I worry too. But I worry more about all these Covid precautions becoming permanent. I travel for a living, and I am on planes all the time. I’ve had something like 150 flights this year. I hate masks. I can’t stand them. I’m afraid that masks on planes will never go away, because people have no sense of operational risk management.
Operational risk management is a phrase we used in the military. It was a study of how you mitigate risk in proportion to your goals and the benefits gained.
I really worry because so many people downplay the loss of freedom that restrictions have on our lives. The same people that talk about micro aggressions and how they weigh on people, can’t see that wearing masks, or avoiding going out, or any of these other restrictions is a real loss.
20 years later, and we are still taking off our shoes, well actually I am not because I have TSA pre-check, but most people are. It’s silly. We have TSA patting down grandmothers and kids. Theater.
Whenever I get into social media debates with people about mask mandates, I ask them what is their criteria for eliminating them. None of them really have an answer. A surprising number say that they think there should be mask requirements forever.
I really think the Democratic politicians underestimate how Covid restrictions will affect voting in the next election.
I’ve read these articles saying that Biden is gambling his presidency on these vaccine mandates. Which I approve of, because everyone should be vaccinated. However if the vaccine mandates work to reduce cases and hospitalizations, and the restrictions still stay, it will do no good. People will vote for the guy saying there should be no restrictions.
That’s what I worry about.
On a sidenote, I’m on day three of my hotel quarantine, or jail, here in Salta, Argentina. Being locked in a hotel room with no human contact for seven days sort of sucks. It’s also frustrating since I’ve been vaccinated, and actually had a booster shot. I hope this is not a regular thing.
As always, this whole post was dictated on my phone. I only made a half assed attempt to correct grammatical errors. Don’t hold it against me
Sorry about your quarantine situation--that does suck. I think your "theatre" analogy to taking off shoes at airports (I also have Global Entry/Precheck, thank goodness) is apt.
I was working in DC in 2001 and getting into federal buildings or even big spaces where policy discussions were held was a huge pain that seemed to bear little or no relation to actual security. Much of the time, people were just asked to show a drivers' license, as if the people who flew the 9/11 planes didn't have them.
I was working for the UK government at this time, and one day I had to convey a message from a British Minister to a US cabinet secretary. I wanted to take it myself to make sure it got there in time; this was a Friday and I was dressed very casually. I'm also American. So I show up at this agency and the person who was supposed to meet me at the secretary's entrance isn't there. I, a poorly dressed, obviously non-British person said "Hey, I'm from the Embassy and I have something from Minister X for Secretary Y." They waved me right in!
Pre-vaccines, wearing a mask was annoying--I wear glasses, which were always fogged up. But in the absence of anything better, it was worth it to get out into the world and do things. But now it seems, in many situations, to be just another form of ideological signaling. As I have been since last summer, I'm (temporarily) in a small town on Lake Michigan. There is not a lot to do, and the variant is not raging despite a significant portion of non-vaxxed people (I got vaxxed as soon as I could). But there are A LOT of people walking around OUTSIDE with masks. I work at the library much of the time, which is seldom crowded, and I'm often the only one not wearing a mask. There's also still a bunch of useless hand sanitizer/temp check/agressive cleaning rhetoric and activity going on. I've seen exactly one business (an excellent cidery) talk about improvements to ventilation.
If I felt even the slightest bit ill, I would stay home and/or wear a mask to seek medical care. I kind of get wearing them on planes, although I hope I don't have to wear one on an Amtrak trip I have coming up in a couple of weeks (I probably do). But what we have now just seems to be yet another large-scale morality play.
Which ones don’t have expiration dates? All the rules and regulations that haven promulgated that I’m aware of are E&P rules, and are temporary by definition. The mayors orders in dc have expiration dates. These things get extended when the deadlines approach since the pandemic continues to rage, but that doesn’t mean they’re passed as permanent measures.
Honestly, a lot of your objections read as someone who is upset about the state of things and hasn’t taken the time to understand the way these things actually operate in giver mental bureaucracies. The legal frameworks and underpinnings of these regulatory responses are more complicated and nuanced than you’re implying.
I hope you’re a better lawyer than you are commenter.
Where in my comment that you are replying to did I talk about Covid mandates or Covid precautions specifically?
I was talking about LAWs. rules and precautions in general. You can see that by the way I mentioned governments and corporations.
Furthermore, I state that I wish “all“ laws and rules had expiration dates, implying that I believe some do.
And after 22 years in the military, and working for a large corporation, I think I have a great idea about bureaucracies.
In fact, I guarantee you that in your daily life there is some sort of form or process or procedure that you have to perform for some reason, and you think yourself God this is stupid and serves no purpose. But you’re still doing it. Every single organization in the world has these. Mainly because the people in charge don’t have balls enough, to just say this is stupid. Or the processing paperwork required to resend a rule is just not worth the inconvenience.
Besides, Washington DC famously kept their outdoor mask requirement until May. I mean that’s a long fucking time. Like literally, kids had to wear masks on the playground outside. This is in March or April. When the Covid numbers were super low.
I mean it took you guys till May. Mat for god sake.
Seriously, if that doesn’t show cowardice at the executive level of the Washington DC government, I don’t know what else does.
Hell, I bet they were relieved when they were able to re-implement the mask requirements.
You have a great day!
Sorry for any grammatical errors, I was dictating this in a very snarky voice.
Just to finish the thought since I tapped "post" prematurely: You say "In fact, I guarantee you that in your daily life there is some sort of form or process or procedure that you have to perform for some reason, and you think yourself God this is stupid and serves no purpose."
Absolutely! I don't agree with a large number of the policies put in place around Covid. On specific proposals I'm sure we'd have a lot of agreement as to whether some specific action is a good or bad idea. But there's a big difference between "this policy is silly and not worth it" and "this policy is being put in place to create a permanent state of authoritarian overreach that will be with us forever!" as your original comment was claiming. I think outdoor masking was silly. I think schools should've opened much sooner. I do NOT think that the fact that DC kept its outdoor mask mandate until May is somehow evidence that we will be wearing masks on planes in 10 years time or that the government is really using these as an excuse to impose permanent restrictions that will outlast the pandemic itself. Those sorts of wildly hyperbolic claims about what is really going on here are a little bit unhinged in my mind.
I am asking you which ones do not have expiration dates. I am not aware of any. You "believe" some don't have expiration dates. Which ones? I can only speak to the ones I am personally familiar with, all of which have expirations. But sure, I have not followed every federal or state or local mandate/law/regulation/order/etc., so there may be some that are permanent. I can't prove the negative though. It was a simple question on my part, and one you could address extremely easily by simply providing an example. Just one. I'm not saying you're wrong, which is why I asked for the evidence. Your rant and insults in response are a pretty bizarre reply to someone just asking for an example.
Which "laws" have been passed? Do you understand the difference between a law and a rule/regulation? Your comments imply that you're confused on the precise differences between these and are lumping them together in ways that are not actually correlated to their real life operations. You say that you never talked about "Covid mandates or covid precautions specifically"- but your comment that I responded to laws and rules and precautions. Do you understand that the government imposed the covid mandates and precautions via things like rules, regulations, and Orders? Again, your whole comment thread demonstrates a misunderstanding of the legal underpinnings of how these things actually operate in a governmental setting. Yes, large corporations and the military are bureaucracies- but they function in a fundamentally different way than the federal, state, and local governments all operate. You continue to respond in a way that you don't actually understand these processes or the nuances of how they operate.
So many rules and regulations are completely outdated, ill-suited to current challenges, or actually harmful. I love the idea of a sunset/review, but one problem is, who would have the credibility to carry it out???
A) Lots of areas already lifted mask mandates when cases dropped- the only reason they're still around is because Delta caused a resurgence in cases that public health officials correctly assessed needed to be addressed and mitigated. So you already have your answer- jurisdictions will lift mask mandates when the situation on the ground justifies it. DC (where I live) has specific targets for what needs to happen before mask mandates will not be imposed. So worrying that mask mandates (as opposed to people voluntarily wearing masks) will become permanent is an odd concern given what has actually happened already this year. B) These concerns about authoritarian overreach and permanent state interventions into peoples live long after the pandemic has passed have been raised during every public health emergency in our history- your concerns are mirrored by identical claims made in 1918. The authoritarian states never came to pass after those outbreaks, and there's no reason to think this situation is any different.
Why can't anyone read the next sentence? DC established specific criteria for lifting mask mandates. When those criteria were met they were lifted. When Delta drove caseloads higher they were re-imposed. We have plenty of well done research at this point that demonstrates how effective masks are at reducing spread, so claiming that we have no idea when they're justified or not is just ignoring the evidence, willfully pretending that the situation hasn't moved in the direction you're advocating for when the situation has improved. and sticking to an odd ideological stance based on some unfounded concerns about the looming authoritarian state.
Mask mandates don’t work when everyone is already masked is what the data said. If you want to hinge the whole argument on “you can’t make me!” I guess you’re welcome to do so.
Honestly, anyone still arguing that MASKS don’t work is being willfully obtuse. If you’re arguing that mandates don’t work because people don’t wear masks then you’ve got yourself in a bit of bind given your other arguments- why object to a rule you oppose that nobody complied with? If anything, the vast body of evidence supporting masks efficacy would mean that we should be arguing for more stringent enforcement of mask mandates that require the wearing of high quality masks. It’s a minor inconvenience (despite all the belly aching on here, which I find akin to complaining about having to wear pants in public) that has significant impacts on transmission. It should literally be a no brainer at this point.
In that study, they also educated people at the same time as handing out masks. This led to, for example, an increase in social distancing in the masks-wearing areas. This interestingly contrasts a common expectation that masks would cause people to be less cautious, although it does become a confounding factor. So how much you can attribute to the masks vs. altered behavior is unclear (I am *not* saying it's zero though!).
Regardless, I think the more relevant question now is more whether there is sufficient benefit from *vaccinated* individuals still masking up (remember, mask mandates for the unvaccinated were never really dropped). I think everyone got way too spooked by the Provincetown data, which wasn't so clear-cut despite claims otherwise. The chance of a breakthrough infection is still really low, plus more recent data indicates what we would expect, that when it occurs, it doesn't spread as easily. Have you seen any attempts to estimate how much masking vaccinated people can affect the spread to the unvaccinated? My suspicion is that it would be very low, but I'm open to arguments otherwise.
But anyway, that aside, your point about the quality of the masks is a good one. But the fact that this isn't being stressed more now makes me feel like a lot of this is (perhaps well-intentioned) theater.
Too bad they don’t have a link to the full paper because a lot of questions were left unanswered (indeed, unasked) in that article. Still:
“…tripled mask usage, from only 13% in control villages to 42% in villages where it was encouraged….the number of symptomatic cases was lower in treatment villages than in control villages. The decrease was a modest 9%…”
"This works by X degree" is not justification. It is a data point that can be used to formulate justification. This is a core problem, a problem at the center of the difference between recommendation and policy.
"Live in your house forever" is unquestionably very effective, but few would say it is justified.
Lol... DC did not establish specific criteria. Mayors order is below. And DC is your example???? They had the strictest requirements in the country for the longest time.
I work as a health care attorney in DC"s government. The MOs were not the place where they identified the specific criteria. The Mayor issued guidance, held press conferences, put out powerpoint presentations through the DOH, etc. I've read the MOs (literally had to for work). The MOs are not the sole source of information on this. Spend more time browsing around https://coronavirus.dc.gov/ as a good place to start to understand what was going on here.
And yes, we did have strict requirements. That's the whole point. When the situation changed DC reversed nearly all of them as cases dropped. That runs counter to your argument that these are power grabs intended to become permanent and usher in a new authoritarian state. Even one of THE MOST restrictive jurisdictions in the country relaxed and removed nearly all of the restrictions as soon as the situation improved and cases dropped. That will happen again when more people are vaccinated, delta burns its way through the population, and numbers drop again. It literally already happened once during this pandemic, so there is no reason to think it won't happen again.
You say "almost" that's not good enough. I want ALL restrictions dropped. I know things like outdoor masking might fade away. But indoor masking at the DMV. Or mask mandates at schools. Or masks on airplanes. I am not at all confident about these. But hey.. .at least I know a good healthcare attorney to contact if I want to sue the cities for the restrictions! Has been fun debating. 2 more hours of my 7-day quarantine passed by. Have a great day!
Yes. I do worry about it. Unlike the past we have national media and social media to stoke peoples fears, and our leaders are a lot more risk adverse than they were in the past, because every bad thing is amplified.
And mask mandates were never removed from airplanes. Bottom line, I don't trust people with out a sense of appropriate risk management, and I especially don't trust when people uses terms like "when the situation on the ground justifies it"
Note. I am 100% in favor of vaccine mandate policies. A vaccine is a one time (or three time thing). Mask mandates effect people every day.
I think these concerns are objectively silly and misplaced, but if you want to worry about them then knock yourself out. Let's plan on meeting back here this time next year and evaluating where things stand at that point.
And why would you pick out the "situation on the ground justifies it" as if I'm saying that we should just rely on nebulous claims of when to return to the previous situation? The very next sentence in my comment demonstrated how jurisdictions have defined when it will be justified.
Your jurisdiction might have specific goals, but it's a rarity. And given the federal and state and health district mandates, and the CDCs warbling.
But I will take your bet... To be fair... if the mortality rate is lower than it was in say 2000, and I am still REQUIRED to wear masks on planes or in any non medical setting, you owe me a beer.
My metro decided a month ago that we were living in an Emergency sufficient that it would re-institute a universal indoor mask mandate, but it was not enough of an Emergency to continue updating the coronavirus caseload, hospitalization, etc. numbers on weekends. That went down to work-week only in maybe May or June, and daily updates have not returned.
What an odd graph to base your argument on. "The US has seen a steady downward trend in age adjusted mortality rate for a century. 2020 was so bad it was the highest mortality rate in 20 years! So therefore Covid wasn't that bad and we shouldn't be doing much to mitigate it"....? Covid dramatically reversed a trend that has been ongoing for about a century, and incredibly consistent since the end of WWII. Your own graph shows how anomalous and concerning last year was.
Nope... Because all of us can remember 2000. Wasn't scary at all. I can only assume that you might be a Gen Z and therefore not remember it. But hell... I grew up in the 80s without acting like the sky was falling.
At some point, society needs to rip off the band-aid and remind ourselves that the CDC et al. are organizations that make science-based recommendations and not organizations that set policy.
If the CDC wants to recommend airplane masks forever (FYI, kinda dumb, the air exchange cycle is much more rapid in an airliner than in an office) or masks every flu season, that's fine. Those are probably scientifically-grounded recommendations, in that you will be safer doing that than not doing that. But it would also be safer for me to wear an ice hockey helmet every winter when I go out to shovel snow, in case I slip and fall. I don't do that, because as a policy recommendation it's kind of silly.
To wit: I spent more than a year optimizing my lifestyle according to placing a gigantic weighting factor on respiratory disease prevention. I haven't decreased that weighting factor to zero, but it's not gigantic anymore.
I for one appreciate how, late last year, the CDC consulted the renowned epidemiologists at the national teachers' unions before revising their social distancing recommendations from the WHO's three feet to a more conservative six feet. That's what I call following the science.
This sort of hints at a larger discussion that the CDC just did a really terrible job at pandemic response. Yeah, Donald Trump is a fractal catastrophe in every dimension, but lots of blue states and regions did whatever they wanted without giving a crap about what Donald Trump said. Yet the pandemic was rather awful in those places.
It seems like pandemic response should be a really big part of the CDC's mission. If they totally shat the bed on that, it seems like we should reconsider how the CDC works. We should definitely *not* say "oh, they didn't do well enough, we should throw more money at them!", and I'm confident that this will be the prevailing message.
I think pandemic response (or more broadly contagious diseases) should be the CDC's whole mission. Give the other stuff to someone else. Stay focused on task
Wearing a mask has revealed that we don’t need to get colds or the flu.
My thought is the 180 degree opposite of yours - why wasn’t I wearing a mask on planes, trains and subways this whole time? The Asian countries knew what was what.
I don’t care what you do to tell the truth. If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. I care what do you want to make other people do.
Also, mask wearing in Asia wasn’t as ubiquitous as people make it out to be pre-pandemic. Yes it was more common, but it was usually older people, or people who were sick who wore them. A big part of it was pollution that was prevalent in many Asian cities.
I could go into a long spiel about how people don’t take into account the negatives of mask wearing. How it reduces social connection, limits communication, especially since a lot of human communication is through expressions.
Then there is immunity debt, where there are immune system needs to be exposed to a certain amount of germs and viruses to basically keep in shape. Especially children.
I would never skydive, but I don’t want to ban skydiving. My risk tolerance shouldn’t he forced upon other people.
Plus, way more Asians wanna move to America than Americans want to move to Asia. And when they do move to America, they stop wearing masks.
I’m only interested in what you want other people to do. Do you want to make other people continue to wear masks or not? What is your threshold for that decision.
I work with a number of Asian people. While in February of 2020, they were the first putting on masks, now that they are vaccinated, almost none of them wear a mask unless specifically asked to.
One of the ironies about this thread is people arguing that it’s no big deal if they become permanent in response to my statement that I worry that they will become permanent. Simultaneously other people are arguing that there’s no way they will become permanent. Those two sets of people should start arguing with each other.
Hi started wearing a mask back in February 2020, and used to get into arguments with people that said don’t wear masks. But when I got my second vaccination shot, I said never again unless legally required.
In Boise I only wear my mask in medical facilities or at the airport.
The easy break point is transmission and hospital load. Masks went back on when transmission surged and hospitals saw spiking capacity. Prior to Delta masks had gone away outside of airports and hospitals. I suspect in hospitals they'll stick around which is probably a good idea around patients
The problem is that the benefits of a policy often only accrue to everyone, if everyone participates. And in particular, with masking, my mask protects you, and your mask protects me, because the point of the mask is to capture the exhaled droplets that carry pathogens.
Let's rephrase your statement: "I’m only interested in what you want other people to do. Do you want to make other people drive below 25 mph on narrow residential streets? What is your threshold for that decision?"
Yes, I want to make other people obey speed limits. With the understanding that the way speed limits operate in the US is that they're "more guidelines, than actual rules." Police enforce them with a certain amount of discretion -- and there are epicyclic problems bound up in that, relating to how the discretion gets used. But regardless, it doesn't keep me or my family safe if _we_ obey the speed limit, while a bunch of other people come tearing down our street at 60 mph.
At some point, you have to reach a decision, as a community, about what rules you're going to enforce one everyone, for the good of the community as a whole. And while "democracy + courts that try to adjudicate whether a majority is over-reaching" is an imperfect way to do that, it's better than anything else that we've tried.
Personally I would not vote for a really rigid ongoing mask mandate in all public places. I would be OK, though, with "you must cover at least your mouth on public transit and planes". This idea that going without a mask is a matter of "personal freedom" is just willfully ignorant. Every freedom has its limits. Your freedom to swing your arm ends at the tip of my nose. We have to hash out as a nation where we want to set those limits, and if you don't like where those land, well, go try to win that argument through the democratic process. Either that, or go live off the grid in some cabin in Montana, where your exhalations don't affect other people.
truth be told, it wouldn’t be hard to convince me to wear a mask on a plane.
however, coercive masking makes my first priority pushing back against the coercion, the threat to my autonomy, and the threat to american culture. i don’t want close views of young womens’ faces to become rare. they are a ray of sunlight in an often dreary world.
i certainly think any time a sick person goes out in public they should wear a mask.
They are going to be so many secondary and tertiary marginal costs to this whole pandemic, that we have no idea. Probably things we haven’t even thought of.
Have you ever thought of the difference between what's good for individual actors and what's good for species generally? This is part of the theory of predation, but it applies to many evolutionary processes. So it's fine that you'll be skipping it and that may be what's right, but I wouldn't be so sure you're on the right side of history. 100% of the time, I limit my certainty to non-0% or 100%. ;)
People are generally really bad at estimating downside risks, and even worse at systems thinking. It's just too easy for the dinosaur flight or fight emotional brain to break you when something threatens to upset your day to day peace.
I don't envy the job of the CDC or the Biden administration. They have to put out messaging that is simple and easily understood. Nuanced discussions of risk are neither.
That said, it seems pretty clear that masks in crowded, unventilated areas are net good (i.e. on the airplane, no; in the airport, probably). Same reason I eat food on washed dishes, wash my hands after using the toilet, and otherwise expend a modicum of effort around not getting myself sick. We should probably embrace them, as most of Asia has since SARS the First.
There is a limit to how much change a society can endure in a fast span of time though - and I think a lot of what we are seeing in terms of resistance to these things is a consequence of that.
It is not clear at all that they are a net-good. I can prove it. When given the choice, way more people choose not to wear masks than to wear them.
And since you speak about systems, we need to talk about immunity debt. Being exposed to Germs is a net good. Its how our immune systems keep in shape.
I don't like wearing a mask either, but, the fact that most people may feel as I do doesn't prove they're not a net good. (If by "good" you're referring to something that, on net, saves lives). Not many people enjoy a low calorie lifestyle but following such a regimen would likely do a lot of good.
You got a point. I am actually going to argue that in the long run, more years lived are lost from the precautions then from actual Covid. Years behind on school... equals lower life span. Kids immune systems being hurt... lower life span. Less travel, means less international migration and trade, equals lower life span. But for me net good means Im not annoyed.
I would argue it depends on the germ. I don't see anyone lining up for Polio parties.
No doubt there is nuance there - we probably get some exercise from common cold viruses and that is net good. Kind of like how overuse of antibacterial soap leads to very antibiotic resistant bacteria.
That said, if masks reduce some of the worst of this, especially in large venues with sketchy ventilation, more people versus less people wearing them likely saves enough lives of vulnerable populations (thinking annual flu, post covid) to make it worth it. Even if compliance is uneven and only half of people actually do the thing.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy floated - I think yesterday - the first trial balloon about endemicity, mentioning that we need to soon worry less about cases but more about hospital capacity and death. I want to hear more about that. This tells me they're hearing a lot of people such as yourself (I'm of the same mind) saying that, in the not-so-distant future, the cure will be worse than the disease. I made the political-backlash argument on a FB group about this exact topic the other day.
My personal feeling is that about 2 months after kids can get vaccinated (at least the upcoming 6-12 - I'd extend this for younger ages _provided those are in the works - if they're not happening, don't wait for them_, then I'd stop doing mask mandates.
The U.S. (AFAIK) at least has enough vaccines to vaccinate every eligible person who wants one - once everyone who wants a vaccine (barring individual immune system issues) can get one, we may be "as good as we're going to get", and once we get there, we should stop with the mandates.
I will say that now that I have masks I'll wear them when _I_ feel sick which I didn't do before (if I was sure I was sick I stayed home, but sometimes it seems like allergies? now I can just wear a mask)
"I really worry because so many people downplay the loss of freedom that restrictions have on our lives. The same people that talk about micro aggressions and how they weigh on people, can’t see that wearing masks, or avoiding going out, or any of these other restrictions is a real loss. "
I'm a life-long Democratic voter who is so sick of the Dems performative bull and identity politics and "equity" nonsense that I don't know if I can vote Dem again. Unfortunately, we have only two political parties, and the other one is worse.
I disagree with part of your conclusion, but it's really shocking just how few Democratic campaign/office staffers seem to have ever worked a regular nine-to-five "go to the office, do your regular office bullshit, then go home" real job.
In the land of Not Twitter, I don't know any normal people who invest heavily in that crap.
TBH, in terms of work I came out ahead because Covid made it possible to finally go fully remote and move my family out of the city to an area where I wanted to live.
So I agree the range of experiences on this really has been extreme, and people spend a lot of time talking past each other or missing other folks' viewpoints.
I appreciate your prespective. We each have our own way of risk assessment. While I personally don't mind wearing a mask, it's always benefical to hear other's views. Hopefully we get to the point that wearing a mask, or not wearing a mask, is simply a personal preference.
Hopefully is what I say to my kids when they say they want to go to Disney World... I will never take them. If people said, I think we should have mask mandates until ICUs are only at 70% capacity... then fine. I can go with this. Right now its just arbitrary with moving goalposts.
You say "hopefully we get to that point" as if it's out of our control. So as Rory said, what then are the criteria for getting to them being optional that you're waiting for? I think if this were clearly stated, people might be more understanding.
People are beginning to talk about the exit stragety. It's a bit premature to get very specific about it, but, if we're not yet at the beginning of the end, we may be approaching the end of the beginning. Mask relaxation will be part of this discussion. Denmark has just announced the end of all covid-related restrictions, and I think Ireland is going there next month.
There's no clearly-articulated endpoint for *any* policy, and when lunkheaded boors say "that's how you know they want this power forever", I have no answer to them.
We already saw blue states like California relax restrictions when caseloads were down amid the first wave of vaccinations reaching most adults. I went to a nice outdoor concert back in late May, and I went to see the Black Widow movie.
Right now I think Delta and other emergent variants have people somewhat worried, but the two legit worries were (1) that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated (which definitely are more common than the original strain) might have higher impact with hospitalization and "long COVID" than breakthroughs of the original; and (2) we don't want kids to get infected, because even though it hits them less hard than older adults, it's still not great, and we're seeing _some_ kids get hopsitalized, and some of them even die.
And on (2), well, it's only a matter of time before everyone down to quite young kids can be vaccinated. At that point, it seems certain that we'll see significant loosening of restrictions. A mandate to either be vaccinated, or get tested regularly, if you want to participate in public life _at all_, will definitely help, in terms of reducing the number of exposures vaccinated people face, and reducing the rate at which the virus can mutate into new strains. We'll probably need boosters every year, maybe even every six months for a while, but in the end it'll be fine -- I get a flu shot annually at work, so I don't pick up the flu and give it to my aging parents or my young nieces, all of whom would be more vulnerable to flu than me. And that's fine too.
Yes but they only relaxed restrictions, they didn’t eliminate them. Until they actually eliminate them, I’m wary. Especially when it comes to things like flying.
I hope you’re right. But I can find a surprising number of people that think there should be indoor mask mandates forever.
But they were _right_ to only relax them! It turned out that we were facing an incipient wave from a new variant. Once vaccination extends down to kids, and we get vaccination rates around the country up to 85-90%, it's going to be a lot easier to drop things.
Regarding masking indoors -- honestly I'd be fine seeing masks become heavily normalized for crowded situations like public transit, the way they are in Hong Kong, though I'd agree that an absolutely rigid mandate here would probably be overkill. (I can't read without glasses, and my eyes have always reacted badly to contacts. I can ride a train without needing to read something, but for folks who can't see _at all_ without glasses, I'd want some flexibility for them to at least just cover their mouth and leave their nose free, so they don't fog up.)
fascinating. I respect your opinion, but I have the opposite personal preferences... I don't mind masks at all, and now I'm totally conscious of how much other people used to get their filthy breath on me (especially on the subway). So I'm pretty ok with the idea that masks in crowded places, or whenever you feel sick, will become pretty commonplace here - like it is in parts of Asia, actually.
And I like being able to sing along with the music in grocery stores without anyone seeing my lips move behind the mask!
But that's it... personal preference. And when it comes to personal preferences, the least restrictive preference should win out. (assuming its a wide spread preference).
And no, it won't become commonplace... some will do it.... but it will always be a small minority.
maybe the vaccine mandates (and natural infections amount unvaccinated) will lower incidence enough that an anti-restriction consensus emerges. That’s Biden’s hope. He knows Ds get crushed if covid is still a big deal after this winter
This is troubling because it means Republicans have the opposite incentive. Enabling COVID to keep spreading and killing people is in their self-interest, not just something they might do out of ignorance.
I strongly believe the politics of *vaccination* are in the Democrats' favor and that the more polarized that issue becomes, the better off the Democrats will be. But maybe the Republicans gain more by keeping COVID numbers high than they lose by being perceived as siding with the antivax freaks. That is, maybe the hit they'd take on being associated with antivaxxerism is, in the bigger picture, a worthwhile investment. To counter that, Democrats might really need to go all-in on vitriolically blaming COVID's resilience on antivaxxers, the way the Republicans in 2002 went all-in on allegations that liberals were pro-terrorist and anti-patriotic.
Well, it's entirely possible I'll be proven wrong (we may find out in 14 months) but I suspect it's not going to work out that way for the GOP because their sabotage is playing a meaningful role in acquiring the herd immunity that will benefit the country and its economy in 2022. (and 2024).
Also, if they could content themselves with being merely "neutral" in covid measures — ie, don't do much to help fight the pandemic but don't be absolute lunatics in their obstruction — then they'd be in a stronger position to attack Biden and the Democrats next year if things don't go well. But at this rate, I'd say there's a non-trivial possibility it is *Republicans* who will be blamed by voters if we're in the 7th covid wave in the autumn of 2022 (at minimum Democrats will have a highly plausible angle of attack).
The funny thing to me is that the 'rona is currently a capital letters Big Deal almost exclusively in places that Democrats can't realistically win anyway.
It seems like the biggest electoral threat is newspapers of record excitedly reporting on bad outcomes among the unvaccinated, and these outcomes are very sad but they don't seem to substantially threaten the vaccinated majority.
My guess is that, oh, three years from now COVID will be a distant memory and we'll be living our lives the way we want to. If some things have changed -- e.g., more remote work -- it will be because we like that more rather than for safety. I doubt that we'll even see a lot of changes for the good, such as wearing masks during flu season, because regression to the mean is such a powerful drug.
As Matt says, we are powerfully affected by what just happened in shaping our view of the future. Here in Los Angeles, the January 1994 Northridge earthquake was one such experience, and we were all convinced that another big earthquake was imminent. No reason geologically speaking; it's just the emotional force of presentism. As a community we've made positive changes since then, such as in improved building codes, but I guarantee you that people here are individually no more prepared for, or thinking about, a big earthquake than they were on Jan. 16, 1994, the day before the quake.
I would have agreed with you last spring. The problem is that I think there's a good chance that 3 years from now Covid will not be a distant memory but a constant, mid-level annoying problem from mutant strains until it becomes endemic like any other respiratory virus. You'll have surges and risk of over-filled hospitalizations and masking/social distancing will have to be re-implemented (or continued if never halted). So in this way I think Rory may be right -- that a lot of mandatory masking will remain in place b/c it simply becomes the norm. I can see both sides on this issue: that it makes sense to mitigate infectious disease in general, and that it's truly annoying to some. Personally I only mind it for my exercise class and would really love to go back to that w/o a mask.
1) There was masking and social distancing for the 1918 epidemic but it passed fairly violently and rapidly through the population creating enough herd immunity in several years. And the population had some immunity to influenza already. Currently, we are still far from herd immunity. There's enough partial immunity from vaccination and prior infection that the curve is flattened. My opinion is that eventually everyone may have to be exposed and develop natural immunity, but it will likely take 5-10 years (as MY's prior post described) rather than 2 violent years and it's over.
2) Coronaviruses mutate quicker and are more infectious than influenza so there will be this constant interplay where the virus can mutate to decrease effectiveness of the vaccine and we'll have recurrent surges. Recurrent surges will threaten to overwhelm hospitals and new masking requirements will be implemented all over again. (Or not, as happened recently in Florida, and the hospitals get overwhelmed with a significant number of people dying.)
3) Our population is significantly older than in 1918. Medical care has advanced significantly since then. So instead of people getting sick and either recovering or dying, you have people hospitalized. Which, once again, leads to the possibility of overwhelming hospitals, requiring masking.
So, eventually masking becomes an accepted part of the culture and no one thinks twice about having to mask on airplanes. Just the way no one thinks twice about needing to wear a seatbelt. Anyway, I could be wrong, but this is what I predict.
>>..My opinion is that eventually everyone may have to be exposed and develop natural immunity, but it will likely take 5-10 years...so there will be this constant interplay where the virus can mutate to decrease effectiveness of the vaccine and we'll have recurrent surges.<<
Can doesn't mean "will." Many researchers believe this virus is approaching the physiological limits of its capacity to become more infectious (and/or defeat vaccines):
Is that my take? I don't have a take, I'm not a scientist. And yes, we may indeed be dealing with deadly outbreaks or waves for another half decade. It's possible! I'm simply pointing out there are a number of different viewpoints held by researchers on this topic.
I expect an annual reminder in the form of a PSA or poster in the window of my local CVS. And I’ll stop in and get a shot of a mRNA cocktail that virtually guarantees I will not contract any sort of viral respiratory disease.
Have we not adapted? Global mRNA manufacturing capacity is up orders of magnitude from a year ago. It wouldn’t make sense to shift that capacity to other vaccines when billions are still unvaccinated. PPE is broadly available. Teleworking is more common.
Congress proved once and for all that stimulus works so well it can wake up an economy from deep freeze within a couple months. In March of 2020, I was afraid even four week lockdowns would cause a depression. That fear was common. It has been dispelled.
Finally, the social dissensus over COVID has owes to its having a curiously ambiguous lethality. If it were 5x more lethal, lockdowns would be uncontroversial. If it were 5x less lethal, only scolds would want coercive distancing. Covid isn’t that big a risk for healthy young people but is a moderate risk for older people so it creates a dynamic where some people are fanning hysteria for personally rational reasons and others feel put upon by scolds. The chances the next pandemic is both roughly as lethal and roughly as contagious as covid are actually pretty small.
America did prove adaptive. It experienced high fatalities because it has a shitty public health baseline. Americans under 65 were something like 2.5 times as likely to die if infected as similar Canadians.
The number of obese, addled and unhealthy people in America is staggering. A historian of the French revolution described the peasantry as a person up to his chin in water, even a slight deepening could prove disastrous. The American precariat treads in deeper water than those in other advanced countries.
We did not make a dent in obesity during the pandemic nor did we enact universal healthcare. Our structural deficiencies remain. However, America did a good job with vaccines, teleworking and debt financing.
I strongly suspect the pandemic will increase the appetite for health care reform. It will swing some moderates towards action, whether that proves decisive enough to result in legislation is uncertain.
Next year, Biden should make health care reform front and center.
His slogan should be “Too many americans died of covid because our public health policies are crap.”
I don't live in America, I live in a developing country that provides manufacturing for America. It is pretty clear that we haven't "adapted".
The ongoing global supply chain woes make clear that there's a lot more to the story than whether the richest country on Earth can make 500 million vaccines for itself in short order.
The Great Famine in Ireland wasn’t as bad as Chinese famines in the 19th century because Ireland was part of the UK, which was rich for 1847, and which (begrudgingly and stingily) provided relief. Without public works projects, subsidized emigration and grain purchases, the Irish famine would have been much worse.
Which is to say the richest countries are always able to weather distress better than poor ones. Look at how many people in the developing world die of cholera and in floods. Poor countries usually get poor outcomes
Bad example. Famines are caused by poor governance. If Britain actually cared about individual Irish people, they would have mitigated it. UK governance could have been even worse of course. This is a great topic if Matt Yglesias wants to indulge in more UK bashing. Repeated famines under the British empire, stopped once countries got even minimally competent self-government.
It sounds like you've done you're research so I'll defer to you, but, Ireland lost something like 12% of its population to hunger/disease in five years. Did China go through anything quite that bad?
(But sure, your point about rich countries weathering storms is obviously valid.)
Direct comparison is obtuse, because China is much bigger than Ireland and different regions fall under different weather patterns and have different yields at the same time. However, if you take a given famine prone province of China and compare it to Ireland, it was clearly much worse.
The Brits had a lot of prejudices against the Irish. If they had been as willing to borrow money to fight the famine as they were to fight Russian expansion during the crimean war, mortality could have been kept to a minimum. However, they did plough 1 or 2% of GDP into famine relief. Virtually no one starved the first year after the potato crop failed, but then compassion fatigue set in. It would have been much worse if the UK had been at the same level of development As 1847 China.
This doesn't seem consistent with the research from Amartya Sen, who claims it isn't really the level of development, but whether local political elites actually have a stake in the local population not starving. In imperial situations, the local elites often don't care whether locals live or die as long as resources can continue to be extracted.
>>Direct comparison is obtuse, because China is much bigger than Ireland<<
Then, don't make them? Your initial claim was that "The Great Famine in Ireland wasn’t as bad as Chinese famines in the 19th century." Um, yes, it very much was from the perspective of the Irish. (Obviously nothing in Ireland is going to be as large in scale in terms of sheer numbers as any data out of China).
The death toll from the Irish famine is estimated to have been about a million people out of a then population of approximately eight million, or some 12%. I can't find any evidence of a famine in China killing more than about 8% of the population (in any century). But sure, the death toll in Ireland would have been larger still had London not been so generous (/s).
ireland was not a country in 1847. it was a distinctive region of the uk, which has a population of 26 million in 1841. if you are doing national comparisons, the 4% death toll in ireksnd was higher than the 8% death toll in china, and there were repeated mass mortality events in china versus only one in ireland.
conversely, one can compare similar geographies and compare ireland to similarly sized regions of china, in which case chinese famines were much, much worse.
nor is it the case that london was “so generous,” they were pretty tight fisted and let a million people starve. however, publix and private aid probably saved a million people who otherwise would have starved, in which case the irish famine would have been like the aforementioned regional famines in china.
sorry i didn’t say “regional chinese famines” earlier
I still have a big box of oatmeal in the basement bought out of fear that a just-in-time supply chain might legitimately collapse. That is a very distant memory.
Another aspect of September & October 2001 that might not come across if you didn't live through it is that the 9/11 attacks were followed by anthrax attacks and the DC snipers. Everyone was freaking out from the 9/11 attacks, and then letters with anthrax in them starting showing up in politicians' and media people's mail, and random people were getting shot by a sniper rifle in the DC area. And the anthrax & sniper attacks carried on for weeks, constantly in the news. People kept hearing about the latest attack, and worrying about the next one.
So there was a sense that this was the new normal - that the sense of safety that we used to have was illusory because really there was very little preventing someone from killing people if they wanted to. We were under attack, they'd killed a lot of people (9/11), they were capable of sophisticated technical work to make scary weapons (anthrax), and they could strike anyone anywhere at any time (DC snipers).
Yeah, I was there too and it was insane. White vans! The most disturbing thing for me, though, was when the administration (I think this just before the Iraq invasion, so there was a high-level terror alert under the official choropleth) told people to cover their windows with plastic sheeting and duct tape. !!!!!
As has become abundantly and painfully clear, almost nobody knows what they're doing. People who expect the government to save us might want to examine the evidence. There are a lot of great, smart, and well-meaning people who work at all levels of government, but the institutions are not doing well on many of the tests.
I was in high school but I remember some of that clearly. I also remember the color coded threat levels that were on TV constantly for months afterwards. I think the threat level thing stuck around for a whole decade. You were always aware of “chatter” and conscious of the “fact” that a “terrorist attack could happen at any time”. The climate of fear was real and never quite went away.
We still make people take off their shoes because one guy unsuccessfully tried to bomb a plane with a shoe.
The interesting part of airport security theater is how easy it is to buy your way out of it. I have PreCheck, Global Entry AND Clear. It seems like a waste of money until you are running late and walk right past all the people in their socks awkwardly struggling with their belts.
That's okay, when I got my first visa I think I promised that I wasn't a member of the Nazi Party between 1933 and 1945 (both of my parents were born after 1945).
Also you had to have not been arrested for any reason within the last ten years, or twice in your entire life, regardless of the outcome of those cases. Got arrested at an Iraq War protest in 2003 and again at BLM? Both charges dropped because they were just randomly rounding people up? Sorry, no Global Entry for you.
You first have to answer the question "is that effective at catching terrorists and preventing terrorism?" Then you can think about the resources expended, the opportunity costs and any side benefits (maybe it makes people feel safer). Then you can decide if it is bad.
I have been through this process (more than once), and I don't think that the goal is catching anyone. I think that the goal is to make you deportable if you are caught having done any of these things. The US government can even strip the citizenship of naturalized people if they are found to have lied in these forms.
I don't know the details, but my guess is that the only reason why this guy could be deported after so many years in this country is that he had answered "no" somewhere where he should have answered "yes". Otherwise, I guess you just have a law-abiding naturalized US citizen and you can't do anything about his Nazi past.
Now, admittedly that doesn't work with suicide bombers, but maybe it works with people who provide assistance or help plot stuff.
Oh, and yes, it's funny that I have promised the US government that I'm not a human trafficker, former member of the NSDAP, or someone who has participated in a genocide, but it doesn't take too much time. I just had to read many such questions on a webpage and select "no" on all of them.
The other stuff like background checks are the actual meat. In practice, the question just ends up being annoying and embarrassing for everyone involved isolated of any of the broader ethical implications. Of course, I'm not of a demographic whose answer would be highly scrutinized so I'd say it's useless at best and potentially abusive at worse, though maybe there's some legal "lying to the FBI" type reasoning behind it.
I am convinced at the core that a shampoo mini bottle industry lobbyist found their way onto the commission that decides what rules to keep after the initial fervor wears off.
The liquids thing bothers me more than the shoe thing. There may have been some assholes plotting, years ago, to use some sort of liquid explosive. But they never got anywhere and a liquid that could conceivably explode looks, smells and behaves nothing like water or toothpaste.
“The liquids thing bothers me more than the shoe thing.”
Back when that first came about there was a story in the NYT that featured comments from a few affected airline passengers. One passenger quoted was - you can’t make this shit up - a Frenchman who lamented that his cologne had been confiscated before boarding his Paris - JFK flight. “It is a long flight; you want to be able to freshen up,” he lamented.
I thought at the time, and still maintain, that if the silver lining of that very dark cloud on 9/11 was that, at the margins, a few Eurotrash will decide to shower before boarding a flight to the US because their precious cologne will be unavailable, well, then, that’s just the way it is.
The issue in my mind isn’t that liquids are obvious so much as that they were required to give enough exceptions that the rule seems useless. Medical liquids, baby formula, and up to a gallon of 3 oz bottles are all fine, if I recall correctly. I could see putting a limit on total quantity of liquids, but it’s hard to imagine how a water bottle poses any more risk than a set of twenty travel size cosmetics bottles.
<I> but it’s hard to imagine how a water bottle poses any more risk than a set of twenty travel size cosmetics bottles.</I>
For one thing all 12 bottles need to be combined first, right? I think mixing dangerous chemicals in an airplane bathroom poses a significant challenge.
There is an upper limit on the total liquids as all the containers have to fit in a single clear quart sized bag.
My favorite TSA jackbooted thug story is the guy that confiscated a mini-cooler of chilled crab meat because the ice gel pack would eventually melt and become a liquid.
I think the quart bag was chosen because that’s below the volume of off the shelf chemicals you’d need to bring down a commercial jet. Best case you’d breech the hull and cause a loss of cabin pressure but they’d be able to land safely.
“ The plot involved liquid explosives – concentrated hydrogen peroxide – to be smuggled on board in sports drinks bottles, dyed orange with Tang.”
In the UK they drilled a tiny hole in the bottle to drain the liquid and refilled it with the concentrated H2O2 so the tamper proof cap would be intact.
There was a real plot just as there was a real shoe bomber. But the plot never got anywhere and it was never clear it would work.
It wasn’t just the sealed bottles – they also had a whole apparatus to detonate it. And concentrated hydrogen peroxide is one of those chemicals that’s pretty distinct.
I mean you can always come up with some plot that might work – and you can put in an action movie screenplay – but in terms of practical applications for millions of travelers looking out for it offers little, if any, benefit.
But to your point about action movie plots - while there was some info available about the 9/11 hijackers they didn’t put it together. I think your dismissiveness could have been an issue. As if that plan could work! Until it did.
Recreating steerage from the 19th century in airplanes does not seem like a positive political development. It would be interesting to see some research on how airport security has influenced opinions about class.
Ok good. I try and tell people to spend the extra $25 for Global. You get an ID and pre-check. Clear is awesome to. I get it via Delta for being a Diamond.
Even better: get Nexus. All the perks of Global Entry, at half the cost. (Though the credit cards won't cover it, and you have to interview with Canada as well, so it may be less practical for many.)
I don't know if it's still the case, but back when I had only pre-check (in the days when being an elite frequent flyer member was enough), I got picked for secondary screening every handful of times I went through. After getting global entry, it never happened again.
I guess I should look into Clear more since I can get it for free now. The pre-check line has never been long enough that it seems it would matter though.
Maybe I've just been lucky then, although I had noticed times creeping up to 10 minutes or so. Anyway, I'll go ahead and figure out how to sign up for clear now so I have the option at least - thanks!
I agree that "we" have not learned much from COVID-19 but the mainly I think "they" (the public health people) have not learned: 1) tell the truth, always, 2) use cost benefit analysis in making decisions 3) in those cost-benefit analyses take about of the costs of delay 4) make recommendations to the public on the basis of the benefits to others not just to themselves of following the advice and explain the recommendations that way, 5) Constantly collect data, update recommendations on the basis of changing data and explain why recommendations are changing, 6) make most recommendations in the form of "when X conditions prevail in your environment, do Y" and help decision makers in each environment to have the information about conditions X.
It’s not always easy to tell “the Truth,” in the sense that the truth is often “we don’t know.” But the one thing we need to hammer into people speaking for the CDC and other public health authorities (and probably political leaders in general) is NEVER consciously shade the truth in an attempt to guide behavior in a particular direction, because that will always backfire. The fiasco early on with telling people not to wear masks (with the purpose of preserving limited PPE supplies) was a disaster and had the opposite of the intended effect—PPE hoarding and price gouging was through the roof while people who could have been wearing cloth masks reserved those for medical personnel (for whom they were inadequate) instead. Medical personnel would probably have been less exposed to COVID if regular folks were wearing their homemade cloth masks and thus lowering the case count until PPE production could catch up with demand.
I think there was also a problem in that the medical establishment really had convinced themselves that normies just can’t use masks effectively, and that masks don’t matter anyway unless you’re dripping blood or saliva. I *hope* they’ve now learned that they had overreacted against the miasma theory when Semmelweis finally taught them to wash their hands.
People wear masks to do construction and a variety of other normie jobs. A short bit before the pandemic arrived in the US, I watched a bunch of training videos for nurses, construction workers, etc on properly wearing an N95 and it's not that complicated. If instead of repeating that masks don't help they had put together a media campaign educating people on how to use masks appropriately that would probably have been more useful.
There ought to be no problem with saying we don't know. It fact that is a necessarily component of constantly changing messages and recommendations. The fact that the hand-washing recommendation never went away but just sort of got ignored, was one factor in undermining PH officials' credibility. Another was not being more transparent with their models. "The spread is better worse than we predicted because of X."
The biggest thing I’ve wanted from many institutions this year (primarily my employer, but also my state and the cdc and others) is some sort of statement of conditions that would lead to a change in policy. Right now the university says they have contingencies for changes in instruction of things get bad (we aren’t allowed to require masks or vaccines) but hasn’t said what “bad” is. With 5% of students testing positive in the past two weeks, and one student dying this morning, I assume we’ve reached bad conditions, but they have given no indication of whether we have. And they haven’t told us what the contingency plan is.
It would also have been nice when Abbott imposed the mask mandate last summer, or lifted it in March, if he had stated some level of case prevalence that would change either of those.
No link to the study and I can't find it. Many of my seniors got their second shots in Jan and Feb. I've had one or two hospitalized with breakthrough infections now, or very sick at home. I have quietly told several to go into the pharmacies and see if they could get a booster and several of the pharmacies see an 80 or 90 year-old and will give the booster even though they don't meet the definition for immunocompromised.
Today I get an email from LA County Public health warning/ threatening providers and pharmacies that boosters are only authorized for immunocompromised, and DO NOT GIVE BOOSTERS to anyone else. CDC has previously very narrowly defined immunocompromised. Being old and having multiple medical problems does not qualify. So their own studies show waning immunity, more hospitalizations and death, but we are not allowed to protect those we consider vulnerable.
And note that the CDC articles all mention the waning effectiveness for those over 75, but none mention boosters. The Politico article brings up the subject of boosters, but the CDC articles don't mention them.
Hi Ellen. Thanks for sending me the link to the studies. I would not expect the CDC articles to comment on boosters specifically. The studies report the data and at the end, suggest possible reasons for the decline in immunity but it is not the purpose of the study to claim that boosters per se would fix that decline. They suggest: "This moderate decline should be interpreted with caution and might be related to changes in SARS-CoV-2, waning of vaccine-induced immunity with increased time since vaccination, or a combination of factors. "
Fair enough: ie - we see a decline in those over 75, but further studies are needed to investigate this decline and see if boosters truly mitigate that decline. Here are my complaints:
1) Early data from Israel does show benefit of the boosters
2) There is no data supporting the "8 month" booster rule they have declared. Where do they get 8 months from? Seems to me it's arbitrary and designed to allow CDC /FDA to get the boosters approved and to prevent a mad rush if they set the time at 6 months.
3) Doctors are desperate to save lives and help during this pandemic. If it is our clinical judgement that someone is at particularly high risk for Covid and is now 8-9 months out from their vaccine, is it unreasonable to suggest a booster given the data that is available? And if it reasonable, why threaten doctors and pharmacies doing our best to care for patients?
4) The J&J vaccine. I've complained about this before. It's not as effective and their rules bar people from seeking one of the mRNA vaccines. And those that are immunocompromised, who are eligible for a booster can't get one if they received J&J initially. How does that make any sense?
One of the singular things about 9/11 is so many Americans all saw and experienced it the same way and it was so visceral and clear in its visual presentation as to invite largely the same immediate conclusions. One thing that’s surprised me about the pandemic is that it’s experienced more as millions of individual experiences as opposed to one collective national experience. And most of it is very boring. Some people have family members or friends who have died or have gotten very sick, but those things don’t happen viscerally in front of you. Understanding the pandemic accurately requires some imagination and abstract thought, which is hard. That’s why it would be nice if our public health and political leadership were performing better. They’re supposed to be the ones doing a lot of that thinking for us, but they seem caught up in the same mental traps as the rest of us.
It’s interesting to look back at the 19th century jurisprudence about vaccines, quarantines, etc. It was a world where communicable disease was an ever present threat - smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, TB, cholera…
As an example Abe Lincoln had 4 sons - Robert, Edward, Willie and Tad. Only Robert lived past his teens. Edward died at 3 of TB. Willie died at 11 of typhoid fever and Tad died at 18 also of TB. And that was not at all unusual. If you go to any old cemetery you’ll find a lot of tomb stones July, 6 1842 September 1, 1844.
I’m firmly convinced that the reason for anti-vax sentiment, going back well before the pandemic, is that we’re spoiled in this regard, which allows people to be idiots.
As others note, COVID just isn’t dangerous enough to really knock us out of that.
I think there's a lot of truth to that. There was an article somewhere recently about Portugal which has 99% vaccination rates among 65+. The article said it was because during their long dictatorship public health was pretty bad, so people don't take vaccines for granted.
That’s a big part of it. I also think a simple rear of needles drives a lot of that. Bob the construction worker doesn’t want to admit to himself or his friends and family that he’s really really afraid of needles. So when he hears some conspiracy theory he latches onto it.
IIRC they are working on a vaccine pill. I wonder if they marketed it as a single dose pre-exposure immune booster how much antivax sentiment would disappear.
I think we also tend to forget the impact of the anthrax mail coming a week or so later. That really cemented the panic, especially when it dragged on with no resolution.
One thing I hope we get is better infectious disease surveillance. That means I want to be able to check the weather site for the current local flu case count report, the way I can check up pollen conditions. If there’s a bad flu outbreak like 2017-18, and it’s bad in my area, I want to get a “flu outbreak warning” or “flu outbreak watch”, the way I get “winter storm warnings” or “tornado watches”.
Just like most of these weather warnings, most of these public health warnings should come with no mandatory conditions, unless things get especially bad. But telling me when it would be good and prosocial to wear a mask or move my meeting to Zoom seems like it would be nice.
I never, ever shared my countrymen's hysteria post-9/11, and actually never even understood it. I lived in Europe during the 1990s, and terrorism was a regular thing in France and the UK and other places. I flew out of Heathrow in March 1994 while the IRA was mortaring the runways. In Paris when the Metro was bombed by Algerians, the authorities would close the affected station and continue operations as usual. This, I believed, was the correct response to terrorism; anything else, to repeat a cliche, was letting the terrorists win. Terrorism was simply another of many lethal risks we accept every day, and never a very likely risk for any particular individual.
When 9/11 occurred I was airborne, flying from the US to London, and first learned about the attack when walking down the High Street in Richmond I saw the photos on the newsracks. My reaction was, "Well, I guess it was about time." A major attack on the US was inevitable, as far as I was concerned (it was also instantly obvious the same modus operandi could never again be employed for subsequent attacks, which made the erection of a vast security apparatus to defend against similar attacks seem . . . bizarre).
And I waited a week for global air travel to resume so I could get back home. Stop all air travel around the world for a week? Not an overreaction at all!
Somehow I felt no more vulnerable post-9/11 than I did before, since I'd been more or less living with terrorism alongside millions of British and French people for years. I never believed the US was somehow "special," with some kind of native immunity from terrorism; it was simply a matter of time.
Also, I didn't think terrorism could really be effectively prevented in a free society, if that society wanted to remain free. Pretty quickly it became evident that Americans were happy to jettison, wholesale, hard-won freedoms in the wake of 9/11, and were even eager to repeat all the mistakes of Vietnam by invading Afghanistan. I never understood it, and could only goggle incredulously when, after asking an airline worker why I could no longer mail a letter from inside an American airport, the response was, "Because of 9/11!", as if I was a child asking why adult dogs were so much bigger than puppies.
One of the the saddest aspects of the post 9/11 world, to me, was how the British, who had stoically maintained their dignity throughout the Troubles, and the French as well, lost their collective shit along with the Americans. It was as if American fear and neurosis infected an otherwise well-adjusted polity on the other side of the Atlantic.
Twenty years on, our hysterical overreaction to a viral pandemic is no longer surprising.
I recall being told by countless private security guards and even public officials that I couldn’t take photos of this or that thing, because terrorism. My response was invariably some version of, “Don’t be absurd,” and to go on taking photos.
I was really disappointed with how rapidly US hysteria spread around the world. Even more annoying is that European airport security decided to actually take the insane fantasies of the US seriously and make a genuine effort to prevent the sort of nonsense TSA was cosplaying at preventing. As a result, European airport security is way more onerous than US airport security.
I'd like to know more about your personal experience as a budding public intellectual in that era, Matt. I know you've written some about why you were wrong about the Iraq War, but I think there's more to explore there about the interplay of fear, certainty, identity, and epistemology.
If I was betting, I'd say a cyberattack is most likely to be next attack on the US that has an impact comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, in leaving us shocked, alarmed and angry at how unprepared and caught by surprise we were.
And how to respond to a cyberattack that seriously disrupts civilian life is ambiguous, assuming it's even clear who to hold responsible- should it be met only in kind, with a cyber counterattack, with bombs and missiles, economic sanctions, etc?
It seems likely that a scared and angry US public would get behind some tragic miscalculations and errors of judgment as far as our response to that situation.
SO MUCH THIS. Our government and corporate actors do not take cyber-security seriously, even a little bit, and the cyber-security industry has been weakened through exploitation by profiteers.
The last Ezra Klein podcast with Tyler Cowen was a surprisingly frustrating listen. They frame up this tension between growth both reducing global inequality and climate change on opposing sides... and then just move on. Then Tyler calls out the loss of academic freedom as a major issue ... an issue Ezra simply has rejected previously as not at all being a big deal - and cuts to commercial. Could have been so much better.
Pandemics have happened before. They will happen again. While some people have argued that climate change and deforestation is likely to result in more pandemics, as a nonexpert I remain unconvinced - the number of people having direct interactions with animals is if anything likely to decline as agriculture becomes increasingly mechanised in the rest of the world, and cold chains make their way into the remaining places were they do not currently extend.
So there is absolutely no reason to think that pandemics on the scale of covid-19 are coming down the pike every five years or so. Another pandemic could happen tomorrow - the pandemic dice have essentially no memory. But I think it's reasonable to assume that global pandemics of this magnitude won't be a thing we're dealing with every few years.
By contrast, there was every reason to assume the worst about 9/11 - a small group of dedicated terrorists had figured out how to murder thousands of Americans, and it wasn't (and still isn't) hard to dream up plausible ways in which this could be repeated. As you say, that assumption was wrong. But it wasn't totally unreasonable.
*However*, while pandemics are rare, I think we can all agree that this one has been consequential enough that we collectively should invest a heck of a lot of effort into reducing the risk and consequences of another one.
And luckily we've learned a lot about things we can do on both counts.
One relatively straightforward (if expensive) mitigation that sensible governments of rich-enough countries will make is ensuring indoor air quality standards are much improved.
Another thing that we could do is invest in a flexible disease testing infrastructure on a massive scale. Despite the CDC's screwup, we can develop tests for novel viruses within days if needs be; if we could deploy that on a scale that everybody in the country could be tested very regularly during a pandemic *and* isolate those people who test positive, it's going to be pretty damned hard for a respiratory virus of any sort to make much progress (though it has to be very regular because things like flu have a very short incubation period).
The other thing we can and should do (carefully!) is go out and look for other potential pandemic viruses and develop candidate vaccines and therapies for them. We were lucky that research on coronaviruses had identified the spike protein as the thing for a vaccine to target; we should try and do the same - or more - for as many of the other potential pandemic respiratory viruses as we can. Additionally, if we could identify a bunch of candidate drugs that inhibit those viruses, perhaps even run some of them to the point of Phase 1 trials, we'll have a massive head start on the next pandemic.
That said, the USA has a fairly unique problem with pandemic response with a substantial fraction of its population seemingly prepared to die to own the libs. Dunno what you can do about that.
>>>I hope I’ll be wrong again, this time about pandemics. But I worry.<<<
In my view by far the worry that's most unjustifiably under the radar (that is, people should be a lot more concerned) is nuclear war. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War, and during that time most folks tended to regard an actual USSR-USA shooting war as unthinkable (not literally so, of course, lots of people get paid to think about things like this!) in that it would likely lead to a nuclear exchange.
In recent years we've seen a terrifying (to me, at least, though I sometimes feel like I'm screaming in the in the middle of the forest where no one can hear) increase in geopolitical tension in the Indo-Pacific. One of these days some general somewhere is going to get trigger happy.
It seems like we had a window in the 1990s to *really* do something substantive to minimize the probability of a nuclear holocaust. But we squandered the opportunity. And so here we are back where we started at just about the time Gorbachev came to power.
You piqued my curiosity (was I using "unthinkable" incorrectly?). Webster's says the word means:
unthinkable
1: not capable of being grasped by the mind
2: being contrary to what is reasonable, desirable, or probable : being out of the question
So yeah, that's my recollection (and I said "most" not "all"). YMMV.
What I was really getting at is: I don't get the same vibe WRT discussions of China/USA conflict. A lot of people seem to talk **casually** about a shooting war between the two superpowers these days in a manner that wasn't present in the 80s—it's as if they're unaware the PRC has a highly lethal and growing nuclear arsenal. In a word, Americans (worryingly) aren't as terrified at the prospect of a Sino-US hot war as they were of Soviet-US hot war. And that's not good. Because fear is a good motivator. In the 80s there was a robust disarmament movement. There were protests. There was a lot of worried discussion about the doomsday clock getting closer to midnight. And there was concern in officialdom, too. And eventually that concern translated into a relaxation in Cold War tensions and big cuts (though not big enough) in nuclear arsenals.
We're sleepwalking into very dangerous times, I'm afraid.
Out of curiosity, what do you rate the odds of a conventional PRC-USA military conflict breaking out? Imagine, say, Xi ordering the PLA to take Taiwan. Does a US president order the Pentagon to defend that island with US forces? Or not? And there are other scenarios, too: most likely a naval confrontation in the South China Sea that—perhaps via a miscalculation at the command level—goes "hot" and before you know it either the US or the PRC has had some ships sunk and a bunch of sailors killed. Surely it's vanishingly unlikely that either the US or the Chinese would launch a nuclear first strike. That's effectively signing a national suicide note. But the chances of a "conventional" war breaking out strikes me as worryingly high. That is my fear (because in such a situation there's surely a non-zero chance either side would be very tempted to use its most powerful weapons system if it felt the war were going badly).
Wouldn't this be the first shooting war directly between two nuclear powers? I tend to think there is a logic in this, that nuclear weapons suppress wars between Great Powers.
How vulnerable is China to a naval blockade? Is it self sufficient in food and energy like the US? I don’t believe it is. Would the Chinese public see empty supermarket shelves and a cratering economy as a sign that the CCP has lost the Mandate of Heaven?
I think it is at least a possibility that one reason we haven't seen more terror attacks is that (1) we destroyed the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and denied the organization a physical space to, well, organize, (2) the United States government has engaged in a lot of morally dubious and unsavory, but sometimes effective, covert action around the world to root out "pre-terrorists." Obviously you can't just assume that to be true, nor can you trust the government's word on that (if they were talking), but neither can we assume it's false.
People aren't as afraid of pandemics because they see viruses as non-sentient and therefore predictable as long as the right people are aware of the threat. But yes that's probably overconfident.
It's very probable that undercover FBI agents radicalized more potential terrorists in the United States than all the fundamentalist Muslim proselytizers combined.
My guess would be that there have been a range of interventions, both foreign and domestic, that we're only dimly aware of, most of which were ineffective and/or unnecessary, but not all. Some of both the ineffective and effective varieties have also been immoral, but again, not all.
This is all unknowable though. We can only guess based on how government tends to work when it tries to kill flies with bazookas.
I don't think there's a ton of evidence for the "blowback" theory though. Or to refine that a bit, any blowback that we've generated has been only mildly threatening at worst - as in, our own actions may have radicalized some potential terrorists but only incompetent ones. That's bad because it has messed with people for no good reason, but large-scale terrorism like 9/11 requires sophistication and coordination, and if you don't have something like an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, then it's very difficult for any aspiring terrorist to get anything serious done.
I worry too. But I worry more about all these Covid precautions becoming permanent. I travel for a living, and I am on planes all the time. I’ve had something like 150 flights this year. I hate masks. I can’t stand them. I’m afraid that masks on planes will never go away, because people have no sense of operational risk management.
Operational risk management is a phrase we used in the military. It was a study of how you mitigate risk in proportion to your goals and the benefits gained.
I really worry because so many people downplay the loss of freedom that restrictions have on our lives. The same people that talk about micro aggressions and how they weigh on people, can’t see that wearing masks, or avoiding going out, or any of these other restrictions is a real loss.
20 years later, and we are still taking off our shoes, well actually I am not because I have TSA pre-check, but most people are. It’s silly. We have TSA patting down grandmothers and kids. Theater.
Whenever I get into social media debates with people about mask mandates, I ask them what is their criteria for eliminating them. None of them really have an answer. A surprising number say that they think there should be mask requirements forever.
I really think the Democratic politicians underestimate how Covid restrictions will affect voting in the next election.
I’ve read these articles saying that Biden is gambling his presidency on these vaccine mandates. Which I approve of, because everyone should be vaccinated. However if the vaccine mandates work to reduce cases and hospitalizations, and the restrictions still stay, it will do no good. People will vote for the guy saying there should be no restrictions.
That’s what I worry about.
On a sidenote, I’m on day three of my hotel quarantine, or jail, here in Salta, Argentina. Being locked in a hotel room with no human contact for seven days sort of sucks. It’s also frustrating since I’ve been vaccinated, and actually had a booster shot. I hope this is not a regular thing.
As always, this whole post was dictated on my phone. I only made a half assed attempt to correct grammatical errors. Don’t hold it against me
Sorry about your quarantine situation--that does suck. I think your "theatre" analogy to taking off shoes at airports (I also have Global Entry/Precheck, thank goodness) is apt.
I was working in DC in 2001 and getting into federal buildings or even big spaces where policy discussions were held was a huge pain that seemed to bear little or no relation to actual security. Much of the time, people were just asked to show a drivers' license, as if the people who flew the 9/11 planes didn't have them.
I was working for the UK government at this time, and one day I had to convey a message from a British Minister to a US cabinet secretary. I wanted to take it myself to make sure it got there in time; this was a Friday and I was dressed very casually. I'm also American. So I show up at this agency and the person who was supposed to meet me at the secretary's entrance isn't there. I, a poorly dressed, obviously non-British person said "Hey, I'm from the Embassy and I have something from Minister X for Secretary Y." They waved me right in!
Pre-vaccines, wearing a mask was annoying--I wear glasses, which were always fogged up. But in the absence of anything better, it was worth it to get out into the world and do things. But now it seems, in many situations, to be just another form of ideological signaling. As I have been since last summer, I'm (temporarily) in a small town on Lake Michigan. There is not a lot to do, and the variant is not raging despite a significant portion of non-vaxxed people (I got vaxxed as soon as I could). But there are A LOT of people walking around OUTSIDE with masks. I work at the library much of the time, which is seldom crowded, and I'm often the only one not wearing a mask. There's also still a bunch of useless hand sanitizer/temp check/agressive cleaning rhetoric and activity going on. I've seen exactly one business (an excellent cidery) talk about improvements to ventilation.
If I felt even the slightest bit ill, I would stay home and/or wear a mask to seek medical care. I kind of get wearing them on planes, although I hope I don't have to wear one on an Amtrak trip I have coming up in a couple of weeks (I probably do). But what we have now just seems to be yet another large-scale morality play.
The issue is... for all governments and corporations... its easy to issue rule and precautions. It's extremely difficult to eliminate them.
Personally, I think all laws and rules should have an expiration date.
Which ones don’t have expiration dates? All the rules and regulations that haven promulgated that I’m aware of are E&P rules, and are temporary by definition. The mayors orders in dc have expiration dates. These things get extended when the deadlines approach since the pandemic continues to rage, but that doesn’t mean they’re passed as permanent measures.
Honestly, a lot of your objections read as someone who is upset about the state of things and hasn’t taken the time to understand the way these things actually operate in giver mental bureaucracies. The legal frameworks and underpinnings of these regulatory responses are more complicated and nuanced than you’re implying.
I hope you’re a better lawyer than you are commenter.
Where in my comment that you are replying to did I talk about Covid mandates or Covid precautions specifically?
I was talking about LAWs. rules and precautions in general. You can see that by the way I mentioned governments and corporations.
Furthermore, I state that I wish “all“ laws and rules had expiration dates, implying that I believe some do.
And after 22 years in the military, and working for a large corporation, I think I have a great idea about bureaucracies.
In fact, I guarantee you that in your daily life there is some sort of form or process or procedure that you have to perform for some reason, and you think yourself God this is stupid and serves no purpose. But you’re still doing it. Every single organization in the world has these. Mainly because the people in charge don’t have balls enough, to just say this is stupid. Or the processing paperwork required to resend a rule is just not worth the inconvenience.
Besides, Washington DC famously kept their outdoor mask requirement until May. I mean that’s a long fucking time. Like literally, kids had to wear masks on the playground outside. This is in March or April. When the Covid numbers were super low.
I mean it took you guys till May. Mat for god sake.
Seriously, if that doesn’t show cowardice at the executive level of the Washington DC government, I don’t know what else does.
Hell, I bet they were relieved when they were able to re-implement the mask requirements.
You have a great day!
Sorry for any grammatical errors, I was dictating this in a very snarky voice.
Just to finish the thought since I tapped "post" prematurely: You say "In fact, I guarantee you that in your daily life there is some sort of form or process or procedure that you have to perform for some reason, and you think yourself God this is stupid and serves no purpose."
Absolutely! I don't agree with a large number of the policies put in place around Covid. On specific proposals I'm sure we'd have a lot of agreement as to whether some specific action is a good or bad idea. But there's a big difference between "this policy is silly and not worth it" and "this policy is being put in place to create a permanent state of authoritarian overreach that will be with us forever!" as your original comment was claiming. I think outdoor masking was silly. I think schools should've opened much sooner. I do NOT think that the fact that DC kept its outdoor mask mandate until May is somehow evidence that we will be wearing masks on planes in 10 years time or that the government is really using these as an excuse to impose permanent restrictions that will outlast the pandemic itself. Those sorts of wildly hyperbolic claims about what is really going on here are a little bit unhinged in my mind.
Sure.
I am asking you which ones do not have expiration dates. I am not aware of any. You "believe" some don't have expiration dates. Which ones? I can only speak to the ones I am personally familiar with, all of which have expirations. But sure, I have not followed every federal or state or local mandate/law/regulation/order/etc., so there may be some that are permanent. I can't prove the negative though. It was a simple question on my part, and one you could address extremely easily by simply providing an example. Just one. I'm not saying you're wrong, which is why I asked for the evidence. Your rant and insults in response are a pretty bizarre reply to someone just asking for an example.
Which "laws" have been passed? Do you understand the difference between a law and a rule/regulation? Your comments imply that you're confused on the precise differences between these and are lumping them together in ways that are not actually correlated to their real life operations. You say that you never talked about "Covid mandates or covid precautions specifically"- but your comment that I responded to laws and rules and precautions. Do you understand that the government imposed the covid mandates and precautions via things like rules, regulations, and Orders? Again, your whole comment thread demonstrates a misunderstanding of the legal underpinnings of how these things actually operate in a governmental setting. Yes, large corporations and the military are bureaucracies- but they function in a fundamentally different way than the federal, state, and local governments all operate. You continue to respond in a way that you don't actually understand these processes or the nuances of how they operate.
Governmental*
So many rules and regulations are completely outdated, ill-suited to current challenges, or actually harmful. I love the idea of a sunset/review, but one problem is, who would have the credibility to carry it out???
A) Lots of areas already lifted mask mandates when cases dropped- the only reason they're still around is because Delta caused a resurgence in cases that public health officials correctly assessed needed to be addressed and mitigated. So you already have your answer- jurisdictions will lift mask mandates when the situation on the ground justifies it. DC (where I live) has specific targets for what needs to happen before mask mandates will not be imposed. So worrying that mask mandates (as opposed to people voluntarily wearing masks) will become permanent is an odd concern given what has actually happened already this year. B) These concerns about authoritarian overreach and permanent state interventions into peoples live long after the pandemic has passed have been raised during every public health emergency in our history- your concerns are mirrored by identical claims made in 1918. The authoritarian states never came to pass after those outbreaks, and there's no reason to think this situation is any different.
“…jurisdictions will lift mask mandates when the situation on the ground justifies it”
No one has the slightest clue when mask mandates are justified.
Why can't anyone read the next sentence? DC established specific criteria for lifting mask mandates. When those criteria were met they were lifted. When Delta drove caseloads higher they were re-imposed. We have plenty of well done research at this point that demonstrates how effective masks are at reducing spread, so claiming that we have no idea when they're justified or not is just ignoring the evidence, willfully pretending that the situation hasn't moved in the direction you're advocating for when the situation has improved. and sticking to an odd ideological stance based on some unfounded concerns about the looming authoritarian state.
“DC established specific criteria for lifting mask mandates”
Yes. Entirely arbitrary criteria.
“We have plenty of well done research at this point that demonstrates how effective masks are at reducing spread…”
The evidence is very mixed, but suggests that mask mandates don’t do very much.
Mask mandates don’t work when everyone is already masked is what the data said. If you want to hinge the whole argument on “you can’t make me!” I guess you’re welcome to do so.
Let’s go further, then: The evidence is very mixed, but suggests that mask don’t do very much to slow community spread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y
Honestly, anyone still arguing that MASKS don’t work is being willfully obtuse. If you’re arguing that mandates don’t work because people don’t wear masks then you’ve got yourself in a bit of bind given your other arguments- why object to a rule you oppose that nobody complied with? If anything, the vast body of evidence supporting masks efficacy would mean that we should be arguing for more stringent enforcement of mask mandates that require the wearing of high quality masks. It’s a minor inconvenience (despite all the belly aching on here, which I find akin to complaining about having to wear pants in public) that has significant impacts on transmission. It should literally be a no brainer at this point.
In that study, they also educated people at the same time as handing out masks. This led to, for example, an increase in social distancing in the masks-wearing areas. This interestingly contrasts a common expectation that masks would cause people to be less cautious, although it does become a confounding factor. So how much you can attribute to the masks vs. altered behavior is unclear (I am *not* saying it's zero though!).
Regardless, I think the more relevant question now is more whether there is sufficient benefit from *vaccinated* individuals still masking up (remember, mask mandates for the unvaccinated were never really dropped). I think everyone got way too spooked by the Provincetown data, which wasn't so clear-cut despite claims otherwise. The chance of a breakthrough infection is still really low, plus more recent data indicates what we would expect, that when it occurs, it doesn't spread as easily. Have you seen any attempts to estimate how much masking vaccinated people can affect the spread to the unvaccinated? My suspicion is that it would be very low, but I'm open to arguments otherwise.
But anyway, that aside, your point about the quality of the masks is a good one. But the fact that this isn't being stressed more now makes me feel like a lot of this is (perhaps well-intentioned) theater.
Too bad they don’t have a link to the full paper because a lot of questions were left unanswered (indeed, unasked) in that article. Still:
“…tripled mask usage, from only 13% in control villages to 42% in villages where it was encouraged….the number of symptomatic cases was lower in treatment villages than in control villages. The decrease was a modest 9%…”
Other studies found smaller effects.
"This works by X degree" is not justification. It is a data point that can be used to formulate justification. This is a core problem, a problem at the center of the difference between recommendation and policy.
"Live in your house forever" is unquestionably very effective, but few would say it is justified.
Lol... DC did not establish specific criteria. Mayors order is below. And DC is your example???? They had the strictest requirements in the country for the longest time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/coronavirus-dc-maryland-virginia/2021/05/17/11c446d0-b719-11eb-a6b1-81296da0339b_story.html
https://coronavirus.dc.gov/maskorder
I work as a health care attorney in DC"s government. The MOs were not the place where they identified the specific criteria. The Mayor issued guidance, held press conferences, put out powerpoint presentations through the DOH, etc. I've read the MOs (literally had to for work). The MOs are not the sole source of information on this. Spend more time browsing around https://coronavirus.dc.gov/ as a good place to start to understand what was going on here.
And yes, we did have strict requirements. That's the whole point. When the situation changed DC reversed nearly all of them as cases dropped. That runs counter to your argument that these are power grabs intended to become permanent and usher in a new authoritarian state. Even one of THE MOST restrictive jurisdictions in the country relaxed and removed nearly all of the restrictions as soon as the situation improved and cases dropped. That will happen again when more people are vaccinated, delta burns its way through the population, and numbers drop again. It literally already happened once during this pandemic, so there is no reason to think it won't happen again.
Also... good come back. Literally the best job you could have to give credibility (Not being facetious... I believe you). I tip my hat to you.
You say "almost" that's not good enough. I want ALL restrictions dropped. I know things like outdoor masking might fade away. But indoor masking at the DMV. Or mask mandates at schools. Or masks on airplanes. I am not at all confident about these. But hey.. .at least I know a good healthcare attorney to contact if I want to sue the cities for the restrictions! Has been fun debating. 2 more hours of my 7-day quarantine passed by. Have a great day!
Yes. I do worry about it. Unlike the past we have national media and social media to stoke peoples fears, and our leaders are a lot more risk adverse than they were in the past, because every bad thing is amplified.
And mask mandates were never removed from airplanes. Bottom line, I don't trust people with out a sense of appropriate risk management, and I especially don't trust when people uses terms like "when the situation on the ground justifies it"
Note. I am 100% in favor of vaccine mandate policies. A vaccine is a one time (or three time thing). Mask mandates effect people every day.
I think these concerns are objectively silly and misplaced, but if you want to worry about them then knock yourself out. Let's plan on meeting back here this time next year and evaluating where things stand at that point.
And why would you pick out the "situation on the ground justifies it" as if I'm saying that we should just rely on nebulous claims of when to return to the previous situation? The very next sentence in my comment demonstrated how jurisdictions have defined when it will be justified.
Your jurisdiction might have specific goals, but it's a rarity. And given the federal and state and health district mandates, and the CDCs warbling.
But I will take your bet... To be fair... if the mortality rate is lower than it was in say 2000, and I am still REQUIRED to wear masks on planes or in any non medical setting, you owe me a beer.
More than fair. I don't drink, so you'll owe me a diet coke instead ;) Cheers.
Well we agree on one thing. Addicted to Diet Coke. And I really don't drink much either.
My metro decided a month ago that we were living in an Emergency sufficient that it would re-institute a universal indoor mask mandate, but it was not enough of an Emergency to continue updating the coronavirus caseload, hospitalization, etc. numbers on weekends. That went down to work-week only in maybe May or June, and daily updates have not returned.
Excuse me, what?
One of the two required effort on the part of the local government.
The age adjusted mortality rate for 2020 was roughly equal to that of 2002. And lower than every year before that. I don't remember feeling panicky in 1999, and I was worried about Y2K! https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/us-mortality-1900-2020-age-adjusted.jpg
What an odd graph to base your argument on. "The US has seen a steady downward trend in age adjusted mortality rate for a century. 2020 was so bad it was the highest mortality rate in 20 years! So therefore Covid wasn't that bad and we shouldn't be doing much to mitigate it"....? Covid dramatically reversed a trend that has been ongoing for about a century, and incredibly consistent since the end of WWII. Your own graph shows how anomalous and concerning last year was.
Nope... Because all of us can remember 2000. Wasn't scary at all. I can only assume that you might be a Gen Z and therefore not remember it. But hell... I grew up in the 80s without acting like the sky was falling.
At some point, society needs to rip off the band-aid and remind ourselves that the CDC et al. are organizations that make science-based recommendations and not organizations that set policy.
If the CDC wants to recommend airplane masks forever (FYI, kinda dumb, the air exchange cycle is much more rapid in an airliner than in an office) or masks every flu season, that's fine. Those are probably scientifically-grounded recommendations, in that you will be safer doing that than not doing that. But it would also be safer for me to wear an ice hockey helmet every winter when I go out to shovel snow, in case I slip and fall. I don't do that, because as a policy recommendation it's kind of silly.
To wit: I spent more than a year optimizing my lifestyle according to placing a gigantic weighting factor on respiratory disease prevention. I haven't decreased that weighting factor to zero, but it's not gigantic anymore.
I for one appreciate how, late last year, the CDC consulted the renowned epidemiologists at the national teachers' unions before revising their social distancing recommendations from the WHO's three feet to a more conservative six feet. That's what I call following the science.
This sort of hints at a larger discussion that the CDC just did a really terrible job at pandemic response. Yeah, Donald Trump is a fractal catastrophe in every dimension, but lots of blue states and regions did whatever they wanted without giving a crap about what Donald Trump said. Yet the pandemic was rather awful in those places.
It seems like pandemic response should be a really big part of the CDC's mission. If they totally shat the bed on that, it seems like we should reconsider how the CDC works. We should definitely *not* say "oh, they didn't do well enough, we should throw more money at them!", and I'm confident that this will be the prevailing message.
Liked for "fractal catastrophe".
I think pandemic response (or more broadly contagious diseases) should be the CDC's whole mission. Give the other stuff to someone else. Stay focused on task
Wearing a mask has revealed that we don’t need to get colds or the flu.
My thought is the 180 degree opposite of yours - why wasn’t I wearing a mask on planes, trains and subways this whole time? The Asian countries knew what was what.
I don’t care what you do to tell the truth. If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. I care what do you want to make other people do.
Also, mask wearing in Asia wasn’t as ubiquitous as people make it out to be pre-pandemic. Yes it was more common, but it was usually older people, or people who were sick who wore them. A big part of it was pollution that was prevalent in many Asian cities.
I could go into a long spiel about how people don’t take into account the negatives of mask wearing. How it reduces social connection, limits communication, especially since a lot of human communication is through expressions.
Then there is immunity debt, where there are immune system needs to be exposed to a certain amount of germs and viruses to basically keep in shape. Especially children.
I would never skydive, but I don’t want to ban skydiving. My risk tolerance shouldn’t he forced upon other people.
Plus, way more Asians wanna move to America than Americans want to move to Asia. And when they do move to America, they stop wearing masks.
I’m only interested in what you want other people to do. Do you want to make other people continue to wear masks or not? What is your threshold for that decision.
I work with a number of Asian people. While in February of 2020, they were the first putting on masks, now that they are vaccinated, almost none of them wear a mask unless specifically asked to.
One of the ironies about this thread is people arguing that it’s no big deal if they become permanent in response to my statement that I worry that they will become permanent. Simultaneously other people are arguing that there’s no way they will become permanent. Those two sets of people should start arguing with each other.
Hi started wearing a mask back in February 2020, and used to get into arguments with people that said don’t wear masks. But when I got my second vaccination shot, I said never again unless legally required.
In Boise I only wear my mask in medical facilities or at the airport.
The easy break point is transmission and hospital load. Masks went back on when transmission surged and hospitals saw spiking capacity. Prior to Delta masks had gone away outside of airports and hospitals. I suspect in hospitals they'll stick around which is probably a good idea around patients
The problem is that the benefits of a policy often only accrue to everyone, if everyone participates. And in particular, with masking, my mask protects you, and your mask protects me, because the point of the mask is to capture the exhaled droplets that carry pathogens.
Let's rephrase your statement: "I’m only interested in what you want other people to do. Do you want to make other people drive below 25 mph on narrow residential streets? What is your threshold for that decision?"
Yes, I want to make other people obey speed limits. With the understanding that the way speed limits operate in the US is that they're "more guidelines, than actual rules." Police enforce them with a certain amount of discretion -- and there are epicyclic problems bound up in that, relating to how the discretion gets used. But regardless, it doesn't keep me or my family safe if _we_ obey the speed limit, while a bunch of other people come tearing down our street at 60 mph.
At some point, you have to reach a decision, as a community, about what rules you're going to enforce one everyone, for the good of the community as a whole. And while "democracy + courts that try to adjudicate whether a majority is over-reaching" is an imperfect way to do that, it's better than anything else that we've tried.
Personally I would not vote for a really rigid ongoing mask mandate in all public places. I would be OK, though, with "you must cover at least your mouth on public transit and planes". This idea that going without a mask is a matter of "personal freedom" is just willfully ignorant. Every freedom has its limits. Your freedom to swing your arm ends at the tip of my nose. We have to hash out as a nation where we want to set those limits, and if you don't like where those land, well, go try to win that argument through the democratic process. Either that, or go live off the grid in some cabin in Montana, where your exhalations don't affect other people.
I believe by making my arguments here, I am doing exactly what you state in go try an “win that argument”.
And I am happy to leave it to the democratic process. Especially if opponents downplay “personal freedom” and talk about limits.
Have a great day.
well put!
a perfectly valid thought!
truth be told, it wouldn’t be hard to convince me to wear a mask on a plane.
however, coercive masking makes my first priority pushing back against the coercion, the threat to my autonomy, and the threat to american culture. i don’t want close views of young womens’ faces to become rare. they are a ray of sunlight in an often dreary world.
i certainly think any time a sick person goes out in public they should wear a mask.
Might be bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7XQ5ZNKDJo
They are going to be so many secondary and tertiary marginal costs to this whole pandemic, that we have no idea. Probably things we haven’t even thought of.
I plan on skipping flu season this year as well. Thanks to my mask.
Have you ever thought of the difference between what's good for individual actors and what's good for species generally? This is part of the theory of predation, but it applies to many evolutionary processes. So it's fine that you'll be skipping it and that may be what's right, but I wouldn't be so sure you're on the right side of history. 100% of the time, I limit my certainty to non-0% or 100%. ;)
People are generally really bad at estimating downside risks, and even worse at systems thinking. It's just too easy for the dinosaur flight or fight emotional brain to break you when something threatens to upset your day to day peace.
I don't envy the job of the CDC or the Biden administration. They have to put out messaging that is simple and easily understood. Nuanced discussions of risk are neither.
That said, it seems pretty clear that masks in crowded, unventilated areas are net good (i.e. on the airplane, no; in the airport, probably). Same reason I eat food on washed dishes, wash my hands after using the toilet, and otherwise expend a modicum of effort around not getting myself sick. We should probably embrace them, as most of Asia has since SARS the First.
There is a limit to how much change a society can endure in a fast span of time though - and I think a lot of what we are seeing in terms of resistance to these things is a consequence of that.
It is not clear at all that they are a net-good. I can prove it. When given the choice, way more people choose not to wear masks than to wear them.
And since you speak about systems, we need to talk about immunity debt. Being exposed to Germs is a net good. Its how our immune systems keep in shape.
I don't like wearing a mask either, but, the fact that most people may feel as I do doesn't prove they're not a net good. (If by "good" you're referring to something that, on net, saves lives). Not many people enjoy a low calorie lifestyle but following such a regimen would likely do a lot of good.
You got a point. I am actually going to argue that in the long run, more years lived are lost from the precautions then from actual Covid. Years behind on school... equals lower life span. Kids immune systems being hurt... lower life span. Less travel, means less international migration and trade, equals lower life span. But for me net good means Im not annoyed.
“ Years behind on school... ”
No it doesn’t:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
> Not many people enjoy a low calorie lifestyle but following such a regimen would likely do a lot of good.
But not necessarily a net good.
I would argue it depends on the germ. I don't see anyone lining up for Polio parties.
No doubt there is nuance there - we probably get some exercise from common cold viruses and that is net good. Kind of like how overuse of antibacterial soap leads to very antibiotic resistant bacteria.
That said, if masks reduce some of the worst of this, especially in large venues with sketchy ventilation, more people versus less people wearing them likely saves enough lives of vulnerable populations (thinking annual flu, post covid) to make it worth it. Even if compliance is uneven and only half of people actually do the thing.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy floated - I think yesterday - the first trial balloon about endemicity, mentioning that we need to soon worry less about cases but more about hospital capacity and death. I want to hear more about that. This tells me they're hearing a lot of people such as yourself (I'm of the same mind) saying that, in the not-so-distant future, the cure will be worse than the disease. I made the political-backlash argument on a FB group about this exact topic the other day.
My personal feeling is that about 2 months after kids can get vaccinated (at least the upcoming 6-12 - I'd extend this for younger ages _provided those are in the works - if they're not happening, don't wait for them_, then I'd stop doing mask mandates.
The U.S. (AFAIK) at least has enough vaccines to vaccinate every eligible person who wants one - once everyone who wants a vaccine (barring individual immune system issues) can get one, we may be "as good as we're going to get", and once we get there, we should stop with the mandates.
I will say that now that I have masks I'll wear them when _I_ feel sick which I didn't do before (if I was sure I was sick I stayed home, but sometimes it seems like allergies? now I can just wear a mask)
"I really worry because so many people downplay the loss of freedom that restrictions have on our lives. The same people that talk about micro aggressions and how they weigh on people, can’t see that wearing masks, or avoiding going out, or any of these other restrictions is a real loss. "
I'm a life-long Democratic voter who is so sick of the Dems performative bull and identity politics and "equity" nonsense that I don't know if I can vote Dem again. Unfortunately, we have only two political parties, and the other one is worse.
I disagree with part of your conclusion, but it's really shocking just how few Democratic campaign/office staffers seem to have ever worked a regular nine-to-five "go to the office, do your regular office bullshit, then go home" real job.
In the land of Not Twitter, I don't know any normal people who invest heavily in that crap.
TBH, in terms of work I came out ahead because Covid made it possible to finally go fully remote and move my family out of the city to an area where I wanted to live.
So I agree the range of experiences on this really has been extreme, and people spend a lot of time talking past each other or missing other folks' viewpoints.
I appreciate your prespective. We each have our own way of risk assessment. While I personally don't mind wearing a mask, it's always benefical to hear other's views. Hopefully we get to the point that wearing a mask, or not wearing a mask, is simply a personal preference.
Hopefully is what I say to my kids when they say they want to go to Disney World... I will never take them. If people said, I think we should have mask mandates until ICUs are only at 70% capacity... then fine. I can go with this. Right now its just arbitrary with moving goalposts.
You say "hopefully we get to that point" as if it's out of our control. So as Rory said, what then are the criteria for getting to them being optional that you're waiting for? I think if this were clearly stated, people might be more understanding.
People are beginning to talk about the exit stragety. It's a bit premature to get very specific about it, but, if we're not yet at the beginning of the end, we may be approaching the end of the beginning. Mask relaxation will be part of this discussion. Denmark has just announced the end of all covid-related restrictions, and I think Ireland is going there next month.
There's no clearly-articulated endpoint for *any* policy, and when lunkheaded boors say "that's how you know they want this power forever", I have no answer to them.
We already saw blue states like California relax restrictions when caseloads were down amid the first wave of vaccinations reaching most adults. I went to a nice outdoor concert back in late May, and I went to see the Black Widow movie.
Right now I think Delta and other emergent variants have people somewhat worried, but the two legit worries were (1) that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated (which definitely are more common than the original strain) might have higher impact with hospitalization and "long COVID" than breakthroughs of the original; and (2) we don't want kids to get infected, because even though it hits them less hard than older adults, it's still not great, and we're seeing _some_ kids get hopsitalized, and some of them even die.
On (1), we seem to be getting consistently good news: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/health/breakthrough-infections-long-covid.html
And on (2), well, it's only a matter of time before everyone down to quite young kids can be vaccinated. At that point, it seems certain that we'll see significant loosening of restrictions. A mandate to either be vaccinated, or get tested regularly, if you want to participate in public life _at all_, will definitely help, in terms of reducing the number of exposures vaccinated people face, and reducing the rate at which the virus can mutate into new strains. We'll probably need boosters every year, maybe even every six months for a while, but in the end it'll be fine -- I get a flu shot annually at work, so I don't pick up the flu and give it to my aging parents or my young nieces, all of whom would be more vulnerable to flu than me. And that's fine too.
Yes but they only relaxed restrictions, they didn’t eliminate them. Until they actually eliminate them, I’m wary. Especially when it comes to things like flying.
I hope you’re right. But I can find a surprising number of people that think there should be indoor mask mandates forever.
But they were _right_ to only relax them! It turned out that we were facing an incipient wave from a new variant. Once vaccination extends down to kids, and we get vaccination rates around the country up to 85-90%, it's going to be a lot easier to drop things.
Regarding masking indoors -- honestly I'd be fine seeing masks become heavily normalized for crowded situations like public transit, the way they are in Hong Kong, though I'd agree that an absolutely rigid mandate here would probably be overkill. (I can't read without glasses, and my eyes have always reacted badly to contacts. I can ride a train without needing to read something, but for folks who can't see _at all_ without glasses, I'd want some flexibility for them to at least just cover their mouth and leave their nose free, so they don't fog up.)
fascinating. I respect your opinion, but I have the opposite personal preferences... I don't mind masks at all, and now I'm totally conscious of how much other people used to get their filthy breath on me (especially on the subway). So I'm pretty ok with the idea that masks in crowded places, or whenever you feel sick, will become pretty commonplace here - like it is in parts of Asia, actually.
And I like being able to sing along with the music in grocery stores without anyone seeing my lips move behind the mask!
But grocery music is awesome these days. All 80s stuff I grew up with!
But that's it... personal preference. And when it comes to personal preferences, the least restrictive preference should win out. (assuming its a wide spread preference).
And no, it won't become commonplace... some will do it.... but it will always be a small minority.
maybe the vaccine mandates (and natural infections amount unvaccinated) will lower incidence enough that an anti-restriction consensus emerges. That’s Biden’s hope. He knows Ds get crushed if covid is still a big deal after this winter
This is troubling because it means Republicans have the opposite incentive. Enabling COVID to keep spreading and killing people is in their self-interest, not just something they might do out of ignorance.
Of course it means that. It also helps Republicans when the economy sucks.
I strongly believe the politics of *vaccination* are in the Democrats' favor and that the more polarized that issue becomes, the better off the Democrats will be. But maybe the Republicans gain more by keeping COVID numbers high than they lose by being perceived as siding with the antivax freaks. That is, maybe the hit they'd take on being associated with antivaxxerism is, in the bigger picture, a worthwhile investment. To counter that, Democrats might really need to go all-in on vitriolically blaming COVID's resilience on antivaxxers, the way the Republicans in 2002 went all-in on allegations that liberals were pro-terrorist and anti-patriotic.
Well, it's entirely possible I'll be proven wrong (we may find out in 14 months) but I suspect it's not going to work out that way for the GOP because their sabotage is playing a meaningful role in acquiring the herd immunity that will benefit the country and its economy in 2022. (and 2024).
Also, if they could content themselves with being merely "neutral" in covid measures — ie, don't do much to help fight the pandemic but don't be absolute lunatics in their obstruction — then they'd be in a stronger position to attack Biden and the Democrats next year if things don't go well. But at this rate, I'd say there's a non-trivial possibility it is *Republicans* who will be blamed by voters if we're in the 7th covid wave in the autumn of 2022 (at minimum Democrats will have a highly plausible angle of attack).
The funny thing to me is that the 'rona is currently a capital letters Big Deal almost exclusively in places that Democrats can't realistically win anyway.
It seems like the biggest electoral threat is newspapers of record excitedly reporting on bad outcomes among the unvaccinated, and these outcomes are very sad but they don't seem to substantially threaten the vaccinated majority.
My guess is that, oh, three years from now COVID will be a distant memory and we'll be living our lives the way we want to. If some things have changed -- e.g., more remote work -- it will be because we like that more rather than for safety. I doubt that we'll even see a lot of changes for the good, such as wearing masks during flu season, because regression to the mean is such a powerful drug.
As Matt says, we are powerfully affected by what just happened in shaping our view of the future. Here in Los Angeles, the January 1994 Northridge earthquake was one such experience, and we were all convinced that another big earthquake was imminent. No reason geologically speaking; it's just the emotional force of presentism. As a community we've made positive changes since then, such as in improved building codes, but I guarantee you that people here are individually no more prepared for, or thinking about, a big earthquake than they were on Jan. 16, 1994, the day before the quake.
I would have agreed with you last spring. The problem is that I think there's a good chance that 3 years from now Covid will not be a distant memory but a constant, mid-level annoying problem from mutant strains until it becomes endemic like any other respiratory virus. You'll have surges and risk of over-filled hospitalizations and masking/social distancing will have to be re-implemented (or continued if never halted). So in this way I think Rory may be right -- that a lot of mandatory masking will remain in place b/c it simply becomes the norm. I can see both sides on this issue: that it makes sense to mitigate infectious disease in general, and that it's truly annoying to some. Personally I only mind it for my exercise class and would really love to go back to that w/o a mask.
I think it'll be like flu. Annoying yes, and deadly (but on a much smaller scale). But we don't engage in societal-wide masking for influenza.
Covid is here for the long haul (sorry!), but we'll get back to normalcy.
Yes, like the flu, but also this is different.
1) There was masking and social distancing for the 1918 epidemic but it passed fairly violently and rapidly through the population creating enough herd immunity in several years. And the population had some immunity to influenza already. Currently, we are still far from herd immunity. There's enough partial immunity from vaccination and prior infection that the curve is flattened. My opinion is that eventually everyone may have to be exposed and develop natural immunity, but it will likely take 5-10 years (as MY's prior post described) rather than 2 violent years and it's over.
2) Coronaviruses mutate quicker and are more infectious than influenza so there will be this constant interplay where the virus can mutate to decrease effectiveness of the vaccine and we'll have recurrent surges. Recurrent surges will threaten to overwhelm hospitals and new masking requirements will be implemented all over again. (Or not, as happened recently in Florida, and the hospitals get overwhelmed with a significant number of people dying.)
3) Our population is significantly older than in 1918. Medical care has advanced significantly since then. So instead of people getting sick and either recovering or dying, you have people hospitalized. Which, once again, leads to the possibility of overwhelming hospitals, requiring masking.
So, eventually masking becomes an accepted part of the culture and no one thinks twice about having to mask on airplanes. Just the way no one thinks twice about needing to wear a seatbelt. Anyway, I could be wrong, but this is what I predict.
>>..My opinion is that eventually everyone may have to be exposed and develop natural immunity, but it will likely take 5-10 years...so there will be this constant interplay where the virus can mutate to decrease effectiveness of the vaccine and we'll have recurrent surges.<<
Can doesn't mean "will." Many researchers believe this virus is approaching the physiological limits of its capacity to become more infectious (and/or defeat vaccines):
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-delta-variant-has-been-caged-whisper-it-but-this-may-all-be-over-soon-jgh3lsmn6
Is that my take? I don't have a take, I'm not a scientist. And yes, we may indeed be dealing with deadly outbreaks or waves for another half decade. It's possible! I'm simply pointing out there are a number of different viewpoints held by researchers on this topic.
Just one minor correction: influenza has a higher mutation rate than coronaviruses, due to the proofreading function of the latter's RNA polymerase.
Ok. Did not know that. Thanks for the clarification. I'll have to read up on it.
I expect an annual reminder in the form of a PSA or poster in the window of my local CVS. And I’ll stop in and get a shot of a mRNA cocktail that virtually guarantees I will not contract any sort of viral respiratory disease.
I hope you are right Marc.
Have we not adapted? Global mRNA manufacturing capacity is up orders of magnitude from a year ago. It wouldn’t make sense to shift that capacity to other vaccines when billions are still unvaccinated. PPE is broadly available. Teleworking is more common.
Congress proved once and for all that stimulus works so well it can wake up an economy from deep freeze within a couple months. In March of 2020, I was afraid even four week lockdowns would cause a depression. That fear was common. It has been dispelled.
Finally, the social dissensus over COVID has owes to its having a curiously ambiguous lethality. If it were 5x more lethal, lockdowns would be uncontroversial. If it were 5x less lethal, only scolds would want coercive distancing. Covid isn’t that big a risk for healthy young people but is a moderate risk for older people so it creates a dynamic where some people are fanning hysteria for personally rational reasons and others feel put upon by scolds. The chances the next pandemic is both roughly as lethal and roughly as contagious as covid are actually pretty small.
Very optimistic!
America did prove adaptive. It experienced high fatalities because it has a shitty public health baseline. Americans under 65 were something like 2.5 times as likely to die if infected as similar Canadians.
The number of obese, addled and unhealthy people in America is staggering. A historian of the French revolution described the peasantry as a person up to his chin in water, even a slight deepening could prove disastrous. The American precariat treads in deeper water than those in other advanced countries.
We did not make a dent in obesity during the pandemic nor did we enact universal healthcare. Our structural deficiencies remain. However, America did a good job with vaccines, teleworking and debt financing.
I strongly suspect the pandemic will increase the appetite for health care reform. It will swing some moderates towards action, whether that proves decisive enough to result in legislation is uncertain.
Next year, Biden should make health care reform front and center.
His slogan should be “Too many americans died of covid because our public health policies are crap.”
I don't live in America, I live in a developing country that provides manufacturing for America. It is pretty clear that we haven't "adapted".
The ongoing global supply chain woes make clear that there's a lot more to the story than whether the richest country on Earth can make 500 million vaccines for itself in short order.
The Great Famine in Ireland wasn’t as bad as Chinese famines in the 19th century because Ireland was part of the UK, which was rich for 1847, and which (begrudgingly and stingily) provided relief. Without public works projects, subsidized emigration and grain purchases, the Irish famine would have been much worse.
Which is to say the richest countries are always able to weather distress better than poor ones. Look at how many people in the developing world die of cholera and in floods. Poor countries usually get poor outcomes
Bad example. Famines are caused by poor governance. If Britain actually cared about individual Irish people, they would have mitigated it. UK governance could have been even worse of course. This is a great topic if Matt Yglesias wants to indulge in more UK bashing. Repeated famines under the British empire, stopped once countries got even minimally competent self-government.
It sounds like you've done you're research so I'll defer to you, but, Ireland lost something like 12% of its population to hunger/disease in five years. Did China go through anything quite that bad?
(But sure, your point about rich countries weathering storms is obviously valid.)
Direct comparison is obtuse, because China is much bigger than Ireland and different regions fall under different weather patterns and have different yields at the same time. However, if you take a given famine prone province of China and compare it to Ireland, it was clearly much worse.
The Brits had a lot of prejudices against the Irish. If they had been as willing to borrow money to fight the famine as they were to fight Russian expansion during the crimean war, mortality could have been kept to a minimum. However, they did plough 1 or 2% of GDP into famine relief. Virtually no one starved the first year after the potato crop failed, but then compassion fatigue set in. It would have been much worse if the UK had been at the same level of development As 1847 China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/the-spoilers-93278889-237694361
This doesn't seem consistent with the research from Amartya Sen, who claims it isn't really the level of development, but whether local political elites actually have a stake in the local population not starving. In imperial situations, the local elites often don't care whether locals live or die as long as resources can continue to be extracted.
>>Direct comparison is obtuse, because China is much bigger than Ireland<<
Then, don't make them? Your initial claim was that "The Great Famine in Ireland wasn’t as bad as Chinese famines in the 19th century." Um, yes, it very much was from the perspective of the Irish. (Obviously nothing in Ireland is going to be as large in scale in terms of sheer numbers as any data out of China).
The death toll from the Irish famine is estimated to have been about a million people out of a then population of approximately eight million, or some 12%. I can't find any evidence of a famine in China killing more than about 8% of the population (in any century). But sure, the death toll in Ireland would have been larger still had London not been so generous (/s).
ireland was not a country in 1847. it was a distinctive region of the uk, which has a population of 26 million in 1841. if you are doing national comparisons, the 4% death toll in ireksnd was higher than the 8% death toll in china, and there were repeated mass mortality events in china versus only one in ireland.
conversely, one can compare similar geographies and compare ireland to similarly sized regions of china, in which case chinese famines were much, much worse.
nor is it the case that london was “so generous,” they were pretty tight fisted and let a million people starve. however, publix and private aid probably saved a million people who otherwise would have starved, in which case the irish famine would have been like the aforementioned regional famines in china.
sorry i didn’t say “regional chinese famines” earlier
These are excellent points and well articulated. Thanks David (the post is great too, Matt! :))
“Congress proved once and for all that stimulus works…”
The proof only exists to the extent that you were predisposed to believe it was true.
What? The US economy is in good shape despite mass shutdowns and panic. That seems like good evidence.
It seems like good evidence that the economy was in good shape and then various governments forced some businesses to close.
I still have a big box of oatmeal in the basement bought out of fear that a just-in-time supply chain might legitimately collapse. That is a very distant memory.
Another aspect of September & October 2001 that might not come across if you didn't live through it is that the 9/11 attacks were followed by anthrax attacks and the DC snipers. Everyone was freaking out from the 9/11 attacks, and then letters with anthrax in them starting showing up in politicians' and media people's mail, and random people were getting shot by a sniper rifle in the DC area. And the anthrax & sniper attacks carried on for weeks, constantly in the news. People kept hearing about the latest attack, and worrying about the next one.
So there was a sense that this was the new normal - that the sense of safety that we used to have was illusory because really there was very little preventing someone from killing people if they wanted to. We were under attack, they'd killed a lot of people (9/11), they were capable of sophisticated technical work to make scary weapons (anthrax), and they could strike anyone anywhere at any time (DC snipers).
Yeah, I was there too and it was insane. White vans! The most disturbing thing for me, though, was when the administration (I think this just before the Iraq invasion, so there was a high-level terror alert under the official choropleth) told people to cover their windows with plastic sheeting and duct tape. !!!!!
As has become abundantly and painfully clear, almost nobody knows what they're doing. People who expect the government to save us might want to examine the evidence. There are a lot of great, smart, and well-meaning people who work at all levels of government, but the institutions are not doing well on many of the tests.
I was in high school but I remember some of that clearly. I also remember the color coded threat levels that were on TV constantly for months afterwards. I think the threat level thing stuck around for a whole decade. You were always aware of “chatter” and conscious of the “fact” that a “terrorist attack could happen at any time”. The climate of fear was real and never quite went away.
We still make people take off their shoes because one guy unsuccessfully tried to bomb a plane with a shoe.
The interesting part of airport security theater is how easy it is to buy your way out of it. I have PreCheck, Global Entry AND Clear. It seems like a waste of money until you are running late and walk right past all the people in their socks awkwardly struggling with their belts.
Yeah but you probably had to do that interview where they make you promise you’re not a terrorist.
That's okay, when I got my first visa I think I promised that I wasn't a member of the Nazi Party between 1933 and 1945 (both of my parents were born after 1945).
Also you had to have not been arrested for any reason within the last ten years, or twice in your entire life, regardless of the outcome of those cases. Got arrested at an Iraq War protest in 2003 and again at BLM? Both charges dropped because they were just randomly rounding people up? Sorry, no Global Entry for you.
Serious question -- is that bad?
You first have to answer the question "is that effective at catching terrorists and preventing terrorism?" Then you can think about the resources expended, the opportunity costs and any side benefits (maybe it makes people feel safer). Then you can decide if it is bad.
My best guess is...yes it's bad.
I have been through this process (more than once), and I don't think that the goal is catching anyone. I think that the goal is to make you deportable if you are caught having done any of these things. The US government can even strip the citizenship of naturalized people if they are found to have lied in these forms.
For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/us/us-deports-former-nazi-guard.html
I don't know the details, but my guess is that the only reason why this guy could be deported after so many years in this country is that he had answered "no" somewhere where he should have answered "yes". Otherwise, I guess you just have a law-abiding naturalized US citizen and you can't do anything about his Nazi past.
Now, admittedly that doesn't work with suicide bombers, but maybe it works with people who provide assistance or help plot stuff.
Oh, and yes, it's funny that I have promised the US government that I'm not a human trafficker, former member of the NSDAP, or someone who has participated in a genocide, but it doesn't take too much time. I just had to read many such questions on a webpage and select "no" on all of them.
The other stuff like background checks are the actual meat. In practice, the question just ends up being annoying and embarrassing for everyone involved isolated of any of the broader ethical implications. Of course, I'm not of a demographic whose answer would be highly scrutinized so I'd say it's useless at best and potentially abusive at worse, though maybe there's some legal "lying to the FBI" type reasoning behind it.
I am convinced at the core that a shampoo mini bottle industry lobbyist found their way onto the commission that decides what rules to keep after the initial fervor wears off.
Ha.... Im bald, so screw them.
The liquids thing bothers me more than the shoe thing. There may have been some assholes plotting, years ago, to use some sort of liquid explosive. But they never got anywhere and a liquid that could conceivably explode looks, smells and behaves nothing like water or toothpaste.
“The liquids thing bothers me more than the shoe thing.”
Back when that first came about there was a story in the NYT that featured comments from a few affected airline passengers. One passenger quoted was - you can’t make this shit up - a Frenchman who lamented that his cologne had been confiscated before boarding his Paris - JFK flight. “It is a long flight; you want to be able to freshen up,” he lamented.
I thought at the time, and still maintain, that if the silver lining of that very dark cloud on 9/11 was that, at the margins, a few Eurotrash will decide to shower before boarding a flight to the US because their precious cologne will be unavailable, well, then, that’s just the way it is.
The issue in my mind isn’t that liquids are obvious so much as that they were required to give enough exceptions that the rule seems useless. Medical liquids, baby formula, and up to a gallon of 3 oz bottles are all fine, if I recall correctly. I could see putting a limit on total quantity of liquids, but it’s hard to imagine how a water bottle poses any more risk than a set of twenty travel size cosmetics bottles.
<I> but it’s hard to imagine how a water bottle poses any more risk than a set of twenty travel size cosmetics bottles.</I>
For one thing all 12 bottles need to be combined first, right? I think mixing dangerous chemicals in an airplane bathroom poses a significant challenge.
There is an upper limit on the total liquids as all the containers have to fit in a single clear quart sized bag.
My favorite TSA jackbooted thug story is the guy that confiscated a mini-cooler of chilled crab meat because the ice gel pack would eventually melt and become a liquid.
I think the quart bag was chosen because that’s below the volume of off the shelf chemicals you’d need to bring down a commercial jet. Best case you’d breech the hull and cause a loss of cabin pressure but they’d be able to land safely.
I don’t think that’s true.
“ The plot involved liquid explosives – concentrated hydrogen peroxide – to be smuggled on board in sports drinks bottles, dyed orange with Tang.”
In the UK they drilled a tiny hole in the bottle to drain the liquid and refilled it with the concentrated H2O2 so the tamper proof cap would be intact.
There was a real plot just as there was a real shoe bomber. But the plot never got anywhere and it was never clear it would work.
It wasn’t just the sealed bottles – they also had a whole apparatus to detonate it. And concentrated hydrogen peroxide is one of those chemicals that’s pretty distinct.
I mean you can always come up with some plot that might work – and you can put in an action movie screenplay – but in terms of practical applications for millions of travelers looking out for it offers little, if any, benefit.
But to your point about action movie plots - while there was some info available about the 9/11 hijackers they didn’t put it together. I think your dismissiveness could have been an issue. As if that plan could work! Until it did.
How is it pretty distinct when dyed orange in a sealed sports drink bottle? Are you going to have the TSA open everyone’s various containers?
Recreating steerage from the 19th century in airplanes does not seem like a positive political development. It would be interesting to see some research on how airport security has influenced opinions about class.
Probably very little. Note that the Seinfeld episode on first class vs. coach pre-dated 9/11.
You didn’t pay for TSA pre-check separate from global entry did you?
I got Pre-Check before Global Entry was available. It's all a scam. I will only renew the Global Entry,
Ok good. I try and tell people to spend the extra $25 for Global. You get an ID and pre-check. Clear is awesome to. I get it via Delta for being a Diamond.
Even better: get Nexus. All the perks of Global Entry, at half the cost. (Though the credit cards won't cover it, and you have to interview with Canada as well, so it may be less practical for many.)
I don't know if it's still the case, but back when I had only pre-check (in the days when being an elite frequent flyer member was enough), I got picked for secondary screening every handful of times I went through. After getting global entry, it never happened again.
I guess I should look into Clear more since I can get it for free now. The pre-check line has never been long enough that it seems it would matter though.
Dude... Atlanta Pre-Check line has been ridiculous sometimes. Occasionally LAX as well.
Maybe I've just been lucky then, although I had noticed times creeping up to 10 minutes or so. Anyway, I'll go ahead and figure out how to sign up for clear now so I have the option at least - thanks!
America still does the shoes off thing. Lots of countries don't.
I agree that "we" have not learned much from COVID-19 but the mainly I think "they" (the public health people) have not learned: 1) tell the truth, always, 2) use cost benefit analysis in making decisions 3) in those cost-benefit analyses take about of the costs of delay 4) make recommendations to the public on the basis of the benefits to others not just to themselves of following the advice and explain the recommendations that way, 5) Constantly collect data, update recommendations on the basis of changing data and explain why recommendations are changing, 6) make most recommendations in the form of "when X conditions prevail in your environment, do Y" and help decision makers in each environment to have the information about conditions X.
It’s not always easy to tell “the Truth,” in the sense that the truth is often “we don’t know.” But the one thing we need to hammer into people speaking for the CDC and other public health authorities (and probably political leaders in general) is NEVER consciously shade the truth in an attempt to guide behavior in a particular direction, because that will always backfire. The fiasco early on with telling people not to wear masks (with the purpose of preserving limited PPE supplies) was a disaster and had the opposite of the intended effect—PPE hoarding and price gouging was through the roof while people who could have been wearing cloth masks reserved those for medical personnel (for whom they were inadequate) instead. Medical personnel would probably have been less exposed to COVID if regular folks were wearing their homemade cloth masks and thus lowering the case count until PPE production could catch up with demand.
I think there was also a problem in that the medical establishment really had convinced themselves that normies just can’t use masks effectively, and that masks don’t matter anyway unless you’re dripping blood or saliva. I *hope* they’ve now learned that they had overreacted against the miasma theory when Semmelweis finally taught them to wash their hands.
“…Normies just can’t use masks effectively…”
That is a fair assessment. Normies can’t even do long division effectively. Or drive cars, for that matter.
People wear masks to do construction and a variety of other normie jobs. A short bit before the pandemic arrived in the US, I watched a bunch of training videos for nurses, construction workers, etc on properly wearing an N95 and it's not that complicated. If instead of repeating that masks don't help they had put together a media campaign educating people on how to use masks appropriately that would probably have been more useful.
Possibly.
There ought to be no problem with saying we don't know. It fact that is a necessarily component of constantly changing messages and recommendations. The fact that the hand-washing recommendation never went away but just sort of got ignored, was one factor in undermining PH officials' credibility. Another was not being more transparent with their models. "The spread is better worse than we predicted because of X."
Masks had a pretty minimal positive effect.
The biggest thing I’ve wanted from many institutions this year (primarily my employer, but also my state and the cdc and others) is some sort of statement of conditions that would lead to a change in policy. Right now the university says they have contingencies for changes in instruction of things get bad (we aren’t allowed to require masks or vaccines) but hasn’t said what “bad” is. With 5% of students testing positive in the past two weeks, and one student dying this morning, I assume we’ve reached bad conditions, but they have given no indication of whether we have. And they haven’t told us what the contingency plan is.
It would also have been nice when Abbott imposed the mask mandate last summer, or lifted it in March, if he had stated some level of case prevalence that would change either of those.
“…and one student dying this morning”
The school administration should be ashamed they did not insist that student be vaccinated before stepping on campus.
The school administration in question is currently legally prohibited from mandating vaccines or masks.
State school?
Yep, in Texas.
Agree, and PH officials should be making recommendations to local politicians of how to link local observations to policy.
This. Yes. I am constantly frustrated by the political shading of truth. Here's my latest frustration. Article comes out in Politico about CDC study that immunity is waning at 6 months for seniors, suggesting boosters are necessary and effective: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/10/cdc-waning-vaccine-immunity-elderly-511206
No link to the study and I can't find it. Many of my seniors got their second shots in Jan and Feb. I've had one or two hospitalized with breakthrough infections now, or very sick at home. I have quietly told several to go into the pharmacies and see if they could get a booster and several of the pharmacies see an 80 or 90 year-old and will give the booster even though they don't meet the definition for immunocompromised.
Today I get an email from LA County Public health warning/ threatening providers and pharmacies that boosters are only authorized for immunocompromised, and DO NOT GIVE BOOSTERS to anyone else. CDC has previously very narrowly defined immunocompromised. Being old and having multiple medical problems does not qualify. So their own studies show waning immunity, more hospitalizations and death, but we are not allowed to protect those we consider vulnerable.
Elana, in case you're still looking, I think the three articles referenced in the Politico piece are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/whats-new-all.html
They're all dated 9/10/21 and all say "early release."
And note that the CDC articles all mention the waning effectiveness for those over 75, but none mention boosters. The Politico article brings up the subject of boosters, but the CDC articles don't mention them.
Hi Ellen. Thanks for sending me the link to the studies. I would not expect the CDC articles to comment on boosters specifically. The studies report the data and at the end, suggest possible reasons for the decline in immunity but it is not the purpose of the study to claim that boosters per se would fix that decline. They suggest: "This moderate decline should be interpreted with caution and might be related to changes in SARS-CoV-2, waning of vaccine-induced immunity with increased time since vaccination, or a combination of factors. "
Fair enough: ie - we see a decline in those over 75, but further studies are needed to investigate this decline and see if boosters truly mitigate that decline. Here are my complaints:
1) Early data from Israel does show benefit of the boosters
2) There is no data supporting the "8 month" booster rule they have declared. Where do they get 8 months from? Seems to me it's arbitrary and designed to allow CDC /FDA to get the boosters approved and to prevent a mad rush if they set the time at 6 months.
3) Doctors are desperate to save lives and help during this pandemic. If it is our clinical judgement that someone is at particularly high risk for Covid and is now 8-9 months out from their vaccine, is it unreasonable to suggest a booster given the data that is available? And if it reasonable, why threaten doctors and pharmacies doing our best to care for patients?
4) The J&J vaccine. I've complained about this before. It's not as effective and their rules bar people from seeking one of the mRNA vaccines. And those that are immunocompromised, who are eligible for a booster can't get one if they received J&J initially. How does that make any sense?
One of the singular things about 9/11 is so many Americans all saw and experienced it the same way and it was so visceral and clear in its visual presentation as to invite largely the same immediate conclusions. One thing that’s surprised me about the pandemic is that it’s experienced more as millions of individual experiences as opposed to one collective national experience. And most of it is very boring. Some people have family members or friends who have died or have gotten very sick, but those things don’t happen viscerally in front of you. Understanding the pandemic accurately requires some imagination and abstract thought, which is hard. That’s why it would be nice if our public health and political leadership were performing better. They’re supposed to be the ones doing a lot of that thinking for us, but they seem caught up in the same mental traps as the rest of us.
It’s interesting to look back at the 19th century jurisprudence about vaccines, quarantines, etc. It was a world where communicable disease was an ever present threat - smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, TB, cholera…
As an example Abe Lincoln had 4 sons - Robert, Edward, Willie and Tad. Only Robert lived past his teens. Edward died at 3 of TB. Willie died at 11 of typhoid fever and Tad died at 18 also of TB. And that was not at all unusual. If you go to any old cemetery you’ll find a lot of tomb stones July, 6 1842 September 1, 1844.
I’m firmly convinced that the reason for anti-vax sentiment, going back well before the pandemic, is that we’re spoiled in this regard, which allows people to be idiots.
As others note, COVID just isn’t dangerous enough to really knock us out of that.
I think there's a lot of truth to that. There was an article somewhere recently about Portugal which has 99% vaccination rates among 65+. The article said it was because during their long dictatorship public health was pretty bad, so people don't take vaccines for granted.
That’s a big part of it. I also think a simple rear of needles drives a lot of that. Bob the construction worker doesn’t want to admit to himself or his friends and family that he’s really really afraid of needles. So when he hears some conspiracy theory he latches onto it.
IIRC they are working on a vaccine pill. I wonder if they marketed it as a single dose pre-exposure immune booster how much antivax sentiment would disappear.
It would be nice if even a single story in the media did *not* feature a picture of someone getting a shot.
I think we also tend to forget the impact of the anthrax mail coming a week or so later. That really cemented the panic, especially when it dragged on with no resolution.
One thing I hope we get is better infectious disease surveillance. That means I want to be able to check the weather site for the current local flu case count report, the way I can check up pollen conditions. If there’s a bad flu outbreak like 2017-18, and it’s bad in my area, I want to get a “flu outbreak warning” or “flu outbreak watch”, the way I get “winter storm warnings” or “tornado watches”.
Just like most of these weather warnings, most of these public health warnings should come with no mandatory conditions, unless things get especially bad. But telling me when it would be good and prosocial to wear a mask or move my meeting to Zoom seems like it would be nice.
I never, ever shared my countrymen's hysteria post-9/11, and actually never even understood it. I lived in Europe during the 1990s, and terrorism was a regular thing in France and the UK and other places. I flew out of Heathrow in March 1994 while the IRA was mortaring the runways. In Paris when the Metro was bombed by Algerians, the authorities would close the affected station and continue operations as usual. This, I believed, was the correct response to terrorism; anything else, to repeat a cliche, was letting the terrorists win. Terrorism was simply another of many lethal risks we accept every day, and never a very likely risk for any particular individual.
When 9/11 occurred I was airborne, flying from the US to London, and first learned about the attack when walking down the High Street in Richmond I saw the photos on the newsracks. My reaction was, "Well, I guess it was about time." A major attack on the US was inevitable, as far as I was concerned (it was also instantly obvious the same modus operandi could never again be employed for subsequent attacks, which made the erection of a vast security apparatus to defend against similar attacks seem . . . bizarre).
And I waited a week for global air travel to resume so I could get back home. Stop all air travel around the world for a week? Not an overreaction at all!
Somehow I felt no more vulnerable post-9/11 than I did before, since I'd been more or less living with terrorism alongside millions of British and French people for years. I never believed the US was somehow "special," with some kind of native immunity from terrorism; it was simply a matter of time.
Also, I didn't think terrorism could really be effectively prevented in a free society, if that society wanted to remain free. Pretty quickly it became evident that Americans were happy to jettison, wholesale, hard-won freedoms in the wake of 9/11, and were even eager to repeat all the mistakes of Vietnam by invading Afghanistan. I never understood it, and could only goggle incredulously when, after asking an airline worker why I could no longer mail a letter from inside an American airport, the response was, "Because of 9/11!", as if I was a child asking why adult dogs were so much bigger than puppies.
One of the the saddest aspects of the post 9/11 world, to me, was how the British, who had stoically maintained their dignity throughout the Troubles, and the French as well, lost their collective shit along with the Americans. It was as if American fear and neurosis infected an otherwise well-adjusted polity on the other side of the Atlantic.
Twenty years on, our hysterical overreaction to a viral pandemic is no longer surprising.
"Because of 9/11!"
I recall being told by countless private security guards and even public officials that I couldn’t take photos of this or that thing, because terrorism. My response was invariably some version of, “Don’t be absurd,” and to go on taking photos.
I was really disappointed with how rapidly US hysteria spread around the world. Even more annoying is that European airport security decided to actually take the insane fantasies of the US seriously and make a genuine effort to prevent the sort of nonsense TSA was cosplaying at preventing. As a result, European airport security is way more onerous than US airport security.
I'd like to know more about your personal experience as a budding public intellectual in that era, Matt. I know you've written some about why you were wrong about the Iraq War, but I think there's more to explore there about the interplay of fear, certainty, identity, and epistemology.
If I was betting, I'd say a cyberattack is most likely to be next attack on the US that has an impact comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, in leaving us shocked, alarmed and angry at how unprepared and caught by surprise we were.
And how to respond to a cyberattack that seriously disrupts civilian life is ambiguous, assuming it's even clear who to hold responsible- should it be met only in kind, with a cyber counterattack, with bombs and missiles, economic sanctions, etc?
It seems likely that a scared and angry US public would get behind some tragic miscalculations and errors of judgment as far as our response to that situation.
SO MUCH THIS. Our government and corporate actors do not take cyber-security seriously, even a little bit, and the cyber-security industry has been weakened through exploitation by profiteers.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-to-get-rich-sabotaging-nuclear
The last Ezra Klein podcast with Tyler Cowen was a surprisingly frustrating listen. They frame up this tension between growth both reducing global inequality and climate change on opposing sides... and then just move on. Then Tyler calls out the loss of academic freedom as a major issue ... an issue Ezra simply has rejected previously as not at all being a big deal - and cuts to commercial. Could have been so much better.
Pandemics have happened before. They will happen again. While some people have argued that climate change and deforestation is likely to result in more pandemics, as a nonexpert I remain unconvinced - the number of people having direct interactions with animals is if anything likely to decline as agriculture becomes increasingly mechanised in the rest of the world, and cold chains make their way into the remaining places were they do not currently extend.
So there is absolutely no reason to think that pandemics on the scale of covid-19 are coming down the pike every five years or so. Another pandemic could happen tomorrow - the pandemic dice have essentially no memory. But I think it's reasonable to assume that global pandemics of this magnitude won't be a thing we're dealing with every few years.
By contrast, there was every reason to assume the worst about 9/11 - a small group of dedicated terrorists had figured out how to murder thousands of Americans, and it wasn't (and still isn't) hard to dream up plausible ways in which this could be repeated. As you say, that assumption was wrong. But it wasn't totally unreasonable.
*However*, while pandemics are rare, I think we can all agree that this one has been consequential enough that we collectively should invest a heck of a lot of effort into reducing the risk and consequences of another one.
And luckily we've learned a lot about things we can do on both counts.
One relatively straightforward (if expensive) mitigation that sensible governments of rich-enough countries will make is ensuring indoor air quality standards are much improved.
Another thing that we could do is invest in a flexible disease testing infrastructure on a massive scale. Despite the CDC's screwup, we can develop tests for novel viruses within days if needs be; if we could deploy that on a scale that everybody in the country could be tested very regularly during a pandemic *and* isolate those people who test positive, it's going to be pretty damned hard for a respiratory virus of any sort to make much progress (though it has to be very regular because things like flu have a very short incubation period).
The other thing we can and should do (carefully!) is go out and look for other potential pandemic viruses and develop candidate vaccines and therapies for them. We were lucky that research on coronaviruses had identified the spike protein as the thing for a vaccine to target; we should try and do the same - or more - for as many of the other potential pandemic respiratory viruses as we can. Additionally, if we could identify a bunch of candidate drugs that inhibit those viruses, perhaps even run some of them to the point of Phase 1 trials, we'll have a massive head start on the next pandemic.
That said, the USA has a fairly unique problem with pandemic response with a substantial fraction of its population seemingly prepared to die to own the libs. Dunno what you can do about that.
>>>I hope I’ll be wrong again, this time about pandemics. But I worry.<<<
In my view by far the worry that's most unjustifiably under the radar (that is, people should be a lot more concerned) is nuclear war. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War, and during that time most folks tended to regard an actual USSR-USA shooting war as unthinkable (not literally so, of course, lots of people get paid to think about things like this!) in that it would likely lead to a nuclear exchange.
In recent years we've seen a terrifying (to me, at least, though I sometimes feel like I'm screaming in the in the middle of the forest where no one can hear) increase in geopolitical tension in the Indo-Pacific. One of these days some general somewhere is going to get trigger happy.
It seems like we had a window in the 1990s to *really* do something substantive to minimize the probability of a nuclear holocaust. But we squandered the opportunity. And so here we are back where we started at just about the time Gorbachev came to power.
“ during that time most folks tended to regard an actual USSR-USA shooting war as unthinkable ”
That’s totally not accurate. A lot of people felt it was a matter of when not if.
You piqued my curiosity (was I using "unthinkable" incorrectly?). Webster's says the word means:
unthinkable
1: not capable of being grasped by the mind
2: being contrary to what is reasonable, desirable, or probable : being out of the question
So yeah, that's my recollection (and I said "most" not "all"). YMMV.
What I was really getting at is: I don't get the same vibe WRT discussions of China/USA conflict. A lot of people seem to talk **casually** about a shooting war between the two superpowers these days in a manner that wasn't present in the 80s—it's as if they're unaware the PRC has a highly lethal and growing nuclear arsenal. In a word, Americans (worryingly) aren't as terrified at the prospect of a Sino-US hot war as they were of Soviet-US hot war. And that's not good. Because fear is a good motivator. In the 80s there was a robust disarmament movement. There were protests. There was a lot of worried discussion about the doomsday clock getting closer to midnight. And there was concern in officialdom, too. And eventually that concern translated into a relaxation in Cold War tensions and big cuts (though not big enough) in nuclear arsenals.
We're sleepwalking into very dangerous times, I'm afraid.
I doubt the US and China would have a nuclear exchange. India and Pakistan on the other hand…
Out of curiosity, what do you rate the odds of a conventional PRC-USA military conflict breaking out? Imagine, say, Xi ordering the PLA to take Taiwan. Does a US president order the Pentagon to defend that island with US forces? Or not? And there are other scenarios, too: most likely a naval confrontation in the South China Sea that—perhaps via a miscalculation at the command level—goes "hot" and before you know it either the US or the PRC has had some ships sunk and a bunch of sailors killed. Surely it's vanishingly unlikely that either the US or the Chinese would launch a nuclear first strike. That's effectively signing a national suicide note. But the chances of a "conventional" war breaking out strikes me as worryingly high. That is my fear (because in such a situation there's surely a non-zero chance either side would be very tempted to use its most powerful weapons system if it felt the war were going badly).
Wouldn't this be the first shooting war directly between two nuclear powers? I tend to think there is a logic in this, that nuclear weapons suppress wars between Great Powers.
How vulnerable is China to a naval blockade? Is it self sufficient in food and energy like the US? I don’t believe it is. Would the Chinese public see empty supermarket shelves and a cratering economy as a sign that the CCP has lost the Mandate of Heaven?
I think it is at least a possibility that one reason we haven't seen more terror attacks is that (1) we destroyed the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and denied the organization a physical space to, well, organize, (2) the United States government has engaged in a lot of morally dubious and unsavory, but sometimes effective, covert action around the world to root out "pre-terrorists." Obviously you can't just assume that to be true, nor can you trust the government's word on that (if they were talking), but neither can we assume it's false.
People aren't as afraid of pandemics because they see viruses as non-sentient and therefore predictable as long as the right people are aware of the threat. But yes that's probably overconfident.
It's very probable that undercover FBI agents radicalized more potential terrorists in the United States than all the fundamentalist Muslim proselytizers combined.
Eh, this sounds like wishful thinking.
My guess would be that there have been a range of interventions, both foreign and domestic, that we're only dimly aware of, most of which were ineffective and/or unnecessary, but not all. Some of both the ineffective and effective varieties have also been immoral, but again, not all.
This is all unknowable though. We can only guess based on how government tends to work when it tries to kill flies with bazookas.
I don't think there's a ton of evidence for the "blowback" theory though. Or to refine that a bit, any blowback that we've generated has been only mildly threatening at worst - as in, our own actions may have radicalized some potential terrorists but only incompetent ones. That's bad because it has messed with people for no good reason, but large-scale terrorism like 9/11 requires sophistication and coordination, and if you don't have something like an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, then it's very difficult for any aspiring terrorist to get anything serious done.