OutcastPhilosopher wrote:Please explain.....
Ok. We had a choice to make, balancing the harm from the virus versus the harm from the measures we had available to contain it. There is no right or wrong answer as it depends on what people value. Different people can look at the same situation and come to different decisions on what we "should" do.
In Japan, wearing masks when you're sick is considered standard and rude not to. So when news of a new virus hit everyone put on their masks. And so life in Japan was able to continue semi-normally and they've had a death rate of 68/million.
In New Zealand, they cut off foreign travel and did contact, trace and isolate on every case that sprung up so they have a death rate of 5/million.
In the US, basic public health measures became ideological (but muh FREE...dumbs!), wrapped up in partisan politics, and conspiracy thinking (It's a hoax!). So since people would not voluntarily take simple precautions to stop the spread, involuntary lockdowns to keep people from mixing had to be imposed. And so we got the worst of all possible outcomes, loads of economic pain plus 1645/million deaths.
But that's what happens when people decide that reality is optional and decide to live in their own little fantasy worlds instead.