To echo your experience, I had a conversation recently with a niece, a freshman at college. She had been in Texas for a sports tournament and mentioned she had only seen many masked people in a Whole Foods (ha ha) but not many other places. We both agreed that most of the masking policies were mostly performative (exceptions: health care and elder care facilities, public transportation, etc.) and that mask wearing is a pain in the ass. I asked her if she wore masks while there (in the big, bad red state of Texas). She replied that though she would have preferred not to mask up, she did so so that no one would think she's a republican.
I don't hold this against her; she's an 18 year old idealistic college freshman. But I suspect this is a lot of what's behind so much performative mask wearing....that mask policies in blue states (like my own) are simply public ways of signaling that we are, you know, anti-Trump.
P.S. Re Freddie's column on Chris Hayes, many of these blue state lefties simply cannot let go of the bad orange man. I see it all over the comment threads of the local paper. He haunts their thoughts and dreams and still gives so many a grand purpose.
At this point, as a triple-vaxxed Californian in a city where nearly everyone publicly masks at all times indoors, I just do it because it has become a social norm, and it's no skin off my back to wear it. The thought DOES frustrate me that perhaps everyone else in that store or dry cleaners or whatever is doing the same thing, and if we all just came to a social consensus that it's silly and meaningless, we could finally just stop it. I'm waiting for enlightened government to see the writing on the wall from the seething masses and make the decision for us. Until then, fine, whatever, I'll mask.
My views on this thing have changed pretty frequently but my first reaction ever to the lockdown ideas were: it seems a little convenient these were all coming from people whose lives would be able to easily withstand a lockdown.
I moved very early during lockdown (that sucked) and my perspective was very different when I was in a suburb and when I was in a city and actually had to be reminded daily how many people didn't get the freedom to just Zoom to work.
I've been trying really, really hard to think of the lockdown from the perspective of all the people who were hurt badly by it.
Because for me, it was literally pure upside. I got a three-week paid vacation to sit around the house and play video games. It was fucking awesome. Then I went back to work and nothing at all had changed.
Lockdowns, as a policy, should *absolutely not* be considered from the perspective of people like me. I will literally be better off. We have to look at the people who get hurt.
Yes, indeed. If COVID were detectable to the common person by any means whatsoever other than a relentless propaganda campaign from every media channel imaginable, the popular response would have been quite different.
Whatever happened to that thing in China where people were falling over dead in the streets?
I once had an argument with some woke kid about weather or not park benches should be made "homeless friendly". Not having dividers, so the homeless could sleep there. I was like "wouldn't it be better to build them actual fucking homes!". It was like this never crossed their mind. He wasn't defending the homeless. He was defending homelessness. As if that position was a virtuous one.
Our nation is only willing to house the criminals because it wants them shut away from the rest of us for "our" safety, not for their benefit. The homeless can't be forced into prison just for being homeless, so the cops roust them from their little cardboard villages, and cities make the benches and every other surface hostile to sleeping. There's no "but" here; our nation doesn't care about ANYONE who can't pay the rent.
My church kept our warming center, food bank, showers, laundry, hot meals and all other homeless services open without interruption throughout the entire pandemic. We actually saw a huge increase in people coming due to other churches shutting down (I'm in a college town). So we raised a huge amount of money to meet the demand. My wife is the pastor and fought very hard for this and I'm very proud of her for it. I was at the church earlier today and it's full of homeless people eating, playing games, napping. Masks optional. Totally worth whatever small risk it entails.
Watching my fellow legal aid lawyers with homeless clients (I don’t represent individuals but know many who do) lose contact with them as all the safe gathering spaces shut down was brutally demoralizing. So many people lost their disability benefits because they had all public spaces, and their attendant necessities for survival, shut to them. So many people lost their only healthcare, their only sanitation.
One of the only businesses in our downtown core that still allowed homeless people to use its restroom and sit for long periods to warm up closed in 2020, because its windows were smashed in anti-police protests so many times the owners gave up on the franchise. I still get angry every time I pass the boarded-up windows.
And real worker solidarity is literal physical destruction of the workplace!
(Joke aside, I at least get to be pissed off in a bipartisan way— my town had several violent clashes between right wing and left wing militias, and both were more than happy to smash up property.)
It didn't take the virus. Public restrooms in the underground transit stations in the Bay Area have been closed since 9/12/01. Because somebody might leave a bomb in one. So the stairs down from the street are covered in shit.
Thank you. I often wondered during the pandemic how mobile wound care outfits were operating if at all. Or if people with gangrene, usually homeless, could be seen in ER to clean their very mortal wounds. It's like some of the most vulnerable were completely forgotten.
I want to add that I think A LOT of elites have soft-a authoritarian tendencies. They have strong feelings that when they personally are in control bad things won't happen so they actively desire that control. For COVID it means doing something - anything - that allows them to exhibit some degree of control in the face of the uncontrollable. Do these controls really make life better? Probably not. It doesn't really matter. The point is that when they are not actively in control they are mortified of what may happen, so even if that control is meaningless they want to have it. I think this is the best explanation for a lot of mask mandates that are publicly and openly not enforced by local authorities. Cities keep passing them, but if they are not enforced in any way what exactly is the point? What is it supposed to accomplish? It's designed explicitly to create that illusion of control.
If you felt you had all the answers - and a more refined moral agency than everyone else - why would you not also feel drawn to authoritarianism? Seems pretty obvious to me.
I don't have all the answers and hold no special claim to moral correctness - both reasons why I'm not an authoritarian.
It is actually quite amazing, when you stop and think about it, how widely society is diverging. It seems like more and more that the various factions in this country have different social and cultural mores:: marriage rates are still very high among the college educated, for example, and not nearly so high for everyone else.
That divergence is so terrifying. In some places you have elderly obese diabetics convinced they have nothing to fear from COVID, and in other places you have young people who have spent the past two years in a constant state of anxiety for themselves and their young, healthy children. We'll get through, or to learn to live with, COVID, but other crises are coming, and all of them will be made worse by the fact that we are living in separate realities and public trust has totally (and for good cause!) collapsed.
I think the elderly obese diabetics have decided to just live their life, rather? Barricading yourself inside a long-term care facility and never seeing anyone is worse than a ~5% risk of death, for some people
For people with a chronic condition, the shoe has already dropped, so to speak. Most of the people I know with one are rather cavalier about enjoying life even if doing so is suboptimal from a health perspective.
Agreed. But in addition to Trump panic & Covid panic (valid panics! I hate Trump and I do fear Covid, though neither worse than the initial fears) I feel like there's "Partizanship" panic. The fear that these two camps, both full of panic about each other ("Proud Boys are Brown Shirts!" "ANTIFA are terrorists!") are going to make society collapse. I don't think it will. Because most people care more about who's playing Spiderman next or what the Kardashians are doing to their lips than any of this crap. If we fall as a civilization it won't be the fringes faults, crazy as they both are. It'll just be normal stupidness.
I like a lot of this but you're exaggerating in saying that this is a "fundamentally self-interested decision." Parents of infants, people helping to take care of elderly relatives, people whose partners are immunocompromised, professionals like nurses who are in regular contact with people who are elderly or sick, etc. are making decisions not on the basis of the risk to themselves but on protecting their loved ones and society at large. And that's good! The idea that protecting yourself from a highly contagious virus with enormously different risk profiles to different groups (as you note) is a purely personal decision is a bleak symptom of an age where people feel little obligation to take care of one another.
Yeah, and to be fair, the risk is not just about those people, it's also about us civilians not getting it to spread more widely so those people inevitably get it; it's that constant, irritating reply scold saying car crashes aren't contagious. I'm vaxxed and boosted but I can still get Covid and spread it. So again while I love and agree with a lot of this essay and I can't stand the Covid one-upsmanship, it makes some sense to me that I'll be asked to stay inside again in January to "flatten the curve."
But what infuriates me isn't the staying inside, it's that it feels like it's only delaying the inevitable. If I flattened the curve while they were building additional capacity for covid patients in temporary hospitals, while we were rushing to produce Paxlovid, while we distributed the N95 masks we'd spent years subsidizing -- then I'd stay the hell inside my apartment! Like, if they asked me -- a perfectly healthy and still relatively young man -- to go sign up for a temporary Covid nursing workforce I'd do it in a second. Hundreds of thousands more people will die of Omicron, this could be my D Day if we could help save any significant percentage of them! But instead "flattening the curve" now feels only like a shrug. And in that case I feel like, hell, what's the point of me skipping The Matrix in IMax, let alone Christmas and New Years with loved ones.
I mean I think at this point we all need to come to grips with the inevitability that we *will* all get Covid. There are arguments to be made about new treatments forthcoming, but it’s here to stay. So for those people terrified for elderly or vulnerable relatives etc…their fear is palpable and understandable, but their needs and requests seem to be at odds with the average person’s. And I don’t know what we do with that besides the obvious, You do you.
I agree heartily. I thought our initial shutdowns were about flattening the curve so we could boost our readiness! And we did do some of that -- we developed much better protocols for treatment, developed a vaccine. It doesn't seem that we invested in our healthcare infrastructure, which consists of both facilities (which are *relatively* easy to procure) and trained people (which are much harder to procure, and very easy to lose). We've done a poor job at communicating what kinds of masks are more and less effective and establishing standards as to what constitutes a "mask" for COVID purposes. It may be that part of the reason there's so little difference between mask mandate areas and non-mandate areas is that the masks in use in the mask mandate areas were horribly ineffective.
We put all our eggs in the vaccine and (crappy) masking baskets. We should have been working on a lot more baskets.
Over the past couple years I’ve been slowly doing my science prerecs to get a second bachelor’s degree, in nursing. I’m waiting till my youngest goes to kindergarten in two years to do the full time program.
Now, if the government had put forth some kind of incentive program for people to fast track their nursing degrees (or even just get them; like paying for the degree) I might’ve taken it.
And while we’re on the topic of hospitals and medical staff, the treatment of frontline staff by hospitals—the same hospitals who received billions in PPP loans—is atrocious. People are burned out and quitting in droves not just because covid is relentless, but because their working conditions, time off, and pay (hazard pay? How dare you mention it!) are abysmal.
In our region the nursing shortage is exacerbated by nurses taking fantastic-paying jobs as “traveling nurses.” There are so many hospitals and facilities in our area that nurses are getting traveling pay without ever leaving home. So it’s more expensive to staff hospitals, and very few nurses are deeply familiar with the way things are run at each particular facility. So they’re constantly in training mode.
Yes, completely agreed! It seems to me that, after the advent of the vaccines, "flattening the curve" has become more or less synonymous with "we have to slow the pace of contagion to protect our unprepared for-profit hospital systems." But while I acknowledge the realism of that demand (we can't suddenly create new and different hospital conditions ex nihilo), the unintended effect (like you say here) is that we prolong the pandemic itself. We don't change the total number of people infected-- we just slow the pace of infection and draw out the pandemic indefinitely. With omicron, it seems that even the most hyper-vigilant masking (not to mention triple vaccination) will not serve as an absolute or permanent barrier to infection. When each of us decides to take on the burden of flattening the curve, we're not protecting the vulnerable from infection-- we're largely delaying that inevitability in order to indulge the self-valorizing narrative that we've been moral, responsible, and caring.
Yes, yes, yes. I have heard arguments about delaying infection (by taking the hyper vigilant route) in order to develop new therapeutics. I can’t disagree with that exactly. But it does feel like at every step of this pandemic, a certain cohort has moved the goal posts. Before vaccines, few people were concerned about kids getting very sick. Once vaccines were available to adults, the new goal was to get children vaccinated and no one should live normally until that happens. Then vaccines were approved for kids, and now we need to keep the elderly and the vulnerable virus-free until better therapeutics arrive and/or we “get more people vaccinated” (ha) or until we “eradicate” Covid (ha HA.)
While Covid is the big baddie, I think 'this specific panic (tm)' is downstream of some sort of performative know-everything-ism from the PMC. I think it's status signalling that they have the free time to 'know everything about everything' because their jobs are pixels on one screen while shallow researching and doomscrolling on the other.
Meanwhile, those that are less plugged in manage to be content not knowing or having to demonstrate they know everything about every fractal complexity of every kerfuffle.
I think the story of the pandemic is it changed terminal onlineness from some sort of personality malaise into a virtuous skill and status signal.
I was reading a blog early in the pandemic, and an 80-something year old had a really insightful comment that I also think plays into why young liberals are more afraid of this than many other groups, even the elderly.
His comment (to paraphrase, I can’t remember which blog unfortunately): I’m 80 and in good health. Every remaining year of my life is the best year I have left - I’m not going to lock down in fear. Next year I might not be able to walk anymore; I’ll wear my mask and get the shot when it comes out but I’m not changing my lifestyle at all.
If you are 35 and still trying to climb the ladder, staying at home and not living your life for 2 years is a lot lower of a cost than it is for this 80 year old. You have a lot of life ahead of you, and dying from covid costs you many more remaining years.
I think expected value of years of life lost, or years with permanent damage, for your demographic, is probably a better way to analyze the risk of covid than just “chance of death” or “chance of permanent damage”.
"If you are 35 and still trying to climb the ladder, staying at home and not living your life for 2 years is a lot lower of a cost than it is for this 80 year old"
I think there is another plausible reading where economically the loss in the early 30s or so is more consequential across the remainder of ones life than capital lost at 80 years of age. Think compounding gains - but for losses.
So some of the striving and failing Journalist class realize this. In real economic terms if Houses went up 20% in the last 12 months, and they don't have any appreciating assets, then they got quite a lot less wealthy, quickly.
Freddie, are you familiar with Peter Turchin? Can't remember if I've seen him mentioned in your stuff, but he has a theory of social cycling that involves two key forces leading to social crises: overproduction of elites (primarily second and third sons in feudal systems, but you can see the rise of the ultra-wealthy and their PMC orbiters as a similar phenomenon in modern societies) which in turn causes intra-elite competition; and what he calls "immiseration of the poor."
The miserable poor become susceptible to populism and outbursts of revolutionary anger; the elites tend to channel this rage in order to weed out some of the competition, often in exchange for concessions that make the lives of the poor temporarily better. For a while tensions are eased... until the elite class grows again, more and more resources are diverted from the main body of the population, and the cycle begins anew.
Sounds fascinating. Makes sense too. Depressing if the theory is right. How do we break that cycle? Especially in these days of black & white thinking?
I am part of a committee that's planning an event in another state for July 2022. The host institution (a public university) in that state has no vaccine or mask mandate. Several committee members (most of them from NY and MA) freaked out when they realized this, and their freak out morphed into criticism of the committee members from that university for not standing up to the administration and demanding better safeguards. The conversation got intense. People were saying stuff like, "I can't be expected to risk my life because your university is anti-science." Finally, a committee member from the "no vaccine, no mask" host university burst into tears. Turns out, her dad had died of COVID just a month ago. She knows the risks. She knows her university's policy sucks. But she's powerless to do anything about it. When she dropped the bombshell about her dad, the whole committee fell silent. People who'd been berating her for not standing up to the administration of her university felt awful for what they'd said and apologized with evident humility. It was an intense moment. I think we all learned something from it.
I am a scientist that knows a lot of other scientists, and we all putatively "follow the science". But so many of my friends and colleagues have been in utter panic mode since March 2020. They were still wearing double masks after getting vaccinated, some wearing masks outside, avoiding any indoor socializing, and acting as if their children were at risk of imminent death (that is still going on for those with kids younger than 5).
I have had some mild criticisms of COVID restrictions, and am seen as a borderline anti-vaxxer. I can only talk about it seriously with close friends, and even they think I'm acting a little reckless because I take my vaccinated kids to the movies or let them see friends indoors without masks.
Private universities are also tripping over themselves to follow whatever the first movers are doing. Mandating boosters, closing for early January, etc. No attempt to learn to live with this virus or acknowledge that most college students are at virtually no risk.
The only thing that has stayed consistent during the entire pandemic is that anyone taking fewer precautions than you are is reckless, and anyone taking more precautions than you are is insane.
As usual, I mostly agree with this piece. Some people, particularly on the left, are too worked up about the latest Covid developments. With vaccination and better treatment, we've hit the point when it's basically time to live your life with the acceptance of some incremental risk. We accept lots of other risks that aren't that different from Covid. I can understand the anxiety, but it's not very useful.
However, being a gadfly for overreactions on the left has a limited interest span as well. If we are best off ignoring their histrionics, what does that say about critiques of their behavior? I suppose someone has to do it, but ultimately I don't find the critique that useful or interesting either. I have Covid meta-discourse fatigue, I suppose.
While I don't doubt that a significant amount of the Covid panic is status-seeking behaviour, we cannot underestimate the number of people who have been brainwashed to the degree they are legitimately afraid of death by Covid. Many people in my social circle have a true, honest fear of the disease to a degree that completely outstrips their actual risk from it.
Lately I've taken to asking people in my circle what they believe is the actual rate of hospitalization of the unvaccinated. Most people so far have replied somewhere from 30-40%, which is dramatically higher than actual reported rates which sit somewhere <1%. These are not virtue-signaling types, but regular people who perhaps consume a little too much news and are a less likely than average to start their own investigations and review the data (or "the science") themselves.
I have also seen a lot of very bad or outright deceptive presentations of statistics. My doctor's office sent out an email a few months ago trying to assuage parent concerns about heart issues from Covid vaccines. They included a chart that showed heart problems in children and youth from Covid itself - trying to convince parents that the risk of heart problems from Covid was far greater than from the shot itself. Naturally, they decided not to highlight that the chart showed heart issues in only *hospitalized* children and youth which is a far cry from the general population. I assume most people would gloss over the little descriptive label that indicated where the data was collected from, and would therefore not be seeing the entire picture.
The irony of this all is that many of these people frequently parrot the "trust the science" narrative but then have an approach that is far closer to "trust the media".
Before I functionally abandoned trying to write a Substack I worked quite a bit on a piece that directly addressed this, using COVID-19 as an example. My research backed this hypothesis up very strongly. Most people are just factually wrong on how dangerous Covid-19 is. Their algorithmic bubbles create a surge of information that - although individually true - leads to making very wrong conclusions. For a lot of people they genuinely believe this virus is far more dangerous than it is, with mortality rates orders of magnitude higher than reality. We're dealing with sizes far too massive for the brain to process, so I don't blame them, but it's fully reasonable to act the way they do when they think this is, essentially, Black Death 4.0.
Yeah, I was surprised how hard it is to get the actual statistical chances of dying of COVID for different ages. I found some good calculators on the internet, but it's not something that is widely shared. It's the same motivation as all other news coverage- motivate behavior rather than tell the truth. For me, if an article is light on numbers, I immediately suspect they are trying to get me to do something.
The stats for children are particularly important. I know people who were really concerned about vaccinating their kids, without realizing that an unvaccinated 10 year old is about 700 times less likely to die from COIVID than a vaccinated 80 year old. Age is the important variable, not vaccination status. Or, you can think of vaccination as lowering someone's effective age.
This is a great take, as is Freddie's. Little of column A, little of column B.
Do you really not see that that's so much worse?
To echo your experience, I had a conversation recently with a niece, a freshman at college. She had been in Texas for a sports tournament and mentioned she had only seen many masked people in a Whole Foods (ha ha) but not many other places. We both agreed that most of the masking policies were mostly performative (exceptions: health care and elder care facilities, public transportation, etc.) and that mask wearing is a pain in the ass. I asked her if she wore masks while there (in the big, bad red state of Texas). She replied that though she would have preferred not to mask up, she did so so that no one would think she's a republican.
I don't hold this against her; she's an 18 year old idealistic college freshman. But I suspect this is a lot of what's behind so much performative mask wearing....that mask policies in blue states (like my own) are simply public ways of signaling that we are, you know, anti-Trump.
P.S. Re Freddie's column on Chris Hayes, many of these blue state lefties simply cannot let go of the bad orange man. I see it all over the comment threads of the local paper. He haunts their thoughts and dreams and still gives so many a grand purpose.
yup. it reminds me of the TSA shoe removal and liquid restriction policies. pure security and compliance theater. but entirely self-imposed.
At this point, as a triple-vaxxed Californian in a city where nearly everyone publicly masks at all times indoors, I just do it because it has become a social norm, and it's no skin off my back to wear it. The thought DOES frustrate me that perhaps everyone else in that store or dry cleaners or whatever is doing the same thing, and if we all just came to a social consensus that it's silly and meaningless, we could finally just stop it. I'm waiting for enlightened government to see the writing on the wall from the seething masses and make the decision for us. Until then, fine, whatever, I'll mask.
"...waiting for enlightened government to see the writing on the wall..."
This may be a big ask in the current political climate.
My views on this thing have changed pretty frequently but my first reaction ever to the lockdown ideas were: it seems a little convenient these were all coming from people whose lives would be able to easily withstand a lockdown.
I moved very early during lockdown (that sucked) and my perspective was very different when I was in a suburb and when I was in a city and actually had to be reminded daily how many people didn't get the freedom to just Zoom to work.
I've been trying really, really hard to think of the lockdown from the perspective of all the people who were hurt badly by it.
Because for me, it was literally pure upside. I got a three-week paid vacation to sit around the house and play video games. It was fucking awesome. Then I went back to work and nothing at all had changed.
Lockdowns, as a policy, should *absolutely not* be considered from the perspective of people like me. I will literally be better off. We have to look at the people who get hurt.
…Dwight “we need a new plague” Schrute? Is that you?
Yes, indeed. If COVID were detectable to the common person by any means whatsoever other than a relentless propaganda campaign from every media channel imaginable, the popular response would have been quite different.
Whatever happened to that thing in China where people were falling over dead in the streets?
The more-or-less complete lack of dead homeless COVID victims stacked up like cordwood over the last two years is, indeed, somewhat surprising.
I was living in Philly when the Pandemic first hit and this was basically my gauge for how serious it was.
Still a problem but as long as the homeless were at the train station vaccinating themselves the sky wasn't falling.
It's similar to the issue with climate change. When the Obamas divest themselves of their beachfront island property, I'll start paying attention.
I've been waiting for the dip so I can get a nice beach house. No such luck.
I once had an argument with some woke kid about weather or not park benches should be made "homeless friendly". Not having dividers, so the homeless could sleep there. I was like "wouldn't it be better to build them actual fucking homes!". It was like this never crossed their mind. He wasn't defending the homeless. He was defending homelessness. As if that position was a virtuous one.
It's pretty easy to house someone who isn't on drugs or going to assault their neighbor.
Utah had a project give houses to homeless people -- I forget how it turned out.
Our nation is only willing to house the criminals because it wants them shut away from the rest of us for "our" safety, not for their benefit. The homeless can't be forced into prison just for being homeless, so the cops roust them from their little cardboard villages, and cities make the benches and every other surface hostile to sleeping. There's no "but" here; our nation doesn't care about ANYONE who can't pay the rent.
My church kept our warming center, food bank, showers, laundry, hot meals and all other homeless services open without interruption throughout the entire pandemic. We actually saw a huge increase in people coming due to other churches shutting down (I'm in a college town). So we raised a huge amount of money to meet the demand. My wife is the pastor and fought very hard for this and I'm very proud of her for it. I was at the church earlier today and it's full of homeless people eating, playing games, napping. Masks optional. Totally worth whatever small risk it entails.
This is wonderful to read!
Yea like I said, I'm very proud of her/this church. Actual community is hard to come by these days (unlike the word "community"). I really value it.
Watching my fellow legal aid lawyers with homeless clients (I don’t represent individuals but know many who do) lose contact with them as all the safe gathering spaces shut down was brutally demoralizing. So many people lost their disability benefits because they had all public spaces, and their attendant necessities for survival, shut to them. So many people lost their only healthcare, their only sanitation.
One of the only businesses in our downtown core that still allowed homeless people to use its restroom and sit for long periods to warm up closed in 2020, because its windows were smashed in anti-police protests so many times the owners gave up on the franchise. I still get angry every time I pass the boarded-up windows.
Damn.
But the smashed-in windows were a vitally important public health intervention!
And real worker solidarity is literal physical destruction of the workplace!
(Joke aside, I at least get to be pissed off in a bipartisan way— my town had several violent clashes between right wing and left wing militias, and both were more than happy to smash up property.)
It didn't take the virus. Public restrooms in the underground transit stations in the Bay Area have been closed since 9/12/01. Because somebody might leave a bomb in one. So the stairs down from the street are covered in shit.
Thank you. I often wondered during the pandemic how mobile wound care outfits were operating if at all. Or if people with gangrene, usually homeless, could be seen in ER to clean their very mortal wounds. It's like some of the most vulnerable were completely forgotten.
I want to add that I think A LOT of elites have soft-a authoritarian tendencies. They have strong feelings that when they personally are in control bad things won't happen so they actively desire that control. For COVID it means doing something - anything - that allows them to exhibit some degree of control in the face of the uncontrollable. Do these controls really make life better? Probably not. It doesn't really matter. The point is that when they are not actively in control they are mortified of what may happen, so even if that control is meaningless they want to have it. I think this is the best explanation for a lot of mask mandates that are publicly and openly not enforced by local authorities. Cities keep passing them, but if they are not enforced in any way what exactly is the point? What is it supposed to accomplish? It's designed explicitly to create that illusion of control.
If you felt you had all the answers - and a more refined moral agency than everyone else - why would you not also feel drawn to authoritarianism? Seems pretty obvious to me.
I don't have all the answers and hold no special claim to moral correctness - both reasons why I'm not an authoritarian.
My gut feeling is that the drive for absolute control stems from uncertainty and anxiety.
Por que no los dos?
Also from The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/where-i-live-no-one-cares-about-covid/620958/
It is actually quite amazing, when you stop and think about it, how widely society is diverging. It seems like more and more that the various factions in this country have different social and cultural mores:: marriage rates are still very high among the college educated, for example, and not nearly so high for everyone else.
That divergence is so terrifying. In some places you have elderly obese diabetics convinced they have nothing to fear from COVID, and in other places you have young people who have spent the past two years in a constant state of anxiety for themselves and their young, healthy children. We'll get through, or to learn to live with, COVID, but other crises are coming, and all of them will be made worse by the fact that we are living in separate realities and public trust has totally (and for good cause!) collapsed.
I think the elderly obese diabetics have decided to just live their life, rather? Barricading yourself inside a long-term care facility and never seeing anyone is worse than a ~5% risk of death, for some people
For people with a chronic condition, the shoe has already dropped, so to speak. Most of the people I know with one are rather cavalier about enjoying life even if doing so is suboptimal from a health perspective.
Someone who gives themselves Type II adult onset diabetes has a set of priorities where "living as long as possible" is clearly not one of them.
Agreed. But in addition to Trump panic & Covid panic (valid panics! I hate Trump and I do fear Covid, though neither worse than the initial fears) I feel like there's "Partizanship" panic. The fear that these two camps, both full of panic about each other ("Proud Boys are Brown Shirts!" "ANTIFA are terrorists!") are going to make society collapse. I don't think it will. Because most people care more about who's playing Spiderman next or what the Kardashians are doing to their lips than any of this crap. If we fall as a civilization it won't be the fringes faults, crazy as they both are. It'll just be normal stupidness.
I like a lot of this but you're exaggerating in saying that this is a "fundamentally self-interested decision." Parents of infants, people helping to take care of elderly relatives, people whose partners are immunocompromised, professionals like nurses who are in regular contact with people who are elderly or sick, etc. are making decisions not on the basis of the risk to themselves but on protecting their loved ones and society at large. And that's good! The idea that protecting yourself from a highly contagious virus with enormously different risk profiles to different groups (as you note) is a purely personal decision is a bleak symptom of an age where people feel little obligation to take care of one another.
Yeah, and to be fair, the risk is not just about those people, it's also about us civilians not getting it to spread more widely so those people inevitably get it; it's that constant, irritating reply scold saying car crashes aren't contagious. I'm vaxxed and boosted but I can still get Covid and spread it. So again while I love and agree with a lot of this essay and I can't stand the Covid one-upsmanship, it makes some sense to me that I'll be asked to stay inside again in January to "flatten the curve."
But what infuriates me isn't the staying inside, it's that it feels like it's only delaying the inevitable. If I flattened the curve while they were building additional capacity for covid patients in temporary hospitals, while we were rushing to produce Paxlovid, while we distributed the N95 masks we'd spent years subsidizing -- then I'd stay the hell inside my apartment! Like, if they asked me -- a perfectly healthy and still relatively young man -- to go sign up for a temporary Covid nursing workforce I'd do it in a second. Hundreds of thousands more people will die of Omicron, this could be my D Day if we could help save any significant percentage of them! But instead "flattening the curve" now feels only like a shrug. And in that case I feel like, hell, what's the point of me skipping The Matrix in IMax, let alone Christmas and New Years with loved ones.
I mean I think at this point we all need to come to grips with the inevitability that we *will* all get Covid. There are arguments to be made about new treatments forthcoming, but it’s here to stay. So for those people terrified for elderly or vulnerable relatives etc…their fear is palpable and understandable, but their needs and requests seem to be at odds with the average person’s. And I don’t know what we do with that besides the obvious, You do you.
I agree heartily. I thought our initial shutdowns were about flattening the curve so we could boost our readiness! And we did do some of that -- we developed much better protocols for treatment, developed a vaccine. It doesn't seem that we invested in our healthcare infrastructure, which consists of both facilities (which are *relatively* easy to procure) and trained people (which are much harder to procure, and very easy to lose). We've done a poor job at communicating what kinds of masks are more and less effective and establishing standards as to what constitutes a "mask" for COVID purposes. It may be that part of the reason there's so little difference between mask mandate areas and non-mandate areas is that the masks in use in the mask mandate areas were horribly ineffective.
We put all our eggs in the vaccine and (crappy) masking baskets. We should have been working on a lot more baskets.
Over the past couple years I’ve been slowly doing my science prerecs to get a second bachelor’s degree, in nursing. I’m waiting till my youngest goes to kindergarten in two years to do the full time program.
Now, if the government had put forth some kind of incentive program for people to fast track their nursing degrees (or even just get them; like paying for the degree) I might’ve taken it.
And while we’re on the topic of hospitals and medical staff, the treatment of frontline staff by hospitals—the same hospitals who received billions in PPP loans—is atrocious. People are burned out and quitting in droves not just because covid is relentless, but because their working conditions, time off, and pay (hazard pay? How dare you mention it!) are abysmal.
In our region the nursing shortage is exacerbated by nurses taking fantastic-paying jobs as “traveling nurses.” There are so many hospitals and facilities in our area that nurses are getting traveling pay without ever leaving home. So it’s more expensive to staff hospitals, and very few nurses are deeply familiar with the way things are run at each particular facility. So they’re constantly in training mode.
Yes, completely agreed! It seems to me that, after the advent of the vaccines, "flattening the curve" has become more or less synonymous with "we have to slow the pace of contagion to protect our unprepared for-profit hospital systems." But while I acknowledge the realism of that demand (we can't suddenly create new and different hospital conditions ex nihilo), the unintended effect (like you say here) is that we prolong the pandemic itself. We don't change the total number of people infected-- we just slow the pace of infection and draw out the pandemic indefinitely. With omicron, it seems that even the most hyper-vigilant masking (not to mention triple vaccination) will not serve as an absolute or permanent barrier to infection. When each of us decides to take on the burden of flattening the curve, we're not protecting the vulnerable from infection-- we're largely delaying that inevitability in order to indulge the self-valorizing narrative that we've been moral, responsible, and caring.
Yes, yes, yes. I have heard arguments about delaying infection (by taking the hyper vigilant route) in order to develop new therapeutics. I can’t disagree with that exactly. But it does feel like at every step of this pandemic, a certain cohort has moved the goal posts. Before vaccines, few people were concerned about kids getting very sick. Once vaccines were available to adults, the new goal was to get children vaccinated and no one should live normally until that happens. Then vaccines were approved for kids, and now we need to keep the elderly and the vulnerable virus-free until better therapeutics arrive and/or we “get more people vaccinated” (ha) or until we “eradicate” Covid (ha HA.)
While Covid is the big baddie, I think 'this specific panic (tm)' is downstream of some sort of performative know-everything-ism from the PMC. I think it's status signalling that they have the free time to 'know everything about everything' because their jobs are pixels on one screen while shallow researching and doomscrolling on the other.
Meanwhile, those that are less plugged in manage to be content not knowing or having to demonstrate they know everything about every fractal complexity of every kerfuffle.
I think the story of the pandemic is it changed terminal onlineness from some sort of personality malaise into a virtuous skill and status signal.
I was reading a blog early in the pandemic, and an 80-something year old had a really insightful comment that I also think plays into why young liberals are more afraid of this than many other groups, even the elderly.
His comment (to paraphrase, I can’t remember which blog unfortunately): I’m 80 and in good health. Every remaining year of my life is the best year I have left - I’m not going to lock down in fear. Next year I might not be able to walk anymore; I’ll wear my mask and get the shot when it comes out but I’m not changing my lifestyle at all.
If you are 35 and still trying to climb the ladder, staying at home and not living your life for 2 years is a lot lower of a cost than it is for this 80 year old. You have a lot of life ahead of you, and dying from covid costs you many more remaining years.
I think expected value of years of life lost, or years with permanent damage, for your demographic, is probably a better way to analyze the risk of covid than just “chance of death” or “chance of permanent damage”.
"If you are 35 and still trying to climb the ladder, staying at home and not living your life for 2 years is a lot lower of a cost than it is for this 80 year old"
I think there is another plausible reading where economically the loss in the early 30s or so is more consequential across the remainder of ones life than capital lost at 80 years of age. Think compounding gains - but for losses.
So some of the striving and failing Journalist class realize this. In real economic terms if Houses went up 20% in the last 12 months, and they don't have any appreciating assets, then they got quite a lot less wealthy, quickly.
Yeah, this also seems right
Freddie, are you familiar with Peter Turchin? Can't remember if I've seen him mentioned in your stuff, but he has a theory of social cycling that involves two key forces leading to social crises: overproduction of elites (primarily second and third sons in feudal systems, but you can see the rise of the ultra-wealthy and their PMC orbiters as a similar phenomenon in modern societies) which in turn causes intra-elite competition; and what he calls "immiseration of the poor."
The miserable poor become susceptible to populism and outbursts of revolutionary anger; the elites tend to channel this rage in order to weed out some of the competition, often in exchange for concessions that make the lives of the poor temporarily better. For a while tensions are eased... until the elite class grows again, more and more resources are diverted from the main body of the population, and the cycle begins anew.
Sounds fascinating. Makes sense too. Depressing if the theory is right. How do we break that cycle? Especially in these days of black & white thinking?
I am part of a committee that's planning an event in another state for July 2022. The host institution (a public university) in that state has no vaccine or mask mandate. Several committee members (most of them from NY and MA) freaked out when they realized this, and their freak out morphed into criticism of the committee members from that university for not standing up to the administration and demanding better safeguards. The conversation got intense. People were saying stuff like, "I can't be expected to risk my life because your university is anti-science." Finally, a committee member from the "no vaccine, no mask" host university burst into tears. Turns out, her dad had died of COVID just a month ago. She knows the risks. She knows her university's policy sucks. But she's powerless to do anything about it. When she dropped the bombshell about her dad, the whole committee fell silent. People who'd been berating her for not standing up to the administration of her university felt awful for what they'd said and apologized with evident humility. It was an intense moment. I think we all learned something from it.
I am a scientist that knows a lot of other scientists, and we all putatively "follow the science". But so many of my friends and colleagues have been in utter panic mode since March 2020. They were still wearing double masks after getting vaccinated, some wearing masks outside, avoiding any indoor socializing, and acting as if their children were at risk of imminent death (that is still going on for those with kids younger than 5).
I have had some mild criticisms of COVID restrictions, and am seen as a borderline anti-vaxxer. I can only talk about it seriously with close friends, and even they think I'm acting a little reckless because I take my vaccinated kids to the movies or let them see friends indoors without masks.
Private universities are also tripping over themselves to follow whatever the first movers are doing. Mandating boosters, closing for early January, etc. No attempt to learn to live with this virus or acknowledge that most college students are at virtually no risk.
The only thing that has stayed consistent during the entire pandemic is that anyone taking fewer precautions than you are is reckless, and anyone taking more precautions than you are is insane.
Bless their hearts! They try so hard.
As usual, I mostly agree with this piece. Some people, particularly on the left, are too worked up about the latest Covid developments. With vaccination and better treatment, we've hit the point when it's basically time to live your life with the acceptance of some incremental risk. We accept lots of other risks that aren't that different from Covid. I can understand the anxiety, but it's not very useful.
However, being a gadfly for overreactions on the left has a limited interest span as well. If we are best off ignoring their histrionics, what does that say about critiques of their behavior? I suppose someone has to do it, but ultimately I don't find the critique that useful or interesting either. I have Covid meta-discourse fatigue, I suppose.
While I don't doubt that a significant amount of the Covid panic is status-seeking behaviour, we cannot underestimate the number of people who have been brainwashed to the degree they are legitimately afraid of death by Covid. Many people in my social circle have a true, honest fear of the disease to a degree that completely outstrips their actual risk from it.
Lately I've taken to asking people in my circle what they believe is the actual rate of hospitalization of the unvaccinated. Most people so far have replied somewhere from 30-40%, which is dramatically higher than actual reported rates which sit somewhere <1%. These are not virtue-signaling types, but regular people who perhaps consume a little too much news and are a less likely than average to start their own investigations and review the data (or "the science") themselves.
I have also seen a lot of very bad or outright deceptive presentations of statistics. My doctor's office sent out an email a few months ago trying to assuage parent concerns about heart issues from Covid vaccines. They included a chart that showed heart problems in children and youth from Covid itself - trying to convince parents that the risk of heart problems from Covid was far greater than from the shot itself. Naturally, they decided not to highlight that the chart showed heart issues in only *hospitalized* children and youth which is a far cry from the general population. I assume most people would gloss over the little descriptive label that indicated where the data was collected from, and would therefore not be seeing the entire picture.
The irony of this all is that many of these people frequently parrot the "trust the science" narrative but then have an approach that is far closer to "trust the media".
Before I functionally abandoned trying to write a Substack I worked quite a bit on a piece that directly addressed this, using COVID-19 as an example. My research backed this hypothesis up very strongly. Most people are just factually wrong on how dangerous Covid-19 is. Their algorithmic bubbles create a surge of information that - although individually true - leads to making very wrong conclusions. For a lot of people they genuinely believe this virus is far more dangerous than it is, with mortality rates orders of magnitude higher than reality. We're dealing with sizes far too massive for the brain to process, so I don't blame them, but it's fully reasonable to act the way they do when they think this is, essentially, Black Death 4.0.
wait. You abandoned your substack. I just subscribed to it
Thank you! I just got an influx so I guess I'm back to writing!
Yeah, I was surprised how hard it is to get the actual statistical chances of dying of COVID for different ages. I found some good calculators on the internet, but it's not something that is widely shared. It's the same motivation as all other news coverage- motivate behavior rather than tell the truth. For me, if an article is light on numbers, I immediately suspect they are trying to get me to do something.
The stats for children are particularly important. I know people who were really concerned about vaccinating their kids, without realizing that an unvaccinated 10 year old is about 700 times less likely to die from COIVID than a vaccinated 80 year old. Age is the important variable, not vaccination status. Or, you can think of vaccination as lowering someone's effective age.