How did the coronanxious come into power?

by philg

Still celebrating the start of Year 2 of “14 Days to Flatten the Curve”…

I closed out Commercial flights during Coronapanic: a mostly mask-free experience with

I wouldn’t recommended the experience for those who are anxious about COVID-19. While you’re constantly being reminded about how hazardous COVID-19 is, there isn’t enough room in the airport to be truly distant from those who are potentially infected. People sit glumly with their masks on, waiting to see how the Russian roulette game that they’ve chosen to play will turn out. Unless you believe in the effectiveness of crude non-N95 masks, it’s the same risk level as being in a crowded Miami club, but a lot less fun.

One of the great things about Internet, which even Facebook hasn’t managed to destroy, is that reader comments can be much more interesting than the original post. From RS:

Can we just say that about all other aspects of life? I would love if people who are anxious about COVID-19 would just stay home so the rest of us can get back to normal life. It feels like they’re holding society hostage so they can have the illusion of protecting themselves without having to do the one thing that actually protects them (staying home).

With a handful of exceptions (Florida, South Dakota, Sweden, Russia), it seems as though the coronanxious are in charge and able to force those who don’t mind coexistence with this virus and its myriad variants (the “covidiots”) into various forms of shutdown, mask theater, etc. The coronanxious have pretty much sat at home for a year anyway. It wouldn’t have cost them anything or increased their personal risk if they’d let the non-anxious carry on with their lives, education, and careers.

So that raises the question… why is it obvious that the coronanxious would prevail in setting government policy? (i.e., could we have predicted Mass Karenhood?) Is it because leaders tend to be old and therefore personally vulnerable? Is it because the restrictions imposed don’t hurt the elite and the elite are indifferent to the suffering imposed on the non-elite? (public school shutdowns aren’t a problem when your children and/or grandchildren are in private school…)

From the CDC, March 14, California and Florida, at opposite ends of the shutdown spectrum:

Note that more than 20 percent of Florida’s residents are over 65 (and therefore potentially vulnerable to COVID) while just 14 percent of Californians are over 65. So the COVID death rate among the elderly in Florida is almost surely much lower than in masked-and-shut California.

An objective measure of panic from one of America’s principal vendors of panic, the New York Times (March 18, 2021):

First of all, it is unclear whether the 1-5% hospitalized answer is actually “correct” if you consider “with Covid” to mean “could produce a positive PCR test”. With the CDC estimating that more than half of Americans have been infected with coronavirus, is it conceivable that COVID-19 means a 5 percent risk of hospitalization? We should have seen 2.5 percent of the folks we know carted off to the hospital (with a median personal network size of 472, the typical person should know 12 people who’ve been hospitalized with COVID). Leaving that aside. Casual inspection of this chart shows that 88 percent of Democrats overestimate the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 while 70 percent of Republicans do. The journalists at the New York Times nonetheless report that “Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks”. Based on the chart, it would be more accurate to say “Four percent of Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks.”

30 thoughts on “How did the coronanxious come into power?”

  1. Because at least two factors combined to the benefit of certain groups:

    1) For the longest time, Coronageddon – was the perfect political club to use against Trump.
    2) If you’re a fan of higher taxes, bigger government, more regulation – could there have been a greater political excuse to go “all in”?

    Having tasted blood, the sharks won’t give up their position easily. See news stories as recently as today:”vaccinated people still catch virus!!!!!”, or “what if this doesn’t work against the Greenwich Village mutation???”

  2. Hospital capacity might be one factor. For various reasons health care professionals don’t like working in facilities with insufficient capacity, long hours, stressful conditions, etc. They often tend to be in favor of policies which are intended to “flatten the curve”. Politicians, journalists, the general public, are influenced to some extent by these health care workers. I suspect.
    https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200317.457910/full/

    • Patrick: Nobody loves 2-3 years of “14 days to flatten the curve” more than I do, but most Covid patients don’t need or benefit from hospital care. And most “Covid patients” in the hospital aren’t receiving treatment for Covid (or anything else!). See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/01/17/our-heros-hospital-is-full-but-not-with-patients-who-should-be-there/ and also https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-home-care.html

      Given a year of time and $trillions in funding, it would have been easy to build specialized Covid care facilities like we have for renal dialysis (my post from April 2020: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/02/if-we-could-build-renal-dialysis-capacity-why-not-covid-19-treatment-centers/ ).

      So I don’t think that limited hospital capacity explains the choice to imprison the young rather than tell the old/fearful to hide.

    • Philg: Is it the practice in any rich countries for severely ill Covid-19 patients to be denied hospital care, when the capacity exists? Doesn’t insurance typically cover that in the United States, for example?

      Searching I saw many proposals for at-home acute care, but I didn’t find any evidence that was implemented at scale in an affluent country. Maybe I missed it?

    • As noted in that January 17 post, Covid does not seem to have been harmful enough to Americans (even though we’re fat and otherwise unhealthy!) to fill up a 900,000-bed hospital infrastructure with “severely ill Covid-19 patients”. Americans filled up hospitals via incompetence, e.g., not preparing any place for not-sick Covid-PCR-positive-a-week-earlier people to be discharged to.

    • Philg: “Americans filled up hospitals via incompetence”
      Why wouldn’t a crash program to spend trillions to build, staff and operate new specialized facilities be afflicted with similar American incompetence?

    • Patrick: Why wouldn’t building Covid treatment centers be handled in the same incompetent manner as other U.S. government-directed programs? For the same reason that building renal dialysis centers wasn’t handled incompetently… they weren’t built by the government. The government offered to pay huge $$ for renal dialysis and the private sector responded by building capacity. So far the U.S. has committed about $13 trillion in tax dollars and future tax dollars (via borrowing) to Covid-19 (see https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ ). About half of those “severely ill” with Covid-19 will die, despite our most elaborate medical interventions. Thus, roughly 1 million Americans have, since March 2020, become “severely ill” with Covid-19. If we devoted the $13 trillion to treatment of the severely ill in private clinics, therefore, we’d have roughly $13 million to offer a private clinic (in a strip mall!) for treating a single patient. That’s a pretty good incentive for an entrepreneurial physician or dentist.

    • @Philg: That’s right. We’ve blown the money, wasted it and used it in the wrong places. Every time I listen to my local NPR station I listen to people talking about how we should blow more of it on things that enrich the administrators.

    • philg: I looked at your previous post on dialysis, and also did a search, but I didn’t notice the evidence that American system was well-run and cost effective.

      On the other hand, these reports have various issues with the American dialysis system:
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-health-202/2019/07/11/the-health-202-the-government-funds-kidney-dialysis-for-all-who-need-it-but-the-program-needs-fixing/5d25f517a7a0a47d87c570ac/
      “A typical dialysis patient costs Medicare about $89,000 per year, and their average life expectancy is five to 10 years.”
      “But it also means dialysis consumes a huge portion of Medicare’s spending — about 20 percent of all services paid under its traditional fee-for-service program.”
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kidney-dialysis-is-a-booming-business-is-it-also-a-rigged-one1/

      As a personal anecdote, I had an uncle on dialysis. My aunt was happy that the enormous bills were completely covered. However his quality of life was very poor and they spent his final years consumed with activities related to his treatment and care.

      Maybe you have other evidence that supports what a great system it is?

    • @Patrick M O’Keefe:

      As far as I’ve been able to tell, everyone shifted to telemedicine so the doctors were protected while the hospitals stayed nearly empty.

    • Alex: I think the empty hospitals that ran out of money and furloughed staff (e.g., https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/mayo-clinic-furloughs-cuts-hours-of-30-000-employees-to-help-offset-3b-in-pandemic-losses.html from April 23, 2020) during what was purportedly the height of coronaplague would be cited as success stories by the Shutdown Karens and Mask Karens (never mind that masks weren’t ordered until later). For the Shutdown Believers, if we hadn’t had the Blessing of Shutdown, the hospitals would have been full rather than empty.

      (A more recent success story for the Shutdown Karens, from February 2021: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/9-hospitals-laying-off-workers-020421.html “The financial challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have forced hundreds of hospitals across the nation to furlough, lay off or reduce pay for workers, and others have had to scale back services or close.”)

      It is like the old story of the guy who goes into a Manhattan psychiatrist’s office and the doc asks “Why are you standing on your head?” The patient says “It keeps the lions away.” Shrink: “But there are no lions in Manhattan.” Patient: “See! It works!”

    • Michael: But that was the point of RS’s comment… why are the fearful/vulnerable going to shops in the first place? Instead of locking down the young/invulnerable/indifferent, wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to use their political power to get more/better services for those who choose to remain in their bunkers? Except on a few islands and maybe in a police state, lockdowns and mask theater, don’t reduce coronaplague to a level that would be regarded as safe by a fearful person (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/03/18/the-one-year-anniversary-of-the-czech-republics-mask-law/ and also Slovenia, Peru, et al.). If the outside world cannot be rendered safe, why care about the precise risk level in the outside world? Just stay home.

    • I’d imagine staying at home just doesn’t scale for half the population, and many of that half have work outside the home (in the UK at least).

  4. Let’s not forget that the government and media have been trying to stir up mass hysteria over infectious diseases for _years_. SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, West Nile Virus, etc. In the past they’ve failed, and I think it’s significant that the insanity didn’t really take off until the great toilet paper rush of March 2020. That event signaled to our masters that they had finally succeeded where they had failed so many times before.

  5. I knew we were doomed to Coronapanic when the outbreaks hit the cruise ships. It was obvious then that the virus was very transmissible among people who skewed elderly and were closely packaged together in their own floating petri dishes. The next big tell was the Biogen conference in late February of 2020. Immediately we knew two things: even the supergenius biotech people could be superspreaders who were totally caught with their pants down, and next it was going to hit the nursing homes and the elderly/vulnerable like a ton of bricks. Those incidents made it clear to me that

    1) If it can superspread among people with IQs a couple standard deviations above the mean, it was going to rip through the rest of us monkeys like s**t through a goose and
    2) It’s going to absolutely terrify the baby boomers and the elderly, and that means total panic.

    Then you can just add in all the rest of the factors, but you knew by the beginning of March last year that this was going to be a full-blown panic of a kind we haven’t really ever experienced before.

    • @George A: I disagree with you on this one. The mobs in Miami are indicative of much deeper social problems. Lots of the people in Miami aren’t from Miami, they’ve been going there to raise hell and cause all the businesses and government in Miami trying to maintain some semblance of law and order a ton of trouble, and they’re goosing each other though the interwebs. They’re a big mob, but arresting them won’t stop the problem. It’s a symptom of the amorality and “f**k it all” mindset.

      I know, sounds like: “Kids these days…” as an old grumpy man, but these people are not behaving like civilized people – even ones that are there to party – because they aren’t. They’re the barbarian hordes.

    • @George A.: In other words, they’re not there to “exercise their freedom.” They’re there to wreak havoc and that’s what they’re doing. I live in a town that has a lot of out-of-state vacationers and transients and every year we have a couple of incidents where someone calls in 100 of their friends to a rental home and wreck the place, drive around drunk at 70 and smash their cars up, toss garbage out of their cars into the lake, and generally terrorize the locals. These people aren’t “exercising their freedom” they’re deliberately causing mass mayhem. It’s the New Normal.

    • By the way, one of my favorite Metallica cover songs is this one, but if you’re going to go and wreck the place, you’d better be Metallica so you can pay to fix it up afterward. These mobs in Miami ain’t gonna do that.

    • @Alex, I agree that many of those mob in Miami are from outside the State. But it goes to show you how people run out of patient. I expect this mob to spread across other states in the coming months once the weather improves. After all, they are getting free money, where else to spend it than go out and party?

  7. It’s the same CYA behavior that gave us “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. (For the youth: IBM was a big company that used to make computers). The work involved in gathering opinions from a variety of health experts, economists and legal advisors and then analyzing the many short- and long-term trade offs involved is too much to ask of politicians. Even if they have the intellect for it, few have the bravery to defend a well-reasoned but complex decision to the public. Better that they simply hide behind the perceived “safest” option and keep their jobs.

  8. And when you have #Science like this, who wouldn’t be anxious?

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/astrazeneca-once-touted-as-a-pandemic-slayer-faces-challenges/ar-BB1eODgv?ocid=uxbndlbing

    “We need to understand what’s behind it scientifically,” Moncef Slaoui, then the chief science adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said at a briefing.

    U.S. scientists have expressed frustration about trying to understand how well the vaccine works and how to best use it given the existing data and confusing communication.

    “The bottom line is the communication has not been good. And I don’t know whom to attribute that to, but clearly companies, especially vaccine development companies, have to have clear communication practices,” said Stanley Plotkin, inventor of the rubella vaccine. “And so there’s been misunderstanding, difficulty, even from the point of view of science, to understand what’s going on.”

    Who picks the winners and losers? Obviously not me!

    • We are living in the CYA world of postmodern George Lakoff Narrative/Framing Commie Bullshit. Nobody gives *themselves* a straight answer because they’re protecting their jobs!

    • Alex, 100% . Lakoff’s philosophy fails as philosophy of nature or philosophy of war but it perfectly describes world where we live and for sure work in and where and how he managed to attain prominence with some of his teachers. His philosophy has connection to lowest among higher worlds.

  9. If the coronanxious were as intelligent as they are opinionated and noisy, they would have stayed home, safe and hidden, while the virus ripped thru the rest of the population and herd immunity was achieved. Alas, the coronanxious seem to have sparse knowledge about biology and limited reasoning capability.

  10. Coronanxious c’mon just call them what they are – Boomers. Finishing off America for one more day of decadence.

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