sigh
I believe that continuing to use language to the effect that, “the pandemic caused ” is hampering our ability to effectively evaluate the decisions of individuals and nations by redirecting blame away from the causative decisions and incorrectly blaming it on the virus.
And to make that point, you compared the deaths of previous pandemics to the current one. I’m saying that it’s comparing apples to oranges because you were comparing a pandemic without lockdowns to a pandemic with lockdowns. And also, this pandemic isn’t over yet.
So since none of us actually believes that the virus is laying people off with an evil grin, nor acting as bouncer at the doors of restaurants, nor nailing the household exits shut, and are therefore evaluating things in exactly the manner in which you appear to desire, we can ignore this sidetrack and carry on with the discussion as before?
Here, I’ll make it clear:
If I say coronavirus is causing people to stay home in large numbers, I really mean that the fear of the effects of catching the virus is causing people to stay home in large numbers. (wordy as fuck, but sure, go with it)
Does that work and can we move forward now?
That’s not what we were talking about, at least not initially. We were talking about government interventions. Things like closures of non-essential businesses, curfews, movement restrictions, and stay-at-home orders.
Clearly there will always be natural adjustments, as you point out, within economic and social systems, even to include incremental political ones if you want to look at it that way. That is patently obvious to all. And it’s not what we’re talking about.
I thought a claim was made that global lockdowns were part of the “standard playbook” of dealing pandemics (since clarified to be a misunderstanding). I presented the fact that global lockdowns were not part of the playbook of 1968 and 1957.
Fair enough.
How many of those deaths are preventable? My father-in-law died at over 100 - not much anyone could have done about that. On the other hand, we have been quite active in reducing preventable deaths from lung cancer and car accidents through government and private action. Both of these had economic costs also, and when seat belts were new people objected to seat belt laws due to freedom concerns. And they mostly only affected the person making the choice, unlike mask laws.
Just today in the Times there was an article about how Iowa businesses are still hurting despite not much of a lockdown or mask restrictions. Most people aren’t stupid, and are not about to put themselves at risk for a restaurant meal.
So you’re asking how many students (or students that live in the dorms?) come into contact with people outside the city of Madison? I’d say it’s ‘a lot’.
Sure, we were together, but it’s not like we just drove around and drove back to the dorms. We’d go to restaurants and bars and stores and the mall and movies.
Off the top of my head, two weeks, give or take a few days depending on various circumstances, but I don’t know what that has to do with anything.
In two weeks of being contagious, you can certainly do a lot of things, especially if you’re pre-/non- symptomatic and feel fine.
Serious question…have you ever lived on a college campus? We had more than enough to do all those things and still leave the campus on a very regular basis as well as go home on the weekends. Besides, it’s not like leaving the campus was some big deal. You just got in your car and drove away, no different than walking out of your apartment, getting into your car and driving away.
Also, about half the people had jobs (off campus).
So if there was a salmonella outbreak in some food item, if someone said that salmonella caused there to be shortages of that food item, they’d be incorrect. You’d want people to say that salmonella only caused a few deaths. The rest of the actions were caused by other people’s reactions to the salmonella deaths.
While that’s true, the only reason to point it out is to imply that either people are being needlessly cautious about their risk of salmonella (to belittle them?) or to point out a technicality that has no meaning? Or maybe something else I’m not seeing?
I’m still not seeing the distinction you’re making and why you’re making it. But I’m curious why you’re continuing to make it.
You still haven’t answered my question. I don’t understand what you are trying to say here. Precautionary principle? Those days are long gone? What are you trying to say? The message is lost in the words.
Are you saying that when it first came out, we could have responded one way and that would make sense, but it doesn’t make sense to respond that way now? Which response?
My understanding is that asymptomatic or presymptomatic people are thought to be infectious for about five days, for the most part. If you don’t know what that has to do with anything, then I don’t know what to tell you. Clearly it would be a much, much different situation (in regard to not just college campuses, that’s for sure) if it it were two weeks.
I’d look at it more along the lines of the government, in that case, indefinitely shutting down stores that sold that food item, quarantining everyone who had shopped there in the last month, and installing a statewide curfew for good measure.
So in my prior career, one element was investigating failures of systems to determine what caused them and how to prevent future failures. We differentiated between the proximate cause, which is the specific trigger for a specific effect, and the root cause, the event responsible for setting the whole process in motion.
The pandemic is the root cause. Our differing responses to the the pandemic have different effects. Each action is a proximate cause.
We can talk about the pandemic causing all the deaths and disruptions and still talk about how mask wearing has a different effect on the results than not mask wearing, or shutting down and having everyone stay isolated has different effects than staying open and trying to maintain business as usual. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive.
In this way, everything after the pandemic is a response to the pandemic. Shutting down international travel? Caused by the existence of the pandemic, also caused by the government choosing to attempt a control on transmission. Filling ICU beds and trying to distribute ventilators and PPE? Response to the pandemic, but also choices made in what to do and how to do it. Letting bodies pile up in the streets while ignoring the sick so we can “keep the economy going”? That would be a reaction to the pandemic, caused by the pandemic but also by the choices of how to react to the pandemic.
Okay, you finally made a clear statement of your point.
So where is saying “the pandemic caused” hampering our ability to evaluate the use of mask wearing to reduce transmission? Where is saying “the pandemic caused” hampering our ability to evaluate the role the US federal government failed to provide in coordinating scarce PPE between the states? Where is it hampering our ability to understand that millions of people were put out of work because businesses were forced to stay closed and people were directed to stay home? Where is it interfering with our ability to understand that those people need financial help, in a bigly way? Or that the businesses themselves will fail if forced to remain closed or reduced operations for too long, with “too long” being a rolling variable?
Please explain how saying “the pandemic caused” is hampering our ability to effectively evaluate the decisions of individuals and nations, because I’m not seeing it.
You do realize that it has been 52 and 63 years respectively between those pandemics and this one? Perhaps maybe the “standard playbook” was written after those occurred? Or has at least been updated in the past 5+ decades?
???
The only reason that your response looks disproportionate is because it doesn’t match the scale of the harm. But if going to that grocery store caused hundreds or thousands of deaths or in the case of covid, hundreds of thousands of deaths, that might be a reasonable response.
But my reply didn’t even have a government response in it, and neither did tofor’s. tofor was talking about individual and collective action of the citizens. The government was not involved in most of the examples.
If working to prevent deaths from lung cancer and road accidents, or anything else along those lines, involves similar restrictions that have the effect of taking away people’s livelihoods, I’d like to learn about it and take it into consideration. I’m imagining it’s not nearly the same kind of thing.
If it’s genuinely fear of the virus that would be keeping people out of restaurants (what if it’s at least partly something else, like people looking more to save money by eating at home?), then in the absence of government restrictions this is something the economic system will work out more or less on its own, and in that way it would be no different, in principle, than at any other time. Failing businesses would have to find a way to adapt, and win over customers in a different way, or find some other enterprise. Maybe the restaurants can innovate and win back consumer confidence. Maybe they can expand their catering operations. I have no idea. But I know that giving them the chance to figure that out on their own is far different than telling them when, and how, they can and cannot operate.
And then, of course, you also have to consider the cumulative effects of these kinds of interventions. Maybe, for example, we decide as a society that it’s in our best interest to kill certain industries. Maybe we finally say that no, folks don’t have a right to smoke cigarettes, and we make those illegal in our state or country. That would of course put a lot of people out of work, but hey, no one said economic survival is an easy game. Maybe we do feel generous, though, and we feel like retraining all those agricultural workers, to help them replace the jobs we’re taking away. Well, it would help if several other industries weren’t collapsing at around the same time, with all the attendant costs of those to bear as well. Maybe spacing out the other closing of industries would be a good idea.
This only begins to scratch the surface of it. God only knows what the effects will be on the arts, with theaters and concert venues and the like closed for perhaps the better part of two years, as may be the case with Broadway. Maybe we can’t just flip a switch and get those back. Maybe some of those effects last for a generation. I don’t know. And I guess not too many other people do, either. And that’s really the whole point.
The problem is that if you don’t restrict their operations, probably a majority will choose the health of their business over the health of their customers. We see this all the time- it’s the same exact attitude that all those big evil corporations have when it comes to their businesses, but is somehow different when it’s a local bar owner now.
Let’s face it- the public as an aggregate group is ignorant, fearful, selfish and has poor risk assessment skills. So the government has to take that into account when they make laws and regulations, and when they enforce them.
Nobody WANTS to deprive anyone of their livelihood. But ultimately, in my opinion, nobody’s livelihood is worth anyone else’s life, no matter how old, infirm or stupid they might be. That’s what this all boils down to- what level of deaths is acceptable versus economic damage. Some clearly think zero deaths is the threshold, and others (Dan Patrick, the Texas Lieutenant Governor) think that old people should be willing to self-sacrifice in order to keep the economy healthy for younger people. As it stands, COVID deaths in the US are expected to surpass the total number of WWII deaths by Christmas. That’s right- we’ll have suffered more deaths than our second most bloody war in 9 months, while it took the war about 3 and a half years to get to that number. Let’s not act like this is some statistical anomaly in terms of the number of deaths we’re seeing here.
People will adapt and do fine without Broadway. They’ll adapt to other restrictions. We as a species are nothing if not adaptable. It may not be comfortable, but so what? This is still light years better than a pandemic could be- it could have been something more lethal or more transmissible.
We’re already on track for COVID to be worse than the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic- back then, they had 1/3 of the population infected and 675,000 deaths. We’re at something like 3% infected, and already have well upwards of 200,000 deaths. What happens when we multiply that by 11? THAT is why people are arguing that we should not loosen up more, or perhaps tighten up some pre-emptively. Otherwise we’re going to get locked down again as hard or harder than last time.
and I wish I lived in a society like that. I am really fucking frustrated, because I am asthmatic and lost a family member early on from COVID. So I am being super careful. I have not set foot in a grocery store or any other building than my own home since March (except for two medical appointments that couldn’t be handled via telemedicine, one of which was to get my flu shot because it seemed safer to go to my doctor’s office for a few minutes than to sit in a random pharmacy for Lord knows how long). Groceries are obtained via delivery, curbside pickup, or growing them in my backyard. I have only seen my own mother outdoors, masked, and from 6+ feet away. The riskiest things we have done since March are host a veggie giveaway at a local community garden, masked and outdoors, for 2 hours a week. Oh, and a couple of times we have had a friend or two in the backyard, again masked and 6’ feet away (luckily we have a couple of small tables, so once we even had a dinner with all parties 20+ feet away from each other). And I can count those occasions on one hand.
We both work remotely and have the good fortune to own a car, so we don’t need to rely on public transportation, although Tom Scud has to go to the office maybe once a month for a couple of hours to work with materials that don’t exist in electronic form. I started a new job a few weeks ago and have literally never been to the office. During quarantine, I decided to try to make a kitchen backsplash and haven’t been able to put a couple of the electrical outlets back together; at this point, it looks like we are simply going to limp along without them until there’s a vaccine, even though it’s somewhat of a safety issue, because I am fucking terrified of having anyone in our house. Thanksgiving has been cancelled.
If everyone in the country exercised a similar level of caution when possible (making allowances for people who need to use public transportation and people who do essential jobs that can’t be done remotely), and wore masks when around people not in their household, we’ be DONE by now. If people want to take small risks on occasion, like seeing a family member in a reasonably cautious way, it wouldn’t make a huge difference IF everyone exercised caution the rest of the time. But we are still on the upswing of the next wave of giant clusterfuck because people think their right to gather in large groups without masks, or drink indoors at a bar, trumps everyone else’s right to live a somewhat normal life.
I am hoping I manage not to lose my mind completely over the winter. And that my 77-year-old mom, who lives alone, and my 80-year-old father, who lost his wife of 30+ years to COVID in April, gets enough companionship from my 31-year-old brother, who has uprooted his life with his own girlfriend to be with Dad since April, don’t lose their minds either. And in many ways, my family has it far better than most people - we are middle class, and are either retired or have jobs that allow remote work.
I want to live in a society full of responsible adults. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
If you’re asking people to stop going to restaurants and bars then yes, you’re asking for too much.
I don’t think your view of society takes into consideration the need for people to socialize and how that need changes over time. People are rioting in Italy over curfews.
Well then that just tells me that they do like what it is happening, an explosion of new cases. /s
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/italy-tops-19-000-new-cases-govt-under-pressure-/2016946
Do I somehow have less need to socialize than anyone else? Hell no, and my mental health is suffering. We would not be under our current levels of restriction if everyone exercised more self-control. And now, where I live, they are having the choice taken away from them again. Which is fine with me if it leads to less time under these levels of restriction overall.