commonsense wrote: ↑Mon Apr 06, 2020 9:54 pm
It seems apparent that lockdowns helped slow the spread of Covid 19 when and where utilized. This was seen early enough that various places could’ve employed this tactic or could’ve employed it earlier than was done.
What could the rationale have been for forgoing or delaying this measure? What do leaders who have omitted or delayed shutdowns see that I’m overlooking?
For one thing there's compliance rates. Democratic nations have varyingly unruly cultures. So when the government orders Germans for instance, to stay indoors, there is a reasonable expectation that they will comply, they are like that as a population. But in Britain we whinge whenever we are inconvenienced by the Nanny State telling us what to do, whilst the Italians are not widely renowned for obeying the law at all if they don't feel like it. So lockdown etc automatically comes with it's effectiveness discounted by the local rate of typical non-compliance.
That same thing is to be multiplied by duration and repetition. Without a technical breakthrough such as a cure or a really reliable and genuinely rapid test, a single lockdown for a couple of months isn't actually going to fix the problem and a second lockdown is going to be required within a few weeks of the first ending. All of this pisses people off even more. Some will respond by complying less than they did first time round. Everyone else will hate those guys, who they will blame for the whole mess.
Those first two things are general political background that applies anywhere the government must respond in some way to public opinion (this offer does not apply to China). They don't take into account any local factors, but a few make the problem stickier in some places than others.
There's the political hardman/authoritarian regime/populist regime issue. There's two approaches they could have taken here, one is that applied by Duterte in the Phillipines, he has threatened to set his police death squads on people breaking curfew, that might work. But most other political hard men have gone the other way instead playing down the problem, and trying to protect the economy ahead of the people. This has led to Brazil, Russia, Turkey and so on all trying to pretend there is no problem and nor would they allow there to be one in various manners. Probably all three will indulge in serious consequences as a result.
Authoritarian regimes are usually careful to project an image of competence, but to maintain that, they must never attempt anything they cannot actually do. They also rely on some political base, which usually benefits from corruption, and the proceeds from corruption are usually required to maintain loyalty in a rather selective edition of trickle down economics where every traffic cop, tax inspector, local judge and so on has to get his beak wet in small doses every day. Those are the two main reasons why Iran couldn't lock down, that pairing applies in many other locales. In Iran's case, they would have had to shut down their holiest shrines which would offend the religious conservatives who decide every election, and the military who, for reasons already alluded to, own every falafel stand and taxi firm in the city as well as the airline that delivers the tourists to it.
Some places genuinely can't afford to have lockdowns anyway. People on this absurd decadent forum seem to think we are suffering even though nobody presently here can actually attest to having been ill yet so far as I can see. We're wallowing in first world problems, but our central banks can all just let the money printer go brrrrr, and in the meantime none of us will starve. We already have fully restored stocks of toilet paper at my local supermarket, which apparently was everybody's worst fucking problem in London last month, it was touch and go whether civlisation could survive the insult. Meanwhile, if people comply with lockdowns in some parts of the world, they actually die. A recent news report told of another country where another populist political hard man with a death count in the thousands (Narendra Modi) initiated lockdown with his typical lack of warning (4 hours ahead of shutting down all the trains and roads). Countless itenerant workers were forced to try and walk hundreds of miles to get home because they have no way of surviving in the city without daily work, a bunch of them died of heatstroke on the trek. They would have starved had they stayed.
The usual shitty little infantile answer to your question though would revolve around winning elections, or servicing powerful media tycoons. This probably applies to a handful of really shit politicans, but in a medial crisis any competent politico is simply going to very publicly do whatever the best available medical advice states taking into account what is possible with their local limitations along the lines of the above. That offer excludes America, where as you will have noticed, everything is a fucking culture wars issue. The American right and left just look at what the other side says and automatically disagrees, even if it is visibly true, no matter how pathetic they must know it shows them to be. Thus we have had that worthless goblin Walker discussing a global pandemic as nothing but an attempt to relitigate Trump's impeachment, and so on. If we had one of their Bernie Bros to balance him out, that probably would be just as bad. So their shit follows no other logic and America is an exception that proves the rule in almost all cases. They might refuse to deal with the medical problem for any number of totally fucking stupid reasons, apparently Jesus is a popular choice.
