11-01-2020, 01:50 PM
(11-01-2020, 01:14 PM)akiddoc Wrote: There never was a true shut down in the USA. The effort to do so was so haphazard and the compliance was so poor that you can't say it wouldn't work. You can say that Americans are unwilling to do it.I agree that the shutdown in the USA was haphazard and the compliance was very poor. However, that was also true in Italy. What Italy was willing to do that the USA was not was to enforce compliance. That fixed the problem, and actually did so without much ado. Our politicians (Gavin Newsom being a poster child of this) simply were and are unwilling to do what was necessary. I am not actually sure Americans are unwilling to do what it took, but rather that our political leaders were unwilling to apply the pressure that it would take to make it work. We have people in the USA who test the limits, and when they discover there are none, compliance fails. You need enforcement to show you are serious. Then the vast majority will comply and the very few who don't will probably get caught.
That said, there was a "true" shutdown in the EU. And it is now not working for them. For that reason, I can't really accept the idea that a "true shutdown" in the USA would put us in a situation where "Plan A" worked. We might be slightly better off in terms of deaths, but we would be where the EU is now, with community spread and no viable options to continue with plan A.