We face unavoidable conflict when society chooses to handle COVID en masse. But there are a few things I suspect we can agree upon. Points of commonality. Stuff we perhaps don’t know and would like to know. Is that not a good start?
None of this is rocket science but you can bet your ass the media (and most people) want nothing to do with it. It’s more fun to pick teams and scream. Slogans and bitching about “the other” just comes naturally to all of us.
Here are observations of the Curmudgeon:
Whether lockdowns are effective not is, at the very least, muddied. Everyone likes to pick their favorite point of view and run with it. “Lockdowns saved eleventy million lives in New York.” Did they? “The absence of lockdowns in South Dakota wasn’t a big deal.” Is that true? It seems like we’d know by now.
Here’s a real fun one. What if both are true? Yowza! Maybe a solution appropriate for subway riding New Yorkers is just plain nuts for a Montana rancher. What about diversity in the same state? Should a Manhattan stockbroker and an Appalachian dairy farmer follow the same rules because they’re in the same state?
This is a big thought from 2020:
The common ground here is that each nation and every State has tried political solutions. None have had a huge, lasting, and incontrovertible effect that can unequivocally be chosen as “right”. I think that might be a point of commonality.
COVID got to every nation. It got to every State. No quarantine held for long. Yet there’s a “quarantine” that keeps me from driving from America (which has COVID) to Canada (which also has COVID). Why? Is Canadian COVID politer? Does it speak French? Does American COVID carry guns and suck at soccer?
Florida loosened controls and COVID didn’t wipe out everyone. New York went so far as to literally crack down on “Jews in the attic”. Ironically, New York lost more people than 49 other states (including Florida). Maybe it would have been even worse in New York if the government hadn’t stepped in… or maybe it wouldn’t. Every human on earth deserves to know if lockdowns really work.
Note: I’m talking about mandatory limitations. If you want to voluntarily wear a mask or avoid crowds that’s nobody’s business but yours. I avoid crowds too. I get ya’ man!
COVID is, at the very least, well within the risk tolerance of some people; and that should be OK. Mandatory limits are debated only when risks are somewhat tolerable. If COVID just flat out killed your ass, there would be no need to promulgate regulations. COVID isn’t the black plague. That’s damn good news!
Huge risks don’t even need rules. I don’t consult state laws when I’m pondering whether to put strychnine in my coffee. I won’t stick my head in a woodchipper even if it lacks a warning label. That’s a level of risk where you don’t need the government to tell you what to do.
COVID clearly did not reach that level for everyone. That should be OK. Different points of view and personal values are a wonder of the human condition.
Alas, tolerance tends to go only one way. In 2020 risk aversion was hella cool. Nobody harasses you on the street because you’re risk averse. If you haven’t gone skydiving or entered a rodeo no Karen will rip you a new one.
It doesn’t go the other way. I went skydiving (long story) and rode a mechanical bull (super-fun!). I’ve never forced (or even recommended) anyone follow my path. Wouldn’t it be weird if I ran around shitting on people who haven’t been skydiving?
I think this is a new thing. Someone somewhere chooses a specific level of risk and we all follow; “this is the proper amount of risk and if you don’t like it, you suck”. People who accept risk are treated as lunatics. People who avoid risk get carte blanche to act like total assholes to risk takers. What’s up with that?
Put another way, if you’re shrieking at someone because they aren’t properly freaking out about COVID you’re not considering their point of view. Also, if someone is freaking out about COVID, don’t be a dipshit and and sneeze on them. Act like a goddamn civilized being.
The degree to which masks affect COVID, when worn by everyone in general environments, is uncertain. It probably helps some. How much? Nobody really knows. Spare me thought experiments about farting through fabric or conflicting pronouncement from the CDC. Plain old basic studies about masks in the general world are sparse.
Yes, Dr. Lister encouraged the wearing of masks during open heart surgery. This doesn’t necessarily scale to making folks wear a bandanna at Wal-Mart. It would be nice if someday we had better facts. I’d love to read “a sample of n-bajillion people under circumstances A, B, and C yielded a net positive result with of p<0.0001 when the bandanna was red on Tuesdays”. After a whole year, this ought to be known big time.
How many people died of COVID is unclear. We can know that; provided we wish to find out. I’m not sure we want to know. Clearly COVID killed many people. How many people is “a lot” in a population of 400,000,000? Did we reach the “a lot” threshold? Is the “a lot” mitigated by other forms of death? Is it fishy there are no flu cases? How many gunshots does it take to die of COVID?
This isn’t an unreasonable question. Yet the CDC has done a terrible job of sussing out and communicating the truth (assuming they actually know). The universal basic statistic is “how many people would have died normally and how many died given COVID exists“.
It ought to be child’s play to roughly answer that simple question.
This thing can be figured out. In general, when an American dies, someone always counts the body. How many dead people were counted in a given year is a hard umber to fake!
In 2019 a certain number of people died. In 2020 a certain number of people died. Lets find out what changed and how much. It’s fuckin’ subtraction!
I suspect 2020 deaths are higher than 2019. I’m suspicious that maybe it’s not by a lot. Possibly it’s a lot less than some people think. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to know the actual true number of corpses counted in each month of both 2019 and 2020.
We can theorize and kvetch about the actual affect of COVID but I want a “dead people count” before (2019) and “dead people count” after (2020). It should already be common knowledge.
Limitation on human lives in response to COVID are not fully evaluated. My earlier points hint at this. Did crushing our economy all year save lots of lives? Did it offset annoying the fuck out of everyone? People have different values. Is it wise to piss off every damn citizen just to save one life? How about a thousand? How about six? If North Korea has less COVID than Canada does that mean North Korea is better governed?
This is a slippery one. I place a different value on some freedoms versus others. Maybe it was wise wise to cancel a rock concert (which isn’t that hard on me) but was fuckin’ brutal to cancel my fishing trip to the Canadian wilderness! Was it worth it to cancel some kid’s graduation ceremony? What about weddings or the county fair? I submit that making choices about how other people should best live their lives is a place where angels fear to tread.
The Howard Hughes Sliding Scale. I think we all should watch out for Howard Hughes issues. Howard Hughes was a fuckin’ stud! Pilot, movie guy, gazillionare. Pretty epic dude. He got to date Betty Davis. Yum!
As he aged, he declined. His choices about germs and isolation got out of synch with others of his time. There’s a spectrum between “reclusive” and “mentally ill” and most folks thought Hughes was closer to the latter.
When does one go from “reclusive and odd” to “mentally ill”? In the late 1960’s Hughes was “nuts” because he “became hindered in normal life function”. I felt “hindered” in 2020?
I think intent and context comes into play. If I’m afraid to eat breakfast at Denny’s because the space bats will read my mind, then I’m mentally ill. If I’m unwilling to eat breakfast at Denny’s because I wish to avoid contagion, it depends on the year. In 2019 it would be “a bit flaky”. In 2020 it would be “mandated by law”. And in 2021… what? Is it “being a good citizen” or not? You can eat at Denny’s in South Dakota but not New York. Does that make you sane in SD and nuts in NY?
I wonder if Howard Hughes would be “normal” in 2020 despite being “mentally ill” in 1969. More to the point, there was a time when “shut in” was considered unhealthy and that time was just a few months ago. Now it’s (somewhat) required and that can’t be good.
Right now, we just assume the impact of isolating family units, stifling economies, and disrupting normal human social interaction is “worth it”. If there are more suicides I haven’t seen the statistics but I haven’t heard many people thinking about it either. In the short term our isolation is “free” and possibly wise. In the long term it’s unsustainable and we might be messing people up very seriously. It’s a question of merit. It’s very rarely mentioned. We might as well think about it.
How long can you be afraid (or banned) from eating at Denny’s before you’ve become Howard Hughes? How big is the gap between “afraid to” and “banned from”?
Well, that’s enough navel gazing for one day. I don’t mean to be a downer.
I suspect we can all agree that there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know. We can examine assumptions that “everyone believes” and see if there’s data to support it. At the very least we ought to measure the shit we can measure. Finally: it wouldn’t hurt to consider the costs as well as the benefits of choices.
Amen.
And that, from an atheist (but I was raised a Lutheran, if that matters).
The Real Kurt
I looked up deaths 2018, 2019 and 2020. CDC and US gov data.
2018 &2019 were 2.84M, & 2.85M
2020 (based on October data-latest I could find) was projected at 3.1M
So about 300K excess which are attributed to CV19
That is from 20M (reported) infections so CFR is about 0.015 so 1.5%
80% over 65yrsold which cohort is 16.5%of population.
For the under 65crowd the rate is significantly lower.
I’d be willing to bet we see a measurable corresponding decrease over the next two or three years.
Thanks! A few months ago I tried wading through CDC to get that info and it was buried. At the time it seemed the CDC was mostly interested in the race of who died. I also went down a rabbit hole of “whole lotta heart disease”. I had no idea!
Also, isn’t 3.1M – 2.85m = .25M? 250,000 is a tragedy for sure but where’d you get 300,000?
As with all this, every death is a loss. I’m not trying to minimize the human misery of any of this.
I found this site,
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
which seems to do a good job of explaining and presenting excess death data for a load of countries (not Australia, which is what _I_ was interested in, dammit…).
D.
We will see deaths increase over the next few years due to missed cancer treatments this year and long term fallout from the physiological toll of this year.
Part of the reason that the Karens are vocally upset and in our faces is that they perceive your risk tolerance about masks is a threat to them as they could get Covid from you. Your doing other risky activities such as riding a motorbike do not impact them, so they’re more apt to let you be.
You’d think that. A bike has no impact on a car so why would the person in the car care? But I’ve seen all sorts or weird responses to me riding a motorcycle that indicate otherwise. They are more apt to leave a motorcycle rider alone as compared to a maskless person in a mask ruled area but the tendency to hassle the biker is still there. There’s occasionally some attempt to stretch the biker’s behavior as negatively affecting the vehicle owner. “You guys without helmets are increasing my insurance rates when you die.” (*I wear a helmet but that’s one overheard.) “If a bike crashes in front of me and I run over it I’ll be mortified forever!” Things like that. An attempt to make the biker’s death an assault on or inconvenience to the person who doesn’t like bikes. Not everyone is like that but a few are.
Also, here’s a really weird one. Many times I’ve heard people say “I couldn’t have one of those, I’d be dead in a week.” I never knew what to say to that. Is that a grown adult telling me they’re so clueless and inept that they need to be protected from themselves? Are they claiming poor impulse control over the throttle? It’s strange. So I started saying “Good thing you don’t have one.” I meant it as friendly but it went over a little harsh. It freaked people out. Now I just mumble something about “good MPG on two wheels” and shuffle away.
I suspect that deep in the human psyche is a desire to make other people live (and think!) like you do. Most of us grow out of it but many don’t.
Seems to me that the stuff we don’t know is stuff we could know but it’s stuff “they” don’t want us to know.
The more I think about it, the more I have to agree the “NPC” meme is more correct than almost anyone would like to admit.
And even those who admit how correct it actually is do not fully grasp the ramifications of a majority of people in this world unable to have a “thought” that isn’t programmed by someone else.
The current situation is just the beginning of a steep slide from mediocrity to medieval, if what I see is true. The best way to describe it would be some hellish combination of Zardoz, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green and such ending up in The Postman (book not movie) and hopefully not The Road.
Good times.
The flu disappeared. Pneumonia disappeared, suicides are WAY up. It turns out, that if you pay hospitals $39,000 for patients on ventilators, they find a lot of people with the (flu) rona. They still get $13,000 if they don’t need a vent. When lame stream media was telling us the hospitals were overflowing with rona victom’s, brave folks went to said hospitals and videoed empty ER’s, empty hallways, empty rooms. The vaccine has mRNA with lipid nano particles. It’s to program you into a genetically modified organism. Terrible side effects, sterilization and more. This is all pushed by the elites to get rid of useless eaters. Agenda 21/30, the Georgia Guide Stones, LOTS of other sources, lay out their evil plans. What used to be considered insane conspiracy theory, turns out to be conspiracy fact. the truth is out there.