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Bad model I'd argue, ignores agency of public officials.
Consider parallel: "terrorist attacks are random and happen at a certain rate. If a huge terrorist attack happens and the state seizes enormous powers, then starts warning about another looming terrorist attack right as they attempt to justify invading another country/win re-election, the dice roll probably just came up 20 again by coincidence."
Pandemics are now "in the tool kit" the same way the "terrorism alert level" warnings at every bus station were in 2003. And deliberate release/false-flags aside, "are we in a pandemic/at risk of terrorist attack" is itself a political decision: see the difference between choosing "we must fight monkeypox stigma and not let it change our behavior" vs "we must close the bathhouses for two weeks (forever) to slow the spread"
Wouldn’t they also have to consider public compliance? After 2020, I don’t think a lockdown is going to be allowed to happen. You won’t get anyone to abide the lockdowns even if it’s Cordysepts of zombie apocalypse fame and mobilized the entire US military to enforce it. It would be resisted and probably violently so. The government would have to be insane to try it.
Depends if it's a situation as unfamiliar as the first one, where medical establishments and governments were truly panicking. That fear is transmissible and I don't think there'd be that much resistance. If it's what looks like a repeat of Covid though, and there is less of a sense of the unknown, I do think people would likely resist.
Even at an unknown, the known negatives of lockdown are known — and the end dates given by the authorities are known to be suspect. If some government officials told you to lockdown for “two weeks” given what happened in 2020, very few people are going to believe that the lockdown is actually going to end within 6 months. They also know that they won’t get much in the way of support when the lockdown forces people into unemployment and to close businesses, or schools or forbidding social gatherings. And given that, and given the knock on effects of inflation and shortages, it’s going to be very very difficult to convince people to go along. Covid wasn’t exactly a nothing burger but it also wasn’t something that justified the extreme measures taken to slow the spread.
I think that when the situation becomes scary, everything changes. Another covid-style pandemic wouldn't do it, until and unless hospitals became overrun on a whole new level. If it was something much more horrific, I reckon you'd be surprised how quickly people's current bravado would disappear.
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You don't have to convince people to go along. Just send cops to close down the businesses.
Logistics would be a nightmare as you’d need cops on every corner to prevent defiance. Even at that, I’m not sure if it’s possible. There are enough hotheads with guns in America that if Americans decided to actually resist an order, you’d have to either back down or bomb cities like Gaza to do it. I’m not sure if even with the police and NG you’d have enough people to pacify 300 million Americans who want nothing to do with a lockdown. At the very least, it would take a lot of effort.
You don't need cops on every corner. They just patrol and shut down the businesses and chase people out of parks and such (just like they did during COVID). Hotheads with guns are irrelevant, there won't be enough of them and you can just have the cops shoot each of them with a rifle.
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No, people would fall right in line just like during COVID, and any that didn't would be forced in line by government force, just like during COVID. There might be some violent resistance in Red areas until some high-profile loudly-praised shootings of the resisters.
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