I really wish journalists would differentiate a «lockdown», where people are forbidden from leaving their homes (or a short radius around them) or moving around freely, and closure of businesses, which in my mind isn't a «lockdown».
[Screenshot from bbc.com/news/world-eur…]
[Screenshot from bbc.com/news/world-eur…]
(I'm not enthusiastic about closure of non-essential businesses either, but at least I think they don't reach the level of drasticness as putting tens of millions of people effectively in prison for months, which is hard to justify even to save maybe tens of thousands of lives.)
Of course, it's hard to find reliable info on what various countries have done, because apparently the only aggregate data source on stay-at-home orders is ourworldindata.org/grapher/stay-a… — which is so bad in its categories that it's essentially useless.
Maybe my terminology isn't the best, but we certainly need very clear terms to distinguish the two, and journalists should be precise, when reporting that a country decided to apply restrictions, and explain whether or not individual freedoms have been canceled.
This is particularly annoying in France because some defend the absolutely brutal and dystopian lockdowns we have by saying «other countries are doing it»: NO! VERY FEW COUNTRIES HAVE DONE THIS, especially post-June. Many countries have closed some businesses, it's not the same!
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