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People like to compare China and the west in very abstract, ideological terms, but really I think it boils down to the political feasibility of a *single* tactic: group quarantine. Everything else is pretty much legitimately available within all political systems.
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It would be interesting to apply Dictator’s Handbook lens to this and determine actual extent of power. For example India is nominally a liberal democracy, but Modi probably has tactics available to him that democratically elected leaders generally don’t.
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One of the difficult questions is: assuming there really is a “cost of democracy” holding tech-level constant, should you be personally willing to pay it? Can’t honestly answer that without normalizing for your relative safety as a function of class/wealth.
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I’m totally willing to accept a 10x-100x higher fatality rate (on a low base like 0.1- 1%) for higher civil liberties but then I’m not most at risk from poverty, crowding etc. Healthcare workers at least knowingly sign up for a risky profession.
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Hmm. Would you, in the wake of this, vote for a measure making forced group quarantine an emergency power, weakening habeas corpus in situations well short of martial law? I honestly don’t know.
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If you could be administered a medical test against your will, by people who have entered your house without a specific warrant, and taken away to quarantine, would you be okay with that? I think it’s technically feasible in the US right now only under martial law right? 🤔
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So... the case that per capita is meaningless because outbreaks are scale free. I’m not sure I buy this. You can’t just assume scale-free based on lack of correlation. A country is a logistics/travel connectivity cluster, not a meaningless fiction.
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A quick chart for those who keep asking for per-capita adjustment: Here’s population vs total death toll one week after 10th death. No relationship. As I’ve been saying, population does not affect pace of spread. All per-capita figures do is make smaller countries look worse.
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I hope I used "scale free" correctly, there. I think that's just from my own messy brain... Anyway, I don't see the contradiction. Vast majority of population has very short range interactions and long range movements largely ignore boarders. Be nice to see a connection graph.
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You're fine... others have used the phrase in that sense. It's not technically scale-free the way it's used in math I think, but more like context independent. As in, the statistics of an outbreak cluster depending only on the cluster's initial conditions and local conditions.