@immortalartisan
From the article:
What is WHO’s position on ‘lockdowns’ as a way of fighting COVID-19?
Large scale physical distancing measures and movement restrictions, often referred to as ‘lockdowns’, can slow COVID‑19 transmission by limiting contact between people.
However, these measures can have a profound negative impact on individuals, communities, and societies by bringing social and economic life to a near stop. Such measures disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups, including people in poverty, migrants, internally displaced people and refugees, who most often live in overcrowded and under resourced settings, and depend on daily labour for subsistence.
WHO recognizes that at certain points, some countries have had no choice but to issue stay-at-home orders and other measures, to buy time.
Governments must make the most of the extra time granted by ‘lockdown’ measures by doing all they can to build their capacities to detect, isolate, test and care for all cases; trace and quarantine all contacts; engage, empower and enable populations to drive the societal response and more.
WHO is hopeful that countries will use targeted interventions where and when needed, based on the local situation.
Which sounds like they are not in favor of prolonged indefinite lockdowns but rather short-term lockdowns that may at most last a few weeks or days, not several months.
Additionally, Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organization's special convoy on COVID-19, urged not to use lockdowns as a primary control method for the virus.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. David Nabarro said to The Spectator’s Andrew Neil. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Here's a source for that.
Again, my position is that you should have short periods of voluntary lockdowns as the worst case scenarios but prolonged lockdowns for the eternity of society is not a good idea, the policies enacted by Cuomo and Whitmer violate both the advice from the World Health Organization, which is appears to be against lockdowns except in the most extreme of circumstances or for temporary relief
This is not me taking them out of context or misrepresenting their position, they did come out against lockdowns as a generality and they have a position similar to mine.
@EOTFOFYL
See above for The WHO, but I am not just "pulling crap out of thin air."
For starters,
China's economy is still experiencing growth despite the COVID pandemic, albeit a much slower than expected growth.
Sweden's voluntary system saw it have a lower shrinkage of economic growth and recession compared to the other countries in Europe, with only an 8.6% recession in its 2nd Quarter.
Hell, even your own source supports my position of not having legal force be carried out but to have voluntary guidelines and recommendations rather than outright legally enforced lockdowns.
Sweden's new guidance is again in the form of recommendations, without the legal force that is being used in the rest of Europe.
And the guidelines are still more relaxed than elsewhere in Europe, particularly France, Germany, and the UK, which announced sweeping new lockdown measures in the past week.
But they still represent a change for a country that had acted as a barometer for the rest of the world to see how closely life could resemble normal while trying to keep the virus under control.
I think you've misunderstood my position quite a bit because I was never advocating we just throw caution to the wind but that we should not have the government enforce or punish us for violating the lockdown orders as it is a violation of our rights.
And yes, Sweden had more COVID deaths, but let's not forget that most COVID deaths are from people who are in their 50s to their latter life, along with people who have preexisting conditions. The issue here is that if we are talking from a utilitarian prospect, we don't know if the economic fallout will ruin more lives or harm more people than COVID deaths would because death and disease is just a force of nature we are not able to control. Not to mention the damage from psychological and social unrest and the increase in things like suicide due to isolation. These factors are hard to definitively prove beyond strong correlative studies, but it's the question of do you want to save the people reaching the end of their natural lives already but risk harming wider society by lowering quality of life, household income, and the many other things that ensure a good quality of life? Think about it this way, would grandparents want to live a little bit longer if it means that their grandchildren aren't going to be as well off as they could have been both psychologically, socially, educationally and economically?
In the wise words of many economics professors: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Sometimes, you have to bite the bullet and take the losses, even if they aren't just as the lesser of two evils, but that doesn't mean you have to like.
As for China, given the track record of its party lying and covering up figures, and the fact that China, with its unclean living conditions that are cramped and its high population density are reporting less positive cases than other countries indicates to me there's reason to doubt their official government documents, especially as its the country of origin. Note also how all the articles don't point to the whole country being in lockdown but only specific places, indicating that they didn't lockdown everyone but only specific parts.
