Off_Field wrote:
I’m not sure why borders are treated totally different to quarantine by people. Surely if we’re saying that keeping people inside and locked down is the worthwhile action to be taking now to save lives, closing borders fits in with that.
It is pretty clear that one of the least savoury aspects of the lockdown is that many unnecessary actions are taken because they are symbolic or expected, not because they make a difference.
For example, for historic reasons, especially if there is a language barrier involved, there will be a lot fewer people traveling between, say, Vaals (Netherlands, around 10,000 inhabitants) and Aachen (Germany, just across the border) than between Laurensberg (a suburb of Aachen, 20,000 inhabitants, which is about the same distance) and Aachen.
Yet, knee-jerk reaction is to close the Dutch-German border, but they wouldn’t think about closing off Laurensberg (maybe six roadblocks would do it).
Also, keeping people from travelling in the confines of their cars from A to B has only a minuscule risk of infecting someone, but draconian police prevents from people driving around even circling back to their home without ever leaving the car.
I follow what you’re saying. and don’t really disagree i just find a strange inconsistency with the apparent suggestion everything should be locked down at any cost to reduce any deaths, but also then saying border control is has no effect whatsoever.
I do think driving around in a car or aircraft is of no real risk. Hopefully it’ll lead to governments being less awful to motorists. I wont hold my breath on it though.
Clipperstorch wrote:
and you just can’t make a different law for every town in a country
No? Regarding contagious diseases that is exactly what the (our) law say. Each county can do, in practical terms, whatever it takes to protect it’s citizens. The law is 130 years old, and is used as we speak. The problem is of course there will be different restrictions at different places, especially in the beginning. Today, about a month into this corona epidemic, it has been “normalized” somewhat with government issued laws, but there are still counties who demand 14 days quarantine for anyone crossing the county border.
This, and also country borders, makes it easier to control the situation. Smaller patches, divided by geography and/or demography (is that the right word?) is more of a matter of breaking down the problem into manageable sizes. A county already has the infrastructure and “chain of command” to get things going, and get it going fast and efficient. My own mayor sent out text messages and videos in social media to each citizen, telling us how the county is reacting and what we all should do. The schools in my county were closed several days before the country wide closing came into effect.
I am convinced that this law is one of the main reasons why Norway has few deaths compared with other countries, even though the initial spread was larger than most other places.
Off_Field wrote:
i just find a strange inconsistency with the apparent suggestion everything should be locked down at any cost to reduce any deaths, but also then saying border control is has no effect whatsoever.
What makes a difference is reducing the number of interactions. How far away from people’s homes these interactions take place [assuming they don’t interact on the way there] makes no difference
There was a case from keeping ‘clean’ areas ‘clean’, but that disappeared some time in January.
I get the reducing interactions, but closing borders surely is not incompatible with this?
Airborne_Again wrote:
Let’s drop the government for a while. Do you agree that effective handling of an epidemic like this would require some coordination at a level above individual communities? If yes, who or what would provide that coordination? If not, why not?(Note: I’m not overly fond of governments myself, but from a political standpoint quite different from yours.)
From my POV it’s a good idea to drop government from the discussion as you suggest, because politics and government do nothing except slow down the coordination issue you raise. Political boundaries and their association with medical care is the problem, not the solution. The coordination needs to be between hospitals, or hospital chains, between people who actually know something, without any regard to national or political boundaries or the slow, clumsy people who control them. Language could be an issue In Europe I suppose, but that’s far from clear to me given the high educational level of people in medicine.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I can well imagine that your particular location in a relatively sparsly populated area of the US makes you less affected by the epidemic than many other are. But what about people who don’t have that luxury? Not caring what happens to them is much too randian for my taste.
My location is not particularly rural, it’s outer suburban, but regardless this gets us again to the issue of too many people. It was interesting to me to see an article in IIRC the Wall Street Journal (?) gently postulating that the US move towards high density housing may be reversed or affected by people’s choices after this situation. If that were true and available housing prices for a family rise as a result, people will be having having less children and/or moving to where there is more, cheaper land. That’s a good thing for public health and quality of life unless you are a property tax collector.
Now we have the virus across Europe, the Borders thing is pointless. When they should have been doing border checks is back in January/February, especially at airports and I know from personal experience there was zilch…nothing. Thats when it could have been stopped & tracing people was important.
Yes; I am sure that will be the biggest of many lessons learnt.
When people demand “border controls”, what exactly do you have in mind? Someone checking passports? Asking “are you an asymptomatic carrier of this new virus”? Or like the immigration form for the US, “Do you plan to carry out any terrorist attack on the US, yes/no/don’t know yet”?
As we have seen, as soon as you have a single sick person who doesn’t even know about it somewhere, that is enough to get the whole thing started and spreading.
I would say it should depend on the nature or severity of what’s going on. If we eventually get to a stage where it’s reduced / under control if you have an outbreak in another country then closing the border to the area that’s an issue makes sense to me. It’s why I think there seems to be a lot of sense to get rapid testing and large scale testing so that we are able to stop it spreading.
Acting quickly and decisively would have helped and looking back on some of the things done, particularly the WHO saying to keep traveling looks rather stupid.
