There is a mountain worth of difference. The policies enacted for COVID have a very specific target, has been shown to work repeatedly, and deviating from them caused decline in the KPI its trying to maintain. Its nothing like TSA.
Ok then what's the target? Eradication of the virus is not achievable and neither is full vaccination of the entire population. I have yet to hear any hard numbers for removal of "safety" measures from any politician when enacting lockdowns/mandates.
I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.
I'm not in charge of making public policy, but the target that makes sense to me is hospital capacity.
It seems that since COVID is highly contagious and not going away, we are all going to get exposed to it and have to fight it off with our immune systems eventually.
Being vaccinated to train your immune system before your first bout with COVID seems to greatly improve your outcome. In my state currently COVID is 15x more deadly for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated one. So it made sense to try to limit the spread as much as possible while we were waiting for vaccines to become available, because the difference between "everybody gets it eventually, with no vaccine" and "everybody gets it eventually, but most were vaccinated first" is a significant number of deaths avoided.
Now that the vaccines are widely available and pretty much everybody who wants to be vaccinated, is, the only reason I see to continue with restrictions is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and can continue to serve everybody who needs medical care (COVID or not). That threshold is being hit in some states in the US, so I can understand why some restrictions are still needed. Eventually I would think we will accumulate enough immunity from vaccination + natural infection that we don't have a hospital capacity problem anymore.
The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures. And covid measures have always been dynamic. Safety measures have been removed or reintroduced based up on very hard statistics man. I don't know how you don't see that.
edit: My first sentence was a bit garbage. The target is to save lives from covid and avoid its spread. Hospital utilization and mortality rate from the disease are good KPIs for that. Almost all responsible countries are at least trying to follow those KPIs.
All the more reason to keep draconian covid measures in place in perpetuity. Covid passports, lockdowns, masks, forced vax.
Sometimes I picture our anti-covid measures as piling sandbags in front of a tsunami. Might hold back the water for a little while, but won't do much in the long term.
They can go around staying whatever they want. But the fact is they have never had nor will they ever have the statistical basis that covid regulations have. I can, right now, google covid and be presented with all statistics broken down by days, countries, continents etc. We can start comparing TSA and covid when TSA starts presenting their statistics.
> That may be the target, but the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.
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Don't we all die eventually? What's your point then?
Are you saying that if people get COVID they'll all die of COVID related complications *eventually•? Because that's not necessarily true. If someone is the 101st person who needs a ventilator and all 100 ventilators are being used by COVID patients, then that person likely dies and they could have been recovered.
>The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures.
Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.
That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.
The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
>I don't know how you don't see that.
Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.
You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here. Others have explained why you are way off base.
What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat. It's best to work to counteract that threat using the best tools we have available, which are pretty simple: masks, distance, and vaccination.
>The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
It kinda feels like you're demanding to talk to the manager of coronavirus here.
Give me the numbers and the objective measurement of what we need to meet for this to happen. Why is this hard for you?
>What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat.
>You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here.
While you're at it stop with the strawman and ad-hominem attacks. What it looks like is you have nothing to support the idea that this will stop once we meet a certain "threshold".
All I'm asking is what the threshold is. Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?
>Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?
Very much so. That much was clear from your first comment, when you equated the knee-jerk acceptance of insane and ineffective security theater post-9/11 with the entirely rational measures we've taken in the face of a novel pandemic for which there is no existent immunity.
Your tirades here demanding someone tell you the threshold at which point we can dispense with masks and distancing are ridiculously off base. As long as ICUs are packed, and as long as regular care is rationed because of antivaxxers flooding hospitals with COVID or Ivermectin ODs, we'll have to keep doing what we're doing to keep ourselves and those we love safe(r).
The threat will never go away, but fortunately vaccination cuts the risk of death to virtually zero. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population, plus several animal species, so unlike smallpox or polio it can never be eradicated. Obviously we can't keep the safety measures in place forever, so what are the quantitative exit criteria?
This feels potentially disingenuous. Why are all the graphs only until mid-April/May? Of course states with higher density populations are going to see more spread/death/hospitalizations. Counts per 100k people don't show the whole picure. How does this site clearly demonstrate that restrictions don't work? How can you know what might have happened without restrictions?
