Well … that pinned my ears back a bit. Thanks for the opportunity to reflect.
As to nursing homes, Mom’s place is real aggressive about staff PPE, outside aides passing through, etc. It’s recognized by everyone involved that since that’s the one import vector they can’t stop cold, it remains the largest one they’re stuck with mitigating rather than preventing.
All of COVID mitigation for everyone everywhere is a matter of applying several individually modestly effective mitigations in overlapping layers and hoping the total amount of filtration makes everybody safe enough.
Of course, how strong a filter you need to achieve any given level of safety depends on how much bad stuff you’re trying to filter out. Which is a community-driven number. Multiplied by your personal risk of a severely bad outcome which is an individual number.
As applied to the nursing homes that means the residents’ opportunities to socialize among themselves becomes more restricted than they might otherwise be if all aides were full-timers who worked only at that one site. Because the individual residents’ risk of a bad outcome is so large, the amount of filtration they require is much greater than e.g. a similar cohort of kindergartners.
Which turns to my second comment that you took greatest exception to. And with some validity.
I am NOT advocating for commerce to be stopped. I am NOT advocating for people to stay away from their work.
At my work we’re doing the best we can to distance, sanitize, and mask. In my personal case my duties include sharing a small space with one other person for hours per day. Where we take turns touching the same stuff over and over while talking to one another almost continuously. Within that unmitigatable risk we take the precautions we can. We also face the unmitigatable risk of needing to eat in restaurants, be in crowds, and sleep in hotels. All of which risks we are taking proactive steps to mitigate. While getting the job done just as we did pre-COVID.
With the result that of our 40K traveling crewmembers of all kinds, we have no higher COVID rates than the public at large was having before FL, TX, etc., started to explode. In fact generally lower rates. So far our internal tracing data shows that crewmembers who have gotten sick are almost entirely bringing COVID in from their homelife, not catching it from their worklife.
This is a large enough sample of both headcount and location to plausibly have predictive power for a state or nation at large. It shows that personal countermeasures work.
What I AM advocating for is for the people (of any age) who are crowding into crowded places and wearing their mask as little as possible, rather than as much as possible, to consider that they are not only working hard to kill the economy they depend on, but their all also putting themselves and everyone around them at *completely unnecessary* risk.
Don’t take precautions for me. Take them for yourselves. I’ll gain as a collateral benefit, and so will everyone else. But you gain too. Best of all, it’s a virtuous circle. The fewer infections we collectively have, the fewer precautions anyone, and therefore everyone, need to take. That’s what I’m advocating for. Let’s make this a virtuous feedback loop, not a vicious one.
Having defended the position I tried to make last time, but perhaps not very clearly, I'll now agree with much of your criticism.
It is easier for me as a settled married person to crunch down my social life. Because it wasn’t that big to begin with. It also helps that I was never a crowd-loving person, but lots of people are. It’s also easier for me with my fairly lax schedule to go to the groc store 1x/week instead of my customary 3x/week. Ditto all the other shopping & logistics of modern life. And easier for me to attend restaurants at off peak times or not at all. Others may not be nearly so well-situated.
Said another way, some non-trivial fraction of what I was shaking my geezer cane at is in fact inevitable and necessary, not just frivolous disregard for public safety.
A privilege check is always a good thing. Thank you.
My bottom line on all this COVID stuff ...
This is a marathon, whether any of us like that idea or not. It does no good to do something unsustainable (e.g. total retail shutdown) for a couple weeks when the war will last a couple of years at least.
Folks should be settling into the idea that this is a multi-year fight. IMO whether we’re talking a single person or a whole planetful of people, we can’t hold our breath until it goes away, but neither can we simply pretend life is as it was in 2019, and double down on the who-cares practices that got us where we are today.
Well, we can pretend, but the cost in dollars, lives, heartache, and political instability will be ginormously more than necessary. I’d prefer we work together to avoid that worst-case outcome.
