If they delete tweets like that, Twitter gets shit for censoring foreign officials. If they don't delete tweets like that, they get shit for not intervening when the public is obviously put in harm's way. I think they chose the lesser of the two evils. Now, on to censor that umpalumpa you call president.
It's worse than that. He's making a reasonable argument that the public will be put in the way of greater harm by letting the economy collapse. I'd find it pretty hard to say whether he's right or wrong.
However, even if you think he's wrong, this is not an argument being made in bad faith. Censorship is a simply bad way to handle it.
Even when not saving the economy leads to people dying?
Not sure if this is free to read, but it offers some of the reasoning behind the difficulty of shutting down the economy in poorer countries: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus...
Short quote: "The worry, as Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister says, is that “if we shut down the cities...we will save [people] from corona at one end, but they will die from hunger.“"
According to this paper[1] public health interventions temporarily depress the economy but it quickly bounces back. OTOH widespread death due to choosing not to intervene depresses the economy for much longer.
You're telling me that a paper about the outcome of something that happened 100 years ago in the US is valid for something happening now in Brazil (or other less developed countries)? From their Conclusion:
"Finally, when interpreting our findings, there several important caveats to keep in
mind. First, our analysis is limited to data on 30 states and 43 to 66 cities. Second, data
on manufacturing activity is not available in all years, so we cannot carefully examine
pre-trends between 1914 and 1919 for the manufacturing activity outcomes. Third, the
economic environment toward the end of 1918 was unusual due to the end of WWI.
Fourth, while there are important economic lessons from the 1918 Flu for today’s COVID-
19 pandemic, we stress the limits of external validity. Estimates suggest that 1918 Flu
was more deadly than COVID-19, especially for prime-age workers, which also suggests
more severe economic impacts of the 1918 Flu. The complex nature of modern global
supply chains, the larger role of services, and improvements in communication technology
are mechanisms we cannot capture in our analysis, but these are important factors for
understanding the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19."
It's not great evidence for intervention but it's good evidence against the idea that curtailing intervention will save the economy. Many people seem to be assuming the latter.
Edit: I'm not advocating either. I believe that we can have our cake and eat it too: reopen the economy AND keep people from dying. It requires two things. Massive testing and tracing (https://medium.com/@sten.linnarsson/to-stop-covid-19-test-ev...), and allowing businesses to reopen when they have proper protection, isolation and cleaning protocols in place.
Of course both these things require large amounts of money so developing nations are screwed, as usual.
The public health interventions the paper covers do not appear to rise to the level of what is currently being done in many countries. There are entire sectors of the economy that are effectively producing zero output (hospitality, tourism, transportation) in most countries. Furthermore, the economy is very different today than it was in 1918.
You forgot the part about some (less fortunate) economies depending heavily on exporting consumer (discretionary) goods to developed countries, which means that the dip in spending in US/Europe/China will lead to a big downturn in these countries.
Many political leaders around the world seem to be downplaying the severity of this virus.
So lets consider some details:
1. Looking at past events, pandemics do kill (i.e. many tens of millions where killed by the Spanish Flu).
2. This Covid 19 also kills (i.e. high deaths tolls in Italy/Spain and rising etc).
3. Covid 19 also appears to be highly contagious (i.e. look at New York).
4. From what I have read the reason the virus kills is hospital get overrun so patients have zero treatment options (i.e. hospitals run out of ventilators, medical staff, space, drugs etc etc).
Now I suspect if Pakistan goes down the path of trying to save its economy before tying to control the virus, they are in for a world of hurt.
The problem is that people who contract COVID-19 don’t just wake up one morning and die. They tend to develop serious symptoms which, if presented at hospital, result in potentially prolonged care over a week or more involving the use of rare icu beds and (currently) rare and expensive ventilators.
If you can convince the population to take your stance “for the good of the economy!” then have the decency to also inform them not to seek treatment and therefore not overload the health care system for those who wish to live.
I'm not sure you understand that my point is that this is a compromise between dwo plights that cannot be resolved by armchair economists and epidemiologists. Sure, Bolsanaro might be wrong, but there are leaders out there who have to make a decision about which of the two options would affect their countries more. Simply defaulting to "just quarantine EVERYONE" might be correct from an epidemics perspective, but people don't only die or suffer from diseases.
It's extremely conceivable to me that the conditions of developing countries means quarantine is one of those "cure is worse than the disease" scenarios. Their fate is already written based on the resources they can muster, and when many countries GDP is dramatically less than the healthcare spending of developed countries, that's not much. It's counter-intuitive to pretend otherwise. Rich countries have the luxury of saying "you can't work if you're dead", when the ground reality in poor countries is "you're dead if you can't work. The demographic pyramid of poor countries with disproportionate youth is more resilient against COVID than the Spanish Flu that targeted the young - they're in a favourable position to get through the pandemic milder interventions.
There are more than two ways to address this problem. I am not an epidemiologist but I did watch a 3blue1brown video on YouTube last night. As I understand it, one of the most effective containment strategies is to test everyone, then take anyone who is infected as well as recent contacts of that person and ask them to self-isolate.
Imagine if we had rapid-result test kits that were deployed at all central choke point locations (say supermarkets, doctors offices, etc). If you needed food, you would have a test and the test would determine whether you contracted the disease. If the test was positive, you would have to submit your recent activities and contacts (perhaps aided by technology, such as tracking phone records or an app that tracks nearby bluetooth). The sick people would be placed into isolation and the contacts would be asked to quarantine.
What I see is a lack of foresight and innovative thinking from the very leaders we are seeking advice from. They're just giving us lazy answers that serve their own agenda. It's disgusting. We could have had effective testing in the US by now - we have made a conscious choice (probably out of inaction) not to develop them.
Thing is, we don't have rapid tests to test presence of virus. Only to test antibodies. And even those take sometime and would create a bottleneck.
Face masks for everybody is best so far. In case you're infected and didn't notice that yet (or asymptomatic at all), you don't spread it.
Problem with "test everyone" is that by the time you test the last person, you can't be sure that the first person didn't caught it. And then you have a good chunk of false-negatives.
1. there are more than two options available to leaders (false dilemma)
2. there is a lack of true leadership and innovative thinking by our elected officials
3. you can't point to the side effect of the current strategy ("look at the economy!") and hand-wave away the side effect of another (lack of hospital resources to handle a peak infected load, causing even more suffering, loss of life, and public panic, most likely also affecting the economy)
The fact that I can't come up with a more effective solution as a layman in five minutes on an Internet comment board should not indicate that there are none.
In other words, you don't like either of existing solutions, don't know any better solutions and you're pissed off that people can't come up with better solutions.
I'm sorry if you felt that I was arguing against you- I think your suggestion of encouraging mask use is a great one! But nobody has done that, in fact, they've suggested the opposite (since there is a scarcity of 75c masks - so that masks are available for first responders and medical personnel, last I heard)
You are strawmanning my argument. My argument is, yes, I believe that there are more than two possible solutions to this. I also argue that the "do nothing" solution has its own downsides. If, however, you force me to choose from the two solutions presented (social isolation, or do nothing)- I pick social isolation because I believe, at least in the US, a good balance between flattening the spread and economic impact.
Yes I'm pissed off, why aren't you? I don't accept mediocrity from my coworkers or direct reports; why would you accept it from your government?
I feel like we're all experiencing mass learned helplessness at this point! We need to demand more from our leaders, not less!
Sometimes magic bullet solution just doesn't exist. Is this one of those cases? I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like things are going that way. Imperfect solution is not necessarily mediocrity. Looking back at history, people rarely take perfect solutions at the time. Sometimes even decades later nobody has came up with a perfect solution for decades old issues.
Personally I'm more pissed off at people who try to spin this situation to take a stab politicians they don't like for other reasons. Or just expect magic pill to appear out of nowhere.
The disinformation campaign "masks do no good!" brought more bad than good IMO. Sad to see lots of people believe that it's not worth to cover one's face out in public. Shitty propaganda in good faith is still shitty propaganda. Who could have thought people believe what they're told and don't change their mind on a whim when they're told opposite!
One thing everyone seems to be missing in this thread is that these tweets aren't in isolation. Last week he came on national TV to beg people to go back to work, saying the virus is just "a little flu" and, while he's a senior citizen, he would be fine because of his "athletic history" (which is interesting, since he can't do a single push up).
If you feel like the economy argument makes sense, fine, but let's not give this complete moron more credit than he's due.
Is it reasonable? In Italy and Spain they have so many bodies that they are running out of space to put them. These people are not dying of economic effects.
Italy and Spain are quite developed countries and part of one of the most prosperous economic blocs in the world. Of course people aren't dying of the economic effects, the state can support them through this.
Do you think every country can just pull out trillions of dollars worth of support for their population when stuff like this happens?
What are you actually suggesting will happen? That there would be a major famine in Brazil? That Brazilians would freeze to death in the harsh Brazilian winter? How are these people going to die exactly?
This is the short term effect. We need to worry about the long term too. We need to worry about an economic depression rivaling that of 1929, in which a lot of people will die of hunger.
Yes people are dying and we should do everything possible to stop that. However I'm getting worried that there's no plan in place for how long this lasts or what happens afterwards.
A possibility is that it's not possible to control this virus, without continuous restrictions on movement, until a vaccine is ready. We're talking about a 12 - 18 months timeframe. If we keep the current restrictions for more than 2 months, we are already fucked, let alone for 12 months. Purposefully slowing down the economy for 12 months would be a disaster.
There's also a detail missed by the pro-economy camp of course: even if you relax restrictions, that doesn't mean we won't go through a severe economic recession, simply because people have already lost appetite for investing in useless shit they don't need, especially when other people are dying around them. This economic recession was inevitable, with or without restrictions.
But we also need to ensure that people don't end up dying of hunger and that's a conversation worth having. It seems to me that politicians don't have a clue about what to do and were this is going and that's freaking scary.
There was plenty of food produced in the US during the Great Depression, it was even getting destroyed by producers in an effort to increase the price.
Maybe instead of a market economy that arbitrarily starves people we should democratically and rationally plan production and distribution for the benefit of all.
Do you know if there are any working examples of that in a history? The ones which work on a state level at least and are sustainable in a long term? And how would that be done democratically? Do you just vote for the expropriation and distribution of goods and property?
I think I have seen it already...
Cuba is probably the best example. Despite decades under illegal embargo and starting off with extreme poverty and inequality, the material condition of the people has drastically improved. The people actually own most of the means of production and distribution through a different and more direct form of democracy.
Beyond that, Cuba is the only environmentally sustainable country and exports medical care to the rest of the world.
I am sorry, but Cuba is not democracy. It is "Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist republic" (see Wikipedia) which in practical terms means no free speech, no political parties (except ruling communist), state controlled media, internet, surveillance of communication and political prisoners.
That is indeed what the US state and media keep saying about socialist. Consider that perhaps US capitalists have a vested interest to smear any group that opposes capitalism.
That is indeed a fact what socialism under communist party rule is. Those who have never lived under such regimes have not a slightest idea what they are talking about. This is extremely sad that our memory is so short lived and only 30 years after collapse of Soviet Union there are so many people in west thinking that the socialism as designed by soviet communists was something which should be admired now. Or, well, some think that the Soviet interpretation was bit bad, and with a little modern tweaking, it can be made right. Rest assured, that is totally false. The regime is not a cent better than fascist regime, just copy/paste few terms and names.
There are millions of people from nations between Germany and Russia which have spent 50+ years under communist regime, and you can ask them if they ever wanted to return to those times. I don't think you will find many. I am pretty sure same applies to Cuba or Venezuela, as their regimes are built around same Marxism-Leninism ideology.
This idea that socialism is anything at all like fascism is disgustingly chauvinistic. It is based on the notion that only the West could possibly have freedom and anything different elsewhere must clearly be evil. Don’t fall for the propaganda.
I have talked to hundreds of people that lived in socialist countries. There are several surveys of Eastern Europeans on the subject. The vast majority of people (the workers) that experience socialism want it.
I am Eastern European and I actually lived under Soviet socialism when I was an adult already so I experienced it first hand. The number of people died in Gulag in our country was way higher than the number of people died in fascist concentration camps.
Obviously our world views are oceans apart, sorry to learn that.
> The number of people died in Gulag in our country was way higher than the number of people died in fascist concentration camps
Yet when the USSR was overthrown, there were barely any political prisoners to be found.
Your claim has no proof to back it up, unless you mean "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn. That is widely known by historians to be unreliable fiction.
It's really hard to get reliable data on that. EUROMOMO (the all-cause mortality monitoring that's been used for years for determining if influenza is causing more significantly mortality than baseline each season) doesn't show any significant spike in all-cause mortality in either country.
Maybe you're getting downvoted because your own source advises against being used as a source for your argument? From euromomo:
> Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO
> Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries.
> The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detectable at the national level, even more so not in the pooled analysis at European level, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution.
> Therefore, although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19.
EDIT: you can even see COVID19 deaths btw - if you scroll down to Italy there is an uptick. If Lombardy was there separately the uptick would be even bigger - the disease kills almost 3 times the number of people who die on an average day
Covid-2019 has made 35,000 victims globally, out of which 10,000 just in Italy, just in one month, victims happening in spite of massive movement restrictions happening on a never before seen scale and it's been pretty clear already that this isn't "just a flu".
On the other hand the numbers are too small so they currently don't make a dent in the overall statistics, however this is a problem of potential and every single prediction thus far came true, with the news being all bad.
The disease is scary not only due to mortality rate, but due to hospitalization rate too and in terms of hospitalization, there's not much difference between the young and healthy and the old or sick. When 10% of those infected require medical assistance, this will cripple your economy regardless of fatally. Plus if the medical system is collapsing, the median age will go down, since the young and healthy won't necessarily get the needed ICU beds.
There's also the small matter of the population not having any immunity to this virus (compared with Influenza) which guarantees that if unchecked it will spread to 70% of the population at least.
70% spread, with a 0.5% mortality rate (an optimistic estimate) means 1,560,422 dead just in the EU and this in the ideal case in which everybody gets treated, otherwise that rate can easily be double or triple. Or 27,000,000 worldwide. Such a number is comparable with the victims of World War I.
You're being down-voted because of downplaying the severity of this disease, when the writing is on the wall — the Italians downplayed this too and now their hospitals are overwhelmed.
Of course, a discussion of where this is headed and what can we do to avoid a severe economic depression is worth having, but let's not downplay how bad this is.
The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's considerably higher from November to April.
The concern should be about additional deaths, not the raw numbers of "how many people died after testing positive for Covid-19" -- which, it's worth noting, is the metric being measured here, not "deaths exclusively caused by Covid-19". We don't treat any other respiratory illness this way. If we applied the same logic to other respiratory illnesses (flu appears to be a trigger word these days, but it's the big one!) then a very large number of deaths we currently attribute to other things (cancer & heart disease to name two huge ones) would suddenly become "flu deaths".
(edited: I had an extra zero on the baseline mortality rate due to a calculation error)
This is the same as in the UK currently. If you have, say, terminal cancer but it is a dose of flu that finally kills you, the death is recorded as due to cancer.
If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1]
"But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.
Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections."
> "If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1]"
If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer. And how many people have terminal cancer right now?
I find this narrative particularly dangerous, because the chronic diseases that have been associated with Covid-2019 mortality, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, are very much manageable with proper treatment. Yet the narrative is that these people are dying anyway, even if they might be having decades of productive life in them.
So the narrative is not only inhumane, it's also bullshit.
I think you are missing the point. I'm not saying "Those people would have died anyway" I'm saying that you can't tell if COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu in a reliable way because mortality is being recorded differently for other infections such as the flu.
If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer
But the stats don't track if you died because "your lungs get filled with liquid". They only track if you die and the virus was present in a PCR test.
I find this narrative particularly dangerous
And yet you failed to understand it properly. It's faulty and facile reasoning like yours that is leading Twitter to delete tweets by elected national leaders; they think they're much smarter than they really are.
Diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory illnesses, etc, these are illnesses that can be managed with proper treatment and the people dying right now could easily have decades left of productive life in them.
There's also another confounder, which is that the restrictions themselves are helping to keep other diseases in check. Air pollution in large cities for example has significantly gone down. Seasonal flu infections have gone down as well.
Any kind of comparison you're trying to make right now is apples versus oranges.
Also every prediction for Covid-2019 came true and 10,000 deaths in a single month may not seem high for Italy — even if the medics and nurses crying out of exhaustion should make you think that the shit has hit the fan — but that number could easily go to 50,000 or 100,000 per month, not to mention the young that may not die, but may suffer from respiratory illness for months or years afterwards.
And as I said, mortality rate isn't everything that counts, a 10% hospitalization rate cripples the medical system and is a clusterfuck for our economy anyway.
The truth is, the leaders who advocate for this approach aren’t doing this analysis. They’re just being lazy and hoping the problem goes away on its own. That works with a lot of “human” scale problems - however you can’t ignore exponential growth.
They put themselves in this situation by not evolving their platform into one managed by its community. Instead, they are the gatekeepers of everything with full responsibility but also full access to their users data and therefore ad money.
When organizations like WHO, CDC spread dangerous disinformation like "it's just a flu" or "masks don't help", should Twitter ban these texts as well? Should they ban people saying things that are obviously true (or proven to be true in the future), but go contrary to the statements by these organizations? What if they change their stance every week?
> If they don't delete tweets like that, they get shit for not intervening when the public is obviously put in harm's way.
Nobody voted for twitter to be the protector of the public. That's the job of the elected official. That's why we have elections. If the public suffers, the fault lies with the official, not twitter.
Why bother having elections, democracy, etc. Why not just let twitter and the tech elites rule over us? Zuckerburg, Wojcicki and Dorsey should form a triumvirate and rule over us. Tell us what to think, how to think, when to think, etc.
I also think there's something to be said for not putting Twitter - or any other company - in that position in the first place. We need to put more concerted resources into building decentralized alternatives.
> Nobody voted for twitter to be the protector of the public.
And Twitter owns the platform he uses to spread dangerous disinformation to further his own political agenda. A car rental company has every right to ban you from their fleet if you repeatedly kill pedestrians with their cars.
Make Twitter (and Youtube while at it) a public utility.
Can telephone company cut you off for spreading disinformation? Can a toll road refuse you if you're driving to "spread dangerous disinformation" at a rally?
Is it not a little bit patronising that American companies think they can regulate political speech in Brazil? It's quite clear they don't think they can regulate political speech in the US. What exactly is the difference?
I think there's a vast difference between the US government doing something, and private companies doing something like this. I'm not saying the US is right in its interventions, but atleast they're a democratically elected government with some form of legitimacy.
Again: If you're shocked by this, just wait until you find out what the US government has been up to in Central and South America over the past 50 years
I grew up in Brazil. I know what the US has been doing for ages. It's just that, in a more civilized world, I would expect governments to hold themselves to a high ethical standard.
If the US did that, they could be a force for good. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
They are not regulating speech in brazil, they are regulating speech on their platform. Bolsonaro can still say whatever he wants in brazil, he just can’t do it on twitter.
Many people look on Twitter first. Brazil could therefore argue Twitter is interfering with government communication in a time of national emergency. That carries a very high penalty in many countries. Besides, this is like the phone company refusing you service because you swore on a call.
Can't it get more whataboutists than just using a link on whataboutism?
I am not trying to be argumentative here but the question stands, treating one and another politician with a different set of parameters is a bit weird.
BTW, I disagree with both of them. I am not trying to defend one or another.
> Is it not a little bit patronising that American companies think they can regulate political speech in Brazil?
I'm sure the President of Brazil can manage to find a way to convey his message other than Twitter. Thus it's not like Bolsonaro was placed under a gag order.
If you want to use a third-party service then you comply with the end user agreement presented by the third party. If you don't agree then that's ok, just get one that you're ok with.
> "It's quite clear they don't think they can regulate political speech in the US."
Think again, they DO censor political speech in the US, specifically one side's political speech. This is especially clear for Twitter but also present on many other social media channels.
Will they eventually come for the WHO/CDC/Surgeon General anti-mask tweets? That's the most interesting case for me, when the expert authorities disagree with the facts (and in a very dangerous way) how does twitter decide?
This is not really news. I think what's really notable about all this... situation — is that a lot of stuff that was not ok only a short while ago, is perceived quite calmly by people, because.. well, "it's different", right? This is a serious thing. It's dangerous. You don't want to be dead, right?
It is 9/11 of sorts. Maybe even worse, since you are specifically "not allowed" to question this, because doubting is assumed to be spreading dangerous misinformation. And it's not hard to sell censoring something that supposedly puts lives of your relatives in danger.
Wouldn't it be Orwellian if it was the elected president censoring/redacting people's tweet ?
I'd be on board with Twitter on this one, hoping they use it as a precedent for dealing with the other living policy infringements they have on their platform.
One piece that may be useful for the puzzle: Approaching this from the perspective of psychology and familial trauma has helped me understand and discuss. Someone close to me had a clinically diagnosed narcissistic sociopath parent. Literature on working with trauma and how to work with the consequences of psychologically hostile parents helps to understand the model.
The narcissist-sociopath model is very simple and there's kind of always the same underlying base behavioral script. This is fortunate, because it can be easily simulated by a normally working mind once we are trained to do it. It's very unintuitive if we are caught unaware.
Because putting entire nations under forced house arrest based on the output of computer simulations isn't even slightly sociopathic? It's literally got "social" in the word.
Argue that it's the right choice by all means. To argue that politicians caring about the economy - that thing that also keeps us alive - is "sociopathic", just shows a complete loss of perspective.
Ordering quarantine is quite obviously not sociopathic to anyone who understands exponential growth and can do basic calculations.
> To argue that politicians caring about the economy - that thing that also keeps us alive - is "sociopathic", just shows a complete loss of perspective.
It's hard to see how someone who directly weighs deaths against economic benefits in such a situation (before the pandemic has even peaked) could not be a sociopath, and by "sociopath" I really mean the personality disorder, not some subjective sentiment. It's a hypothesis, but one that would be easy to confirm empirically with standard personality tests.
You have to bear in mind that politicians in those positions have good scientific advisors. They were attempting to delay measures in order for the economy of their country (or their personal stocks) to come out better in the end. They were willing to risk this gamble, even though they knew that this results in many more deaths, because no country's health care system can deal with so many patients at once. Except for Bolsonaro, all of these sociopaths have backed off by now, because most sociopaths are also narcissists and they realized the many deaths would make them look bad.
That's the sad truth, whether you like it or not. The good news is that there are less sociopathic heads of states than one might think and the vast majority of all decision makers have reacted wisely. Let's not forget that.
Ordering quarantine is quite obviously not sociopathic to anyone who understands exponential growth and can do basic calculations.
Lots of people understand both yet are sounding the alarm as loudly as they can about over-reaction, the poor track record of epidemiology and the poor quality of the data. For instance it's not even clear COVID-19 is spreading exponentially. The percentage of positive results from tests done is not scaling exponentially, but only the raw numbers are being reported usually so an exponential increase in the number of tests can make it look like an exponential increase in spread.
The world does have experience of bad policy initiated by governments who were following what they perceived as scientific advice (of the kind politically acceptable to themselves). The worst one being Lysenkoism. And of course abuse of psychiatric evaluations to declare anyone politically opposed to the government as mad or bad has a terrible history as well.
You should really think a lot more carefully before declaring anyone who disagrees with you as having a personality disorder. Shutting down the world indefinitely will cause everyone to die: that is a fact. COVID-19 will not approach even a fraction of that, not even under the worst case projections. Obviously at some point the "sociopaths" as you put it have to win the argument or else we're all reverting back to stone age times.
You have to bear in mind that politicians in those positions have good scientific advisors
Having read the output of such scientists, I don't think that's at all obvious. You're assuming it, maybe hoping it, but scientism is a real problem in academia.
They were willing to risk this gamble, even though they knew that this results in many more deaths, because no country's health care system can deal with so many patients at once.
So far not a single countries healthcare system has come anywhere even close to collapse. All stresses have been highly regional and could have been handled by inter-region transfers, yes, even in Italy and China. In fact in Italy a politician wondered the other day why they are transferring patients to Germany when nearby Veneto the ICU is 2/3rds empty.
And a significant source of the pressure on healthcare systems is in fact the quarantine measures placed on staff, many of whom are self isolating without symptoms.
The belief in totally collapsed healthcare systems comes entirely from simulations of questionable utility (because attempts to simulate prior epidemics have failed).
The exponential spread of SARS-CoV2 in the early phase (without containment measures) is a fact. You will not find an expert who thinks its R0 without any measures is <=1, since no data would support this thesis. Look at the curves. Estimates are currently between 2 and 4. As for health care systems not collapsing: All countries have reacted with drastic measures and that is the reason why their health care systems have not collapsed. Some have also better health care systems than others (e.g. Sweden, Netherlands). If you think any country could have done without quarantine or equivalent measures such as constant testing, temperature measurement, forced quarantine of infected, and very stringent case tracking, then you really do not understand exponential growth and how the disease spreads.
I'm not declaring anyone who disagrees with me to have a personality disorder, I have laid out reasons why it is very likely that a certain small percentage of politicians has one. It can be inferred fairly well from what they say. In fact, a certain small percentage of the general population has them, so it would be a miracle if politicians where somehow exempt from personality disorders. Sociopaths lack empathy, so they have no problem weighing other people's lives against any other factor. That is a fact, too. As I said, it would be easy to confirm my claim with personality tests. It's not an outlandish view at all.
