There’s a lot of criticism of the CDC’s recent lifting of recommendations involving quarantine and distancing. This includes a lot of implications, and outright stating, that the agency’s decisions are not scientifically sound and are driven by politics and money, so that wealthy employers can justify forcing employees back to work regardless of exposure danger.
This has been a theme throughout the pandemic at various levels and volumes, and I at least understand where it’s coming from. Nobody’s comfortable with placing prices on human life. It’s a very human reaction to think that the money shouldn’t matter, that governments can get it somehow, and that greed is the only thing keeping sensible restrictions in place long term. After all, you can undo poverty. You can’t undo dead or many levels of disabled.
Nobody wants to put their lives at risk so that Jeff Bezos can make some extra cash. But we are currently stuck with the capitalist society we have, and money, like it or not, does matter. So where do you think the balance should be? Where is it now? If the CDC were completely free to “follow the science,” what would they be saying now? How big a tragedy is it that they’re not, if they indeed are not?
It seems pretty clear to me that money and the economy are inextricably intertwined with public health in many ways, and thus they should and must have a place in public health decisions.
To be clear, are you talking about people, who had not been working, being forced to resume working, or are you talking about employers who are requiring current employees, who have been working remotely, to return to the office/workplace?
Don’t blame capitalism. No matter which system you have for organizing scarce resources, resources are still scarce. There aren’t enough doctors, nurses and equipment to give everyone unlimited health care. So economics and choices will always be a part of the health care debate. Somehow, some way, decisions will be made to ration health care. If the market doesn’t do it, bureaucrats will have to.
Anyone who is telling you that you will get all the healthcare you want if you vote for them is lying to you.
CDC recommendations did not have the force of law, the laws about quarantine were from the individual states.
Most states had already lifted at least the strictest quarantines anyway, hadn’t they? Mine had (California).
Conditions are not as bad as they were when the quarantines were put in place, just as they are not as good as before Covid arrived. The latter will probably never happen again. So we have to balance health risk against the continued downward economic spiral. Where would you draw that line? How much quarantine vs. how much deeper in debt for the country?
Finally, most employees, including those in risky public-exposure jobs, are still welcome to wear masks that are effective against aerosol transmission of Covid. It’s not perfect, nothing is. If I were in that position I would give serious thought to trying another line of work, if that was possible. If not, I would do my very best to protect myself and my family (and the public and my co-workers by not going to work sick).
Sorry, yes, I probably should’ve said “forced to work in inherently unsafe conditions without protection or compensation.”
Yes, but many businesses use CDC recommendations to set their own policy, so now they have an excuse to toss workers back into the virus pool so they don’t waste rent… uh, I mean, so they can exercise direct control… ah, I mean for better collaboration.
Public health is affected by money and the economy. If the government imposed strict lockdowns that crippled the economy, people would die from that. If businesses go under because of lockdowns and unemployment soared, people would die from that.
There has to be some balance. People can argue whether the CDC has found the right balance, I guess, but the CDC has to take the economic considerations into account.
In an ideal world there would be unlimited funding for all the treatments that any one could ever wish for and all public health decisions would be free of cost and also free of negative consequences in terms of their effect on our ability to keep society functioning.
We don’t have an ideal world and never will so all those decisions need somehow to be balanced with their effect on society and all those treatments need somehow to be evaluated for effectiveness and rationed accordingly
I get concerned when I hear people decouple “money and economics” from public policy decisions because it shows a stunning lack of understanding of what money and economics represent. The assumption seems to be that money and economics are simply some tools for bankers and rich CEOs to enslave others so they can get richer and if we somehow remove it from the equation, people will be free to obtain the best services possible.
In reality, economics is the study of how society makes those decisions to allocate what are ultimately finite resources. So yeah, it needs to have a place in public health decisions because it’s not just deciding about public health.
Or to put it another way. Are people ok with employees not having to work if it means you can’t buy critical items in the grocery store because there is no one to manufacture, distribute, and sell them?
OP, to use an obvious example, you could stop all car crash deaths and injuries by banning cars and trucks, but the economic impact would just be too great – you would have many more people dying from lack of food and medicine than currently die in car crashes.
So, for public health reasons, society is better with cars and trucks, even though it leads to traffic accidents and deaths, because the economic effect would be so dire.
Similarly, you could have imposed quarantines and remote work and so on in 2018, because people were dying of infectious diseases in 2018. But under 2018 conditions, that would be a bad decision.
Well, at some point, the world starts looking more like 2018 than it does like 2020. And we’re probably already past that point.
Well, I’m not sure about that. There’s still almost 500 people/day dying from it. If it stays at, say, 400, that’s 146,000 people per year, which is like two or three years of the flu, right?
I measure it in 9-11s. In February of 2020 when this pandemic was all brand new and shiny bright and the United States had yet to have its first COVID death, would you have predicted that a mere 30 months from now people would look at 15,000 deaths per month; equivalent to a 9-11 every 6 days, and go “Looks pretty good, we’re in really good shape here and can safely drop those restrictions”, and yet, here we are.
I assume they found the “restrictions” were not terribly effective. Maybe because they weren’t followed, or maybe because they don’t work so well. Either way, there’s not much harm by doing away with them.
The economy is people. It inherently has to have a place in all decisions about how we structure society, because it’s inherently always there being affected (and affecting things) one way or another.
I exactly expected this because I figured we had around 18 months of “emergency” reactions against Covid as a society. This prediction bore out very well.
I am very conscious that when asking society to do things, the shots at that are limited, not unlimited. I don’t want to see measures that are pointless enacted because I’d like to save that ammo for stuff that really matters.
As far as the deaths right now, they are highly concentrated in vulnerable groups. We’d likely be best served protecting those vulnerable groups than enacting society wide measures that are going to be seen by many as pointless.
I also don’t know that the current death counts are separating out “dying from Covid” and “dying with Covid.” The latter being people who are dying of other causes that happen to test positive for Covid at the time.
Furthermore, I have other health issues in my family that have nothing to do with Covid. I’ve seen a parent’s mental health decline, and at least one of my children has issues that mean I’m not going to be kicking the can many months or years down the road because I can’t trust that she’s going to be as healthy many months or years down the road.
Maybe those who want to go back to March 2020 can use their words and tell us exactly what they want society to be doing about Covid in August 2022.
Without taking a position on whether 15,000 deaths per month from COVID is “acceptable” or not, this illustrates why guiding the population towards large-scale public health goals is difficult if not impossible, and how our arbitrary decision making (or lack thereof) usually derives from whichever shiny thing we’re focusing on at the moment.
Like, what is the context of 15,000 dying of COVID every month? Obviously, just a few years ago, there were 0 dying of COVID every month. But is 15,000 a lot? What is the threshold of deaths/mo below which dropping “those restrictions” would feel reasonable? What additional health risks are we willing to accept as a part of ongoing maintenance precautions against COVID? What are the long term implications of an increased annual death rate as a result of COVID? Why maintain a massive cultural effort in possible perpetuity in response to COVID when there are other leading causes of death we could also minimize or eliminate with dedicate effort/resources/cultural shifts?
I don’t pretend to have a clear answer to any of the above, but what does feel clear is that
it’s all super complicated and finding solutions (to any global problem) that are effective, achievable, measurable, equitable, and that don’t make some other equally- or more-bad problems worse is the unsolved problem of the global era.
what is good for me as an individual is not always what’s best for the group.
as individuals we are inherently bad at understanding how dangerous/risky things are when we look at numbers at a large scale.
we also are bad at weighing the potential costs and benefits of long-term decisions against each other (at least in part because our understanding of the scope of those decisions is, by nature, incredibly flawed. The system is too complicated).
people tend to gain confidence about what the “right” thing to do is by narrowing the scope, consciously or unconsciously, of what they consider relevant.
As far as the OP goes, of course money and the economy has a place in public health decisions. What if we were presented with: “we can implement a COVID cure that will absolutely work, but it will mean that over the next 5 years there is a 70% chance that a middle-class American will fall irrevocably into poverty.”? Of course we talk about that and consider it when deciding whether or not to implement the cure.
This, exactly. There’s very little political or public-health willpower left to try to enact restrictions, in large part because most people have been ignoring the restrictions for the better part of a year, anyway. And, frankly, I think that most businesses had already made, and implemented, their decisions about how to handle their work forces well before last week’s CDC announcement.
Yes, certainly, there’s an economic aspect to this, but more broadly, there’s a societal aspect. The restrictions, particularly in 2020, helped to save lives – I have no doubt about this. But, it wasn’t realistic to expect people to live like hermits, and a large fraction of the population to work entirely from home, for the indeterminate future.
I’ve been largely working from home for 2 1/2 years now; it’s not terrible, but it’s by no means perfect. Collaborating with colleagues has been significantly more challenging in this environment, despite the best efforts of my employer.
COVID hasn’t gone away, and it’s not going to go away, but thanks to the vaccines, and antiviral and monoclonal antibody treatments, it’s not the same sort of existential public health threat that it was 2 years ago.
If a particular person, who has been able to work from home for the past two years, has decided that they will never feel comfortable working in an office setting again, for fear of COVID, that’s their choice. If that person also has serious pre-existing conditions, and is still at high risk for serious complications from COVID, despite having been vaccinated and boosted, then that may even be a wise choice.
(On the other hand, if said person is worried about COVID, and has chosen to not get vaccinated, despite being eligible and physically able to have the vaccine, then I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them anymore.)
If said person is being “forced back to work” by a change in policy from their employer, then yes, that person is, unfortunately, going to need to look at other work options – but in the end, that’s no different from your employer implementing some non-COVID job rules that you find intolerable, or moving their offices a hundred miles further away from your house.
I honestly do a lot of work on my own. My company is still almost entirely virtual 2 1/2 years in. I could go in, but there’s no one there so why bother? That kind of thing.
It’s not that I needed all of the water cooler conversation, it’s just depressing after a while. Sometimes we just need to see other people, even if we don’t need them specifically for work.