Two things happened yesterday, one macro and one micro, that made me realize how so done I am with what passes for our response to the coronavirus. I am tired of feeling punished for incompetence from the White House and for happening to live in the state that got hit third-hardest in the nation. The macro thing that happened is I learned that an annual event I always look forward to, the Lowell Folk Festival, has been cancelled for this year. (Lowell has also cancelled July 4th fireworks which are less interesting to me personally.) The Folk Fest would have been more than two months away and we do seem to be heading in the right direction in terms of cases, but I guess nobody wants to take any chances. For me every closure, restriction, and cancellation sounds like an admission of failure that I am not accustomed to in this country. The oft-cited precedent is the Spanish flu, but that was 100 years ago. Do you mean to tell me that in 21st century America with all our supposed medical knowledge and technology the best we can come up with is spread out and wear a mask – SERIOUSLY?!
Speaking of masks, that leads us to the micro event from yesterday that just about sent me over the edge – I went grocery shopping. I do this about once a week, but yesterday was the first time since Governor Baker made face coverings mandatory in such venues. (We’ll get back to executive fiats in a minute.) This was extremely uncomfortable to me and I tried, unsuccessfully, to get in and out of the store quickly. The covering was as loose as I could make it without falling off, but I still struggled to breathe. When I found myself without anyone in my immediate vicinity I removed it for a couple of seconds to take in some fresher air. I am not looking forward to repeating that experience next week.
I’ve also noticed that masks have become the latest method of virtue signaling for many on the left. To hear some tell it if you don’t want to wear a mask you must want people to die. Never mind a hospitalization rate of 5% and a fatality rate of 1%, and that’s just among those who contract the virus at all – a percentage which is also pretty low. On FB today I mentioned in a comment my breathing difficulties and other commenters told me to suck it up and that it was a small price to pay since the virus is much worse. Daily Kos has become mask orthodoxy central. If we were always this concerned about potential fatalities we would never fight another war, never get into a car, and definitely get more serious about access to firearms.
Our reaction I think has bordered on hysteria, but now instead of witches or Communists under every bed it’s COVID carriers. We rushed to shut everything down without deliberation regarding how this would affect all aspects of life. Public health voices are important, but so are voices regarding the economy, personal safety, education, civil liberties, etc. Almighty science can be a blunt instrument and we seemed to have used it as a sledgehammer when maybe a scalpel would have been more appropriate. The banning of gatherings is constitutionally fraught at best, especially when worship services are included in the ban. There is no more public health exception to the Constitution than there is an exception for terrorism. The United States should not bow to anything – not terrorism and not pandemic – and if we had reacted to September 11th the way we are reacting to the coronavirus we would have said the terrorists have won.
If we must fudge our liberties then at very least it should be by specific law enacted by the legislature rather than executive order. In a free and open society the people’s representatives need to be heard, though in this case many legislators we like were pushing the hardest for Baker to act even more quickly and decisively. I was very disappointed that liberals were not the ones asking the questions about how this would impact jobs, how it would impact education, how do we protect abuse victims, how does this square with protected rights, etc. As a co-equal branch they should on general principles question the executive on the use of his power, but we got barely a peep. While I’m sure Baker is acting in good faith, constitutional restrictions exist for those who might not. Banning gatherings reminds me of the Massachusetts Government Act which helped spark revolution. Face masks seem contrary to the idea of sovereignty over one’s own body and personal space.
I’m not against government action of course. In fact more of it early on would have been nice. The WH threw out Obama’s manual and council for fighting pandemics largely because I suspect they were indeed Obama’s. While I do not favor xenophobic blanket travel bans it seems beginning with the turn of this year we should have tested everyone seeking to enter the country – whether immigrant, visitor, or returning American – for the virus and isolated those who tested positive. Here in MA we should have contact-traced the heck out of February’s Biogen conference. It also seems we should have started work on a vaccine as soon as this appeared and meanwhile inoculate people with something that was close enough for a similar virus. I know this particular strand is new, but we do have some experience with similar viruses such as SARS, H1N1, and MERS. Even the “common” colds are in the coronavirus family. We should have done more to isolate the vulnerable, but in a way that did not have to involve upending the lives of the rest of us.
We have done what we can and it’s time to reassess the risk. I say let’s get on with it. There will likely be a bit of a spike in cases in the immediate aftermath of reopening whether we do it now or later, but waiting until a vaccine which may not be widely available until next year as I’m starting to hear some suggest is not tenable. Our species was not designed to hibernate. Our species was not designed to live in hermetically sealed six-foot radius bubbles. Our economy was not designed to take such a deliberate gut punch, but let me make this clear. I don’t want to reopen “for the economy”. I really could not care less about the health of Wall Street per se, but I’m also getting a little tired of hearing how the virus tanked the economy. No, the REACTION to the virus is what mostly tanked the economy. Some of us would like to get back to work, even though we may actually be making more through unemployment and stimulus than we were before.
I want to reopen my LIFE. I want to go to my meetings and events, and see people in the flesh. I want to get out of my lightly-furnished studio with half a kitchen that I was calling my cell even before all this happened. I don’t think it is selfish to want to do more than exist and I certainly don’t think it’s selfish to want to breathe in public. I also don’t think the consequences of easing up are going to be nearly as bad as some fear, but I for one think we can handle the risk. Part of me thinks we just have to let this run its course to some extent. That said, we should probably be more careful about germs, but not in a way that drives us nuts. We can all come up I’m sure with 100 different ways germs can get transmitted in the course of a normal day, which to me says we just have to accept it on some level and trust our immune systems. Basically I’m saying develop and maintain healthy habits, but without becoming Howie Mandel in the process.
As we reopen we need to recalibrate how this is reported as well. The numbers are real, but not given a lot of context. The media have continued the mentality of “if it bleeds it leads”. They are quick to report new cases and new deaths, especially when those stats cross a round number threshold, but they have not pointed out how low the percentages are. I usually have to do that math myself, as well as go digging for recovery figures, which have consistently far outpaced deaths. The vast majority of people would probably be content to live their lives as normal if not bombarded by this story day in and day out. While I for one have a “keep calm and carry on” attitude and will be happy to jump right back in to life with both feet as soon as permitted many will be much more cautious, especially if all they continue to hear is the bad news. One way or another, sooner rather than later, we have to simply decide it’s time to move on even if we don’t have perfect solutions on the virus.
(end of rant)
“. . . in an emergency you take what you can get that everyone agrees on, then fight later.”
This is an emergency, and we have to do what is necessary.
Not as big of one as it’s being made out to be and I think you know you took that quote completely out of context.
I feel you, Christopher. I really do.
But please, please, bone up on this thing and get with the program on masks. They are not to protect you, directly, from the virus. They are to protect all of us from all of us, including (potentially) you.
Because you cannot know with certainty of you are infected and infectious, taking the mask off inside a store where there are products on the shelf that other will take home, and where air is contained and recirculated, is exactly wrong.
Only if people follow health guidelines, such as mask wearing in some settings, and do so diligently, will it be possible to reopen things without a lot of unnecessary death. Death, Christopher.
Haven’t we flattened the curve? Baker was talking about reopening the economy just a few days ago. Making masks “voluntary but strongly encouraged” seems like it should go along with that. I have a family member whose glasses fog up from masks. She’s in a difficult position until she can get contacts.
As Christopher suggests, our response needs to be balanced. If nothing else, people who don’t qualify for unemployment need to be allowed to support themselves. Given lawmakers’ aversion to UBI, I think we’ll see things reopen for this reason alone.
One of the first rules of wearing masks is, ‘if your glasses fog up, the mask is not on your face correctly.’ She doesn’t need contacts, she needs to get a mask to fit appropriately. If she’s wearing an N95, then something is really wrong. If she’s wearing a mask with a metal strip on the top she needs to mold that metal strip better to her nose/cheeks. If it’s a straight cloth mask without metal, she can add something like a pipecleaner or something semi rigid to mold it to her face. If she know’s how to sew she might make a custom mask which contours to her face and her face alone.
But by no means are contacts the answer to this problem.
I see you’ve joined the “we’re all going to die” caucus. If I were the Grim Reaper I would not be liking my odds. The reaction has been very disproportional. The odds of my being infected are tiny, but of course if I knew I was I would not go out at all even with a mask. My understanding is that anything that lands on surfaces doesn’t last that long and hopefully people wipe down things they purchase, but I refuse to gasp for air. The Governor’s order makes reference to when you can’t socially distance, so I expose my face for two seconds when nobody is close enough to violate that.
The reality is we did not close soon enough. Had Baker acted sooner before the Biogen conference was allowed to take place, we might have been able to seal up the state. DeBlasio and to a lesser extent Cuomo share some blame too for closing NY and NYC a week or two later than the experts advised them too. Of course the biggest slice of blame is on the President for pretending this looming threat did not exist. There needs to be a 9/11 Commission on steroids to determine who knew what when and who is responsible for this failure. I hope the voters make that judgment quite clear this Fall.
So how do we go forward? Reopen too early like Sweden, Georgia, and Florida and see deaths surge? You will not like my answer, but we need to identify every one who has this virus, trace them, and mandate their isolation. Revere took the wise move and bought out a hotel for carriers in non-critical condition to self isolate from family, but its voluntary and far short of capacity. Mandating that separation is vital to stopping the spread of the disease. We also have to be realistic about what is and is not dangerous.
Restaurants in my view could reopen outdoors if they kept tables six feet apart. This would be a welcome relief to owners and workers and to folks like you who feel couped up. Rebuilding those third spaces that are not quite home or work. I think some offices can reopen in staggered schedules and shifts as schools are planning to reopen. I would welcome the return of live sports without fans. Baseball seems especially conducive to on field social distancing. Basketball and hockey are more contact based, but a strict testing regime could be a model for non-sports businesses and governments to follow.
The big thing is we need way more testing and tracing equipment than we have, and it pains me Democrats are not pounding the tables demanding that the government buy that equipment, demanding that Trump invoke the DPA to make that equipment, and making sure that equipment along with PPE and ventilators get to front line workers. I would give Trump or Newsom a ton of credit if either imminent domain Tesla to build ventilators and PPE instead of fancy electric cars nobody can afford right now. We need to better identify the sick and asymptomatic carreirs and be stricter with their movement to create the safe space for the rest of us to move on.
And see I felt the decision to shut down was rushed. We did not take time to weigh all the societal impacts. To me it seemed like shut down first, ask questions later.
Rushed? Are you kidding me? Had we shut down two weeks earlier there’d be be very few cases today and thousands of lives saved. I really don’t think you know how pandemics work. The goal is to overreact and over prepare at the start to make sure few cases get in. Once they get fin, it becomes hard to isolate them. Leaving responses up to states and localities was a terrible move. Had we started the shut down in February we’d be Korea today, and not where we actually are.
This is just BWAA TRUMP. The USA could not have done this, even if it wanted to, because we are not equipped to run a police state, even a benign one, even in an emergency.
I disagree with that entirely. Other democracies like Korea and Taiwan has better capability and locked this down. Even Italy which cannot run its trains on time locked down better and more quickly than we did. Fewer deaths per capita there and in the UK which has the NHS.
It’s not just Trump. It’s Dr. Redfield and a lot of public health officials who slow walked this without evidence.
I’m more of a Sweden guy myself, and while we did wait longer than some I just think with something that drastic you should have all your ducks in a row FIRST. I would not have minded more over-preparedness on the macro level. As for Korea, it’s easy to say their way worked, but that’s like saying torture sometimes gets you the confession you want. We have to balance other values and expectations too, but I did say we should have contact-traced the Biogen conference.
Sweden isn’t working. We’ve been over this. You’re wishful thinking isn’t reality based. It isn’t working here. It would be great if you bothered citing your assertions ever once in a blue moon.
I’ve cited the math a number of times. Sweden works or not depending on what’s acceptable. Sweden has had more cases per capita than its neighbors, but I’m OK with that as it’s still a small percentage of the overall population.
Thank you, Dr Strangelove.
You re really missing the point here, Christopher. The masks do not protect you from others. They protect others from you. The effect is collective.
The masks that protect the wearer are the N95 masks we don’t even have enough of for first responders and health workers.
The masks we have are not as good but, cumulatively, have a significant e=beneficial effect, They filter out a meaningful chunk of virus-particle inventory from people whom (I assume) do not know they are shedding. Because you cannot know absent testing. Which we also do not have.
Really, you should find a mask that does not make you gag and join with your fellow citizens in fighting this thing the way the experts recommend. Naive epidemiology is just your own “private set of facts.”
I know which direction the mask protection goes, but I still say the odds of me, or really any given individual, being infected and thus able to pass it on to others is small. Even if it is passed on to others the odds of it being serious are single digit percentages. Some seem to be trying for an absolute guarantee that more people won’t be infected; I am not.
It’s an absolute guarantee you will not infect others. The way the math works shows how this can easily spread. Look at this information and get back to me.
The link does not appear to say anything I did not already know. I am very much aware how easily this one spreads.
So why do you favor making it easier for it to spread? How many innocent people, most of them poor, black, or elderly need to be sacrificed on your altar of personal convenience disguised as libertarian nonsense?
Please do not refer to my ability to breathe as a personal convenience. I’m fine with easier spreading, including to me if it comes to that because the overwhelming majority of us will be fine.
@… the overwhelming majority:
I’m sorry my friend, but that’s just not even close to being true.
You drastically understate the risk in comparison to other hazards. You ignore the reality that your denial of these obvious facts endangers everyone around you.
You’ve always been a strong proponent of anti-smoking laws because you and I should not have to die because somebody else chose to ignore the health hazards of cigarettes.
The likelihood of dying from second-hand smoke is MUCH smaller than the likelihood of catching COVID from somebody who isn’t wearing a mask, especially in an enclosed space like a store. The CDC attributes about 42,000 deaths a year to second-hand smoke. The pandemic has already killed twice that many people.
Oh, and by the way, the odds of COVID being serious for a senior (65+) are in the range of 30% — THIRTY percent.
A mask does not impair your ability to breath. Similarly, the fact that my glasses fog is an incredibly trivial annoyance.
I don’t know what to tell you, but so far covering my face HAS impacted my ability to breathe. Please do not try to deny my lived experience. Smoking is not breathing. You don’t have to do the former to live; in fact doing it restricts your ability to do so. Also, the hospitalization rate is very low and the recovery rate far outpaces the death rate. I’m really not making this up. I know seniors are more vulnerable, which is why it baffles me that more effort was not put into protecting them and the facilities in which some of them live. Here in Lowell I read the other day that 82% of our COVID deaths were in nursing homes.
And those patient lives and those workers lives matter, just as much as yours.
My point was to focus MORE on protecting those vulnerable populations, and to note that outside those facilities it’s not nearly as bad. I don’t understand why some seemed to sound surprised when it first came out that type of facility was being hit especially hard. Vulnerable population in close quarters – what did they expect?
My wife has lost a co-worker and several patients she had cared for over the last three years at her second job. I think this attitude is misleading and really elitist. You are not the one in harms way. You are not a member of the communities that have been devastated by this. A former co worker lost his father. A student lost his grandfather who was a surrogate father to him. Another co-worker is married to a grave digger who says he has buried more bodies in the last two months than he has his entire career. My niece down in Florida, which has already reopened after closing too late, says the top floor of her hospital is floor to ceiling body bags. So for the 70,000 people who died and their loved ones this is a true tragedy, one that is not being overplayed. For the millions of essential employees who are putting their bodies on the line so we can enjoy a relative degree of normalcy, what is being asked of the rest of us is practically nothing.
I would hate to see you in WWII Christopher, whining about all the necessary rationing and blaming Roosevelt for picking a fight with Japan. How would you have conducted yourself during the Blitz? A little bit of courage goes a long way to get through this crisis, and it saddens me so many Americans have a me first attitude and shrink at the first sign of any request for self sacrifice. We certainly would lose WWII if we had to fight it today, so many of our people lack the will to beat this thing. I agree with you downthread we need a Phase II plan, but pretending this virus isn’t deadly isn’t it.
First let’s get the silly stuff out of the way. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and of course we had to fight back. In fact if WWII had gone my preferred way, we would have jumped in with both feet on the side of Britain to stop Hitler long before that happened. During the blitz I of course I would have followed human instinct and sought shelter, but bombing is a much more clear, present, and immediate danger than a virus flying around with a low fatality rate. My heart of course goes out to people who have lost loved ones and who, in the very definition of adding insult to injury, are told they can’t even say goodbye properly due to social distancing, but even if someone close to me succumbed to this I would not be wishing the whole rest of the world stopped on account of that. Somehow rationing doesn’t strike me as onerous. There’s a bit of that going on now in the stores and it doesn’t bother me. Part of my frustration is that I’ve gotten used to this country being unbeatable in a way it wasn’t necessarily going into WWII, yet somehow a virus has brought us to our knees.
The silly stuff is saying “World War two wasn’t so bad for our soldiers, after all it was a 1.5% fatality rate for those wjo served”. This thing is gonna be hell on the survivors too and is going to shape our society for years to come.
Spanish Flu half the casualties came after a premature reopening. Compare Philly and St Louis and tell me you want to go down the Florida and Georgia path.
Again, join me in pushing for testing and tracing and mandatory isolation. Then we can enjoy the world we both want. Your cry sounds less like a plan and more like dangerous wishful thinking.
I don’t think anyone wants the status quo, I lament the third of a year we won’t ever get back with these kids, but it is what it is. You can’t make me go back to to an enclosed environment with 2400 other bodies until this thing has largely passed. We’re looking at staggered schedules and socially distanced classrooms. Normal ain’t coming back for awhile. I’m going crazy too, but I would rather reopen later.
This thread is helpful and comes from a scientist. We bought time and Trump largely squandered it by not making more tests, more PPE, or investing in a vaccine. Now we are prematurely reopening and the cases are gonna get even worse since we still lack the ability to ID and separate the carriers from the general population.
Also this is a dress rehearsal for climate change and we are failing miserably.
Yes, climate change, another area where I know we can be doing a lot better, but I don’t go around like Chicken Little predicting the sky is going to fall. I guess I just have a calm personality like that.
More like an ignorant one.
Sitting silently and doing nothing while a fire spreads through a crowded room is just as wrong as falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.
Most of us are struggling with the economic, social, and political impact of the pandemic. That personal struggle should not blind us to the facts of how dangerous this disease truly is.
Why are we no better off than 100 years ago when the Spanish flu was around?
Also, please stop putting words in my mouth about WWII. My position is that we had to defend ourselves against Japan and we should have gone on the offensive earlier against Hitler. You have the analogy backwards though. If people were as concerned about the possibility of death in that context as they seem to be in this one, we never would have sent our soldiers to war.
I agree with you Christopher. I think we are approaching “it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it” territory, and there has been extremely little rational discussion on the tradeoffs.
It is unfortunate that Trump ever talks, because when he raised the issue of the tradeoff, the response was inevitably reduced to “BWAAA TRUMP,” to the point that quarantine has been incorporated into the endless culture war. I think a lot of the fear mongering has been fueled by the everything-is-culture-war phenomenon. There has never been any rational debate of the tradeoffs, either from right or from left.
Meanwhile, education,despite the best efforts of teachers, isn’t happening. There will be a large cohort of younger kids, especially from poorer families, who never make up the lost ground, which will ripple through the economy for 60 years or more. Younger kids lose ground every summer vacation, and this is probably causing a de facto missed year of education. People with mental illness are screwed; you couldn’t come up with a worse thing for a clinically depressed person than “social isolation.” Businesses are being wrecked. Unemployment is approaching 25%, and is going to grow, A LOT, as employers collapse. That is getting near the “widespread and violent civil unrest” territory.
I definitely hope your last sentence doesn’t come to pass, and just in case it isn’t clear, I want nothing to do with the nut jobs who have been showing up to state capitols locked and loaded. They are I think largely responsible for preventing any reasonable discussion because they are abusing their rights to PEACEABLY assemble. Once you come armed you have forfeited your claim to assembling peaceably even if you never fire a shot IMO. Also, many of them claim to be standing up for their freedoms while flying Nazi and Confederate flags, two regimes that represent the antithesis of freedom. Yet their participation in these demonstrations gives the left an excuse to suggest that if you are concerned at all about freedom you must be one of them.
What you both share in common is valuing your own personal conveniences over the health and well being of the vulnerable. Not all communities are getting hit equally. Once again blue states, the undocumented, and majority minority cities are bearing the biggest burdens in this pandemic while rural white Americans wave their guns at state legislators. Meanwhile black nurses and joggers are getting gunned down. Just another day in America.
You just recently defended Pelosi for bailing-out her fat cat husband but not passing UBI. So you’re willing to IGNORE a major systemic cause of inequality, while pulling the race card over a mask. Unreal.
Was Mitch McConnell gonna pass UBI? She’s already supporting it, he’s the one blocking it. Also anyone who says “pulling the race card” is pretty ignorant about what’s actually going on in America.
She floated the idea a couple of weeks back, but UBI didn’t make it into her new proposal, did it?. She gave nearly unlimited cash to Wall Street more than a month ago, while average Americans are still waiting for a comparatively modest UBI. But you’re not outraged by that, you’re outraged by someone who struggles to breath with a mask on his face.
This is what the Democratic party has come to — engaging in meaningless virtue signaling and identity politics, while continuing to give massively disproportionate government assistance to the wealthy and powerful.
They voted in the package today with 2k payments. Watch the news.
Then why don’t we focus on protecting the more vulnerable communities rather than pretend that one solution fits all?
That’s exactly what we are doing. What would you do differently? Stopping the spread and flattening the curve is how we help those communities. It’s also about keeping hospitals functional. Every single infected patient puts the staff and the non/Covid patients at risk. Every hospital at capacity for Covid puts the non-Covid emergency patient at risk. You can’t build a wall to stop a pandemic, you gotta self isolate for a period of time and invest in testing and tracing.
America is typically doing this ass backward and reopening before the curve flattens, before we have tracing and testing capabilities, and before we have PPE for workers. Had Trump spent the months of Dec-February honestly laying out the risks to Americans and making proper preparations, we would not be in this mess today. Blame him for your woes, not the scientists and not those of us who trust them more than the politicians to get this right.
@ What would you do differently:
I would use the data that we already have to relax restrictions on the 2,604 counties nationwide (out of a little more than 3,200 nationwide) where the cumulative case count is less than 500 as of 10-May-2020, There are only TWENTY counties nationwide where the cumulative case count is more than 10,000 as of that day.
This rate of spread of this pandemic is exquisitely sensitive to population density (number of people per square mile). For nearly all of America, it just isn’t a problem. Isn’t now, won’t be.
For America’s cities and densely-populated regions, it’s a catastrophe.
Regarding “widespread and violent civil unrest territory”, we are sadly already there in Michigan.
We are embracing the same false dichotomy that we did when the AIDS crisis first hit, when our official government policy — to everybody — was, in essence, “don’t have sex.”. What we’re doing right now is locking down Chicago because a tornado killed people in Nebraska.
We urgently need a data-driven middle ground. We need tools analogous to real-time weather reports that allow local officials and people to see approaching infection waves and take steps accordingly.
As of May 10, there were a total of SIX corona virus cases in Aroostook County, ME. There have been a total of TWO corona virus cases in Coos County, NH. Even Franklin County MA has had a total of 296 cases. I think it’s silly to lock down those counties.
There is a data-driven middle ground between absolute denial and puritanical tyranny.
That’s fine, I have no issue with rural areas without cases reopening. I am specifically saying it’s too early to reopen the big eastern seaboard cities that have endured this.
Amen to that. I’m working with this data now (I just launched a beta version yesterday) and it’s been available in rough form for weeks. Open the beta version, and LOOK at the map. It’s ALL GREEN. The handful of hot-spots account for essentially ALL of the cases and deaths. Drill in a bit and look around in the red states. The objections from those states to a nationwide lockdown are legitimate.
Drill in to Michigan, and you’ll see why the people are in the streets to protest the lockdown. Yes, it makes sense to take steps in Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties to limit or halt the pandemic before it starts and spreads. It is a betrayal of our fundamental freedoms to do the same in the rest of the state.
Now navigate to MA, and drill down to see the cumulative county data.
The case total for Middlesex County is a horrifying 11,774 — one of the worst in the nation, Neighboring Suffolk Count (including Boston) is even worse at 15,356. Those two are among the worst in the nation (that’s why they’re colored yellow). Switch to the “Cumulative death count”, and you’ll see that Middlesex is again AWFUL at 2,425. It would be positively criminal to relax any restrictions anywhere in either of those counties. Christopher, It is absolutely criminal to be in a grocery store without a mask in either of those counties — for whatever reason. If you really can’t breathe with a mask, than arrange for somebody to do your shopping for you, or sign up for something like PeaPod.
Now pull back and navigate to Franklin County, in the western part of the state. There have a total of 296 cases and 42 deaths. Anybody who lives someplace like Hawley, Charlemont, Buckley, Shelburn, or Shellburn Falls can do pretty much as they please without risking harm to themselves or others. Of course, it’s pretty much all mountains and is as close as you can come to living “off the grid” in MA. The restrictions that are absolutely essential in Revere, Everett, and Somerville are draconian and absurd in Franklin County.
I see this as a real test of our information systems, our national unity, and our ability to be a nation of law governed by reason and fact rather than hysteria and unbridled passion — from any place in the political spectrum.
What we are doing economically to the residents of Franklin County is unconscionable. What has already happened to the schoolchildren of Revere is similarly unconscionable.
I started this tool at the end of March. I used publicly available sources and free tools. It was screamingly obvious to me the very first time I rendered the very first map layer, in mid-April, that our national strategy — including the hysteria from MSNBC and too many Democrats — is horrifyingly misplaced.
Everything that I’ve found was or should have been known to government officials, especially at the state and local level, weeks ago. We are absolutely SHREDDING the idea of personal liberty and freedom. Frankly, we Democrats are leading the charge.
We are being tested in a way that I can’t remember in my lifetime — and we are, so far, failing miserably.
…because people do not move around and come in contact with other people from other places?
If that is the case, it is a result of stay-at-home practices. End those practices and the virus will spread.
We do not, indeed, have a national strategy. We do have public-health recommendations at thee state level.
And we have a body of “yes but not for me” second guessers who construction different arguments, some involving religious beliefs, some involving appeals to tribal loyalties, and some some involving a lot of data.
The argument that social distancing is not needed because the virus has not spread nearly so much after almost two months of social distancing is like saying the fire department caused a lot of water damage to my house because it did not burn down.
Who here wants to be in that number? Really?
@The fire department caused a lot of damage …:
This is closer to someone who calls the fire department because of small and contained fire outside the rear corner of a distant barn. If the fire crews smell smoke on the front porch, barge in the front door, break out all the second floor windows, ventilate the roof, and open the hoses all across the second floor and attic, then you’d have a legitimate complaint.
We already have the data needed to identify the spread. In fact, it does not happen instantly. It’s true that a single person might bring it back to Shelburn Falls from a visit to Boston, and might infect a household in Shelburn Falls. It’s also true that that infection will show up in the daily data as soon as anybody gets treated. Imposing a local (as in neighborhood or family) self-isolation/quarantine and local lockdown of that particular neighborhood or family is enough to manage the outbreak.
This virus does not possess magical powers. It does not violate physical constraints of time, space, and distance. It is not an “enemy” that seeks to destroy us. It is a virus that needs to be managed.
This is fantastic. In precisely the same sense that mainlining bleach is fantastic.
80000 Americans have died in your small fire (more, probably). So far.
Massachusetts today reported 1512 new cases in a single day..
This number is almost certainly understated, since we are not testing enough to know, But we do know that if we stopped containing this pandemic those numbers would be much greater.
Tom, you are picking your own facts to suit your wishes. There is nothing more perilous.
You’re not hearing what I’ve said.,
There is a terrible crisis in the handful of counties where this pandemic is out of control.
Open the map. Choose “Cumulative death count” from the drop-down. LOOK at what you see.
It is true that because of a temporary issue with the way that NYC data is reported (it is reported for the city rather than the five counties that comprise it), the entry for NYC that should be bright red is empty.
Nevertheless, you have to zoom into the map to see where those 80,000 deaths happened. They are concentrated in a handful of counties. THAT is where the crisis is.
A tornado in Kansas cannot kill people in Chicago.
Because a communicable pandemic is so like a tornado.
Not.
This is magical thinking at its worst.
@This is magical thinking at its worst:
And your comment is a canonical example of projection.
This pandemic spreads by person-to-person contact. It is true that an infected person can carry the virus from one place to another. The origin will already show in data. The destination will start small and expand as the infection spreads in its new place. There is no benefit and much cost to locking down a region while there is no Coronavirus in that region.
What your comment ignores is that everywhere else is not affected. America is REALLY REALLY large, and nearly all empty. Your intuition about infection risk is incorrect, and at least so far you refuse to inform your intuition with facts and data.
Did you look at the map?
Do you understand that Coronavirus geospatial infection rates (number of cases per square mile) are even more concentrated than wealth distribution?
There are just four counties nationwide with a cumulative death count (as of 10-May-2020) greater than 2,000:
1. New York City: 19,436
2. Nassau County, New York: 2,413
3. Cook County, Illinois: 2,317
4. Wayne County, Michigan: 2,097
Those four account for 26,263 total deaths, of which nearly all (19,436) are from NYC.
There are 2,865 counties, nationwide, with a cumulative death toll of less than 325 per county. Those total 25,509.
So the top four counties account for as many deaths as the bottom 2,965 counties.
The top 0.14% of the counties account for as many total deaths as the bottom 98.5%.
Talk about 1% vs 99%!
I’m not suggesting that we ignore this. To the contrary, I’m insisting that we actually LOOK at how devastatingly concentrated this is.
For virtually ALL of America’s area (98.5% of our counties), this pandemic affects a tiny number of people. Yet every one of those 98.5% counties is being creamed by the collapsing economy, creamed by stay-at-home orders, and besieged with media hysteria from mainstream outlets.
We ignore that distribution at our extreme peril.
To be clear, I’m covering my face in accordance with current orders, but doing everything I can to limit my time in such situations. Having someone do my shopping or getting food delivered aren’t good options either since I also need excuses to get out. Using your numbers for Middlesex County that means that 0.73% of the total population (2019 estimate of 1,611,699 per Wikipedia citing the Census Bureau) is infected and 0.15% have died so I stand by previous claims that these numbers are tiny (though admit to being shocked by your map of how few counties are anything other than green). As I mentioned elsewhere, here in Lowell (Middlesex’s largest city) 82% of the deaths have been in nursing homes, so it seems to me that even here we have information to more narrowly target our response. I guess I’ve just never taken well to being on the receiving end of collective consequences. This goes all the way back to my elementary years when I was the kid who whined the most that I had to lose recess as part of a class punishment because some of my classmates couldn’t behave.
Those “tiny” numbers include the surrogate father and bio grandpa of a student of mine and a friend from the Chelsea Collaborative who lost his dad, sixty patients my wife cared for over three years, and one of her coworkers. It will include many more if we do not continue to practice social distancing.
I think once we have a test and tracing regime set up, we could do what you and Tom are requesting. We are many weeks away from that since Trump dithered.
There are no “tiny” numbers anywhere in Middlesex or Suffolk County. Christopher is badly mistaken to claim to the contrary.
OTOH, the numbers truly ARE tiny anywhere in Michigan outside the Detroit hotspot.
Christopher, by the standard you are using — occurences/population — there are essentially ZERO threats to public health.
For example, do you support the ban on atmospheric nuclear tests? Do you agree that the risk of cancer from fallout was an appropriately large factor in that ban? Most studies agree that the total cancer deaths nationwide attributed to the nuclear fallout that already occurred are between 11,000 and 49,000 over the fifty-year period since the tests ended. That’s in a nation of a population that ranged from about 150 M in 1950 to about 300M today. That’s a CUMULATIVE death rate of about 30 per 100K over a fifty year period assuming the smaller (150 M). That’s about 0.6 per 100K per year. The average COVID death rate per 100K in Middlesex county is already 2.13 — almost three times as high. Should we resume atmospheric testing, because the risk from fallout is so “tiny”?
As another example, do you oppose seat belt laws? The NSC estimates that seat belts saved about 15,000 lives in 2017. That means that seat belts save a “tiny” number of lives — only 5 deaths per 100K, according to the NSC. Do you therefore join the crusade of the late Jerry Williams against mandatory seat belt laws?
A more valid comparison is to, for example, examine typical death rates from all causes in the absence of COVID to what we’re seeing now. Various sources have done that, and are seeing death rates DOUBLE in hot spots like Middlesex county.
There is simply no way to correctly deny the grave risk that COVID brings to Middlesex County — most especially to the more densely populated areas of Middlesex County.
Didn’t nuclear bombs kill pretty much everyone on Nagasaki and Hiroshima (though I’ve heard those who defend their use claim that ultimately saved more lives than they took)?
I fully support seatbelt laws and have always worn mine without complaint. They do not make it hard for me to breathe nor do they symbolize hysteria and failure to me. However, I do get in a car without a second thought all the time even though fatal crashes do happen from time to time. Seems to me if we were as concerned about even the possibility of death in a car as we are regarding the virus we would ban the use of cars.
I’m not talking about nuclear bombs, I’m talking about fallout and dirty bombs. Speaking of nuclear bombs, it is fascinating that it is trivially easy to find out how many people were immediately killed in the bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Most sources say that total is about 250,000 people (depending on how you count it).
I think you’ll find it is MUCH harder to discover the number of people who ended dying prematurely from cancers caused by those two blasts. Most sources agree that the number is MUCH larger — at least as much as ten times higher, some say more. After all, the blast pattern is roughly radial. Each blast happened in a densely populated urban area. The people who died immediately were within a relatively fixed radius. A HUGE number of people survived the initial blasts, because they were outside that radius, and still received huge doses of radiation because the radius of exposure is MUCH larger. The area of a circle expands as the square of the radius, and the exposure rate is proportional to area. The radius of total devastation at Nagasaki was about 1 mile. A radius of just 1.783 miles encompasses 10 times as much area.
We Americans have never been willing to spend much time investigating the real number of deaths caused by those to nuclear bombs.
The National Safety Council estimates that about 40,000 people died in car crashes in 2019. That’s about 12.5 deaths per 100K people nationwide.
COVID has already killed twice that many, and we’re still in the beginning of the pandemic.
The seatbelt laws save about 15,000 people, so they make the difference between 65,000/year and 40,000 per year. That’s why they exist.
The argument you’re using is wrong. Smoking kills about 480,000 people per year. By your approach, that’s a “tiny” problem — it’s “only” 0.15% of the population. The CDC says that there were about 34.2 million adult smokers in the US in 2019.
So “just” 1.4% of the people who smoke die every year. By the argument you’re using, that’s a “tiny” number. Are you arguing that smoking is safe?
Of course they include individual loved ones, but public policy should be about the macro impact.
@macro impact:
Yes indeed.
The issue here is macro impact on a tiny handful of absolutely devastated neighborhoods versus macro impact on vast areas of the nation.
Our political challenge is to be responsive to those devastated neighborhoods while not destroying life in those vast areas that are essentially untouched.
With all due respect CMD you’re a lawyer from an affluent suburb, I teach in a district where my students are getting sick, their parents and their family members are dying, and many of them are working long hours in dangerous conditions to make up the difference in family income. There is no way remote learning can happen under this environment, especially since whole we were one to one two years ago we had a lousy tracking system for devices and many of them are lost or inoperable.
I agree it’s a lousy trade off and my students and I both hate being away from each other. There will be gaps, wider in our community than wealthier ones, but I would rather they be safe than risk infection. 30 kids in a classroom and 500 crowded into at a cafeteria during the middle of a pandemic is a recipe for disaster.
You just seemed to make exactly the argument for weighing other considerations. Your students are suffering probably even more than those in my district because they can’t go to school. These stories really are more upsetting to me than whatever “convenience” I might lose, though it’s always easier to testify to how one is personally impacted.
There’s a greater risk they get infected by coming back to overcrowded classes in the city that has the second highest number of cases in the state. Far better to have then stay home until the danger passes and redouble our investment in vaccines, tracing, and testing. And start mandating that the sick be quarantined.
I ran across this on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, which I think in these discussions we should all do well to remember:
The first group is putting all the other groups at risk and not being kind to them. It’s hard to be kind to others when you value your personal freedom over their security.
My wife had two solid weeks of rest and recovery from the big waves in April. Why would you callously reopen and make her life hell again? Wipe out the 40% of her patients who survived so far. That doesn’t seem fair to her or to those patients and their families. You’re inoculated from the body bags and the ptsd, I’m not. Be kind to us. Stay home and wear your mask. I’ll ship a more comfortable one to you if you’d like, my sister in law makes great ones for free.
I suspect there will be a bit of a spike in cases whenever we reopen. I’m sorry if this sounds callous, but like smallpox was, for example, for a long time we may have to just acknowledge it as a fact of life for a while.
It is callous since you are outsourcing the pain to communities that do not have the resources to deal with the virus, to the essential workers who are overexposed, and to overtaxed health care services and professionals.
I’ve said all along that my method would have been to focus on those communities and get them the resources they need.
You cannot focus on those communities without stopping the spread to them! We all need to self isolate to stop the spread. Like, do you even know any of the science behind this? it’s why quarantines work.
Then quarantine where absolutely necessary, but not whole communities.
Um, the first group on the above list are those who do not agree with the state opening. Seems to me those would not be who is putting others in danger. Your personal freedom over security comment is exactly what reminds me of a Ben Franklin quote about sacrificing the former to the latter and deserving neither.
Franklin is wrong and Hobbes is right. The dead have the fewest freedoms.
If MSNBC and especially Steve Kornacki were nearly as dedicated to reporting the FACTS of this pandemic as they are of reporting election night results, we would have much less hysteria and a much more reasonable pandemic response.
I’m quite sure that MSNBC has the tools and data. I’ve spent the last six weeks making a data browser and collecting data for it, and the data is just as available and just as easy to get as election coverage data.
Every election night, Mr. Kornacki is in his monitor-filled room walking from board to board, each a different state, clicking on Congressional Districts, wards and precincts, and bringing up population totals, prior election vote totals, exit polling, and of course up to the minute returns. ALL of that data and technology works just as well for pandemic data. Covid statistics from hospitals, nursing homes, and other data sources is no harder to gather and curate (in real time) than exit polling data.
The fact that neither network (MSNBC or CNN) does anything like that for this pandemic is obscene. In the classic “if it bleeds, it leads” tradition, these networks are hyping hysteria and fear rather than perform the valuable public service that they could and should be performing.
I suspect that the government agencies, especially at the local level, are doing about all they are able after forty years of GOP-driven “austerity” measures that have stripped government of any ability to actually DO anything useful.
We allegedly live in an “information economy”. It is ironic and shameful that our most extreme suffering at the moment is the direct consequence of an absence of information — information that ALREADY EXISTS.
I had Rachel Maddow on for a few minutes last night, but turned it off when the caption read “US surpasses 1,400,000 cases and 84,000 deaths.” There’s nothing I can do about that so all it does for me is depress me. It’s bad for the psyche.
Masks are a massive inconvenience, it’s true. I’ve had some form of beard for the last 30 years, until now. Just couldn’t make it comfortable with the mask so I had to shave. I’m desperate to hold on to my ‘stache, but even that makes a mask tricky. I am no longer as ridiculously hirsute as once I was… But it’s got to be done.
Have you experimented with different types of masks? I find I’m cycling through a few different types of masks and bandanas, experimenting with fit and ease: I don’t wear when outdoors but place it on when going indoors and take it off almost immediately afterwards.
I’m trying not to be a jerk about this Christopher. Just like in WW2 If you drive alone, you drove with Hitler, if you don’t wear a mask, you make my wife’s life a lot harder and riskier then it needs to be. DM me. I’ll have my sister in law make you a good mask. I promise.
You do seem to like your WWII metaphors on this thread! I don’t see the similarities at all.
Really? Every time you go out without a mask you risk getting sick or making someone sick and overloading our hospitals and overburdening our health care workers.
So just like driving alone helped Hitler by wasting gas needed on the front, not wearing a mask and not following the protocols makes it more likely the disease will spread.
I’m with you and Tom that rural areas should have relaxed restrictions, once we create a contact tracing and testing regimen like South Korea. We have not done so, You seem to be suggesting over and over again that we sacrifice the 1% most affected by this disease to save the 99% of Americans who are not. Had we not shut down, the death rate right now would be in the millions and not the thousands. That is not me talking out of my behind like you are, that is what the Imperial War College scientists concluded in their conservative estimate. The cost of not shutting down would have been millions more casualties.
Now just as the curve is flattening and the restrictions are working, idiots like Rand Paul and sadly, smart people like yourself are proposing we relax them, right when they are finally working. It’s ridiculous. I shudder to think at all the morons in Wisconsin who will now get sick and now have to be taken care of by my friend at Wisconsin Med, who will risk infecting her young child and husband to save the lives of morons who crowded bars and lack common sense.
Now Berkeley is reopening in a smart way, but the tradeoff is, you wanna go out, you wear a mask and practice social distancing. If you can’t do that, then stay home. Those are your choices. There is no universe where it is smart to go out without any protections. Not until we get a vaccine.
You are getting my arguments exactly backwards. I want to protect the 1% you refer to without sacrificing the 99% in the process. I do not want to live in paranoia now anymore than I’d want to avoid going out after 9/11 on the off chance the next public building I entered might be bombed while I was in it.
Wow, portrait of a baby as a middle-aged man. What I’m not sure about your mask tale is, did it actually threatened your ability to breath or were you basically uncomfortable? If it was more like uncomfortable or even very uncomfortable then get a new mask, stop being a self-centered fool, and keep it on in the grocery store. If wearing any kind of normal mask for a matter of minutes minutes made you struggle to breath you should not be so confident that you are a not one of the people who is at high risk and get yourself checked out as best as you can.
Not that it should matter whether it’s you or the other guy who has a preexisting condition.
I think we can do without the name calling. Obviously I can’t make you feel my exact experience so you can judge exactly what I mean. All I know is I wanted to get to where a mask was not necessary ASAP.
Then stay home. Staying home makes that reality more likely. Relaxing the restrictions and reopening prematurely will lead to a spike in cases and stricter restrictions to compensate. We have already been down this road. St Louis stayed closed, reopened later, and did not have to close again. Philly reopened too soon, had a spike in cases, and was not flu free for another year after St Louis. Learn from science and history and apply those lessons to today. That’s leadership. Whining about the government and freedom is what brain dead conservatives do, you’re better than that.
There’s likely to be spikes either way. I do mostly stay home, but have to shop for food (and living in my cell is driving me nuts so I part of me needs excuses to go out too). You are not helping the discussion by comparing me to brain-dead conservatives. I thought liberals (from the same Latin root as liberty) would at least raise concerns about freedom.
I’m in a better mood today and I’m choosing charity whenever possible. I am not just telling you to suck it up, I am advising you to make the best of this until it’s safe for everyone and not just yourself. I went to a flower farm with my wife today for our anniversary and we even brought our dog (who we rescued four weeks ago!). Everyone was wearing masks and still enjoying themselves outdoors. Just being in the country for an hour and going to a different part of the state felt cathartic.
There were swarms of people at the Fells on the way home doing the same thing. I will literally ship you a better mask, just wear one and be outside as much as you like if home feels like a cell. Zoom with people. Read books (remember those? I was happy to get reacquainted). Do simple work outs. I feel like we got it easy compared to my wife and the retail and food workers keeping the country afloat.
So my dog keeps my busy and happy when she’s at work, and when she comes home I leap into caretaker mode since she’s so worn out from the shifts. We rinse and repeat and the days and indeed weeks blend together. Whenever I feel at my most melancholy I go for hikes in the various state parks and forests around me. Lowell and nearby Andover has some nice ones too if my neck of the woods is too far. Drive to rural Maine or NH and hang up there for a day.
I am in fact reading a bit more again, though wishing I had a more comfortable spot to do it. Also walking more, so anytime evidence of that would like to show up on my waistline that would be OK too:) I’m glad you were able to do something for your anniversary. I hope your wife is doing OK, both physically and emotionally.
This is a very short-sighted and selfish view. Wearing a mask and social distancing is inconvenient, yes. But the more people adopt your position and ignore basic public health rules, the longer this will go on!
To be clear, I’m not ignoring the rules, but following them reluctantly and under duress. I would call connection a social and emotional need of our species, as important as physical health. Struggling to breathe is NOT “inconvenient”!
What mask are you wearing dude? My sister in law is making some, please let me send you one.
One of my old Boy Scout neckerchiefs – fairly loose-fitting, but still.
—President Obama, last night.
I think of the first responders, risking their lives. I think of the scientists and epidemiologists and public-health officials who have been 100% clear about what to do (including masks). I think of my 96-year-old mother, living on her own in Connecticut—whom I cannot even visit. I think of the vast majority of Americans, doing their part.
To the way-to-clever-by-half amateur epidemiologists in this conversation. Stop telling yourself the dangerous, seductive stories. Either you follow the experts or you are drinking the Lysol kool-aide—and endangering me and my family.
Suck it up, join the rest of us, and get with the program.
In other words, “shut up and drink the kool-aid”. You don’t have to be an epidemiologist to read a map.
The data is there for all to see. The fact that you choose to ignore or deny it doesn’t change it.