Get Off My Lawn, Coronaplague Version

by philg

A journalist friend posted on Facebook asking how people greet each other in the mask age.

Her friend:

I greet someone who is wearing a mask this way “GOOD MORNING, thanks for wearing your mask.. oh by the way, I am smiling” To the people that aren’t wearing one I turn my back and walk away.. I’ve started saying “nice mask, so clear, where did you get it?”

Me:

I like to scold unmasked teenagers here in our suburb who are having fun on skateboards and scooters on the road near our house. I remind them that their personal risk of dying of Covid-19 is at least as high as their chance of being struck by debris from the International Space Station and therefore I expect them to be diligent in mask-wearing.

“Get off my lawn!” has become “Stop breathing into my air!”

30 thoughts on “Get Off My Lawn, Coronaplague Version”

  1. I am so glad I found this blog. It’s just the information I needed to feel like I wasn’t the only skeptic out there. I also adore your sense of humor. A child was sadly killed in Rock Creek Park (DC) recently by a falling tree branch. In order to prevent another tragedy, we are coordinating an effort to cut down all trees in the park. Then we will ban all trees from private property. We must be safe at all costs.

    • Personally I find Philip’s blog fascinating because it seems like it’s being written from a parallel universe. The number of US deaths is approaching 80,000, Massachusetts has one of the worst outbreaks in the US (perhaps because of the Biogen conference), and yet Philip keeps talking about how the real problem is people who are overreacting, and that the solution is for everyone to get back to life as usual.

      Ironically, it seems like the big problem with fast-moving mass-death events like SARS-2 isn’t panic. It’s that people are worried about causing a panic, so they don’t sound the alarms fast enough. http://www.psandman.com/articles/Corona8.htm

    • Russil: 80,000 deaths of people whose average age was 80+ is bad. Massachusetts is, as you say, worse. Is that a reason to terminate the Constitutional rights of young people to assemble?

      Let’s stop back to the 1980s. The medical consensus was that HIV/AIDS would spread quickly beyond the LGBTQIA+ and IV drug-using communities and thus kill millions of Americans. Had I been governor then and armed with today’s rules about how to interpret the Constitution, I would have criminalized any kind of sex outside of marriage (and allowed marriage only after a negative HIV test for everyone intending to be married; because I am not a hater, an individual marriage could be between or among any number of individuals with any gender IDs).

      AIDS has killed more than 700,000 Americans, most of whom could have easily lived an additional 40 years. If we assume an additional 4 years of additional life expectancy for the 82-year-olds with “underlying conditions” who represent the average Covid-19-tagged death for Massachusetts, roughly 7 million Americans would need to die from Covid-19 for it to have the same destructive effect, in life-years, as AIDS. See https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-in-the-united-states-the-basics/

    • “Is that a reason to terminate the Constitutional rights of young people to assemble?”

      Yes. Commentary from the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation: https://pacificlegal.org/are-quarantine-orders-constitutional/

      You’ve argued that “flattening the curve” just means delaying when most people get the COVID-19 virus. Are you expecting that you’ll get the virus yourself?

      It seems there may be a mistaken belief going around that once 60-70% of the population is infected, herd immunity should protect the rest of the population. This is incorrect.

      Affluent Americans of all stripes I think are quietly mulling something like this: It’s a terrible time, and tremendous death and suffering may be inevitable. For all kinds of reasons, we as a country may not be able to “crush the curve” and adopt South-Korea-style social distancing. Maybe it’s just impossible, given the extent the disease has spread and Americans’ general unruliness. Maybe it’s not worth the cost, in dollars and liberty, of living several years in a kind of quiet stage-managed by public health bureaucrats. So maybe acquiescing to “herd immunity” before a vaccine will have to be the way forward. We could get lucky! Maybe asymptomatic spread is much more than experts estimate, so the infection fatality rate is low. Maybe much of the population is immune already, genetically or due to cross-reactive antibodies from common-cold coronaviruses. But we have to be prepared for not getting lucky, in which case more than 200M Americans would become infected, and (under current estimates of an infection fatality rate of ~0.7%) more than 1.4M would die.

      But even in that case, some significant fraction the country — say 25% to 33% — need never become exposed, need never risk this game of Russian Roulette where even “winning” may involve suffering and disability. If my family can isolate, comfortably and so diligently, if we can place in the top 25% of isolation diligence, then we can hold out until enough other people have risked and suffered and died that we can emerge safely. If, sadly, herd immunity before a vaccine is inevitable, then why delay acquiring it? Shouldn’t we race there as fast as we can, subject maybe to the constraint that ICU capacity should not be outstripped? The people who are going to be exposed will be exposed anyway, but at least they’ll not be unemployed as long. And the people capable of isolating most diligently would like to be (safely) free of their diligent isolation as soon as possible, thank you. So, as Frum describes it, let’s (let them) “take the punch”.

      Why isn’t this going to work?

      Segregation is affluent America’s go to coping mechanism. There are always horrible things going on “over there”, whether over there is a famine in Africa, a war we are prosecuting in the Middle East, or poverty and violence in West Baltimore. The first amenity Americans seek as they grow affluent is a “nice neighborhood”. As a nation, we describe ourselves as blessed by the protection of our two wide oceans. As families — if we are affluent, especially if we are white — we understand that we are protected by more subtle boundaries. Maybe that’s a sad injustice, maybe it’s because we’ve earned it, choose your poison and your political party. But whatever it is, we are used to it. It’s not surprising, when we read that COVID-19 has hit poorer communities, black communities, immigrant communities disproportionately. It may not be right, but it’s the way of the world, and whatever our political or ethical attitude, affluent Americans tacitly rely upon it. Manhattan, denser but whiter and richer, has less than half the COVID infection rate as the Bronx.

      But the segregation that so often protects affluent America this time cannot free it. Remember how herd immunity works? If R0 is 3 and more two-thirds of the population is immune, then an infected infects less than one replacement and the virus dies out. But that assumes a uniform draw: the three people a new case would have infected are randomly chosen from the population, and at least two of them turn up immune (on average). But if the population is segmented, segregated, stratified, that won’t be true at all. Herd immunity might be achieved in the Bronx, but over in Manhattan, most of the privileged will remain immunologically naive. If you want to ride out the epidemic without exposure, it’s not enough to be in the top 25% to 33% of the most diligent isolators in the United States, or even in New York City. You have to be one of the top 25% to 33% of diligent isolators in your own community, among the people you interact with. If you are an affluent person who lives in a desirable neighborhood, who if liberated would work in a tony office, your implicit competitors in the coronavirus virginity game are not meatpackers or transit workers, but your neighbors and coworkers. And that’s a much tougher league. They have resources comparable to your own, or maybe better. The game of mortal attrition could last a long time. Months or years after the transit workers have taken their punch, your little world could still be ripe for an outbreak, if you all come out to play.

    • Russil: Do I expect to get the virus myself? I live in Boston, one of the most thoroughly plagued cities on Planet Earth. I think that there is at least a 50 percent chance that everyone in our household has already had the plague. If not, I do expect to get it soon enough, consistent with what Angela Merkel told the German people before they plugged up their ears. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/angela-merkel-most-people-will-get-the-coronavirus.html

      Like everyone else on this planet, it would be ideal from my point of view if almost everyone else would get this, thus creating herd immunity to protect me, while I remained unexposed. I do not think that this is a practical expectation, however, unless Sweden reopens their borders and we escape to Stockholm.

    • “I think that there is at least a 50 percent chance that everyone in our household has already had the plague. If not, I do expect to get it soon enough”

      Thanks, Philip. I’m sorry that you’ve given up. There’s no treatment and no vaccine.

      The expectation here in BC is that we want to continue using NPIs to ensure that the infection rate remains low. Confirmed cases in BC. The BC government estimates that we can increase contacts from 30% of normal (where it is today) to about 60% while keeping R0 below 1.

      “it would be ideal from my point of view if almost everyone else would get this, thus creating herd immunity to protect me, while I remained unexposed.”

      As you note, that’s not going to work.

    • “There’s no treatment and no vaccine”

      That’s also true for influenza and for the common cold. I could have built a bunker 20 years ago and gone down into it to hide from the potentially fatal flu as well as a ton of colds. You’re saying “this is completely different because the risk of death from Covid-19 is somewhat higher than the risk of death form influenza”?

      I guess if I had known that Massachusetts would turn into one of the world’s leading centers of plague and that Texas would be more or less unscathed and that schools here wouldn’t reopen for our children until September (if then; if people are thinking more along your lines, the schools may never reopen in Massachusetts because there may never be an effective vaccine against Covid-19), I would have considered packing up for Fort Worth, Austin, or the Woodlands. But I didn’t have a letter from God back in March telling me how this would play out!

    • Not sure why you think Texas would be a refuge. I thought your belief was that most people will get the virus. According to Google, Texas has 35,000 confirmed cases.

      I’m also puzzled by your comment that there’s no treatment for the flu, and no vaccine. Mayo Clinic: “Usually, you’ll need nothing more than bed rest and plenty of fluids to treat the flu. But if you have severe infection or are at higher risk for complications, your doctor may prescribe an antiviral medication, such as oseltamivir (Tamiflu), zanamivir (Relenza), peramivir (Rapivab) or baloxavir (Xofluza).” And of course there’s the seasonal flu vaccine that health care workers take to protect themselves and others.

    • @Russil, with your logic, the next time there is a car accident in the driveway of your next door neighborhood, then every one in your neighborhood, be it they own a car or not, drive or not, must be investigated and required to take driving courses. The only class will be offered and everyone must take it over and over is title “Car Accidents: The Human Killer” to inject panic into the students. And till when everyone student graduates, no cars are allowed in the neighborhood. Enforcing such a policy is the only way to ensure accidents are not spread.

      I know my example is extreme for and a car accident doesn’t exactly map one-to-one to COVID-19 but that’s the whole point — it is exactly what we are doing today with COVID-19.

    • You think people are over-reacting? In just two months, COVID-19 has killed 2X as many Americans as died in car accidents last year.

    • Russil: the comparison to car accident deaths would make sense if the average age of a car accident victim were 82, as it is for a Covid-19-tagged death. And if 98% of car accident victims had “underlying conditions”, as Covid-19 victims do here in MA. In terms of life-years lost, however, since car accidents kill mostly young adults, Covid-19 would have to kill 10-20x as many people to cost US society the same number of life-years.

    • Russil: 11 years of expected life? https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-may-10-2020/download is the latest from Massachusetts, which keeps some reasonably good statistics, I think. Average age at death is 82 and there were “underlying conditions” for 98.4%.

      Are you saying that a sick 82-year-old is going to live to be 93? The Social Security Administration says that an 82-year-old in average health will live for 7.26 more years if he/she/ze/they identifies as “male” and 8.52 years if he/she/ze/they identifies as “female”.

    • Russil: “10-20X is pretty much the rate of COVID-19 deaths vs. car-accident deaths. In the US, car accidents kill about 100 people a day.”

      Are you sure that this is a relevant comparison? Isn’t the U.S. right near the peak of a Farr’s law bell curve of deaths from this novel virus? Whereas the rate of car accidents has been relatively (albeit on a downward slope) for decades.

      If you looked at deaths from jihad on 9/11/2001, for example, you’d conclude that jihad was by far the most likely cause of death for an American infidel going forward.

    • @Russil, I used car accident as an example to make my point and highlight how we are reacting and responding so wrongly to COVID-19 [1]. I was not using it to compare numbers, that’s why I limited my example to “car accident in the driveway”. But since you want to look at numbers, then how about we look at this table [2]. Why isn’t our community, mayors, governess, et. al. taking the same kind of response to heart disease, cancer, etc.? After all, isn’t one live too many?

      And if that’s not enough, what about those who are dying now due to the panic we permanently cemented in people’s live? People are avoiding medical help [3] for non COVID-19 health issues and dying at home.

      [1] See my comment on “May 9, 2020 at 10:19 am” in this blog.
      [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
      [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-coronavirus-real-death-toll-covid-29-cases-a9504911.html

    • Philip: “Life expectancies for old people are surprisingly high, even when they have underlying conditions, because many of the unhealthiest have already passed away.” Using American data, the life expectancy of an 85-year-old is 6 years; of a 75-year-old, 12 years; at 65, 19 years; at 55, 27 years; at 45, 34 years; at 35, 43 years; at 25, 52 years. For the Massachusetts deaths, the average years of life lost is roughly 10 years.

      9/11 was a major event, right? The 1993 WTC bombing, which killed six people rather than 3000, got a lot less attention. I’m still not sure how many Americans need to die for you to regard SARS-2 as a major event.

    • Russil: Covid-19, even if we subtract the panic/shutdown, could qualify as a “major event”. But it isn’t clear that there is much that humans can do about it. If all that matters is “saving lives” there are a lot of easily preventable causes of death that we could address with a lot less effort, restriction of what used to be Americans’ Constitutional rights, and cost. If you rationalize this further to a British-style “saving life-years” (in which saving a 20-year-old has more value than saving a 90-year-old), then Covid-19 falls a lot farther down the list of stuff worth paying attention to.

      Of course it is bad that sometimes the virus wins. But just because we don’t like losing doesn’t mean that we can avoid losing.

      (More importantly, being unhappy about losing to a virus doesn’t make it rational to kill far more people with a shutdown than you ever could have conceivably lost to the virus. See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/03/28/if-all-lives-have-equal-value-why-does-bill-gates-support-shutting-down-the-u-s-economy/ and https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/20/stayhomesavelives-or-stayhometradelives-clinical-trials-for-new-drugs-are-on-hold/ for example.)

    • “it isn’t clear that there is much that humans can do about it.”

      Test, trace, and isolate. https://testandtrace.com/

      Again, I’m sorry that you think the US should give up. If 60% of Americans are eventually infected, and 0.7% die, that’s about 1.4 million deaths. The worst case is that essential services – health care, food production, grocery stores, police – break down because people are sick or afraid to go to work. (In NYC, 20% of the NYPD was out sick in early April.) It looks like New York is past the peak, but in the rest of the country, the number of new cases is still rising. https://time.com/5832365/new-york-covid-cases-us/

  2. You love to use Sweden as an example but what about Taiwan? Doesn’t everyone wear a mask in Tawian including teenagers? Since Taiwan actually seems to know what it is doing with respect to the coronavirus (even compared to Sweden!) given they have 0.3 deaths/millionn, isn’t anybody who acts differently than their Taiwanese counterpart by definition an ignorant idiot?

    Is the Taiwanese Philip Greenspun blogging about the superiority of Sweden and the idiots he knows wearing masks?

  3. It’s difficult to believe that a woman who would turn her back on a person not wearing a mask would be capable of smiling. Does she critique people she meets by the effectiveness of their masks? A N95 mask is far different from a bandana. Moreover, proper fitting of the mask greatly affects its functioning. Does she inspect the extent to which the mask seals the other person’s mouth and nose? Does she have sex with a mask on? These are questions worth asking on your very worthwhile campaign to have all these sorts of persons defriend you on Facebook.

  4. I pulled into the parking lot of my local convenience store this afternoon in my Ford Escape Hybrid while listening to Andrew Cuomo on my local NPR station, and inadvertently left my mask on the passenger seat going into the store. As I approached the counter the owner emerged from the back of the shop and two other customers entered behind me. Everyone was wearing masks.

    The owner (whom I know as a friend) took the opportunity to wag his gloved finger at me: “You should be wearing it!” He has two young children, one of whom followed him about 10 seconds behind, wearing a mask, of course. Nice kid, I taught him how to bunny-hop his BMX bike. I felt like a criminal from the Forbidden Zone!

  5. “nice mask, so clear, where did you get it?” She is most certainly lying. Being a mask refuser I can tell you most people are afraid to say anything and either pretend not to notice or scurry away like scared mice. Good to see the pysop is working and people are now afraid of people. If they keep the mask thing going there will be two distinct and very separate species soon. When do we the unmasked get out own water fountains? I don’t want to share my fountain with gross germ rebreathers.

  7. This whole COVID-19 has been blown out of proportion, thanks to our clueless media who are looking for something sensational to cover and to our scientist who don’t know much about it or what to do about it. The news coverage has been totally misplaced and the word “infected” is being way over played as if, if you are “infected” you will surely die within weeks.

    Did you know that more people worldwide die of suicide [1] then COVID-19? Did you know more people go through the “though of suicide” then being “infected” by COVID-19? But yet there is NO coverage of suicide or other far more human killing events by the media or our scientist.

    This whole thing would have been handled and managed much, much better if the media and the scientist focused more on the preventive and education effort of COVID-19 vs the panic and lock-down of it. Imagine how much better this whole thing would have been if the media was spending as little as 4 hours a day educating viewers and readers how to prevent the spread vs. spending 24 hours a day on how the virus is spreading and killing people.

    [1] https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/

    • Something like 130 suicides/day in the US. Yes – it is a huge public health issue and in our country also linked to our high density of guns. But I believe that the 130/day puts the COVID numbers in perspective. I get a little tired of the crowd that is trying to minimize the numbers. The numbers are pretty big – and will continue to be. I don’t have an issue with discussions around whether or not the shutdown and the costs associated with it are worth it. Those are good and valuable conversations and if we had real political leadership we would have those discussions in a constructive way.

Comments are closed.