But I've got to say, as someone who is living in a tightly locked down region where there has been no community infections for well-over 200 days, the lack of concern n the US about the pandemic and how it is being handled is baffling. How this could ever have become politicised I just don't understand. (The region I live in, Western Australia, is the powerhouse of our national economy and has some high risk remote Aboriginal communities where a covid infection would have decimated them.)
A side issue from the election discussion, but I want to address it.
I think you make the point that drives Trump's logic, that you are in an enormous lockdown that is crippling Australia's economy, with really minimal effect. As soon as the lockdown ends, for all the economic damage, the cases will immediately spike at the exact point the lockdowns end. It only delays the inevitable. So it is far better to just isolate the elderly and immune-compromised, and let the rest of society function. That is what Governor Ron DeSantis has done in Florida.
The science at this point shows that lockdowns don't work. There's a former New York Times reporter named Alex Berenson who wrote a short book on the subject (that Amazon tried unsuccessfully to suppress from being read). Even if the entire population were to get Covid-19, only about 1% die, and the increase in suicides, drug overdoses, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and child abuse, not to mention economic damage, demonstrate far more damage from a shutdown than deaths from the disease itself.
And no one in liberal circles seems to want to discuss Sweden and other states, that never had any lockdown, and are now emerging far better than the rest of Europe, approaching herd immunity, with no economic damage. The U.S. offers a unique example, because mostly countries did a nationwide lockdown, whereas President Trump left it to individual states to decide their own Covid policy. I'm lucky to live in Florida, that locked down only the worst hit areas. And while I am in one of the areas that was locked down (Palm Beach County) if I wanted to, I could have still gone to work daily, shopping daily, or gone wherever I wanted without fines or imprissonment. But I chose to comply as much as possible, only going out to buy groceries and visit family occasionally for the most part. I'm lucky to have that ability.
Others are starved of income and at risk of eviction or losing their homes if they don't get a weekly check. Not everyone can stay home. And how are we able to stay home and comply? Because tens of millionss of other people still go to work every day, produce and transport our food, deliver our mail, and countless other essentials and luxuries we take for granted.
In the early months, we were dealing with an unknown Covid-19. Now we understand it better, and have many therapies to treat the dangerous inflammatory stage of the illness, and have vastly lowered the death toll. Yes, people still get sick and infections are increasing, but most get well even without treatment, and far fewer are dying because doctors know better how to treat it in the 15% or so of cases where there is risk. Lockdowns no longer make sense.
