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.