The judicial branch is supposed to rely on facts and logical arguments. That is not how “America” writ large, however, is “supposed to work.” If that’s what the framers anticipated, they would have have had the other two branches likewise run by unelected subject matter experts with life tenure. But they didn’t.
The fact is that the world is too complicated to figure out via facts and logical analysis, and that’s why ultimate control of policy rests with elected politicians. We’re seeing this play out at a grand scale right now. In the US, classes are cancelled for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis doesn’t tell you what are the appropriate trade offs between keeping the economy running and keeping people safe. What the purposes of the welfare state should be isn’t a fact waiting to be discovered through empirical methods. These are all political judgments. Even where facts and logical analysis could play a role, it often doesn’t, because experts don’t agree on often very simple facts, or the experts’ answers are too complicated to be actionable.
I actually moved to Chapel Hill, NC in 2017 though I was planning to move back to NYC in June of this year. That plan is now delayed though for the obvious reason.
Fam is doing about as well as one could expect with two working parents and a 4yo stuck in the house.
> Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis
Where do you fit Italy, Spain, or even Portugal in your logica analysis? Because arguably the US is being hit harder than any of those countries and yet they are respecting their quarantine with notable results.
Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Sweden has suffered as much as neither Spain or Italy.
The US has not been harder but than Italy or Spain, or even Sweden.
Sweden has had 2,300 COVID-19 deaths for 10 million people. The USA has 25 times as many deaths, but 32 times the population. Indeed, American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm have far fewer deaths. Washington DC is a little smaller and has similar density, but has had 165 deaths, versus over 1,100 in Stockholm. (Deaths are doubling in both countries every two weeks, so they seem to be at similar points in their overall trajectories.)
Similarly, the death rate in the US outside of NYC is comparable to that of Germany. (NYC has no counterpart in Germany; it’s almost three times as dense as Berlin, and more than twice as tense as Munich.)
But that’s a political decision the Swedes have made, and maybe it will prove to be the right one. It could be that, in the fall, the virus resurges in places where people have been sheltering and have not developed anti-bodies, while Swedes manage to avoid that resurgence because they never shut down. No expert can tell you which way it will be. They can tell you a discrete fact (sheltering in place will save more lives than otherwise), but are in no position to plug that fact into a value framework and reach a decision. But politicians must make a decision one way or the other.
> The US has not been harder but than Italy or Spain, or even Sweden.
You should check the facts. In the past few weeks New York alone reported more covid infections and deaths than Spain's total from the start of their outbreak, and New York has around 25% the population of Spain.
New York also has between 2 to 3 times the number of active covid cases that Spain has, which indicates the death count will only get far worse than what it already is.
> American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm
You may try to cherry pick anything, but the facts are the facts.
You’re the one who is cherry picking. 97.5% of America doesn’t live in NYC. What’s going on in NYC isn’t a proxy for the USA as a whole. If you want to talk about NYC, we can do that—we could compare to Barcelona or Madrid or something similar. NYC has suffered for some reasons very specific to it. (Due to its role as an international travel hub, it is estimated that up to 100 different people started chains of infection in NYC, versus less than 10 in California). But even including NYC, the USA as a whole hasn’t been as hard hit as Sweden, much less Spain.
And excluding NYC (where, again, 97.5% of Americans live), the USA has been even less hard hit. My state is about the size of Switzerland, and has had half as many deaths.
>You may try to cherry pick anything, but the facts are the facts.
I enjoy the irony of criticizing someone for cherry-picking, while using NY as a proxy for how the whole of the US is doing.
Perhaps you could've picked the state that is most directly comparable to Spain in population and land size, California: 1/10th as many people dead per million. (But that too would be cherry-picking)
Sure if you cherry pick the worst city in the US and compare it to Italy or Spain then yes you can make it look like there are more cases in the US and be technically correct but overall the US is doing better then Italy and Spain.
Fairfield County, CT has 0.77 deaths per 1000[0] which far exceeds Stockholm despite having far less population density. New Orleans also falls short and has 0.78 deaths per 1000. The US is a big country, so I think it's a mistake to look at the whole country's infection curve rather than regional infection curves. Some areas have not yet been hit hard by the virus because their region was not hit first. Hopefully with adequate public health measures their curves will never match NYC or adjacent regions.
It's also worth noting that the death curve probably has a 2-3 week lag behind the infection curve. At a 2 week doubling rate, even if you miraculously came out with a vaccine tomorrow and immunized the whole population you would still have yet to experience half of all deaths from the disease.
The fact is that the world is too complicated to figure out via facts and logical analysis, and that’s why ultimate control of policy rests with elected politicians. We’re seeing this play out at a grand scale right now. In the US, classes are cancelled for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis doesn’t tell you what are the appropriate trade offs between keeping the economy running and keeping people safe. What the purposes of the welfare state should be isn’t a fact waiting to be discovered through empirical methods. These are all political judgments. Even where facts and logical analysis could play a role, it often doesn’t, because experts don’t agree on often very simple facts, or the experts’ answers are too complicated to be actionable.