BY MARTIN KICH
What follows is a Facebook post that is apparently being shared fairly widely:
Is there someone out there who can tell me what our end game is with the Rona?
What is the magic formula that is going to allow us to sound the all clear? Is it zero cases? The only way that will happen is if we just stop testing and stop reporting.
Is it a vaccine? It took 25 years for a chicken pox vaccine to be developed. The smallpox inoculation was discovered in 1776 the last known natural case was in 1977. We have a flu vaccine that is only 40 to 60% effective and less than half of the US population chooses to get one, and roughly 20,000 Americans still die of the flu or flu complications. Oh, you’ll mandate it, like other vaccines are mandated in order to attend school, travel to some foreign countries, etc. We already have a growing number of anti vaxxers refusing proven, tested, well known vaccines that have been administered for decades but aren’t necessarily safe! Do you really think people will flock to get a fast tracked, quickly tested vaccine, whose long term side effects and overall efficiency are anyone’s best guess? How long are we going to cancel and postpone and reconsider?
You aren’t doing in person school until second quarter? What if October’s numbers are the same as August’s?
You moved football to spring? What if next March is worse than this one was?
When do we decide quality of life outweighs the risks?
I understand Covid can be deadly or very dangerous for SOME people, so is shellfish, peanut butter and bee stings. We take risks multiple times a day without a second thought.
We know driving a car can be dangerous, we don’t leave it in the garage. We know the dangers of smoking, drinking and eating fried foods, we do it anyway. We speed, we don’t buckle our seatbelts, we take more than directed and quite a few of us don’t think twice about unprotected whoopie, we just hop right in (or on.)
Is hugging Grandma really more dangerous than rush hour on the freeway? Is going to the bar with friends after work more risky than 4 day old gas station sushi? Or operating a chainsaw? When and how did we so quickly lose our free will?
Is there a waiver somewhere I can sign that says, “I understand the risks, but I choose a life with Hugs and Smiles, and the State Fair and Concerts and Homecoming.”
I understand that there is a minuscule possibility I could die, but I will most likely end up feeling like crap for a few days.
I understand I could possibly pass it to someone else, if I’m not careful, but I can pass any virus onto someone else.
I’m starting to ramble and I apologize, but I’m struggling to see where or how this ends. We get busy living or we get busy dying.
When God decides it’s your time, you don’t get any mulligans, so I guess I would rather spend my time enjoying it and living in the moment and not worrying about what ifs and maybes, and I bet I’m not the only one.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
First, this is a pandemic, not a common virus or flu. We haven’t had a pandemic on this scale for almost exactly a century. We’ve blown by the tolls of the flu outbreaks in the late 1950s and late 1960s, and we have no way of knowing what percentage of the final COVID-19 tolls that the current numbers will ultimately represent. In fact, it’s getting clearer that due to both run-of-the-mill and politically orchestrated inconsistencies in reporting of the data, the current numbers are almost certainly undercounts—representing perhaps as much as 25 percent less than the actual totals.
Second, the attempts to compare the risks posed by this virus to other risks that are part of our daily lives are idiotic. Take this paragraph specifically:
Is hugging Grandma really more dangerous than rush hour on the freeway? Is going to the bar with friends after work more risky than 4 day old gas station sushi? Or operating a chainsaw? When and how did we so quickly lose our free will?
If you have an active case of COVID-19, then, yes, hugging Grandma is much more dangerous than rush-hour traffic–especially if grandma happens to be a clutcher. Likewise, if there is such a thing as “gas station sushi,” which I doubt, it’s not at all commonly available because very few people would be stupid enough to buy it. So, what, exactly, is the analogy and how, exactly, does it illustrate the risk of losing our free will? And, finally, operating a chainsaw would be comparable only if one decided to carve the Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas ham with a chainsaw while squeezing oneself in among the family members crowded around the dining room table.
Third, if we had prepared for the pandemic when it surfaced in China and then spread across East Asia and then across Europe, we probably would not have had to impose the nationwide lockdown that occurred in March. Likewise, if we had actually learned something from that experience and had not abruptly tried to re-open everything in mid-April, we might have avoid the ongoing, summer-long surge in cases across just about every part of the country but the Northeastern states and Pacific Northwest.
You cannot simply resume ordinary life in the midst of a pandemic because most people are not delusional enough to risk their own health and that of their families, friends, and co-workers simply because some other people are impatient to be done with the whole thing and somehow think that it can be minimized–if not completely put out of mind and body–through some level of simple, fundamentally American exercise of self-assertion. Now that we are on the verge of a third iteration—in just six months—of dismissing the severe consequences of this sort of self-delusional willfulness, most people have recognized the speciousness of such arguments.
Lastly, the very dark irony that seems to have escaped everyone who is echoing Trump is that in behaving as if the pandemic can simply be wished away—without any variation from how we lived before the pandemic—they have actually been insuring that it is an ever-escalating and ever-lengthening crisis. It’s comparable to someone accidentally shooting himself not once but repeatedly–and repeatedly blaming the gun.
Lastly, this morning, an epidemiologist pointed out that to achieve herd immunity, about 245 million Americans will have to be exposed to the virus. So, do the basic arithmetic. Let’s say that the five million confirmed cases in the U.S. represent just half of the actual number of people who have already been exposed. At roughly 170,000 deaths per 10 million cases, 4,165,000 Americans will die if we simply let nature take its course and act as if dying from this virus is just one of those things that needs to be accepted to achieve herd immunity without disrupting our daily lives. This will, of course, require us to gloss over the fact that more than four million funerals and forty million or so hospitalizations might themselves be distracting, if not disruptive.
That death toll is ten times the number of Americans who perished in the Second World War.
I defy anyone to find a statement by an American politician in which that death toll has ever been minimized in any way.
Ironically, those who have shown the least regard for “science” in responding to this pandemic are, like the author of this Facebook post, very quick to cite statistics that ostensibly “prove” the case that the epidemiologists ought to be disregarded. Even more ironically and incoherently, they are quick to cite experts whose research can be reframed to support the case that negative effects of economic lockdowns and virtual schooling far outweigh the risk of disabling illness and death.
Let’s be clear, the people now most vocally insistent that schools re-open have had half a year to get the pandemic under control and to provide the resources needed to permit schools to re-open more safely. They always gloss over the failure not just to achieve those aims but even to come anywhere close to achieving them.
They also conveniently ignore the toll on our healthcare workers who, even when they have not caught the virus or died from it, have exhausted themselves in dealing with case counts that have stretched even the most well-equipped healthcare systems in many major urban areas to their limits. Since the proponents of in-person schooling are now so concerned about the consequences of lockdowns and virtual schooling, why have they been so little concerned about the deaths attributable to hospitals having been so overwhelmed by CVID-19 cases that very ill people either had no place to seek treatment or were too fearful to seek treatment.
Moreover, those insisting that schools reopen are largely the same people who have been the staunchest proponents of the for-profit online universities, Western Governors University, and the virtual charter schools for grades K-12. Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) may be the most spectacularly scandal-ridden of the virtual charter schools, but stories involving financial irregularities and malfeasance have emerged about most of them, and almost none of them have performed any better than the worst-performing public schools to which they are supposed to be providing a viable alternative.
I hope that they remember this sudden deep conviction about the crappiness of virtual learning and the necessity of in-person public education when they are next asked to approve appropriations for all of the “alternatives” to public education that they have been very insistently promoting for the last four decades—at the expense of support for public schools, public colleges, and public universities.
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The quoted FB post, does pose a reasonable, if obvious scenario, that any rational mind should contemplate. The response after it, does ultimately reveal the basis its ideological bias: “The very dark irony that seems to have escaped everyone who is echoing Trump is that [they] have…been insuring that it is an ever-escalating and ever-lengthening crisis.” Translation: “It’s all Trump’s fault, and its yours too, if you support him.” The election, combined with labor union’s ‘re-open’ extortion demands (universal health care, defunding police, charter school de-commissioning, and more) expose the actual contention, which is only notionally based in “pandemic” management.
But put this argument aside, because it is too emotional to settle in these kinds of forums.
Much more contentious, I think you would have to agree, if you are a college parent, a student, or a college professor even, is the major media report tonight by The Angle, which provided a very well-done, balanced presentation and interviews, on a very disturbing campus development that should raise the interest and concern of the AAUP:
Colleges are organizing armies of student paid “health monitors” or “health ambassadors” and contact tracers, to ultimately intimidate, harass or threaten students and faculty with behavioral demands, and punishments. Such extreme behavior management measures are being adopted by administrations at Duke, Penn State, Yale, Texas A&M, Cornell, Vanderbilt, NYU and dozens of others, including variations at Northwestern, UChicago, Harvard, Columbia and all state institutions. It utilizes students, faculty and staff as ‘behavioral observers’ who report “non-compliance” to university administration, followed by hearings and discipline including expulsion, academic sanctions, blacklisting on data-bases and permanent surveillance. It is referred to as the “covid student spy ring” including using university campus, classroom and dorm “tip lines,” and modifying the university WiFi network to track students, faculty and staff on their iphones, including maintaining a digital facial image web site of offending students and faculty. Forced vaccinations will follow, subject to sanction if refused.
It will be fascinating to see just how much control and compliance will be accepted, and under what possible criteria, and how the compliance data actually performs and is organized, across ideology, academic department, and psychological type. It has obvious ramifications in a number of legal challenges, including a version of the ever-present free speech right.
Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago
So, you dismiss my argument in a brief paragraph–simply because there is a single direct criticism of Trump, which makes the whole argument too partisan to have any merits. And then you use the rest of your lengthy comment to raise an issue that we supposedly should care much more about? Trolling 101.
No, I dismiss your argument because you cite no evidence. The partisan politics of the massive public relations campaign is only relevant in the United States, I believe the politics part is just opportunistic. My comment has nothing to do with what you wrote about he Donald.
I respond to your argument. Whether it is dismissed, is subject to interpretation. Comments here suggest a quorum. Concerning otherwise what you describe as “your lengthy comment to raise an issue that we supposedly should care much more about,” the issue I raise is directly related to, and an immediate product of the ideological position you make here, and apparently in the capacity of the AAUP role you represent. Yes, readers–parents, students and faculty– should indeed “care much more about it” as university administration, along with nearly unanimous acquiescence by faculty, are turning college campuses–due to their unquestioning embrace of the virus narratology, mixed with partisan opportunism, and out of fear of liability–into an Orwellian dystopia of social engineering (see the news report, “United we stand, divided we fall,” on Fox, an excellent investigative report on college security plans). That is among the reasons why Fall enrollment is down on average, 30% or more, and many universities quickly becoming insolvent. This should be of profound concern to you and your colleagues. While you debate statistics and politics, your customers are fleeing, and your campus, being turned upside down into an ideological re-education center and ‘ant farm.” The modern university is quickly becoming the very symbol of everything it has traditionally stood against, in its fight for enlightenment principles and intellectual independence. It is a tragedy. I would not otherwise characterize such directly relevant, constructive response, as trolling. And this has nothing to do with your political nemesis, and everything to do with the abandonment of reason. Regards. ’96, UChicago
Wow. This is interesting, you say the original article is “reasonable” (and give no reasons why we should believe that), and call the response biased, because it mentions Trump handling the pandemic horribly…
Well, I await your actual REASONING and LOGIC and EVIDENCE for those blind assertions.
Yes, you responded with a recap of everything that was acknowledged in the original post. ie deaths, risks ect. However, I will point out that you NEVER answered the question posited in this post which is “what is the end game here”? T
The original marketing of the shut down back in March was to “flatten the curve” with the acknowledgement that such an approach would save lives by preventing the health system from being overwhelmed with the downside of extending the time of the pandemic. In much of the country, the curve was flattened, and the pandemic extended. In other parts of the country it took longer for the infection to reach there and become peak, followed by a flat endemic curve, but now it appears to be getting there as well, even in Arizona which was a mess two months agol….
So… Again, what is the end game? Maybe it will be a FDA approved vaccine that is 100% effective if we are lucky, so that could mean a return to normal perhaps in a year or so? But what if the resulting vaccines are more like the flu vaccine? We need to be honest and really think about what risks we will accept. Is it the 20,000-40,000 deaths per year for flu that we used to accept in the USA without blinking an eye? Is it something more like the 1.5 million deaths per year worldwide due to tuberculosis that we “accepted” without another thought?
Responses like the one given to this Facebook post are predicated on the assumption that even one Covid19 related death is “unacceptable”. Perhaps it is. However, are the increased deaths due the other things that are untreated due to Covid19 restrictions (such as mental health things, opioid addiction, cancer, stroke, heart attack etc) suddenly acceptable?
Someone is thinking. This is dangerous today, as it always has been in oppressive social constructs.
The lockdown didn’t work because the re-opening was so abrupt and haphazard. So you cannot reasonably argue that that failure says more about the nature of the virus than about the inadequacy of the response to it.
New York and several other states have actually “flattened the curve,” in the full sense of that phrase. It’s not gone perfectly, but it shows that what has worked in other nations can work in the U.S.
But it obviously makes such successes much harder to sustain, however, when there is no uniform national strategy.
To reduce this to an either/or choice between live and let live (until the virus seriously affects you or someone in contact with you) and even one death is unacceptable is just a gross exaggeration of what anyone reasonable is arguing.
As I point out in the post, it’s basically a nothing more than a straw-man assertion to express concern about the collateral damage of the response to the virus while minimizing the direct damage caused by it. And it’s especially galling when the predominant strategy seems to be to avoid any coherent, consistent strategy that could be judged fairly on its merits.
Do you actually think that the partial shut down policies of NY are responsible for their current very low infection rates? Or, is it a combination of the recently reported T-cell mediated immunity that 40-60% of the population has likely due to infections with other Corona viruses along with the reality that about 25% of NYC’s population got infected during the surge in April (a number based on antibody testing) which would give NY a 65-80% protection (ie the magic number for herd immunity)? I live in an area adjacent to NYC that had a high infection rate back in the spring too, and we are largely open now as a community with almost no one in the hospital with COVID and only a modest baseline infection rate. Maybe our low infections are due to decent compliance with masks, but all of the folks who wear them on their chin, the folks going to the gym where they do not need to wear masks while exercising, (and the lady I saw this weekend who was wearing a crocheted mask made out of a granny square) would suggest not).
NYC is NOT New Zealand, it is a major metropolitan area with tons of travel in and out. The idea of a 14 day quarantine for those coming from out of state is nice and all, but utterly unenforceable. Just in the NYT this weekend was an article about folks not following this at all, we also have BLM protests, large funerals with no masks in the Hasidic community, etc with no spike in cases? Why are cases falling in Arizona though? Essentially no one wears masks there and they never did a hard shutdown at all?
In the end, in regard to your call to a consistent policy here…. New Zealand, a country surrounded by sea has a new community outbreak that they still do not know where it came from…. China did control their initial outbreak, but how many American’s will agree to quarantine away from their families for weeks in stadiums while living through a shut down of that magnitude? In the end, American’s perhaps would be willing to accept the restrictions of a hard national shutdown if COVID19 was Ebola with a 70% + mortality…
However, at this point, the virus has infected 1-2% of the US population based on active infection testing, and up to 25-30% of the population based on antibody testing. It has killed 160,000 folks or so to this point, perhaps 70,000 of whom were in long term care facilities/on DNR orders. Yes, the deaths due to this virus have been heartbreaking, particularly the apparently healthy folks (who get all of the selective press) who had alot of life ahead of them. For this reason, we need to continue to get people to wear masks, make sure our hospital workers have adequate PPE etc, but the reality it that there is NO way for us to eradicate the virus at this point, mostly because there are so many asymptomatic carriers that it can circulate until it lands in a susceptible community as happened in Arizona, Florida, Texas this summer….
So, again, you did not answer the original poster’s question… What end game do YOU envision, especially if there is not an effective vaccine? I would advocate for a new normal where masks are required, while opening schools and colleges nearly fully for face to face with alot of testing to be able to keep the rate of community transmission moderate for the health care system to not be overwhelmed. And yes, I am a college professor in a moderate risk group. Not going to a bar anytime soon, and not eating “in” at restaurants, but teaching face to face? I have no issues with that personally… As a parent, no issues with sending my own kids back to college either, unfortunately they will be taking their classes via zoom this fall from their childhood bedrooms….. The harm to their educations due to this is not worth the slight risk to their health….
Yes, I am posting anonymously though… There is way too much irrational behavior on this issue for the risk of a public post….
I agree except for the masks, which have not been proven to prevent or even impede virus transmission and were not designed to do so. Nonetheless, the most interesting point in your comment is at the end–namely the irrational behavior. I see educated people whose thinking on this has reverted to pre-modern, unscientific superstition. I see public policies that have been the reverse of what has long been proven to contain epidemics. I see promotion of irrational fears by governments and all major media. I think the appropriate question is why. Why are all these things taking place now? Where are they not taking place and why?
Promote this guy. Beautiful. A thinking man.
Unfortunately a typical example of how this has polarized in America because neither side is willing to engage with facts (while both sides scream terms like ‘common sense’ or ‘science’ at each other with no actual regard for critical thinking or honesty). We have had a pandemic on this scale, caused by a novel virus, in my lifetime – it is simple ignorance to claim otherwise. And the 1918 influenza didn’t reach a million deaths in the US despite running largely unchecked, so any suggestion of four million deaths is absurd. Yes, its serious, and should be taken so, but hyperbole is not going to convince anyone.
As usual, these debates have become politicized pissing contests with each side urinating out its own horror stories if THEIR IDEAS aren’t followed and with rosy pictures of what “following the facts and the science’ will get us.
unfortunately, guess what? The “experts” are often wrong and they contradict each other. (I hope I don’t have to detail how often Dr. Foccacio has changed his mind on VERY important issues (the China travel ban, masks, etc.).
The original post seemed to ask QUESTIONS, although they seemed to be rhetorical questions, not requests for information — which would have given them more credibility. It also cited past experiences (viruses, chicken pox, smallpox, etc.), which may not be relevant to this rather different incarnation.
The response is filled with the old “guilt by association” rhetoric — ” those insisting that schools reopen are largely the same people who have been the staunchest proponents of the for-profit online universities,” SO WHAT, if those people are correct — and they may or may not be.
WHO DO WE BELIEVE?
So you engage in what-aboutism as a way of chastising me for critiquing the “arguments” in the Facebook post (and that term should be used loosely in respect to its content), and then you turn around and dismiss my arguments as being worse than those that I am critiquing.
That’s rich.
Yes, we must be perfectly reasonable in responding to people who are unwilling to acknowledge a basic reality. Because if we aren’t perfectly reasonable, then we are unreasonable by defauult and that makes whatever they say the reasonable alternative by default. Really?
And it’s not enough simply to say that I have my facts wrong. The flu outbreaks in the late 1950s and 1960s were not on this scale–perhaps because they were handled more effectively, even though there have been tremendous medical advancements since they occurred.
And, in 1918-1920, the U.S. had a third of the population that we now have; a much higher percentage of that population was rural; there was no air travel, and the whole infrastructure connecting parts of the country was much more limited–all of which mitigated the spread of such disease. Not to mention that a large percentage of the flu victims were servicemen who got it in Europe or while serving on ships on the Atlantic (including one of my great-uncles).
Have you looked at the numbers? Have you compared the numbers? Are you familiar with epidemiology? Do you know that COVID numbers are rigged? Do you know causes of death in the US for the previous 50 years? How is the COVID public relations campaign related to the abysmal state of US public heath and US health care system? Why aren’t the medical “authorities” (almost all toadies of Big Pharma for decades) talking about diet, exercise, rest, smoking? What is the Infection-moratality ratio for COVID compared to infectious respiratory illnesses since 1950? Do you know the laboratory tests of masks? Do you know the effectiveness of other corona virus vaccines? If not, why are you writing this? This is a multi-layered public relations campaign that has three related consequences. 1. It has potentiated an obedient, and ultimately complicit US public; 2 Lowered wages, dis-employed tens of millions and thereby driven them to desperation; and 3. Promoted a partisan political divide that favors war monger racist Joe Biden and fascistic racist Kamala Harris (yes, I know she is Black but her whole career has been devoted to supporting White supremacy) versus the clownish, feckless, non-establishment The Donald and his sidekick religious fanatic Mike Pence. Wake up Horatio, there is more going on than your philosophy can ken.
So I’m biased and you are providing an objective view? Your reply to my post is much more politically inflammatory and ideologically driven than anything in my post.
Moreover, I notice that those who refuse to recognize that the pandemic is a crisis because that would force an admission that the response to the crisis has been abysmal frequently employ the tactic of raising a host of rhetorical questions–as if one cannot declare the pandemic a crisis and judge the response to it to be abysmal unless one has answered all of the questions.
No one needs to answer all of these questions. Almost 170,000 people have died and about 150,000 of them died between the beginning of April and the end of July.
What would have happened if Obama were still president? Well, a handful of Americans died at Benghazi, and six congressional committees very quickly launched investigations. One of those committees met for longer than any other congressional committee in U.S. history except for the committee that oversaw military production during the Second World War. So I don’t think that it’s politically partisan to point out that the deaths of almost 170,000 Americans–and counting–ought to be taken very seriously.
I’ll just focus on the 170,000 deaths in the United States. It is unclear how many are “Americans,” if by that you mean US citizens and (maybe resident aliens). Between 880,00 and 900,000 people die each year in the United States. Since March of this year the mortality category ‘influenza-pneumonia’ has virtually disappeared from CDC. CDC changed the death certificate form and instructions for filling it out in March so that only a suspicion of a COVID infection (tested or not) gets counted as a COVID death. In 1957 the proportionate equivalent flu deaths would be about 220,000 today, but there was hardly a word about it in the press. The Hong Kong flu of 1968 was more virulent and fatal than COVID. There were the usual warnings and advice about protective measures during that flu season–e.g., fluids, rest for those sick and diet rest, exercise for prevention. This COVID crisis has relatively little to do with a disease, but much to do with the global crisis of capital.
All of you miss the boat. I love the original response, but once again, it is a response to the baited arguments of the Right. Deaths. All they speak of is Deaths. But real, peer reviewed science is showing that DEATH is a TINY part of what Covid will do to literally cripple our population.
THIS:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-damage-covid-19-s-lingering-problems-alarm-scientists
and THIS:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/07/08/from-lung-scarring-to-heart-damage-covid-19-may-leave-lingering-marks/
and THIS:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about-lasting-heart-damage/
78% of those tested, including asymptomatic people, are showing damage to the heart, and the lungs and the brain and this ISN’T a damn flu. This is just as akin to Meningitis or HIV than a flu.
I wrote a long response which I have been posting to the folks on Facebook who post this “article” of badly loaded questions, and Martin, you dive right in, ignoring the fact that if MOST people are NOT immune to this virus and so contract it, and MOST who contract it end up with heart and lung and brain illnesses, as well as loss of smell and taste and other complications we have yet to discover, this could truly mess up the HUMAN RACE, in a way which changes our culture and civilization. 78% of ALL people having substantial heart damage, especially after we now see news that it is RE-INFECTING people. Once you’ve had COvid 4 times, how bad will your heart be?
It is ridiculous how this debate is not driven by the actual science we uncover daily on this virus.
The three sources you cite are all popular publications. They do not cite scientific studies. Their stories are all anecdotal, without controls of any kind. Let me take just one example. The recovered patients, were any of the put on ventilators? Ventilators regularly cause lung damage. Here’s another: did any of them have co-morbid conditions and/or pre-existing conditions? The articles are neither clinical reports nor controlled studies.
This virus issue is evidently doing what it seems meant to do: divide everyone and create sides. You may be interested to see this new research paper: A Ph.D economist from Northwestern University, Sonal Desai, recently published a professional report where she asserts that the risks are overstated, in some cases by a factor of 50. It is otherwise very interesting with good graphics: https://www.franklintempletonnordic.com/investor/article?contentPath=html/ftthinks/common/cio-views/on-my-mind-they-blinded-us-from-science.html.
You may also enjoy my recent article on Covid and university re-opening: https://dissidentprof.com/index.php/8-home/163-covid-19-on-campus-turning-the-university-of-chicago-into-a-re-education-camp. Regards, ’96, UChicago
Would be nice. IF these were peer reviewed papers by actual virologists, epidemiologists, or even an MD somehow related to the field of viruses.
But they are political BS pieces that do not take anything I said above into account.