The Tyranny of Stringency

The character of a people and its leadership is best displayed by response to crises. A website called “Our World in Data” has measured and published the worldwide, nation by nation response to Covid. It lays out the data in the most accessible format, that of “color coding” the level of “stringency” of the government response country by country.

The chosen color used by “Our World in Data” is what I’d call a “salmon hue.” The lighter the salmon color, the less the stringency. The darker the salmon color, the greater the stringency.

The saturation of the salmon color is based on the following metrics according to “Our World in Data.”

“The stringency index is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school closures, workplace closures, and travel bans, rescaled to a value from 0 to 100 (100 = strictest). If policies vary at the subnational level, the index shows the response level of the strictest subregion.”

I will assume that the saturation will change as more information becomes known. So it would be worth checking the “Stringency Index” from time to time, if only to gauge how we are doing as a governed people, individually and collectively.

Find it here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index

I find it odd that the freest, most democratic country in the world, the United States is only ten points behind Russia in terms of stringency. Even worse, our Australian cousins are nearly thirteen percent more stringent that Russia. And Australia is in a dead heat with Austria while Germany has everyone beat at a whopping 24% more stringent than Russia or a solid 30% more stringent than the United States.

My guess is Germany doesn’t have any Ron DeSantis’s or Kristi Noem’s. They eliminated a lot of those types in the last century.

For Germany that has roughly 25% of the population of the population of the United States, it has a Covid rate that is double despite being 30% more stringent in its response. News is that by early 2022, vaccine mandates will be in place for all its citizens.

Austria will be lifting its lockdown in a few days but not for the unvaccinated. And children will have to provide PCR test results in order to move about society.

But in Australia they’ve come up with a more innovative solution; build quarantine “camps”. One such camp is Howard Springs in the Northern territory. Housed there are people returning to the country, despite their vaccination status or their testing negative. Early on, at the beginning of the pandemic, Australia would house returning citizens in hotels on their return to the country. Guess is the hotels got tired of it so they built “camps” with all that the word “camp” insinuates.

Hayley Hodgson described her internment at Howard Springs in an interview with The Federalist. Despite her testing negative for Covid, she had to stay at the camp for 14 days under threat of an even longer stay. She was not allowed outside her cabin and meals were delivered to her once a day. In the course of her stay she lost her job.

Read it here: https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/03/covid-free-woman-recounts-time-in-australian-quarantine-camp-you-feel-like-youre-in-prison-like-youve-done-something-wrong/

All this despite a .009% death rate from Covid in Australia.

Sadly, Australia does not guarantee the same level of rights to its citizens as does the United States. We believe our constitutional rights cannot be infringed despite times of national emergency. However, we have certainly witnessed restrictions such as the internment of the Japanese during World War II and our more recent travel restrictions at the beginning of Covid when State Troopers lined up at state borders to prevent cars from crossing state lines. Or the closure of churches, even the arrest of pastors during the early hysteria of Covid, clearly a Constitutional violation of the First Amendment.

The Australian courts have made it painfully clear that there is no constitutional guarantee of freedom in the midst of a pandemic. Three separate cases were brought to challenge the restrictions and all three failed with judges saying there is nothing in the Australian constitution to prevent restriction of movement. Even though the guarantee of the right to travel freely is plainly in the Australian constitution.

See how that works?

Even the great Abraham Lincoln suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus in the heat of the Civil War.

So keep an eye on the “Stringency Index.” It could make you feel better, but then again, there’s always the possibility you might feel worse.

Until it’s over, it ain’t over.