Liberty is a constraint

If you take the basic system model components -- stocks, flows, feedbacks, and constraints -- liberty is a constraint.  There are these things, and these things must not be done.

One consequence is that the mammonite position -- money is a feedback, so everything can be done with feedback, and no other social organization can be tolerated, never mind accepted as required -- functions to remove constraints.

This is more basic than the slaver desire for free labour; it's a philosophical axiom.

So one consequence is that the concern for erosion of liberties in a time of pandemic is not inappropriate as a concern, but it (like many other problems) reduces to "can't let mammonite axioms into public life".  It's not a question of will or enforcement or intent, really; a world defined by money destroys all constraints, including the "these things must not be done" ones.

Misuse of money

Rhetorically and generally, money is regarded as a rationing system for value.

(value is the ratio between benefit and cost.)

As this rationing system for value -- having a finite amount of money compels you to decide your preferences as a means of spending yourself into the position which best approximates those preferences, given the amount of money which you have, and thus theoretically providing everyone with the closest approximation of their desires possible -- money is defined as a means of exchange and store of value, and if you're lucky the definition will point out that the value arises from the exchange and the exchange is possible because of the value.  Exchange and store of value are not separate properties, the exchange creates the value and the value enables the exchange, you can't pry these two things apart and still have money.

Once you've got money -- your culture has produced the minimum requirements of a sovereign state and sufficiently general organization to sustain the systemic mechanisms necessary to money, including but not limited to compelling sufficiently accurate bookkeeping that the haves don't regularly rob each other -- you find out that value is temporally distributed; you've got fast (I need to buy lunch), medium (I need to buy a house), and slow (I need to buy a transportation infrastructure) and wind up with systemic support for the temporal distribution.  That's everything from credit (I can use my medium asset (a house) as the basis for credit that lets me spend on a fast need (lunch)) to bonds (can't pay for the transportation infrastructure out of immediate income, so I need a mechanism everyone recognizes as able to accumulate sufficient money to match the value) to heritable land tenure (there's a great deal of selection pressure attached to conserving slow assets).

Then you get an emergent property; the slower the money is, the more resilient it is.  (Lunch is ephemeral; houses are generational, with maintenance; the transportation system is an eternal necessity whether we're talking about moving flint around on donkeys or standard containers via an integrated global shipping network.)  That turns into selection pressure to move effort -- the daily production of benefit through work that creates the possibility of value -- into slower time.  It starts to serve the abstraction.

Which is in principle fine; you get a society and civilization that way, the basic tradeoff between immediate direct reward and eventual indirect reward that defines civilization.

Except that the slow stuff has preferences; it wants things to be predictable over long spans of time.  It really doesn't believe in the possibility of surprise.  (Think about how a canal owner felt about railroads.  If you believed in surprise, you wouldn't try to create slow money assets.)  It's a system and associated institutions; it gets predictable by controlling access to slower money.  (Which it can do because it is the slower money.)

So if you want to go from fast to medium, you need a credit rating.  You get a credit rating by doing certain things, mostly (in Anglo NorAm) by buying a car and a house and carrying debt.  Once you're carrying debt, your behaviour is fairly sharply constrained; you have to keep your job.  You then have to devote a lot of your time to commuting, and thus to buying fuel.   You get additional parasite layers -- the Home Owner's Association, there to make the credit rating seem trivial -- but the core point is that the slower money gets to say how you can slow your faster money down.

The thing that has emerged in the last forty years is the outright setting of prices; Amazon's core business model is to be the thing that sets prices, for example.  The profitability of pharma companies derives from using the patent system to set prices; if you want to live, you have to find at least this much money.  (Noting that the patent system is being gamed is missing the point; the point is that the enforcement arm of civilization, the state monopoly on force, has been co-opted to enforce profits for the folks holding slow money.  And to transfer slow assets to well-connected individuals.)

So what you get in late capitalism is a situation where money is used not to ration value (something it as a mechanism actually does do pretty well) but to ration agency.  "You can only make these choices" (if you want to participate in the economy, if you want any  nice stuff, if you want any vague semblance of personal material security...).

Of course someone invents a religion to explain why this is just and good; if people think they're being enriched, they'll come up with a set of morals to explain why god wants this to happen.  And the folks getting access to the inflated supply of slow money are absolutely certain they're being enriched.  (If you're a billionaire, pretty much all the necessities of life are functionally free.  You lose your sense of value pretty comprehensively on the available examples.)

Put this against a time of pandemic, and you get the uncomfortable realization that the system as enacted -- the thing that exists to constrain agency to guarantee that the fast money turns into slow money under its control to the greatest possible extent -- simply hasn't got any way to not kill people.  It can't want that; it has no mechanism to observe value, because it broke the utility of money.

Which (I think) renders the political choices before us simple, stark, and urgent.

Herd immunity

"Herd immunity" is the level of individual immune response such that, as a sufficient proportion of and sufficiently distributed across a population, a specific pathogen can't spread in that population.

It's usually used about vaccines.

So there are three parts here:

1. individual immunity; there's enough immune response this person won't get sick
2. there are enough individuals as a proportion of the population to allow for herd immunity
3. those individuals are evenly distributed throughout the population

With COVID-19, we run smack into the limits of our ignorance.

For item 1, the question is "Can you become lastingly immune to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19?"

Nobody knows; the virus has existed for about six months.  There really isn't any reliable way to tell except wait and see who gets it again, when.  The painstaking work to determine what an immune condition looks like hasn't been done in large part because there hasn't been time, but the component of time in the human immune system's natural responses can't be reduced.  There are a great many unanswered questions about this; research is ongoing, and consensus hasn't emerged yet.

For item 2, you figure out how many people need to be immune as a proportion of the population with the formula 1 - 1/R₀ and we don't confidently know what R₀ is  for this disease.  We're reasonably confident it's more infectious than the flu, which has an R₀ of about 2 and requires a population where 50% of people are individually immune to have herd immunity.

Since there's no vaccine, that's talking about recovered survivors.  There isn't anywhere that has had as many as 10% of the population contract COVID-19.  That isn't enough, and can't possibly be enough.  Anybody talking about herd immunity as a means to re-open the economy is either totally unclear on the concept or necessarily talking about making sure absolutely everyone gets infected with COVID-19, with the concomitant health-care system collapse and excess deaths in excess of 2% of the population.

(Most people actively trying to kill 2% of the population would expect to be arrested, but apparently it's OK if you're a capitalist.)

For item 3, it does no good if all the cities contain people who are immune and all the hinterlands contain people who are not immune; you might meet your population percentage for herd immunity that way, but as soon as the disease gets into a region where people aren't sufficiently immune, off it goes.  So again, anybody talking about herd immunity is either unclear on the concept or asserting that they want absolutely everyone to be infected.

Well... why not pay the one-time cost and get it over with?   That's awful, but it might be the least awful option out of a selection of dire consequences?

Go look at item 1 again.  We don't know herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is possible in principle.  (While we certainly do know COVID-19 kills people.)  There are lots of diseases where you just don't get herd immunity because you don't get lasting individual immunity.  (All those common-cold coronaviruses, for example.)  (Yes, this means we don't know for sure a useful vaccine is possible.)

Terminology is an agenda

So the written Chinese 猫头鹰 literally translates to "cat-headed eagle" and sensically translates to "owl".  (If you are a French speaker, "hibou" rather than "chouette".)  German "Kriegsmarine" literally translates as "war fleet" but sensically as "navy". There are arbitrarily many examples.

Which term people pick means something about their intent.

"Wet market",  湿市场, is a term to distinguish a traditional market with fresh produce from a supermarket. Up until supermarkets became regionally popular, the term would just have been "market" or "public market".  Since we've known with some confidence for a while now that the important mutation that created  SARS-CoV-2 happened in a human -- this is not direct zoonotic transmission -- the focus on misrepresenting wet markets as responsible for the current pandemic reveals layers of agenda.

First off, blame someone else.  A pandemic was identified as inevitable a long time ago; certainly there was no possibility of not knowing that after SARS in 2003.  Failure to be ready today is just that, failure.  Responsible government requires owning up to the failure.

Second off, yes, novel zoonotic diseases are a problem, but it's a problem because humans are over their carrying capacity, on the one hand, and making that worse, on the other, by using an open-loop resource extraction economy.  Trying to stuff all of that big systemic problem into "look at the appalling foreign practice!" isn't what could be described as helping.

Thirdly, blame isn't presently useful.  Co-operation is.  Minimum standards of data-openness are a reasonable thing to ask prior to co-operation.  Admissions of guilt absolutely not.

Pay attention to the agenda.

In advance of the data

So there have been a couple possible revisions to R₀  for COVID-19 (it could be almost six), and various people talking about "not until a vaccine", and other people going on about how the lethality rate is less, and so on.

The short answer is that, as yet, we don't know a whole lot.  We certainly don't know any of those things with confidence.

The reason R₀ matters is that the degree of immunity you need in the population to extirpate the disease is greater the greater the value for R₀ (or, really, R-effective); the formula is 1 - 1/R₀, so if R₀ is 2 (the flu), you get a lot of benefit from 50% immunity.  If R₀ is 12 (low end of measles estimates), it's  92%.  If we're looking at a COVID-19 R₀ of 6 (ish), that means, absent other efforts to reduce the effective value, you need 83% of the population to be immune.

Only... we don't know any of that.  Everything we've got so far is a rough estimate.

To know R₀ with confidence, you have to antibody test the whole population.  (with the antibody test we have not yet got!) You have to go back and test the tissue samples that weren't kept from folks who died of pneumonia in March. You have to do a lot of work there simply hasn't been time to do.  (We do not, for example, know how much immune response amounts to functional immunity, or how long it lasts.  We can't know that; it takes time to find that out.)  Once you know R₀ with confidence, you know how effective the vaccine has to be; if R₀ is as  high as the folks thinking there's been an enormous number of asymptomatic cases implicitly think it is, any vaccine has to be nearly perfect to be effective.  ("can we create a vaccine at all?" doesn't have an empirical answer yet, either.)

Then you have to look at a few things other than "got well"; what happens when you catch it again?  Is the immune system panic reaction worse?  Has your immune function been generally compromised, as it will be with the flu or measles?   Do mild cases confer immunity? Do any cases confer immunity?

If you want to plan, you need to be able to answer all of those questions.  Nobody can answer those questions today; a lot of work needs to be done first.

So, really; isolate enough, and long enough, that the rate at which people are dying is decreasing.   We can measure that.  Make sure there's enough testing to tell what the rate of people dying really is, that the measure we're taking is accurate.  Support efforts to get enough information to plan.  Don't go trying to plan when we don't know anything.

If you have to plan -- if you just can't cope with not planning -- the only thing to plan for right now is the Uncommon Cold; in an environment with no transmission barriers, you get it every year, there's no vaccine, there's no direct treatment, and it's got at least a one percent chance of killing you every time you catch it.

The transmissions barriers are not only important, they're long term.  Minimum time to a vaccine is something like a year.  (There's no way to test a vaccine that doesn't involve waiting to see what happens over time to the immune response of the test subjects.)  Probable time is much more like "at least two years".  This just isn't a short term problem.  Getting through it absolutely involves making large changes to social structures and institutions.