Since a number meta-analysis of exiting studies of the question points to reduced transmission rates and past practice included masking for respiratory disease transmission... What is -most- likely is any subsequent study will show something similar. That body of existing studies and the various meta-analyses done on them was and is the existing thing that made (and should make in future pandemics) mask mandates during a raging deadly pandemic the wise move.
I was somewhat aware of pandemic planning (that there was some under previous administrations), enough to have taken note when Trump had the bright idea of shutting down that function in 2018--what we got in 2020 was a hastily patched-together attempt to revive the plan, which did not go well. The worst thing was the utter failure to even consider stockpiling supplies (PPE) for the event of a respiratory pandemic--a significant part of the early success of Asian countries like Korea and Taiwan was that they had enough masks (surgeons and N-94/95s) to outfit the entire population, because they had survived original SARS in the early 2000s. Probably the worst thing the CDC did was discourage mask-wearing early in the pandemic in order to (in their very mistaken thinking) preserve scarce supplies, which ended up encouraging the production of mostly-ineffective cloth masks because we had nothing else for most medical personnel. Now we have companies continuing to produce cloth masks, which are really nothing more than pandemic pantomime, and probably contribute to the “masks don’t work” discourse because masks made of regular woven or knit cloth really don’t “work.”
“ Business closures and school closures were not low cost!” Agree. Masking and social distancing however are, IMO. I didn’t hear the CDC discuss such costs (they may have at some point). If you believe they were overly focused on preventing hospitalization, death, prolonged illness and disability I would respectfully disagree.
Reflexive anti-Trumpism was one part of the reason why people were so big on masking, but I think another reason is just “safetyism” generally. The same people who wanted perpetual masking want kids to sit in car seats until they are 12 and wear full protective gear to ride a bike and so on.
I notice that neither I nor most of the 805 comments so far actually followed Matts Example and talked about what WE got wrong. Good for Matt!
Where _I_ was wrong was only criticizing the incorrect arguments of anti “lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates folks, but never engaged, even locally when I had returned to DC from abroad, on the substance, OUR school closures, government office closures, indoor dining restrictions, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, etc.
We missed the boat on air filters and UV sanitization. We should still be pushing that improved air filtration and sanitization - pretty much as a default standard for indoors air for increased protection against respiratory disease. I still wear a mask when going indoors - I am immunized, but my wife has significant health issues and is unlikely to survive infection. Improved air filtration also helps with pollen, mold, smoke, and other irritating aerosols.
Masking greatly reduces the risk for airborn disease. At the peak of the Omicron wave I was called for jury duty - I showed up wearing a powered air supplied respirator. Not only would it protect me, but it was certain to keep me off the jury.
You can't judge whether a decision was good or bad after the fact based on later-acquired knowledge! (Otherwise you'd kick yourself for having wasted time putting on your seatbelt every time you drove home safely without having a collision.) Past experience with respiratory virus epidemics was that schools were the primary driver. That didn't turn out to be true for Covid, but there was no way of predicting that. As for vaccines, they were actually excellent at preventing infection and transmission of the original virus. That the virus turned out to mutate very rapidly was unexpected based on existing knowledge (there was reason to believe that a single stranded RNA virus with rudimentary error correction capability would mutate significantly slower than the flu virus).
I was a covid hawk pre-vaccine, and when the GF protests started I came out on Facebook loaded for bear. I specifically warned the people participating that they wouldn't live it down, that when we saw the covid numbers it would lay bare for the entire world just what this "social justice" movement really means for the downtrodden and marginalized.
And I was right! There was, in fact, a large spike in covid hospitalizations and deaths coinciding with the protests. You can go look at it right now, it still shows up in the graphs even next to the omicron surge that came later.
What shocked me to my core was the stories that subsequently came out in reputable newspapers quoting experts saying there was "no evidence" of a protest-related spike. No evidence!
So what was that June/July spike in hospitalizations and deaths, then? Well, they said, it's probably people spending more time indoors due to hot weather. Except no other respiratory virus shows mid summer seasonality like this. And that covid spike hasn't repeated in subsequent summers.
IIRC Part of the "no evidence" claim was based on a lack of correlation between counties that had protests and counties that had outbreaks. But that proves nothing; we assume people traveled to/from these protests.
This is what's so disorienting about the debate in these comments about whether we knew in June 2020 that outdoor gatherings are safe: 1. We 100% did not; 2. The protests themselves did not demonstrate this! Again, just look at the graph. How else do we explain that spike?
It is certainly true that outdoors was safer, if not safe in some absolute sense, and in retrospect we should have relaxed restrictions outdoors sooner to help with mental health & reduce political polarization.
But it should surprise no one that crowding together & yelling & screaming for hours is going to increase transmission, even if it's partially ameliorated by being outdoors.
Tell me where I'm wrong, but it feels like we've memory-holed the June 2020 covid spike because the cognitive dissonance was too great.
As silly as the public health people were on the protests, it’s hard to determine the effect they had on covid numbers. One thing that is clear to me is that infections went up and down in particular areas without any apparent exogenous reason.
You could easily latch onto a reason (masks, protests, indoor dining, whatever) why numbers were high there but low here, and then in a matter of a week the situation would reverse.
I thought the summer spike in 2020 was a slow burn in late June and early July, in Texas, Florida, and California, exactly as one might expect from something driven by indoor air conditioned behavior. I definitely didn't see a summer spike in early June, which might have lined up with the George Floyd protests. In fact, it looks like June 16 was the lowest covid case numbers for several weeks before or since - there had been a gradual decline that didn't reverse until then.
Not sure what you're seeing but at the national level it looks like rates were dropping through May 2020, then they leveled off first week of June and started climbing again. This didn't happen in every state, but it happened in a lot of places, some of them outside the South.
Is there a reason why we would see this indoor-air-conditioned effect for covid in 2020, but not in subsequent years & not with other respiratory viruses?
Not meant to be a rhetorical question, I actually don't understand virus seasonality and there might be a reason. I just haven't heard it yet
Yeah, I think we're seeing the same thing - it looks to me like the change in direction of the chart is in late June, after the George Floyd protests were over, and not a spike resulting from the two weeks or so of actual protests.
My understanding is that no one actually understands virus seasonality (here's one long attempt to understand what is known: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality but I think it leaves out the fact that polio has summer seasonality, and some other diseases have fall and spring seasonality).
I think we did see maybe something of covid seasonality the following few years - though it's hard to say for sure. In summer 2021, the delta spike definitely started in July, though it peaked later than the 2020 summer spike. And in 2022, the Omicron BA.5 did seem to produce a pretty robust summer hump. But it's really hard to say.
At any rate, the main thing is that I don't think there's any clear spike around the George Floyd protests (the big rise started several weeks after the protests) just like there was no big spike around the Spurgis motorcycle rally that August (though at the time I did try to make the claim that the clear rise in cases in the Dakotas beginning in September was somehow connected).
Belatedly, thanks for engaging with me on this. I didn't realize the warm-weather correlation was so strong; it makes me a little less frustrated that this has become the accepted explanation.
However, none of this is evidence against protests contributing to the spike, and I still think this is the most common-sense assumption. Even if it was ultimately only a few dozen extra killed -- in the context of a pandemic that was killing many thousands -- I think it should be acknowledged.
It bothers me because there was no discussion about the necessity of crowding together and yelling, as a tactic. It seemed like cargo cult 60s-style protesting.
The organization Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County at first refused to participate, citing COVID risks. Their leadership was sharply critical of CHOP; no one seemed to notice. After a few weeks they relented and organized a silent, socially distanced, 100% peaceful protest. The protesters didn't take it as a suggestion; the next day they went right back to crowding & yelling & throwing things at the cops.
There wasn't enough discussion about tactics because people were afraid of being canceled. It's a root problem that's created many others. But maybe causes-of-the-2020-summer-COVID-mini-spike is a weird hill to die on. Obviously I was 100% wrong about the protesters not living it down.
I do think it’s likely that some people got infected at the hundreds of thousands of protests. I suspect local conditions at the protests were different in different places. I just looked back at my photos of the ones in Bryan/College Station, Texas and see that the ones in Bryan, by the jail and courthouse, were just people lining the narrow sidewalk of the main arterial road and waving signs at passing cars. Over 90% of the people are wearing masks; at the most crowded intersection, there are people shoulder to shoulder, but not facing each other; along the other blocks, it’s “only” two or three dozen people per block, so they all have space (though this is far more people than I have ever seen outside of cars on those blocks in the nine years I lived here). I suspect that in cities with more pedestrian infrastructure, there were denser crowds. I should revisit the nytimes photo galleries from those weekends. I still think the timing of the national protests doesn’t line up with the main spikes in late June but it’s quite possible that there are some locations where it is tighter.
It seems odd to me to center the shift to stupidity in public policy to social media. It was government agencies and the press suppressing counter arguments. In most of the press, I thought the driver for Covid militancy was initially a way to disparage Trump and subsequently evolved into a good governor, bad governor trope. This is in no way to suggest that Trump didn't provide much worthy of disparagement, but that policies evolved for non-rational reasons.
This was refreshing. To actually have someone reflect on the last few years.
Because mostly I just think its really weird how we have largely memory holed the COVID-19 pandemic. We don't really mark key dates, haven't build memorials like we have for other tragic events, we don't really talk about the lessons learned for public policy. And this isn't just in the US where polarization blew up the discourse, its the same here in Australia where we had overwhelmingly bi-partisan support for the strategy. We just don't talk about it (or celebrate our relative success). Weird.
I think I will always remember March 24, as the date I got the vaccine, and which also turned out to be the one-year anniversary of the date my local county implemented its shelter-in-place order. There are many other dates in early March that are seared into my mind.
Still kind of crazy that some parts of the country had some of their tightest restrictions in January of 2021 (couldn't eat outside in LA, for example). I remember thinking "holy shit, this is never going to end" because it was at its peak more than 270 days in. In hindsight just a total nightmare of a year, and it was always going to be seemingly no matter what the policy choices were.
January 2021 was basically the highest point of the classic virus, and was only outpaced by Omicron, and maybe the very peak of Delta. So it's probably a good thing that the strictest rules were in place then.
Matt’s opening vignette about the taqueria owner makes me wonder how much of the recent Latino shift away from Democrats is COVID related. We know that many of our essential workers - folks working in slaughterhouses, kitchen workers, other forms of close in distribution that were essential AND highly likely to spread COVID (unlike say - an electrical line worker) were disproportionately Latino. So at the time they were being asked to give up the social interactions that we all loved, they were also being asked, no, FORCED to put themselves on the line in Covid- dangerous ways. Maybe there wasn’t an alternative to that but it still grinds my gears when I run across some sanctimonious progressive who brags about how “good” they were during COVID - always getting takeout or delivery. No, you weren’t especially “good” - you were just privileged enough to be able to pay to transfer your COVID risk to someone else who couldn’t afford to say no.
PPP is worth its own separate condemnation. The way to deal with unemployment is with unemployment insurance that replaces a portion of lost income, not getting business to operate at a loss.
I agree, but the issue is that the federal government has no way of physically delivering that aid, right? And then many states that provided UI were completely overwhelmed, to the point where checks took multiple months to be delivered. We simply don't have the infrastructure to apply the correct policy here.
Today is an excellent day to once again air my grievance to Substack against its horrible practice of occasionally shoving the bottom comments behind the Load More button. It leaves no good way of trying to find where new comments are when it does that.
I won't go that far, the other commenting software I have experience with is Disqus, and one thing they don't have that Substack has is asynchronous updating of edits in real time. It's annoying on Disqus to have to write a separate comment to make a correction because people might not reload due to the bad Load More button that both platforms have.
I completely disagree! Whenever I see that "Load More" button ... I just assume something's gone terribly off the rails. Sadly, learned from personal experience taking things way too far.
Since a number meta-analysis of exiting studies of the question points to reduced transmission rates and past practice included masking for respiratory disease transmission... What is -most- likely is any subsequent study will show something similar. That body of existing studies and the various meta-analyses done on them was and is the existing thing that made (and should make in future pandemics) mask mandates during a raging deadly pandemic the wise move.
I was somewhat aware of pandemic planning (that there was some under previous administrations), enough to have taken note when Trump had the bright idea of shutting down that function in 2018--what we got in 2020 was a hastily patched-together attempt to revive the plan, which did not go well. The worst thing was the utter failure to even consider stockpiling supplies (PPE) for the event of a respiratory pandemic--a significant part of the early success of Asian countries like Korea and Taiwan was that they had enough masks (surgeons and N-94/95s) to outfit the entire population, because they had survived original SARS in the early 2000s. Probably the worst thing the CDC did was discourage mask-wearing early in the pandemic in order to (in their very mistaken thinking) preserve scarce supplies, which ended up encouraging the production of mostly-ineffective cloth masks because we had nothing else for most medical personnel. Now we have companies continuing to produce cloth masks, which are really nothing more than pandemic pantomime, and probably contribute to the “masks don’t work” discourse because masks made of regular woven or knit cloth really don’t “work.”
“ Business closures and school closures were not low cost!” Agree. Masking and social distancing however are, IMO. I didn’t hear the CDC discuss such costs (they may have at some point). If you believe they were overly focused on preventing hospitalization, death, prolonged illness and disability I would respectfully disagree.
Reflexive anti-Trumpism was one part of the reason why people were so big on masking, but I think another reason is just “safetyism” generally. The same people who wanted perpetual masking want kids to sit in car seats until they are 12 and wear full protective gear to ride a bike and so on.
I notice that neither I nor most of the 805 comments so far actually followed Matts Example and talked about what WE got wrong. Good for Matt!
Where _I_ was wrong was only criticizing the incorrect arguments of anti “lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates folks, but never engaged, even locally when I had returned to DC from abroad, on the substance, OUR school closures, government office closures, indoor dining restrictions, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, etc.
Most neurotic super-doves? Do you mean super-hawks? Or am I confusing my doves and hawks…
We missed the boat on air filters and UV sanitization. We should still be pushing that improved air filtration and sanitization - pretty much as a default standard for indoors air for increased protection against respiratory disease. I still wear a mask when going indoors - I am immunized, but my wife has significant health issues and is unlikely to survive infection. Improved air filtration also helps with pollen, mold, smoke, and other irritating aerosols.
Masking greatly reduces the risk for airborn disease. At the peak of the Omicron wave I was called for jury duty - I showed up wearing a powered air supplied respirator. Not only would it protect me, but it was certain to keep me off the jury.
You can't judge whether a decision was good or bad after the fact based on later-acquired knowledge! (Otherwise you'd kick yourself for having wasted time putting on your seatbelt every time you drove home safely without having a collision.) Past experience with respiratory virus epidemics was that schools were the primary driver. That didn't turn out to be true for Covid, but there was no way of predicting that. As for vaccines, they were actually excellent at preventing infection and transmission of the original virus. That the virus turned out to mutate very rapidly was unexpected based on existing knowledge (there was reason to believe that a single stranded RNA virus with rudimentary error correction capability would mutate significantly slower than the flu virus).
I was a covid hawk pre-vaccine, and when the GF protests started I came out on Facebook loaded for bear. I specifically warned the people participating that they wouldn't live it down, that when we saw the covid numbers it would lay bare for the entire world just what this "social justice" movement really means for the downtrodden and marginalized.
And I was right! There was, in fact, a large spike in covid hospitalizations and deaths coinciding with the protests. You can go look at it right now, it still shows up in the graphs even next to the omicron surge that came later.
What shocked me to my core was the stories that subsequently came out in reputable newspapers quoting experts saying there was "no evidence" of a protest-related spike. No evidence!
So what was that June/July spike in hospitalizations and deaths, then? Well, they said, it's probably people spending more time indoors due to hot weather. Except no other respiratory virus shows mid summer seasonality like this. And that covid spike hasn't repeated in subsequent summers.
IIRC Part of the "no evidence" claim was based on a lack of correlation between counties that had protests and counties that had outbreaks. But that proves nothing; we assume people traveled to/from these protests.
This is what's so disorienting about the debate in these comments about whether we knew in June 2020 that outdoor gatherings are safe: 1. We 100% did not; 2. The protests themselves did not demonstrate this! Again, just look at the graph. How else do we explain that spike?
It is certainly true that outdoors was safer, if not safe in some absolute sense, and in retrospect we should have relaxed restrictions outdoors sooner to help with mental health & reduce political polarization.
But it should surprise no one that crowding together & yelling & screaming for hours is going to increase transmission, even if it's partially ameliorated by being outdoors.
Tell me where I'm wrong, but it feels like we've memory-holed the June 2020 covid spike because the cognitive dissonance was too great.
As silly as the public health people were on the protests, it’s hard to determine the effect they had on covid numbers. One thing that is clear to me is that infections went up and down in particular areas without any apparent exogenous reason.
You could easily latch onto a reason (masks, protests, indoor dining, whatever) why numbers were high there but low here, and then in a matter of a week the situation would reverse.
I thought the summer spike in 2020 was a slow burn in late June and early July, in Texas, Florida, and California, exactly as one might expect from something driven by indoor air conditioned behavior. I definitely didn't see a summer spike in early June, which might have lined up with the George Floyd protests. In fact, it looks like June 16 was the lowest covid case numbers for several weeks before or since - there had been a gradual decline that didn't reverse until then.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Not sure what you're seeing but at the national level it looks like rates were dropping through May 2020, then they leveled off first week of June and started climbing again. This didn't happen in every state, but it happened in a lot of places, some of them outside the South.
Is there a reason why we would see this indoor-air-conditioned effect for covid in 2020, but not in subsequent years & not with other respiratory viruses?
Not meant to be a rhetorical question, I actually don't understand virus seasonality and there might be a reason. I just haven't heard it yet
Yeah, I think we're seeing the same thing - it looks to me like the change in direction of the chart is in late June, after the George Floyd protests were over, and not a spike resulting from the two weeks or so of actual protests.
My understanding is that no one actually understands virus seasonality (here's one long attempt to understand what is known: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality but I think it leaves out the fact that polio has summer seasonality, and some other diseases have fall and spring seasonality).
I think we did see maybe something of covid seasonality the following few years - though it's hard to say for sure. In summer 2021, the delta spike definitely started in July, though it peaked later than the 2020 summer spike. And in 2022, the Omicron BA.5 did seem to produce a pretty robust summer hump. But it's really hard to say.
At any rate, the main thing is that I don't think there's any clear spike around the George Floyd protests (the big rise started several weeks after the protests) just like there was no big spike around the Spurgis motorcycle rally that August (though at the time I did try to make the claim that the clear rise in cases in the Dakotas beginning in September was somehow connected).
Belatedly, thanks for engaging with me on this. I didn't realize the warm-weather correlation was so strong; it makes me a little less frustrated that this has become the accepted explanation.
However, none of this is evidence against protests contributing to the spike, and I still think this is the most common-sense assumption. Even if it was ultimately only a few dozen extra killed -- in the context of a pandemic that was killing many thousands -- I think it should be acknowledged.
It bothers me because there was no discussion about the necessity of crowding together and yelling, as a tactic. It seemed like cargo cult 60s-style protesting.
The organization Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County at first refused to participate, citing COVID risks. Their leadership was sharply critical of CHOP; no one seemed to notice. After a few weeks they relented and organized a silent, socially distanced, 100% peaceful protest. The protesters didn't take it as a suggestion; the next day they went right back to crowding & yelling & throwing things at the cops.
There wasn't enough discussion about tactics because people were afraid of being canceled. It's a root problem that's created many others. But maybe causes-of-the-2020-summer-COVID-mini-spike is a weird hill to die on. Obviously I was 100% wrong about the protesters not living it down.
I do think it’s likely that some people got infected at the hundreds of thousands of protests. I suspect local conditions at the protests were different in different places. I just looked back at my photos of the ones in Bryan/College Station, Texas and see that the ones in Bryan, by the jail and courthouse, were just people lining the narrow sidewalk of the main arterial road and waving signs at passing cars. Over 90% of the people are wearing masks; at the most crowded intersection, there are people shoulder to shoulder, but not facing each other; along the other blocks, it’s “only” two or three dozen people per block, so they all have space (though this is far more people than I have ever seen outside of cars on those blocks in the nine years I lived here). I suspect that in cities with more pedestrian infrastructure, there were denser crowds. I should revisit the nytimes photo galleries from those weekends. I still think the timing of the national protests doesn’t line up with the main spikes in late June but it’s quite possible that there are some locations where it is tighter.
It seems odd to me to center the shift to stupidity in public policy to social media. It was government agencies and the press suppressing counter arguments. In most of the press, I thought the driver for Covid militancy was initially a way to disparage Trump and subsequently evolved into a good governor, bad governor trope. This is in no way to suggest that Trump didn't provide much worthy of disparagement, but that policies evolved for non-rational reasons.
This was refreshing. To actually have someone reflect on the last few years.
Because mostly I just think its really weird how we have largely memory holed the COVID-19 pandemic. We don't really mark key dates, haven't build memorials like we have for other tragic events, we don't really talk about the lessons learned for public policy. And this isn't just in the US where polarization blew up the discourse, its the same here in Australia where we had overwhelmingly bi-partisan support for the strategy. We just don't talk about it (or celebrate our relative success). Weird.
I think I will always remember March 24, as the date I got the vaccine, and which also turned out to be the one-year anniversary of the date my local county implemented its shelter-in-place order. There are many other dates in early March that are seared into my mind.
Still kind of crazy that some parts of the country had some of their tightest restrictions in January of 2021 (couldn't eat outside in LA, for example). I remember thinking "holy shit, this is never going to end" because it was at its peak more than 270 days in. In hindsight just a total nightmare of a year, and it was always going to be seemingly no matter what the policy choices were.
January 2021 was basically the highest point of the classic virus, and was only outpaced by Omicron, and maybe the very peak of Delta. So it's probably a good thing that the strictest rules were in place then.
Matt’s opening vignette about the taqueria owner makes me wonder how much of the recent Latino shift away from Democrats is COVID related. We know that many of our essential workers - folks working in slaughterhouses, kitchen workers, other forms of close in distribution that were essential AND highly likely to spread COVID (unlike say - an electrical line worker) were disproportionately Latino. So at the time they were being asked to give up the social interactions that we all loved, they were also being asked, no, FORCED to put themselves on the line in Covid- dangerous ways. Maybe there wasn’t an alternative to that but it still grinds my gears when I run across some sanctimonious progressive who brags about how “good” they were during COVID - always getting takeout or delivery. No, you weren’t especially “good” - you were just privileged enough to be able to pay to transfer your COVID risk to someone else who couldn’t afford to say no.
What, if any, position did you take re school lockouts, Mr. Y?
https://www.slowboring.com/p/dont-close-schools
PPP is worth its own separate condemnation. The way to deal with unemployment is with unemployment insurance that replaces a portion of lost income, not getting business to operate at a loss.
I agree, but the issue is that the federal government has no way of physically delivering that aid, right? And then many states that provided UI were completely overwhelmed, to the point where checks took multiple months to be delivered. We simply don't have the infrastructure to apply the correct policy here.
Today is an excellent day to once again air my grievance to Substack against its horrible practice of occasionally shoving the bottom comments behind the Load More button. It leaves no good way of trying to find where new comments are when it does that.
The commenting software sucks.
I won't go that far, the other commenting software I have experience with is Disqus, and one thing they don't have that Substack has is asynchronous updating of edits in real time. It's annoying on Disqus to have to write a separate comment to make a correction because people might not reload due to the bad Load More button that both platforms have.
I completely disagree! Whenever I see that "Load More" button ... I just assume something's gone terribly off the rails. Sadly, learned from personal experience taking things way too far.