Yeah, sure that is what we have to fall back on, but that doesn't address the reality that for younger people its a nothingburger. It is a Prisoners Dilemma situation, and you need to have nearly the entire population not defect, when in fact there is a reasonable payout that is situation dependent for many younger people. That is why I think it will be a very interesting experiment.
There were a number of articles in the WSJ and other sources beating up on the Chinese because they are a "totalitarian" system and claiming that was responsible for CV-19 blowing up because they controlled their press and punished early efforts to spread info about the virus. True, but the response after that was the flip side of that coin, where their system of government allows draconian measures more easily than ours, not to mention the people comply more willingly.
So we will get to see how the two systems play out. BTW, Trump of course tried to muzzle the US press too a bit on the subject, but his tools are more limited to bashing the press and firing his staff who are too open. Still, it set a tone early on of wanting to ignore things, no different than the early Chinese response. Wuhan has a population of cr 12M and they ended up with 90K cases or so, and looks to be contained. They did that by isolating the entire area, and then the people within that area took pretty drastic isolation measures to each other too. We have hot spots spread all over the USA now, but we are taking nowhere near the action they did. So we get to see what the results will be. |
