I returned a bike yesterday in North Beach (SF) and people were crowded together. Maybe half of the people were wearing masks. There was a 4 piece street band walking around playing brass instruments like it was a carnival.
I play in a jazz band, and one of the first things that came to mind when the lockdown started was standing next to the all of the horn players blowing their spit all over the place. Fortunately, both our rehearsal and performance spaces shut down before we had to decide as a group whether to continue operating.
>> standing next to the all of the horn players blowing their spit all over the place.
That's an aspect of the universal 6-foot rule that everyone seems to forget. It originally appeared as advice for business (restaurants). You don't want to sit too close to someone else in still air. But if we are spitting, singing, shouting, coughing, panting, playing in a Jazz band, or are simply downwind of someone, that 6-foot distance is probably not enough. Airlines have basically said as much about their cabins. If the air is being circulated artificially in a closed environment, specific measured distances are probably irrelevant.
The "universal 6-foot rule" is anything but universal. Other countries have recommended 1m, 1.5m, 2m, etc. The distance rules are almost entirely arbitrary and not based on sound science.
Distances can be both arbitrary and based on sound science. You can scientifically determine that your chances of infecting someone at 1.5m and 2m are e.g. 40% and 50%, but you still have to pick one to recommend.
No one has scientifically determined the infection risk at various distances. Such an experiment with human subjects would never pass ethical review due to the serious risk. Some scientists have created mathematical models of virion distribution, but those models are basically a joke and don't appear to align with observed reality.
I do appreciate that public health authorities have to make clear and simple recommendations to avoid confusing people. But let's not pretend there is anything scientific about it.
IMO it’s scientific as soon as someone uses data to get an edge in prediction over random chance. It’s technologically relevant when it can outperform an average person’s guess.
My understanding is that the six foot distance is based on the expected air speed of a cough/sneeze and distribution of droplet sizes in a cough/sneeze. Given these two factors you can calculate how far droplets are expected to travel from a cough before hitting the ground.
When a person stands in a checkout line and breathes into the air and all over the plexiglass that stands between you and the cashier...and you carefully stand 6 feet back and then walk into the same exact airspace the person occupied just seconds prior...believe me, you're breathing in droplets from that other person. Our bodies contract diseases all day every day. There are millions of viruses and bacteria that but for our immune system, would bring us to our knees in a matter of days or weeks. We cannot carry on like this. Social distancing will tear society apart and destroy the economy, resulting in far more deaths and misery.
That argument only works if everyone caught the disease if they were exposed to even a single infected droplet. In fact, infection is highly non linear: below a certain concentration, the probability of infection is practically zero. That's because if you're exposed to a very small amount of the virus then most people's immune systems can fight it off immediately without "catching" the disease.
If you walk into the space previously breathed in by an infected person (or even if you just stand a couple of metres away from them) you will still indeed be breathing some infected droplets, but far less than if you stood closer to them. The result is not just that you chance of being infected is less, but that it is disproportionately less. This is born out in the observed consequences of social distancing in many countries. It's pointless to dispute it.
Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I suspect that this isn't really the point of your comment or the main reason for your view. I suspect that you think social distancing is a bad policy even if it does prevent infection. So I suggest against tacking on "oh and by the way it doesn't really prevent infection anyway", which is obviously not true; you're only weakening your credibility which undermines your main point.
Well, it seems to have worked out well for some of the Asian countries (and countries like Australia/NZ) which have gotten COVID-19 under control. The US still ha a major problem with deaths in the tens of thousands, as do many of the European countries.
I take your point that there will be economic paint - but I think you're being a bit hyperbolic about "tearing society apart" and "resulting in far more deaths and misery". This is the sort of rhetoric that Trump has been using - whilst I agree in principle there is economic pain - please don't treat people's lives as meaningless, or that the almighty dollar is all that matters. It's the job of governments to guide the country through these crises - this is where government stimulus and spending should be used - not just letting people die needlessly.
COVID-19 is a new and novel disease that's highly spreadable, has no known vaccine, and is killing an unprecedented number of people.
And we're not just talking about yourself - perhaps you're young/healthy and are prepared to contract COVID-19 and roll the dice.
However, those around you - family, or friends - may not be so lucky, or it could be a potentially life-threatening condition. Please think about people around you.
That is over 30x the death toll from the 9/11 plane attacks - and look what lengths the government went to combat that?
I just got my second COVID-19 test (fortunately came back negative) - my parents (who are older and vulnerable) are paranoid I'll give it to them. So when I got a sore throat, I went to get the test. And a few weeks back, my son had a cough, so I got myself tested.
Our government (Australia) is encouraging people with any symptoms to get tested - and I think that's a good thing, towards eradicating this illness.
It's not just about the dollar. We are social creatures, we thrive off of social interaction and contact and we benefit from community. Businesses, schools, churches, concerts, dancing, sporting events, all these things that give people joy and fun are shut down. We only get a few dozen trips around the sun. I do not want to spend my life cowering in fear and in a society that cowers in fear. I want kids playing in neighborhoods and playing ball, I want concerts on the regular, dancing in public squares and I want to live.
But to your point about the economy, we are seeing unprecedented damage to the worldwide economy from the shutdowns. It's not the virus that's doing this. It's the shutdowns. 40 million people are unemployed in the U.S. alone and rising, rapidly. This is unsustainable. The economy has to function or everything falls apart. And a big part of that functioning is travel and tourism and restaurants and it creates value and moves trade along. It's very important to re-establish those things.
Much of those deaths are in nursing homes with extremely vulnerable populations. I think its a tragic shame that many of these outbreaks occurred especially in nursing homes all over the northeast (NY, NJ, PA, CT, etc). However, once a patient gets moved to a nursing home, the average length they live is about 1 year. We can make nursing homes cleaner and safer and we should probably get those patients outside a bit more, but there's also only so much that can be done for people in the last months of their life.
Lockdowns vs no lockdown is an false dichotomy. The lockdown didn’t impact many people like myself, and many people can still be financially impacted even without a lockdown. Some people and businesses have actually been thriving. So your model is too black and white and doesn’t really match reality.
>> and is killing an unprecedented number of people.
Black death.
Bubonic plague.
Smallpox.
Malaria.
Measles.
Polio.
There have been many more virulent and many more destructive diseases than this one. Malaria in particular has been so destructive over thousands of years that it has modified human populations, forcing observable natural selection for traits such as sickle-cell anemia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria
You're correct that historically, there have been other illnesses hundreds of years ago that killed more people.
And in many developing countries, there are tragically many deaths caused by poor sanitation or healthcare.
However, this is a disease that has - even with incredibly draconian lockdowns and a global effort from every country to combat it - tragically killed nearly 350,000 people in a matter of months. And this is often in countries with state of the art healthcare systems, and every effort made to keep those people alive.
And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation. Ironically, I read that things like air travel and holidays actually worsened illnesses like this.
Imagine if we'd simply let the diseases run its course.
The thing that baffles me is the US - advanced Western nation - with a death toll of nearly 100,000 people. How is that even possible?
>> And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation.
Polio.
"On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[15] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined."
Measles too. These are diseases that hit the western world, the rich countries, killed thousands, in living memory. They causes panic. They caused quarantines. They caused social change. Polio lead directly to the disability rights movement. Wheelchair ramps as mandatory in all buildings: that's from polio.
I don't see what's funny about that. If you have some measures that are feasible and at least somewhat helpful (wiping the keypad, encouraging people to use contactless payment instead of cash) and some measures that are infeasible (sanitizing cash), obviously you do the feasible stuff and not the infeasible stuff.
It is scientific, but only partly. It has to include practicality, adherence, and every other human factor. They can’t say 2 miles because nobody could comply. They can’t say “2 meters minus the (square root of the outside temperature in Kelvin) in centimeters” because everyone would be flummoxed by the math. When getting a large group of people to coordinate an action, communication clarity/effectiveness is more important than the specific recommendation itself.
the experiments done were on how far these sorts of particles can travel, not on how infectious they are. so if we know a potentially infectious particle can travel 2m then we know the best chance to avoid infection is to not get in that radius.
it doesn't mean you won't get it outside that radius or that you will get it inside that radius, just that the opportunity to catch it is increased or decreased based on distance.
People have looked at well documented super spreader events as real world evidence even if it’s not a formal experiment. Aka infected person A sitting at X with local airflow Y infected N people at these locations without infecting people at K other locations.
Such data is much harder to collect after an infection has become endemic, but early contact tracing can provide great data.
There are a handful of unscientific experiments circulating around, like this Mythbusters one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f4sUNWkq60 . Tl;dr: 6 feet is optimistic. But, compared to 2 feet it's probably worlds better. It's a numbers game.
The fact that it's an arbitrary cutoff point still matters, though. If there's a cliff of infectiousness at the 2 meter line, you'd better send out people with rulers; if it's an arbitrary cutoff, you can give some wiggle room to restaurants where some tables are only 1.8 meters on a diagonal.
They are based on science, the further you are apart the longer that interaction is (probabilistically) safe for.
Different governments are a) using different models; b) choosing different (and yes, arbitrary) times over which they want interactions to be safe ('enough').
It also depends on motion and speed. In France at some point there were talks about a rule of 10 meters when people are in motion, for skateparks or jogging for example. Because the droplet of the person in front of you takes sometime to fall to the ground, depending on your speed you can end up breathing it.
The virus survives in water droplets or aerosol which fall down faster than smoke.
You can easily smell cigar smoke at 10 meters but you are ver unlikely to get infected at the same distance, current estimates put it to 4 meters in hospital settings.
Also,the amount of virus you receive matters, and distance decreases it.
You are right about viral load being a factor. You are not right about only macro droplets being a problem. Micro dropplets, that are suspended in air and do not "fall to the ground" soon carry enough of the virus to be infectious in accumulation. This is why indoor areas are problematic regardless of the 6 foot spacing, as the air just gets saturated over time unless you have a continual strong crossdraft.
The smoke analogy is not perfect, as it's composition is less moist, but it is closer to the truth than the '6 foot' model that was itself already a compromise between the now accepted as disproved macro fluid projectile model and economic concerns.
There is not much difference between smelling cigars and smelling my neighbours smoking weed, is there?
It never occurred to me, that being able to smell this might indicate danger.
Not OP, but I had the same theory
but with cigarettes. According to Google results, cigarette smoke particles are 0.25 micron at the largest, Sars-CoV-2 virus is 0.12 micron, so about half. They're both so light that gravity probably has little effect.
So, sharing a room with someone sick probably gives you a high chance of encountering the virus, but outdoors one hopes the concentrations would be so low that our bodies can fight it off.
And if you're wearing a mask and can still smell cigarette smoke, then surely it means that mask would let the virus particles through as well.
And in fact, this is how you test the respirator fit in professional setting. You don your respirator, and then somebody sprays a funny-smelling substance. If you can smell it, it means it doesn't have a proper seal on your face.
Indeed, there was no chance that we were going to continue. I live in a town that was ahead of the curve about shutting down. When the band's performances were canceled, most of the musicians were already in the process of clearing their schedules.
Even if that is true, it is missing the point. Avoiding infection is not just for your own good; more importantly, keeping the speed of the virus spreading down is for protecting everybody.
And what you say isn't even true. Plenty of healthy young people get very very sick. The percentages are lower than for older and/or less healthy people, but the numbers are still significant.
Don't think you're invulnerable, cause you're not. Don't think that if you get no or only mild symptoms, no harm is done. Think about the other people you have unknowingly infected, and how you've contributed to the spread of the virus. (Where 'you' = the generic 'you', not you personally).
>> Don't think you're invulnerable, cause you're not. Don't think that if you get no or only mild symptoms, no harm is done.
Such statements were true a few months ago. Now 1 in 6 Londoners have had the disease. So those 1 in 6 know exactly how it will impact them because it already has. There are now more than a few people out there who can confidently say "I'll be fine" because they are fine. In coming days/months many people will be getting tests and learning that they have suffered and recovered from the disease at least once. Others will learn that they have been living with someone who has had the disease but it didn't spread even within the household. The days of shouting "you don't know, you might die" at every naysayer are behind us.
"With further statistical adjustments, they found about 17% of London adults had been infected; this compares to only 4.3% in the north-east of England."
That is as true for any flu - or indeed any disease - as it is for COVID-19. There are many diseases out there and most people don't know very much about any of them regarding what a 2nd infection might do. It isn't a reason for them to behave any differently to how they behaved in 2019.
How common is that? I know there have been a few cases where it's believed to happen, but similarly there are some cases of people getting chicken pox more than once. With chickenpox, that's rare enough that chicken pox is generally considered something that you only get once, but it does happen.
That doesn't answer my question though. What does the data actually say about the covid reinfection rate? I've heard of anecdotes, but haven't seen any numbers.
"The top stories on Thursday: UK government data suggests around one in six people in London and one in 20 elsewhere in England have had coronavirus"
"With further statistical adjustments, they found about 17% of London adults had been infected; this compares to only 4.3% in the north-east of England."
That's the _BBC_, perhaps the most respected news organization on the planet, and unarguably an expert on all things London. They are citing information released by the UK government: 1 in 6 Londoners. Misinformation my a--.
One of the things we have learned during this pandemic is that reputable sources are capable of publishing false information. So we can’t just take their assertions as facts. We have to ask them to explain how they arrived at them.
The claim that one in 6 Londoners have had the virus is particularly suspicious because Sweden made similar claims about infections in Stockholm based on rough estimates and they turned out to be wrong when actual studies were carried out.
It was the government figures, and it raised far more questions - London has an IFR of half that of the rest of the UK, does that mean it’s spread more widely amongst healthy people? Does the antibody year require a higher viral load (which you’d get spending a long time on the tube compared with driving to work in north east).
Need larger antibody tests and data broken down by demographic, globally, but we’ll have them by summer.
The BBC an expert in all things London? Maybe if you define away all the people in the city who aren't like BBC employees! Your view of the BBC is quite out of date. Most of the British population say now in polls they don't trust it. It's an open question for how long it'll stick around.
> "England has had 132k reported cases. London has a population of 8.9M."
I personally know about a dozen people in London who have had probable Covid-19, including myself. None of those cases were ever actually confirmed by testing or "reported" to anyone.
Until you actually have an antibody test result, be careful to equate "probably COVID-19" with "COVID-19". I have a friend who lives in the NYC metro area who was sure he had COVID-19 in March. All the symptoms matched, felt like he was dying for 6 weeks. Never tested, because tests were in short supply then, but his doctor said it was very likely COVID. He just took an antibody test and got the results yesterday. Negative for COVID-19.
Swine flu was going around this winter, which also will knock you out for a month. If you didn't specifically get a coronavirus PCR test positive, there's about a 10:1 chance that what you actually had was the flu. Outside of major hotspots like NYC and Chelsea MA, I believe the serological studies that suggest about 2-4% of the population has had coronavirus.
It’s not clear yet how reliable the antibody tests are. Antibodies fade over time, and we don’t know how long Covid-19 antibodies remain detectable in your blood. It’s quite possible that after 6 weeks or so, you’ll no longer have easily detectable levels of antibodies.
We also do not know the seroconversion rate for mild or asymptomatic cases (every study measuring this seems to use an entirely-hospitalized or mostly-hospitalized cohort).
I can't believe that people are quick to tell me that the pneumonia I had in January couldn't possibly have been COVID-19, but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
> but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
I have no idea where you came up with this nonsense, but if anything there are academic studies demonstrating that, even in countries that do a honest job reporting covid19 deaths, Covid19 deaths have been systematically underreported.
Who, exactly, says every death since January is caused by COVID-19? I cannot find any statistics which suggest that about 20 million people have died to coronavirus this year.
You may be confusing this with excess deaths count, which is tracking the difference between deaths in a given month of 2020 and deaths in the same month in previous year (or years, averaged). Assuming no other unknown disease or phenomenon other than COVID-19 is silently ravaging our societies, this is the most reliable metric we have - as government after government has been caught on underreporting COVID-19 deaths.
But that's clearly a false assumption. It assumes hospitals can be emptied and society put under house arrest with no excess deaths as a consequence, which is not only a very strange assumption but contradicted by huge amounts of evidence.
There's by now a whole lot of people, including many experts in many domains, who are concluding the lockdown will kill more people than the disease itself. Far more if it turns out they had little impact, which there is also quite some evidence of.
You can filter out deaths by suicide and similar, of which there isn't many so far (but yes, maybe the lockdown will kill more; it hasn't now). You kind of already have to filter out things like deaths by traffic accidents, of which there's much less now.
And consider that heart attack and stroke centers are seeing precipitous drops in patient referrals, almost certainly meaning that the fear of catching COVID-19 is causing many people to avoid treatment and die at home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...
In my case, fever which lasted less than 24 hours. Felt like I was coming down with a bad flu, but the fever was over much more quickly than any flu would be.
Lingering symptoms for a week or so afterwards: “shortness of breath” feeling with slightly sore/tingling chest (but no congestion, snot or phlegm), mild dry cough, all-over muscle aches, feeling much more tired than usual, and sleeping longer than usual. I did not notice any loss of sense of smell.
The data (and you have to scroll down to find the details) is based on antibody tests carried out on a sample of 1000 people living in London and elsewhere and extrapolated from that, and not on people who have tested positive for the virus. The selection criteria are not mentioned, but a random sample of 1000 would have an error margin of 3%. False positive rate for the test is 0.2%: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52656808
- Number of tests available are limited still (and were severely so until recently)
- People who are showing symptoms but aren't high risk have been turned away after pre-screening
- People who are showing symptoms but aren't front line workers have been turned away after pre-screening
- People who have had severe exposure but aren't showing symptoms have been turned away after pre-screening
(Heck, understanding it's an anecdote, but my neighbour showed all the symptoms, after waiting hours and talking to all the pre-screeners, they told him, literally "Yup, you have it; we don't need to bother testing". )
Anecdata notwithstanding, it is crucial for people to understand that the number of tested positive cases is by definition, always, under all circumstances, always going to be some subset of people actually sick. And sometimes significantly so... sometimes by order(s) of magnitude.
I am always rolling my eyes at breathless news reports along the lines of "the actual number of deaths may be higher than the official count!"
Of course they are going to be higher.
Even the official counts can be fuzzy. For example, people dying of cancer are often carried off by pneumonia due to their weakened state. Was the cause of death the cancer or the pneumonia?
That's true, but it kills very few people in the developed world. Deaths from norovirus are mostly a result of inadequate treatment, and/or lack of detection.
And, frankly, if covid was only going to kill 200k people, we probably wouldn't be closing anything much. It has already killed almost 350k people, and that's _with_ most countries imposing variously draconian measures.
I don't understand this thinking. Do you think it's fine if new endemic diseases are added that will kill multiple of 10k or 100k people a year, every year?
The entire car safety industry is a result of people freaking out over automobile deaths. Car safety is reactive. People die, friends /relatives /society freak out (justifiably) and the car industry responds. These responses are also debated and argued by the population (seatbelts, safety ratings, speed limits etc.)
This is preposterous. The measures we are taking will kill far more than the disease itself when all is said and done - look at the referral numbers for stroke centers alone. If this was a test of our collective ability to meet an emerging threat, then we failed about as badly as it is possible to fail. What’s worse is that we failed not so much because of an initial honest mistake, but because we’ve turned out to be superstitious cowards. Shame on us all.
We shouldn't compare it with the number of people who eventually die from covid. We should compare it with the number of people who would have died if there were no measures taken.
I’m not OK with that option. We can make up nonsense on computers as many times as we like, but it will never mean that reality “would have” been anything. Science doesn’t work on “would have” questions, and anyone who claims otherwise is a charlatan.
So we may not be able to resolve this disagreement. Just understand that I’m at least as pissed off as the people on the other side.
> The measures we are taking will kill far more than the disease itself
You're comparing (cost of measures) to (cost of disease after taking those measures), which is a nonsensical comparison. It's like saying "parachutes are too expensive; almost no one dies from skydiving!"
How many people would die from skydiving if skydivers stopped using parachutes but continued to skydive? Am I a charlatan if I give a rough number?
Surely there is a continuum of uncertainty between the skydivers and "it's impossible to know." Surely diseases can be modeled, and those models used to predict outcomes with various degrees of uncertainty. Surely those predictions have meaning.
We can test the prediction that parachutes improve skydiver survival with a simple experiment. It would be an inhumane experiment, so in this case it is fair to assume the theory would be proven correct (but we can always test a similar prediction that parachutes prevent human-like objects from being destroyed, if you prefer).
With a global pandemic, it is in fact impossible to know, and anyone who claims otherwise is in fact a charlatan. That’s the key detail you’re missing here: The skydiver theory can be phrased as a “will” question, but this is always going to be a “would have” question. We can’t run an experiment to test any prediction - where’s the control Earth? If we can’t run an experiment, it is not science. Period.
You are allowed to believe whatever you like, but this shameful episode will be the final nail in the coffin for all pop-bullshit “science”: https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/
People were saying that in New York in February and going to street parties. A month later the hospitals were overwhelmed.
I think it is reasonable to ease restrictions when case numbers fall. Hopefully enough people will maintain distance and minimise unnecessary contact to slow it spreading and keep the pressure off the hospitals. However free riders recklessly endangering themselves, others and health care staff should be ashamed of themselves.
I live in New York and I'm under the impression the hospitals were never overwhelmed. That was the fear, but it didn't actually happen.
They also thought they would run out of ventilators, but never came close to using all of them, started giving them away to other states, and then discovered that ventilators were not actually a good treatment anyway.
NYC hospitals increased capacity dramatically, with people treated huge wards and some sent to temporary facilities. That’s what being overwhelmed looks like, it’s not a binary condition just a decrease in the average quality of care.
In terms of ventilators many people where kept off of ventilators who would have been given them in normal conditions. That was likely a good thing as ventilators have huge risks associated with their use, but things where a long way from ok.
That said, the lockdown likely prevented a much worse situation at local hospitals.
> In terms of ventilators many people where kept off of ventilators who would have been given them in normal conditions.
Sadly, that wasn't the case in NY. Even though Chinese doctors warned of the risks of ventilators in Jan/Feb, the US ignored that. There were 2 reasons:
1) intubating patients protected staff from aerosolization after the intubation
2) old understanding of oxygen levels led doctors to intubate way too early for corona.
I have a friend who works in a NYC hospital and they absolutely were overwhelmed. Every available space (including supply closets, ERs, staff briefing rooms) converted into a coronavirus ward. A few staff members (including their ER director) died from coronavirus.
They never ran out of ventilators, but they did run out of beds.
That’s hardly surprising, there’s no reliable record of health care worker deaths. “...US officials say they have no comprehensive way to count those who lose their lives trying to save others.”
Also: “In some facilities, the person who is supposed to do the reporting is caring for patients and is overwhelmed,” Schuchat said.
My friend is an ICU nurse in Manhattan and they were(are) absolutely overwhelmed. PPE shortages, mandatory overtime, staff shortages due to infection, and almost every department became a covid department.
Really? There are well-regarded articles stating that most hospitals were well below normal capacities. The emergency hospitals setup across NY state were barely used, some are closing have not treated even a single patient. No doubt some parts of some hospitals were hit hard, but I see no evidence of the city/state as a whole being anywhere near capacity.
I'm not sure about the articles, but my SO had worked nights in the ICU just outside of NYC for the past two months. Notes from her:
- They quadrupled ICU capacity, taking over empty hospital beds from elsewhere in the hospital. At one point the only patients were COVID. No other admissions.
- Out-of-work doctors like cardiologists, soldiers, out-of-state nurses came in to help. They didn't know what to do in the ICU, so they mostly got in the way.
- At the peak they needed about double the normal number of beds.
- Most 12-hours shifts were done without sitting or having time to go to the bathroom.
So they overestimated the flood of COVID patients and were able to deal with it, possibly because they over-prepared, and there were essentially no non-COVID patients. At least that's n=1 ICU physician's perspective. Her friends in difference cities seem to have had similar experience (all east coast doctors, though), but the only overwhelmed ones are in NYC metro.
Completing 12 hour shifts without a moments break isn’t overwhelmed?
Read this article about two of the nurses in NY that committed suicide due to the stress of watching patients die and not having the resources to help them, then tell me those people were not overwhelmed.
Waving people's deaths around like this is crass and offensive. It's very sad that these nurses died, but when people say "overwhelmed" in this context they mean that people cannot obtain healthcare.
> when people say "overwhelmed" in this context they mean that people cannot obtain healthcare.
The “no non-COVID patients” part didn't happen because suddenly no one needed ICU care or other hospitalization for non-COVID reasons, it happened because people were systematically excluded starting with methods from soft (discouragement to seek care) to hard (bans on classes of procedures, triage prioritization, etc.) from hospital care for non-COVID reasons.
Hospitals in and around NYC were, like those in Italy at the peak of the crisis, using criteria beyond medical need to allocate ventilators because medical need exceeded supply. That's overwhelmed, and ant standard which suggests it isn't is a dumbass standard.
Oh I see, the human cost to health care workers doesn’t count. Got it.
Maybe your threshold for what counts as ‘getting health care’ is different from mine. For me it amounts to more up than just being physically in a hospital. If the people described below were your family, would you be satisfied with their health care?
"Some of them, bless their souls, can't do anything for themselves," she said. "How can I take care of 14 people when I have one tech and they have 30 patients. It's so bad here you guys."
That’s a real shame. I just don’t understand at all where you’re coming from, or in what way I’m being dishonest.
To me is seems straightforward to say that a system that is no longer able to provide an acceptable standard of care to a majority, or large minority if it’s patients, has been pushed beyond its capacity.
I’m under the impression that this is in fact what an overwhelmed health care system looks like. That the people in the system would rather die than continue being in it. This is also how we measure the despair of poverty.
> At the peak they needed about double the normal number of beds.
If they had not been able to annex a portion of the hospital for more beds, they probably would've been overwhelmed. Most of the people with normal things (heart attacks, severe diabetes-related issues, alcohol withdraw, etc.) stayed home, so they were able to create more capacity. I think every hospital did the same, so there's no good control group.
In the beginning of March Mayo Clinic circulated a COVID ICU protocol which virtually everybody implemented. Cleveland Clinic had something similar though NYC, Philadelphia and Baltimore hospital systems went with Mayo. It had metrics and trigger points at which point different units at hospitals were converted into COVID ICUs. Such protocols are absolutely standard for any large scale disaster scenarios. "Overwhelmed" means "handling of this event is not in a protocol". That has never happened. 2x the normal ICU beds was would not have triggered even the 2nd implementation of a second phase.
To me, overwhelmed means not able to provide the expected standard of care to a majority, or large minority of patients. In many cases the patient to nurse ratios went up to 3 or 4 times higher than would normally be considered acceptable, and patients dying before the nurses can even get to them. Simply having a bed isn’t enough.
If I attempt at AWS load balancing was “cut down all other services for the purpose of this particular services up to and including the full shut down of other services to divert to this service” I would definitely say this instance is wildly out of hand and an unacceptable state and that we may need to evaluate if this is temporary or if we need to grab more AWS $$$.
This definition you have concocted isn't real. Just because everyone stops what they are doing and starts bailing water out of a boat doesn't mean the boat isn't flooded.
You can't hallucinate some new definition for being overwhelmed and then say New York hospitals weren't overwhelmed. That is not rational.
New York came distressingly close to capacity, but indeed didn't hit a saturation point like Madrid or Milan.
But that's, quite frankly, just dumb luck. At the rate of growth we were seeing in the early epidemic, their safety margin comes out to something like two days. The lockdown almost missed the target.
Quite frankly, a very large number of New Yorkers probably owe their lives to the other early movers in the US that enabled the NYC lockdown: Washington State was a big one. Also when the history is written, the NBA cancelling its season is probably going to be one of the biggest heroes.
Milan didn't hit saturation either, I believe, you may be thinking of Bergamo.
But the saturation was not reached because of lockdown, clearing hospital beds from electives, adding more beds, recruiting new sanitary personnel from all over the country.
If all of italy had kept going "business as usual" we'd likely count deaths at a 30x rate.
I 100% agree with you. Also don’t forget the mayor of SF. I don’t like her politics but objectively she had the courage to make a very hard choice and locked down the SF Bay Area much sooner than anywhere else. She saved thousands of lives right here.
The lockdown order wasn’t her doing. It was supposed to have been orchestrated by Santa Clara county’s health director , Sara Cody. Also, SF has no power over the other counties. It was a joint health order.
It’s remarkable the amount of just plain wrong information that people believe in.
You ever had/lived with multiple relatives going with cancer or Alzheimer's. I'm sure it's un-PC to say it, but Covid is a relative cakewalk in comparison...
I have (both my parents died from cancer in their 50s). How is this related to this topic?
Lockdown or not, crowding and not wearing a mask is irresponsible - you aren't just putting yourself at risk, but also the people around you.
It's relevant because we currently have two sides going at each other raising irresponsible levels of hyperbole, virtue/team- signaling and fear mongering on both sides, just in different directions.
Covid is simultaneously currently worse than the flu, but on the order of genuine avoidable human suffering it SHOULD have (and should still) be treated rationally: isolating and protecting the most vulnerable, practicing good hygiene, a moment to reflect on our lifestyles, policies and our self imposed diseases that make us more vulnerable to the virus. It has a mortality function that, statistically, correlates most strongly with a person's already existing X year survival probability. If you plotted out the frequency of ages and deaths over time, it would primarily register as a small blip/compressing of deaths primarily amongst the older.
People who go off on the other end of the spectrum: that this should be the end of society/ socialising, commerce/trade and public life, are just as ridiculous and irresponsible as those who think nothing should be fine, because they illicit fear, partisanship, and stop our finite resources being spent where they do most good, not to mention the harm that's going to come from all the poorly targeted reactions.
In this case it's an opportunity to drop the hyperbole and rationally visit how we deal with healthcare and end of life, because how we deal with the elderly already, especially our experiences with those illnesses I mentioned, are qualitatively worse than the experience of dying relatively quickly from covid, but we accept it because it was "part of the everyday" (or in a lot of societies, deliberately excluded from the everyday so we don't think about it too much).
The rest of your comment is valuable commentary but I want to point out that
> If you plotted out the frequency of ages and deaths over time, it would primarily register as a small blip/compressing of deaths primarily amongst the older.
is not strictly true. In certain regions, NYC as an example[1], you have to look at excess mortality, or the number of deaths that are in excess of expectations given a periodic seasonal model. In some areas the number is much, much higher than normal. It's not enough to read off the reported deaths because there are many more that are attributed to other causes.
I think the point the parent was making is that many of the people who died in the last 2 months would likely have died in the next year anyway - so although there's clearly high numbers of excess deaths today, we may actually find that many of those deaths are just brought forward by 6 months. We won't know whether that's true for years though.
I keep seeing this idea that people are demanding the lockdown last forever and everything should be over, but it seems to primarily come from people using it as an attempt to seem rational by taking a standpoint in the perceived middle rather than any sort of reality.
The actual reality is that one side wants people to wear masks and gradually open up in a safe manner because other places that opened up irresponsibly were hit by a second wave of infections. The other side takes mask wearing as fascism and will do literally everything in their power to harass people who wear masks or attempt to bypass the requirement for the sake of making themselves feel better. You calling COVID19 a cakewake is irresponsible hyperbole in itself considering it is dangerous and we should not be under any delusion that it is not. But it is manageable if people don't operate under delusion.
If you are 70 and get Covid-19 you have a 90% chance of recovering. You make it sound like you have a 90% chance of dying which is an extreme exaggeration.
In 2017, a 70 year old American man had a 2.2% chance of dying that year and on average was expected to live another 14 years. I'm curious how the average life expectancy of a 70 year old has changed from that year to this one. Is it down to 13 years yet?
You can’t catch cancer or Alzheimer’s, and the hospitals are set to handle the predicable case load. This is a situation where you can prevent a massive increase of simultaneous cases on top of all the cancer so people are trying to do that. Stabbing kills you more quickly but still seems worthwhile to prevent.
Catching means the disease itself is contagious - it is the environment or habbit which spreads it as opposed to a cancer patient coughing on you and giving you cancer - unless radiation treatment has gone /very/ wrong through historic levels of medical malpractice.
Indefinite chaining area of effect vs just area of effect roughly.
So you very well could have a cancer patient coughing on you and giving you cancer but the underlying cause is the virus that they have (that caused their cancer) rather than the cancer itself. So you have chaining of cancer (albeit via a virus).
Come on, just wear a mask. Why would you resist it as though it's something to be proud of? Even if the only thing that it does is make other people feel safe, that's a good enough reason.
When did I say I don’t wear a mask? You’re making some big assumptions. This is the danger with vilifying someone who you disagree with.
There will always be different opinions and views. Being civil and accepting of others seems to be less and less common under the guise of doing “the right thing”.
Well the same reason you don't share your email with the FBI and agree to be monitored at all times.
I wear a mask, and I choose to wear a mask. I also wore a mask before it was "supported" by the CDC. If tomorrow it was legally required, I would stop wearing a mask.
The issue is not wearing masks. The issue is legally mandating them.
You should wear a mask. You may be an asymptomatic carrier, and masks have fairly good odds (~90%) at stopping liquid droplet spread.
However legally mandating masks is a different problem. The state is engaging in compelled action - which is usually right out save a few cases. Just as the state can't legally mandate someone to say they support the president, the state can't mandate helpful behavior - it's just not a power the state has.
Could the state legally require condoms unless you were intending to conceive? Condoms are effective at stopping almost all std/sti, and are 99.98% effective when used properly at preventing unwanted pregnancy. We could eliminate HIV tomorrow if the state forced their usage. You should use a condom, but that isn't the same as legally mandating them.
You are confusing mandating masks in order to protect the wearer with the real purpose: to protect people around them. Wearing masks protects other people from being infected if you unwittingly have the disease. Clearly, states have the right (and indeed responsibility) to mandate that their citizens do not recklessly endanger other citizens in specific encoded ways. For example, do you think it is unreasonable for there to be speed limits on roads? Or even that if someone shot their firearm around at random in a crowded place and happened to kill someone that they shouldn't be held responsible if they could prove they hadn't specifically meant to hurt anyone, they were just having a bit of a laugh?
Maybe you actually do think the state shouldn't intrude on those freedoms, but you would be in a minority holding those views. Personally, I like laws that impose mask use during pandemics, speed limits on roads and restrictions against firing shots randomly into crowds, because their absence intrudes on my freedom to continue existing.
I even consider it possible to like these things while not considering it reasonable to "share your email with the FBI and agree to be monitored at all times". An analogy about condom use does not explain the connection at all.
This is a subtle point but it's a difference between compelled action and a restriction.
When I'm not allowed to drive over 65mph, that's a restriction. I have no innate power to use government roads, so even requirements like a license and a seltbelt are aligned.
Let's talk about discharging a firearm since that doesn't have some of these special cases like government vs private roads. I do have a right to bear arms, I don't have a right to discharge them.
Typically there are restrictions even on private property. You can't discharge a firearm in a city, or on property that is too small. But, if I have several acres in the country I can discharge a firearm. If my discharge (either the noise or the round) crosses my property, then I may have an issue.
I agree these are good things but good and legal are unrelated. I think universal condom usage and donating to non-profits is good, but legally mandating those things would be problematic.
If everyone shared all of their data with the FBI - well, we could stop a lot of crime. Insider trading, lots of fraud, some premeditated murder. Though, that would be a grave invasion of your rights, wouldn't it?
I see. Well, that is a very specific, and frankly rather bizarre, thing to get hung up on.
Would you consider a law that disallows people from getting too close outside, or being in the same room, acceptable? Technically that is a restriction rather than a compelled action... one that's much more onerous than a mask mandate, but that's not the point, right?
Edit: "universal condom usage and donating to non-profits" are still red herrings regardless of this technicality. The point of masks is stop you from personally and directly killing someone that did not consent to you getting near to them and infecting them. Condoms only directly affect people that consented to be with each other (if one didn't consent then obviously that's another matter). Donating to charity may save lives but that's not the same as stopping you from personally killing someone.
Edit 2: I also feel like masks could be phrased in terms of being a restriction rather than a mandate. Surely a law not allowing you to spit in someone's face is a restriction? What about a law restricting the concentration of your breath droplets that get onto other people's faces, at least during a pandemic? If the only way to satisfy this is to stay well away from everyone or wear a mask, that's still a restriction. (Even I feel like that's cheating. But I also think that the existence of "cheats" like this is part of why the distinction is so silly to start with.)
No, of course not. This is just a matter of setting a sensible threshold when the borderline from acceptable to unacceptable is fuzzy, and applies to any number of other things that you'd surely consider reasonable.
Going back to speed limit analogy, driving at 100mph down a crowded high street (I'm thinking of a narrow European-style street here where there's no such thing as jaywalking) is tantamount to murder. But - like your seasonal flu argument - even if you set the speed limit at 10mph (imagine a fantasy world where people stuck to that speed limit) occasionally there would be a road death to pedestrians. Does that mean that is essentially murder too, and that we should ban all driving altogether? No, we have to choose some threshold, a speed limit, that is an acceptable trade off between allowing people to live their lives vs safety to others. Any limit like that will always be somehow wrong - too high and too low at the same time, in some sense - but you have to draw the line somewhere. The same goes for a limit to how much we allow people to risk spreading potentially deadly diseases to others.
If that trade off only involves the safety of the participants then you can leave it to them to choose that threshold. For example, some might choose to take part in extreme sports while others consider them too risky. But if the trade off is between the benefit of the participant vs risk to an unconsenting third party, then the threshold of course has to be set in law.
(BTW, on the subject of comment votes, I've not been down voting your comments (except the first one so others don't end up down this rabbit hole), actually I've been upvoting them to ungrey them. Although I still find your views extremely strange it has been interesting and you do seem to be constructively engaging, and I hope I have been too.)
I would not be surprised if at least one “reckless endangerment” had not already been filed for that reason in the past. Probably many years ago.
I recall reading years ago about an AIDS patient who was convicted for manslaughter after knowingly having unprotected sex with many people without disclosing their condition.
Phrased as a restriction, the requirement for masks is a limit on how many droplets of saliva can fly out of your face in public. If it's worded that way, are you satisfied?
> it's a difference between compelled action and a restriction.
No, you're making the wrong distinction. The right distinction is between causing actual harm, and not causing actual narm.
You do have a right to travel unimpeded over public roads (since you're a member of the public and a taxpayer). Imposing a 65 mph speed limit on you and giving a cop the power to stop you and write you a ticket that imposes a fine (or a court appearance) for exceeding the limit, even if you have caused no harm to anyone, is wrong. However, posting a sign that says "maximum safe speed 65 mph", and then imposing extra liability on you if you cause an accident and it is found that you were exceeding that posted limit would be fine.
Similarly, forcing you by law to wear a mask in public, even if you have caused no harm to anyone, is wrong. But if you aren't wearing a mask and you cough or sneeze on someone and they get COVID-19 because of that, having a law that imposes liability on you would be fine.
ah, the old post-facto libertarian dream. in short, it's only OK to sanction behavior after it has caused harm, never OK to sanction behavior that increases the odds of harm.
there are places you can live in the world that work much more closely to your post-facto ideal. however, if you want the benefits of the rest a contemporary western industrial society, you'll either have to convince a lot more people that post-facto only is right, or just live with the fact that most of the rest of us thing that post-facto only is wrong.
> most of the rest of us thing that post-facto only is wrong
Yes, because most of the rest of you do not see the harms caused by sanctioning behavior that some government official believes increases the odds of harm. If you did, you would realize that only sanctioning behavior that causes actual harm is the right rule for the government, because humans simply cannot be trusted with the power to dictate the behavior of others based on some estimate of "the odds of harm" when no actual harm is caused.
Most of the rest of you also do not realize that the sanctions of law are not the only kinds of sanctions that can be applied. For example, I do not believe the government has the right to require me to wear a mask whenever I go out. But I do believe the grocery store I go to, for example, has the right to require me to wear a mask before I enter the store (which it does, and which I happily comply with--indeed, I'd be doing it even if it wasn't required), as a condition of being allowed to shop there. (And all the store employees are wearing masks as well.) I also believe I have the right to require anyone who comes into my house to wear a mask (as my wife and I did a few days ago when two people from the flooring company came to look at gaps in the laminate floor they installed--they made no objection to wearing the masks).
When I describe cases like this, I get asked: well, if you're doing the same thing the government is telling everybody to do anyway, what's the problem? The problem is that the cases I just described are the easy ones. What about the hard ones, where someone's particular circumstances make the best thing for them different from what the government is mandating for everybody? For example, an acquaintance of my wife's recently was forbidden from visiting her dying grandmother in a nursing home, because of government mandated lockdown rules. (No family members were permitted to see her.) The family would have been fine with wearing masks and gloves, washing their hands, and taking all other prudent precautions; but nobody was even permitted to exercise common sense, because the government lockdown did not allow for that; it was just a single, one-size-fits-all, hard and fast rule. So the grandmother died with no loved ones there with her, because of a government diktat. That is simply wrong in any country that calls itself a free country. And a government that forces such things on people loses the confidence of the people.
In this case, the core of your position seems to consist of 3 fairly conventional libertarian axioms/tropes:
* government policy/law is always one-size-fits-all and that never works
* government is incapable of nuance or intelligence when deciding policy
* government preventing harm preemptively is oppression
I have 500MB of transcripts from rec.politics.theory during the first half of the 1990s that consist of discussions between libertarians of several stripes and other non-libertarians (including me). Some of those folks are still floating around online (hi, Perry Metzger!)
So far, I see no evidence that you have any arguments that were not a part of that usenet group from 25 years ago. I feel fairly comfortable with the way these were debated and shot down back then, so in the absence of an actual new argument, it doesn't seem worth continuing.
Is not what you say. If you insist on breaking it down into "axioms", here are some:
(1) Government policy/law cannot take into account the individual circumstances of individual cases, since it is impossible for government officials/lawmakers to obtain that information; so government policy/law that dictates what people must or must not do will always dictate the wrong thing for some people.
(2) The government dictating the wrong thing for anyone is wrong in a free country.
(3) Therefore, government policy/law should not dictate what people must or must not do at all unless failing to do so would make it impossible for a free country to exist.
Whether or not the government dictating that everybody must wear masks in public, or must not leave their homes except for a certain small number of reasons, would be justifiable under #3 is a question that might be worth discussing (I personally think it wouldn't be, but others might be able to give reasonable arguments that it would). However, the grounds under which the government dictating those things is actually being justified is nothing like that. The grounds on which it is actually being justified is that we don't actually have a free country: that the government does not need to meet anything like the above standard before dictating what people must and must not do.
If your response is basically, yes, indeed, we don't have a free country (which is what it seems to me to be), then I guess you're right that the discussion isn't worth continuing. But it certainly seems like a sad outcome considering the country's original goals.
Same logic as I said: driving drunk, by itself, if you don't cause any actual harm, should not be punishable by law. But a law imposing extra liability on you if you cause an accident and are found to be drunk would be fine.
Driving whilst intoxicated (or under the influence of drugs) is straight-up illegal in basically every single civilised country I'm aware of.
This is because alcohol impairs your judgement and reflexes - and when you're driving a 1 tonne piece of metal that can maim and kill, you want your wits about you.
I confess I find this kind of reasoning very bizarre - I truly do admire the US, and all the freedoms, literature, and amazing critical thought it's given to us. But I still don't understand the strange logic that seems to emanate from certain circles - where people will sincerely claim it's their God-given right to drive over the speed limit and kill people, to take drugs and kill people, to shoot guns and kill people, and other such things.
It's also in this context I hear people from the US complaining a lot about the "nanny-state".
Or that somehow, if the government provides any modicum of healthcare, you are infringing on their God-given right to make really poor healthcare spending decisions.
I get it there's happy medium between the two - and I apologise if there's hyperbole in the above - but as an outsider looking at how the US has handled the COVID-19 pandemic - it's heart-wrenching.
As a country, you have nearly 100,000 people dead (the worst in the world I think?) - and people are still talking about how "mask wearing is oppression", or "lockdowns are trampling on our rights!".
Even your leaders - if the press can be believed - apparently see wearing a mask as a sign of weakness. Yet other governments (e.g. UK, Australia, Scotland) have sacked high-level ministers, simply because they breached the health lockdown rules. It's the complete opposite - those governments are taking it seriously (or at least trying to be seen to be).
In the US, we don’t have the same faith/trust in our government that many Europeans seem to either enjoy or suffer from, depending on one’s political views.
There are some things our government does well and many things it does far less than well. Government is also self-perpetuating, so if you’re going to make a mistake, I think it’s wise to make a mistake in having too little government, as that’s easier to correct.
(In any event, I think it’s also fair to observe/predict that “drunk driving is OK as long as the outcome does not result in a crash” is an extremely minority view in the population and does not reflect the laws in any US state.)
> “drunk driving is OK as long as the outcome does not result in a crash” is an extremely minority view
You are misstating the view I was describing.
I did not say drunk driving was OK as long as it doesn't cause actual harm. I only said drunk driving should not be punishable by law if it doesn't cause actual harm. Not being punishable by law does not make it any less stupid or irresponsible.
I also did not say that there are no ways at all to address drunk driving that doesn't cause harm. For example, consider the following scenario: I'm a cop, and I see a car driving erratically. I turn on my lights and pull the car over. I am perfectly justified in doing that because the car is driving erratically.
I find out that the driver of the car is drunk. I tell the driver, "sir, why don't we leave your car parked here, off the road, and lock it, and I can call someone to come and pick you up?" If the driver protests, I put him in the back of my police car, make sure his car is safely parked and locked, and drive him to the police station--where I then call someone to come pick him up. No ticket, no citation, no fine--just getting him safely home and avoiding possible harm to anyone else.
Have I overstepped the boundaries that I have argued must be placed on what the government can do? Not at all. First of all, a cop is still a citizen, and any citizen has the right to try to stop someone from continuing obviously reckless and irresponsible behavior. Second, I didn't punish the person; he gets no fine, no jail time, no record of any offense. So the rule that nobody should be punished by law unless they cause actual harm has not been violated.
It is true that supporting the kind of regime I just described, in preference to what we have now, is an extremely minority view. But I think it's because people have simply failed to think through the implications.
> where people will sincerely claim it's their God-given right to drive over the speed limit and kill people, to take drugs and kill people, to shoot guns and kill people, and other such things.
I have made no such claims. I did not say anyone had a right to harm anyone else. I explicitly said that people who cause actual harm should be punished.
You are simply attacking a straw man here. And you should definitely not be judging the US by what you see in the popular press.
So wait - you're saying it's ok to engage in risky behaviour - as long as it doesn't result in maiming/killing somebody?
Surely you can see that's a recipe for disaster?
People are very bad at judging risks - and everybody things they're cleverer/more careful/better than the average.
That's exactly why no government that I'm aware of has ever enacted what you dscribed.
Ok - so you make it that driving whilst drunk is OK - and you will only be charged if you kill/maim somebody. You will soon get a whole bunch of young 20 year old males, who think they are invincible (or that they can hold their liquor like Captain America) who end up destroying families in completely preventable MVAs.
Everybody thinks they're a "better driver than the average" - or that "their reflexes are really good". Unfortunately, the average is exactly that - the average.
Sure, according to you - you can now charge them after having killed a mum and her kid walking across the road - but what about the fact that you've essentially encouraged this behaviour, and raised the probability of such things happening?
Similar logic applies to any risk taking behaviour - yes, there are certainly grey areas - but there's a reason handguns are a restricted item and not anybody can buy them at any corner store. Having a gun in and of itself doesn't "harm somebody", as you say - but having more handguns distributed among the population, without any attempt to reduce the risk (e.g. background checks, safety checks, licensing checks) will increase the risk that something bad will happen.
Likewise drugs are a controlled item.
And with public health directives like this - the aim is to force people to take sensible precautions to protect those vulnerable among the population. I hate to say this, but people are sometimes selfish and only think of themselves (we all do this). So sometime you need somebody to look out for society as a whole.
> you're saying it's ok to engage in risky behaviour - as long as it doesn't result in maiming/killing somebody?
No. You evidently lack basic reading comprehension, so I suppose it's futile to ask you to go back and re-read what I wrote to see that I explicitly contradicted this.
> People are very bad at judging risks - and everybody things they're cleverer/more careful/better than the average.
First of all, speak for yourself.
Second, evidently you have no clue about how people who actually are good at judging risks get that way. Hint: it isn't by "thinking" anything. It's by objectively evaluating your own behavior the same way you objectively evaluate other people's behavior. Everybody can see when someone else is doing something dumb. All you need to learn is how to look at yourself as the someone else. This is a learned skill.
Third, if it's true that "people" are very bad at judging risks, that's just as true of government bureaucrats and lawmakers. Why should I trust them to properly balance all the risks vs. benefits of various laws and policies? Let alone "look out for society as a whole", to use your phrase? All the historical evidence we have says that they suck at it.
Fourth, drunk drivers don't kill other people, if and when they do, by magic. And they don't do it purely on their own. There is always a chain of events, and there are plenty of places to break the chain. For example, you describe a drunk driver killing a mother and child walking across the road. How did the mother and child come to be walking across the road when a car was coming? If they had waited, they'd still be alive. If you say "well, it was a blind turn and they didn't see the car", why weren't they taking extra precautions if it was a blind turn? And so on.
Similar remarks apply to other situations where irresponsible actions by one person harm others. Everybody focuses on the harm to the victims and the badness of the irresponsible person. Nobody spends any time teaching themselves, or their friends, or their kids, how not to be the victim. But knowing that there are some irresponsible and dangerous people in the world, and learning how to keep from being harmed by them, is supposed to be part of being an adult human being in this world. Certainly an adult human being is not supposed to expect the government to make sure no bad things happen to them; no government can possibly do that, or even come close. But that's what our mentality has become.
Okay, let's take another thing turns out fine by itself but might cause harm with irresponsible behavior. If I discharge a gun at my spacious property while pointing it at someone and miss, should I be punishable for attempted manslaughter or a similar offense?
> If I discharge a gun at my spacious property while pointing it at someone and miss, should I be punishable for attempted manslaughter or a similar offense?
Were you firing it at someone on purpose? Or did you just not realize you were pointing it at someone?
If you were firing it at someone on purpose, even if you didn't hit them, that's already a common law crime: in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. Whether it would also qualify as attempted manslaughter would depend on your intent: were you actually trying to kill them, or just scare them?
If you just didn't realize you were pointing it at someone, and you didn't cause any harm, you should not be liable for any offense. But if I were the someone you were pointing the gun at, I would do my level best to avoid all further interaction with you since you're clearly a careless and irresponsible person. I would also spread the word amongst the neighbors so they know it too.
Who cares? If among all the things the state shouldn’t do and doesn’t have the legitimate authority to do, this is where you put your foot down, you’re just being an ass. I can’t think of anything that could hurt the cause of freedom and limited government more than making masks the hill to die on.
I put my foot down on illegal seizures of poor people's property under the guise of stopping drug trade. I put my foot down on attempting to have legal penalties for supporting the Israeli BDS movement even though I don't personally support it.
I also put my foot down on legal penalties for compelled actions such as mask wearing. I also give masks out for free to my neighbors and friends. I support wearing a mask, I will never support fining or jailing an American over not wearing one.
The state requires me to wear underwear on the bus, put kids in car seats, signal at intersections, keep a gun safely, not let my tires go bald, and many other things to protect people around me.
If they had made it a temporary law and fined people heavily at the very beginning it would have saved thousands of lives and jobs. Look at the countries that acted swiftly back in January and February.
That people consider civil unrest because they're told to wear masks for a few months in order to prevent countless deaths is more a sign of a broken culture than anything else.
This is a US specific phenomenon, and it's not a new one. I will further argue it is a critical principle for Democracy.
The issue is not being asked to wear a mask, the issue is legally mandating them.
I can ask you to donate money to a political party - you may say no, but me asking is perfectly fine. If I force you under duress to donate - well, that's something else, isn't it?
Freedom is the ability to say no, even if that isn't an optimal choice. Taking that freedom away leads to bad outcomes like arresting people for unpopular views and sending Muslims to "re-education" camps.
I assume you're also against seatbelt and helmet laws. What about those laws applying to children? What about smoking laws?
The US already has numerous laws that few people complain about because they've come to recognize them as necessary for the public good. But that was only after they were passed and enforced.
Likewise, kids do not have rights the same way an adult does. The government can compel education until you're 18 (thankfully).
We do not have laws because they are good. It is the case that some laws are good, but we have laws because the goal of governments is to govern the people. The difference between a democracy and an oligarch is the source of that right.
I have no special rights over you. I am not any better, I am not empowered by any god or special bloodline. I, if elected in a democracy, can pass laws but I can't limit your rights. I can't compel you to worship somebody, limit what you say or take your property - even if I have a good reason.
Well, being good and for the public good are separate concepts in my mind. That aside, you never addressed the smoking, seatbelt or helmet laws with regard to adults. Permissible or not?
Smoking laws are restrictions. You can't smoke within 30ft of an eating establishment or in a car with a child. You want to go home and chain smoke yourself to cancer? Have fun. Likewise, you couldn't restrict smoking at home typically.
Seatbelt and helmet laws are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road). Likewise for drivers licenses and minimum road hours.
A good case here is the Texas anti-sodomy law (Lawrence v Texas) that was struck down in 2006(!) after being used to go after gay men. Here Texas made claims it was acting for the public good, SC ruled the state had no presence on a private matter outside the public eye.
> Seatbelt and helmet laws are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road).
"Mask laws" are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road, the town square, the park, the trail). Nobody is going to force you to wear on mask on your own property.
There is no "government" as an owner of anything. Anything not owned by individuals (within the USA) is owned by some sector of the public (either the entire nation, or a state, or a city etc. etc.). Governments do not own courthouses, they do not own national parks.
Governments are the structures we use to make decisions about legal, economic and social policy. They are not owners - the public is.
But I've forgotten your posting history, so I can't really tell if we're in violent agreement or if you're just flipping your terminology around.
> Seatbelt and helmet laws are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road).
In England, at least, the law also applies in the (somewhat unusual) circumstances that you happen to own the road.
Going meta here: There seems to be a mental condition that causes people to try to interpret everything in terms of contracts and property rights. In extreme cases it leads to phenomena like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_on_the_land
You seem to be changing the argument rather than answering the question. Do you believe public decency laws are the result of the state overextending its hand?
You are doging the question, maybe because you realize that you can't answer it without lying or contradicting yourself. Do you agree with the fact that you are compelled to wear clothes? After all a mask is essentially clothing.
Nobody checks these conditions when I use the roads. I could be a tax avoider and my use of the roads is unimpeded. Arrest of my use of the roads is consequent to being arrested for tax noncompliance, but I am not expressly forbidden from use of the roads.
Indeed, I could go live under a bridge and never pay taxes, and I would still be able to access and use roads.
Visa holders, undocumented immigrants, and more can use the roads. People without jobs, teenagers, etc. can use the roads. Your point is made without evidence and without observational adherence to reality as I've experienced it.
Do you have a source you can direct me to showing me the requirement that any publicly (taxpayer) funded road is only usable by taxpayers?
> the requirement that any publicly (taxpayer) funded road is only usable by taxpayers?
I never stated any such requirement.
What I did say was that taxpayers have a right to use public roads. That is not the same as saying anyone else is prohibited from using them. The latter is a matter of how we choose to make public policy.
Our current public policy is that anyone is, in practice, allowed to use public roads, whether they are taxpayers or not. We could choose a different, more restrictive public policy regarding non-taxpayers, but we don't. (That is probably, as I said before, because it's not worth the cost to check everyone using public roads to see their taxpayer status.)
But we cannot, at least not based on the legal principle I stated, choose a public policy that does not allow taxpayers to use public roads, since they have a right to do so.
> Yes, you do, if you're a member of the public and a taxpayer.
The idea that being a taxpayer gives you an innate right of use of government resources is bizarre. Being a citizen gives you an innate right of supervision, of course, but being a taxpayer doesn't add anything to that, and supervision isn't use.
> The idea that being a taxpayer gives you an innate right of use of government resources is bizarre.
They're not "government resources", they're public resources. We all collectively own them. The government is an agent that we use to manage those resources, but it doesn't own them. The public does.
They are public resources that the public has elected to administer through the government. It is possible to have resources that are public because there are no constraints on their use, but the two types of public resources are not the same.
> We all collectively own them.
In much the same way that corporate shareholders collectively own the assets of a corporation. And, for much the same reason as this is not true of corporate shareholders and corporate resources, the constituents of a government don't each individually have the right to arbitrarily use the resources administered by government on behalf of the public.
> The government is an agent that we use to manage those resources, but it doesn't own them. The public does.
The public collectively does, but being a 1/~300millionth owner doesn't give you the right to arbitrarily use resources so owned in contravention of the direction of the management agent employed by all ~300 million owners to protect their interests.
> In much the same way that corporate shareholders collectively own the assets of a corporation.
A public road is not the same as, say, a factory. As a shareholder in a corporation, I have no use for a factory, and the factory is not built for direct use by anyone. It is built to produce things that get sold, and as a shareholder I get a piece of the proceeds. (Actually it's often much more complicated than that, but going into all the current problems with corporate governance would take way too long.) But a public road is built with public money for the direct use of the public.
> being a 1/~300millionth owner doesn't give you the right to arbitrarily use resources so owned in contravention of the direction of the management agent employed by all ~300 million owners to protect their interests
The management agent is still just an agent. Yes, I myself am only a 1/~300 millionth owner of the public roads, but I have the same right to use them as the other ~300 million owners. The management agent cannot arbitrarily deny or restrict that right of usage to any of the owners. All it can do is manage the roads: build them, maintain them, repair them, and assess taxes to cover the costs of doing those things.
At least, that's the legal doctrine that should be in place in a free country. Of course it's not the one that's in place in the US at present. To me that's a bug, not a feature.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that US citizens are used to thinking of "the government" not as their representative but as an independent agent that has its own interests that don't necessarily align with their own interests. A powerful institution that can compel them to do things they don't like. Sort of like banks.
This is something that has always made me wonder. The libertarian ideal of "less government" makes more sense if one sees the government as above, an independent agent with its own interests. As a citizen of an EU nation, the way I think of it is that voters elect a government to represent them, so "less government" means "less power to voters to represent themselves". But to libertarians it means "more freedom".
So when the government compels you to "shelter in place", social-distance, wear a mask and so on, it is clearly not doing that because it is trying to protect you, because government is not an agent that has your own best interests in mind, but its own. Instead, it's trying to take away your freedom, because that is what government does, it takes away your freedoms.
That's my best explanation, as someone who has never lived in the US. In any case it's clear that the question of "mask or no mask" has become politicised by being caught up in this peculiar interpretation of "freedom". Which is very unfortunate because it's not a political matter, whether everyone wearing masks makes it less likely that anyone will catch the virus. It's a practical matter and what is necessary is a practical decision. But such practical decisions cannot be taken when everything has to be politicised.
> I think the confusion stems from the fact that US citizens are used to thinking of "the government" not as their representative but as an independent agent that has its own interests that don't necessarily align with their own interests.
I think the confusion is on the other side, and stems from the fallacy of division, wherein people mistakenly treat what is true of the public collectively as true of members of the public individually.
> such practical decisions cannot be taken when everything has to be politicised.
But what politicizes it is precisely the fact that the government is making the decision for everybody, instead of letting each free person make the decision for themselves. If the government didn't force its decision on everybody, then it would not be politicized at all. It would just be a practical decision, exactly as you say.
> US citizens are used to thinking of "the government" not as their representative but as an independent agent that has its own interests that don't necessarily align with their own interests.
US citizens are (or should be) used to thinking of the first as the ideal and the second as the reality. The reason we favor limited goverment is that we know the reality will never measure up to the ideal, so the best we can do is to limit the extent to which we make the attempt.
> As a citizen of an EU nation, the way I think of it is that voters elect a government to represent them, so "less government" means "less power to voters to represent themselves".
Again, this is the ideal, but the reality is that "less government" means "less opportunity for the government to advance its own interests to the detriment of the people". There is simply no way to eliminate the inherent conflict of interest that arises whenever you give some humans the power to dictate what other humans have to do or not do, and that's what a government is.
> when the government compels you to "shelter in place", social-distance, wear a mask and so on, it is clearly not doing that because it is trying to protect you, because government is not an agent that has your own best interests in mind, but its own. Instead, it's trying to take away your freedom, because that is what government does, it takes away your freedoms.
I realize that some people's rhetoric frames it this way, but the actual conflict of interest is deeper and does not require a conscious intention on the part of government officials to take away people's freedoms.
The actual conflict of interest in a situation like the current one is that government officials can't predict the future, yet they know they are going to be held responsible for bad things that happen, because they know many people have this idea that the government is supposed to act in the people's best interest. Government officials cannot prevent bad things from happening, because they're not omniscient or omnipotent and no central authority can possibly know all of the individual circumstances in each situation. They can't possibly balance all the tradeoffs for each individual person. No central authority can. So the best they can do is minimize the chance that they will get blamed for the bad things that do happen. They are less likely to get blamed for issuing draconian orders to stay at home, wear masks, etc., and jailing people for non-compliance, than they are for letting indiivdual citizens use their best judgment in their individual situation. So they do the former and not the latter.
But from the standpoint of an individual citizen like me, I know I am a better judge of my individual situation than the government, so if my judgment of what's best for me conflicts with what the government is ordering everybody to do, I am going to have a severe problem. And in a country of hundreds of millions of people, there are going to be a lot of people in that situation. And if it's supposed to be a free country, having a lot of people in that situation is simply intolerable.
For example, my wife knows a woman whose grandmother recently died in a nursing home. The grandmother was ill and family members, including the woman my wife knows, wanted to visit her before she died. The nursing home would not allow it because of the government lockdown orders, even though all the family members agreed to wear masks, protective equipment, wash their hands, etc., etc. In short, the government took away what should be an inviolable right of people to pay their last respects to a loved one, and to have loved ones with them when they die. It does not help at all to say that the government has to go by the greatest good for the greatest number and some people are bound to be negatively affected. To a person who truly understands what freedom means, that's no better than Stalin's famous remark that to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. People are not eggs.
Current law does not allow you to do this, yes. But current law also allows you to be ticketed if you exceed the speed limit. So obviously not all of current law is consistent with the basic principle I have stated. The application of the basic principle I stated to these cases should be obvious.
(Btw, it seems a little odd for you to be saying, on the one hand, that certain current laws are wrong--such as the 65 mph speed limit--and on the other hand to be relying on other current laws for your understanding of what "rights" you have. Surely you should apply the same principles to all of the laws?)
> Can you legally walk down a highway?
I actually don't know what the law is on this one. The application of the basic principle I stated to this case, as to the ones above, should be obvious.
Current law in much of the US absolutely allows this, as long as you aren't on a public road or private property where the owner has opted-in to the rules generally applicable to public roads.
Of course, most of the interesting trips a person might want to take by car involve traversing public roads.
I don't think the government should be able to make smoking outright illegal (except on government property like government buildings), but I think owners of individual homes and businesses and public spaces (e.g., malls) should have the right to prohibit it, with violations of the owner's prohibition being punishable by law (similar to how, say, trespassing would be handled).
> I assume you're also against seatbelt and helmet laws.
Laws that allow you to be fined or punished simply for not wearing a seat belt or a helmet? Yes, those are wrong.
Laws that impose extra liability on you if you are in an accident and cause harm (including harm to yourself) and aren't wearing a seatbelt or a helmet? Those would be fine. Indeed, people would probably be more likely to wear seatbelts and helmets under such a regime than they are now. Now they're just risking a fine. Under that regime they'd be risking, for example, not having their medical insurance cover the costs of treating them.
"Laws that allow you to be fined or punished simply for not wearing a seat belt or a helmet? Yes, those are wrong."
Why should I have to pay, through increased insurance and other societal costs, for your increased economic burden if you are paralyzed or run up huge medical bills because you could not be bothered to wear a seatbelt?
> Why should I have to pay, through increased insurance and other societal costs, for your increased economic burden if you are paralyzed or run up huge medical bills because you could not be bothered to wear a seatbelt?
Go back and read the second part of my post, which you failed to quote, which addresses exactly this issue.
> Indeed, people would probably be more likely to wear seatbelts and helmets under such a regime than they are now. Now they're just risking a fine. Under that regime they'd be risking, for example, not having their medical insurance cover the costs of treating them.
That is not how people work. They never think it will happen to them.
It's not dangerous at all. The US already has helmet laws for motorcycles and kids on bikes, seatbelt laws, gun laws around safe use and numerous other laws that prevent people from inadvertently affecting others lives.
Making people wear masks in public transport or other public settings during a pandemic is hardly an overreach in comparison.
So how do you feel about speed limits then? Do you just go ahead and break the speed limit every chance you can get, because it's legally required to follow them?
I don’t think it is a strawman. The parent commenter said he wears a mask, knows that it’s the right thing to do, but if there were a mask law he’d deliberately stop wearing it just to prove a point.
If tomorrow you started fining or charging people not wearing a mask, who would it be?
Statistically, a mixture of immigrants, minorities and the poor. Not a bunch of well off white soccer moms or gun toting rednecks, but the vulnerable.
And who can stand up for themselves the least? Well, it's those same people - people who have the same rights as you and I on paper if not so much in a court system.
So yes, I would challenge that, because I am in a position to defend myself and go to court. I have the funds, I own a suit, I can retain a lawyer. That's not true for those most likely to be affected by fines and criminal charges for not wearing a mask.
Right, so I think the analogy holds. If you believed that speeding laws were enforced disproportionately against the vulnerable, you would presumably endanger people speeding so that you could go to court and prove your point.
You can never be naked in public, so the proper comparison is whether you are never naked at home. Most people probably sit around their room naked at some point.
Because you've set up the comparison in an illogical fashion it inevitably leads to nonsense.
> Well the same reason you don't share your email with the FBI and agree to be monitored at all times.
So if G=government requires me to do thing X, and X=I do thing X
G→¬X
G
-----
¬X
and then:
> I wear a mask, and I choose to wear a mask. I also wore a mask before it was "supported" by the CDC. If tomorrow it was legally required, I would stop wearing a mask.
assuming that again G=government requires me to do thing X, and X=I do thing X, you're saying that
G→¬X
G
-----
¬X
and also (because you have been wearing a mask):
¬G→X
¬G
-----
X
So then the "for the same reason" doesn't make sense. It invites the idea that the two cases are parallel, and the only logical way I see of forcing them to be parallel is if:
> I wear a mask, and I choose to wear a mask. I also wore a mask before it was "supported" by the CDC. If tomorrow it was legally required, I would stop wearing a mask.
My family has already had Covid-19. We wear masks to not be jerks and make others fearful or uncomfortable because we can’t be bothered to put a simple article of clothing on.
Wearing masks outside when you are not close to someone from outside your bubble isn't necessary. The virus needs close human contacts for several minutes to spread successfully. On the outside you have wind and other positive factors.
I returned a bike yesterday in North Beach (SF) and people were crowded together. Maybe half of the people were wearing masks. There was a 4 piece street band walking around playing brass instruments like it was a carnival.