It seems like in a situation like this authoritarianism is a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, you get fed deceptive information by your local officials, but on the other hand, you have the power to enforce city-scale quarantines rather effectively.
It's not immediately clear to me which of these is actually more important, but it doesn't seem quite as simple as this article is portraying it to be.
> you get fed deceptive information by your local officials
> you have the power to enforce city-scale quarantines rather effectively.
These two things cannot possibly both be true, which is why people are skeptical that authoritarian regimes are good at this kind of thing. If you can't trust what your officials are telling you, you can't organize and maintain a quarantine, an effort that requires detailed coordination to keep the quarantined area well-supplied enough to avoid most escape attempts.
This is not to say that democracies are "good" at it, just that the idea that authoritarian regimes can actually control their people any more than democracies can is mostly a fantasy.
> If you can't trust what your officials are telling you, you can't organize and maintain a quarantine, an effort that requires detailed coordination to keep the quarantined area well-supplied enough to avoid most escape attempts.
That's part of what contributed to various failures explored (I do not know how accurately) by the HBO Chernobyl series. Punish truth and reward lies, and you're bound to end up with fragile systems that can't be efficiently fixed or otherwise addressed when they fall apart, in part because information can't be trusted.
[EDIT] notably it also explores the benefits of authoritarianism: when The System finally decides people who can fix the problem should have what they need to fix it, by god, they'll get it.
Why should a democracy not be able the enforce a city-scale quarantine effectively?
Italy did it on a smaller scale in no time yesterday.
I do not see why this should not work for example for Milano too.
I'm unsure how this would work in the US though. Everyone being on at-will employment, if you're sick you still have to go to work and spread the disease, otherwise your employer can fire you.
Most software adjacent employers maybe. Service industry would rather have you sneezing into customer's food (as long as the health inspector isn't currently there) than have to reconfigure the schedule.
In California people are guaranteed 3 days. That’s not much when dealing with a flu-like illness. Additionally, it gives employers the right to cap the number accrued to 6 days.
My employer resets sick days to 0 at the beginning of the year, and you have to accrue them over time. I was sick very early in January and they were unhappy about it.
One problem is getting anyone to accept beds for quarantined patients anywhere near them. A plan to use an existing, mostly unused facility in the middle of a golf course is being opposed by some residents of Costa Mesa.
> Why should a democracy not be able the enforce a city-scale quarantine effectively?
Because decision making here is less centralized. People have rights, and they will agitate about them. It's not clear where the governmental authority to quarantine an entire city would come from in say, the US. It might be constitutionally challenged, people would get mad and sue. None of that happens in China.
According to Wikipedia the authority comes from H.R. 5122 signed into law by G.W. Bush in 2006, which “gave the president the power to declare martial law and to take command of the National Guard units of each state without the consent of state governors.”
Also, Why should not officials in a democracy be unable to feed deceptive information to their superiors? There was a case in India, where the govt knew there were cases of Zica, but it suppressed the reports[1]
Milan has a metropolitan population of 7.2 million, not far behind Chicago and well ahead of Austin.
Enforcing quarantine in New York would be very difficult, not least because it's in the middle of a continuous urban agglomeration between DC and Boston with no hard boundaries.
Ban all traffic across the George Washington, Bayonne, Goethals, Outerbridge, Lincoln, and Holland tunnels, as well as cutting off the Hudson River rail tunnels. Next, set up checkpoints on all roads accessing or crossing I-287. Ban all ferries to or from Manhattan and Long Island. Shutdown LGA and JFK.
You now have a quarantine zone separating New York City, Long Island, and some of the nearby cities in New York from the rest of the country. The Hudson River provides a pretty decent barrier to travel along the NEC. The Delaware, Potomac, and Susquehanna also provides some barriers, but enforcing quarantine barriers to inland travel is much more difficult (unless you're cutting off the Delmarva entirely).
This is pretty much a useless quarantine given what we know about COVID-19. Millions of people in Northern New Jersey and north of 287 travel into the center of New York every day, so there's no way you would catch everyone exposed in Manhattan that way given COVID-19's 14-day incubation (and some think it's even longer). The northern and western segments of the metropolitan area would be far harder to secure.
It's not immediately clear to me which of these is actually more important, but it doesn't seem quite as simple as this article is portraying it to be.