guys.

listen.

the transmission of disease is a well studied topic. this is not a new field. and, the reality is that the experiments have already been done and that it's very well understood that this "east asian model" doesn't work, except maybe to slow statistics about the onset of the disease (perception, rather than reality), at the expense of a steeper curve in the end.

we could look at empirical studies, and i'll leave it up to you to look it up. i'm a logician, remember. i'm happy to present an argument. why doesn't this work?

because you just end up fucking scaring people. the context that these policies are generally employed within are authoritarian states, where if you end up in a cell, you're probably never getting out. if you think the cops in north america are scary, imagine getting arrested in a country like iran....

so, when you set up these checkpoints with armed guards with thermometers, people go out of their way to avoid them, thereby making it more difficult to control the spread of the virus.

the initial numbers look promising. "look", observers will say "we have found and isolated the cases and neutralized the problem". but, it only appears that way because the actual carriers are avoiding the checkpoints like the plague.

what the literature actually states will happen if you employ this model is that you'll get a steep curve in the end, once the effects of evasion have made themselves known. and, that is what we are seeing right now in countries like singapore and taiwan - as well, increasingly, in south korea.

i know that there were some media reports early that pointed to these countries as models, and that these reports were spread widely on social media. this spread of information over social media has consequently constructed a narrative about an east asian model, and the need to surrender individual civil rights for the benefit of collective security.

but, these reports were written in ways that are starkly ignorant of the literature on the topic, and everything that we know about how diseases transmit.

we want to be able to track disease, that is true. that means that we want people to come to the checkpoints, rather than avoid them. and that means we want to avoid scaring them, by doing things like publishing their credit card history on social media, or putting them under forced lockdown for days or weeks.