Having a long-term sustainable strategy that allows society to keep functioning with relative normality, while controlling the rate of spread.
I made this graph for you. It plots percent gdp change in the second quarter* vs deaths per million population, thus quantifying the economic harm vs. public health tradeoff. Country labels are to the left of the datapoint. The one at the very bottom left is Taiwan.
The topology of this graph makes a few things obvious. First of all notice the yawning gulf between countries on the left and countries on the right. Since you shied away from this term and it's up for grabs, I will call these successful and unsuccessful countries, respectfully. Successful meaning "successful at managing a public health crisis caused by a lethal pandemic."
Second, unsuccessful countries employed a variety of different strategies and endured a variety of economic impacts, none of which were correlated. The UK completely fucked up its lockdown and had deaths comparable to Brazil, which had no lockdown. The same thing happened in the US. Sweden has its hands off policy and suffered a health and economic crisis similar to Italy, which had a lockdown and was the epicenter of the European pandemic. To your credit: 1) not trying any lockdown at all does keep the economic damage lower (as expected) and 2) it's better to not have a lockdown than to pretend to do one and fail in an epic way.
Third, let us look to the left. With the exception of Japan which is heavily dependent on western imports, countries with successful public health policies had way more manageable economic shocks. A successful coronavirus policy is far and away the best economic policy. That doesn't mean lockdowns. I'm not an expert but I know South Korean life has really been business as usual except for the occasional nightclub having to get shut down. China had a now infamous lockdown in Wuhan but it lifted restrictions in other provinces quite quickly. I think Japan never really locked down or took it to heart. There were a variety of responses but in every one of these countries trust in the government was high, masks are ubiquitous, and a smart testing policy was put in place to enable precision interventions. Every country on the left has a "sustainable" policy.
Sweden is a failure. Writing an op ed in the guardian saying "maybe it's time to learn to live with the virus" is equivalent to the author saying he wants to give up. That's it. Looking at these two types of countries, successes and failures, and listening to the discourse in the countries on the right, makes me feel like an insane person. A different future was possible.
EDIT: I think to be totally fair I should have included Q1 contractions as well but different countries had outbreaks at different times and it was always going to be apples to oranges in some sense.
*Except China, which had the greatest change in the first quarter
Probably because they are two different situations. Inb4 some people report me for console warring and refusing to understand what the problem is, let me explain:
The PlayStation platform is a more privileged platform. It has the best third-party support even if the games don't sell well on it. By that, I mean the tons of niche Japanese games that are going in decline after the loss of handheld platforms. Also stuff like the Doraemon port or Yokai Watch 4 port had abysmal sales on the PS4. Yet, this will never stop companies from supporting it even if they lose money on it. PlayStation fans truly have it good.
So what's the problem? The problem is that Sony moneyhats exclusives DESPITE being this privileged. They already had such a strong platform. Many Japanese third-parties REFUSE to support Xbox (for obvious reasons) and Switch (despite being market leader in Japan) already. Even so, Sony still wants to completely shut down competition by buying more exclusives. That in itself is anti-competitive. Do you understand?
Nintendo platforms, on the other hand, don't have such luxury support. Nintendo can have the strongest platform, and third parties would skip it (see Gamecube vs PS2). Nintendo can have the best selling platform, and third parties would skip it. Hence, when Nintendo goes out of their way to moneyhat exclusives, it is of a competitive nature. They're getting games they might otherwise not get OR to make up for games skipping out on the platform. This balances the market and makes it healthier.
The problem with all the PlayStation fans being upset here is that you guys don't accept that the context are different. From your point of view, it's hypocrisy, but is it? Is it truly console warring and devoid of reasoning? The easiest way to evaluate this is to substitute the context into another similar situation. Let's compare the a rich guy who has everything to a working class citizen. The two are both hoarding goods, but they do it under different circumstances. The rich guy already has enough resources, but they simply want to buy more to keep others from having it. The working class citizen isn't as privileged and is hoarding goods to save up for bad times. Who would you support more? Is it not obvious?
You can say that both Nintendo and Sony are bad, but one's definitely worse. It's not console warring to point out that one platform is clearly more privileged and has more support. The less privileged platform will have compete using the same practice since the dominant one is being extremely aggressive. It is therefore, unreasonable to accuse both of being equally bad when one is doing it to compete and the other is doing it to prevent competition. I don't understand how that is so hard to get. You can say that this is shitty, but you must accept that it's a consequence of Sony's actions. You must, also, cannot deny that it is logically wrong to condemn Nintendo of being more ethically wrong than Sony when the latter is the main driving force and the one with the most privilege on the market. This is a reality you can't deny and calling it console warring because you guys can't dispute this is stupid. It just means you don't want to engage in a discussion where you might be wrong so you just want to shut it down using authority.
tl;dr I can already predict some will dismiss this as some copypasta and satire because they can't and don't want to address the valid points that have been brought up. It's easier to invalidate than engage after all. Be upset about the news if you want, but if someone wants to tell you that your anger is misdirected and the ethical problems you guys brought up are misplaced, then they have all the rights to do so. Just because you're upset doesn't mean anyone who denies your justification for feeling that way are wrong/bad/or console warring. Accept that. An undersupported platform getting exclusives > the most supported platform getting exclusives. I'll say it how many times you need to hear it. The latter is more unnecessary than the former. If the former is being more widely accepted, then there is a reason for that. You try to understand things by analyzing the norms and values that created such a different standard for the two platforms in the first place. Dismissing is NOT understanding.
