesting at the same time in the US. I wonder if even the civil rights movement during the 60's ever got that many people out on the streets at the exact same time.
>Heck, the only real recent unrest of that magnitude, the takeover of Capitol, was without guns as far as I remember. As in, no standoff.
Condescending to other countries with smug quips by the American founding fathers turns out to be much easier than taking those principles seriously on your own soil when facing the prospect of armed Federal police.
I think in practice (from the US) they come in with 10 people, guns drawn, in bulletproof vests ready to fire at anything moving just in case which leads to unfortunate deaths which is why 'Swatting' is so dangerous in the US
They also murder unarmed people with a frequency I'm not comfortable with, so any argument that guns is what makes the police trigger happy has plenty of counter examples of clearly unarmed people getting killed.
Yeah but they always think they have a gun, or so they say. It's not always having a gun pointed at you, it's the threat that it could happen. Very real to American police that keep them on edge, where in other countries that risk is lower so there is less sensitivity to a suspect moving there arm near a pocket or behind their back if they are far away from the officer (which makes it naturally harder to see what they are going for). Not saying it's a good thing, it's just a large contributing factor.
There was recently a video of US police attacking a lady in a wheel chair with a stun gun because she was filming them detaining and being rough with her pregnant daughter.
In these incidents the victim was clearly either unarmed or in no way was threatening the police with a firearm. I think that is just yet another excuse the police use to evade prosecution when brutalizing citizens.
This is nothing new, here's the police brutalizing citizens protesting in Chicago in 1968.
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With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of having to deploy all available police resources just to see if people are submitting to the whim of the government every 15 minutes. Bonus if you opt to answer the door naked and claim you were busy showering/having sex/aligning your chakras/whatever.
Any bureaucracy will naturally follow the path of least resistance. It is your job to make it more painful for them to pursue their goals than it is to leave you alone.