Tag Archives: distancing

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Open Up!

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What an excellent read. I am amazed by our sheep mentality with this Virus. Several governors are really exceeding their powers e.g. NJ and MI. New terms like “overclass” and “underclass” fit the situation at hand very well, You have to ask yourself, “What about us, do we not have a say in this?”

Those who are anxious to open up the economy have led harder lives than those holding out for safety.

By  Peggy Noonan

 

 

 

 

 

May 14, 2020 7:17 pm ET

PHOTO: BARBARA KELLEY

I think there’s a growing sense that we have to find a way to live with this thing, manage it the best we can, and muddle through. Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon. Summer may give us a break, late fall probably not. Vaccines are likely far off, new therapies and treatments might help a lot, but keeping things closed up tight until there are enough tests isn’t a viable plan. There will never be enough tests, it was botched from the beginning, if we ever catch up it will probably be at the point tests are no longer urgently needed.

Meantime, we must ease up and manage. We should go forward with a new national commitment to masks, social distancing, hand washing. These simple things have proved the most valuable tools in the tool chest. We have to enter each day armored up. At the same time we can’t allow alertness to become exhaustion. We can’t let an appropriate sense of caution turn into an anxiety formation. We can’t become a nation of agoraphobics. We’ll just have to live, carefully.

Here’s something we should stop. There’s a class element in the public debate. It’s been there the whole time but it’s getting worse, and few in public life are acting as if they’re sensitive to it. Our news professionals the past three months have made plenty of room for medical and professionals warning of the illness. Good, we needed it, it was news. They are not now paying an equal degree of sympathetic attention to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.

There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lock downs and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in “The New Class War,” calls “the overclass”—and regular people on the other. The overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses. The normal people aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power structures, and they have regular jobs—service worker, small-business owner.

Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor.

I’ve called this divide the protected versus the unprotected. There is an aspect of it that is not much discussed but bears on current arguments. How you have experienced life has a lot to do with how you experience the pandemic and its strictures. I think it’s fair to say citizens of red states have been pushing back harder than those of blue states.

It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.

They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.

Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.

They’re more fatalistic about life because life has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh what informed, caring observers.” They think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.” And if you don’t know, why should you have so much say?

The overclass says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.”

Something else is true about those pushing back. They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows the societal costs in the abstract—“domestic violence,” “child abuse.” Here’s something concrete. In Dallas this week police received a tip and found a 6-year-old boy tied up by his grandmother and living in a shed. The child told police he’d been sleeping there since school ended “for this corona thing.” According to the arrest affidavit, he was found “standing alone in a pitch-black shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back.” The grandmother and her lover were arrested on felony child-endangerment charges. The Texas Department of Family Protective Service said calls to its abuse hotline have gone down since the lock downs because teachers and other professionals aren’t regularly seeing children.

A lot of bad things happen behind America’s closed doors. The pandemic has made those doors thicker.

Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding. “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like Gen. George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no respect, only judgment.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs, and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests may only make the lock downs last longer, which sounded less like irony than a threat.

When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them.

This is no time to make our divisions worse. The pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.

Originally posted 2020-05-17 11:36:23.

Current Events

Should I Social Distance??

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The writer uses thoughts of several scientists to  make a very compelling case for this whole social distancing issue to be useless. You decide.

‘Social Distancing’ is Snake Oil, Not Science

By William Sullivan

5/11/20

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York says that it’s “shocking” to discover that 66 percent of new hospitalizations appear to have been among people “largely sheltering at home.”

“We thought maybe they were taking public transportation,” he said, “but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

“Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself,” he continues.  “Everything closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could.”

It’s your fault, he says to the hospitalized New Yorkers who loyally complied with his government directive.  But here’s an interesting alternative theory as to why, mostly, old people who are staying at home are being hospitalized.  What if the government directive to close everything down and mandate “social distancing” actually made the problem worse?

Dr. David Katz predicted precisely this outcome on March 20, in an article that is proving every bit as correct in its predictions and sober policy recommendations as Dr. Anthony Fauci has been proven incorrect — which is another way of saying that the article has proven flawless, so far.

Dr. Katz writes:

[I]n more and more places we are limiting gatherings uniformly, a tactic I call “horizontal interdiction” — when containment policies are applied to the entire population without consideration of their risk for severe infection.

But as the work force is laid off en masse (our family has one adult child home for that reason already), and colleges close (we have another two young adults back home for this reason), young people of indeterminate infectious status are being sent home to huddle with their families nationwide. And because we lack widespread testing, they may be carrying the virus and transmitting it to their 50-something parents, and 70- or 80-something grandparents. If there are any clear guidelines for behavior within families — what I call “vertical interdiction” — I have not seen them.

One might be inclined to simply accept this as an unintended consequence of “social distancing,” but accepting that would require there to be some kind of h the cost.  Is there?

Very likely, you already instinctively know that the guidelines suggesting that it’s somehow helpful to keep a six-foot space between healthy people, even outdoors, is not based on science, but just an arbitrary suggestion we’ve been conditioned to accept without evidence.

And your gut feeling would be right.  There’s a reason that “social distancing” wasn’t a buzzword common to the American lexicon prior to 2020.  There’s very little science behind “social distancing” at all. 

“It turns out,” Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness, “as I wrote last month, “social distancing” is untested pseudoscience particularly as it relates to halting the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On its website, the CDC provides no links to any peer-reviewed social distancing studies that bolster its official guidance.” 

There’s a reason for the lack of peer-reviewed studies on the CDC website.  She continues:

The alarming reality is that social distancing never has been tested on a massive scale in the modern age; its current formula was conceived during George W. Bush’s administration and met with much-deserved skepticism.

“People could not believe that the strategy would be effective or even feasible,” one scientist told the New York Times last month. A high school science project—no, I am not joking—added more weight to the concept.

“Social distancing” is very much a newfangled experiment, not settled science.  And, Kelley writes, the results are suggesting that our “Great Social Distancing Experiment of 2020” will be “near the top of the list” of “bad experiments gone horribly wrong.”

You also don’t have to be a scientist to also instinctively know that “two weeks to flatten the curve” becoming “America must lock down until a vaccine is created” is more social experimentation than science.  But what the data have fleshed out, beyond the point of argument, is that the proximity of one human being to another has proven to be a very small factor in determining the impact of Covid-19 infections. What’s far more important is which human beings happen to be in close proximity of one another.

According to Dr. Steven Shapiro and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center:

Crowded indoor conditions can be devastating in nursing homes, while on the USS Theodore Roosevelt 1,102 sailors were infected, but only 7 required hospitalization, with 1 death. This contrast has significant implications that we have not embraced. Epidemiologic prediction models have performed poorly, often neglecting critical variables.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt had a crew of 4,800.  Given the acute sample, testing was holistic.  This yields an actual infection rate of roughly 23 percent, and among those infected, the fatality rate is 0.09 percent.  Among the Roosevelt’s entire crew of assumedly healthy and able-bodied sailors, on a floating Petri dish, during the thick of viral outbreak that shut down all schools and placed healthy citizens across America under house-arrest, the fatality rate was .002 percent.

It seems more than obvious that there is little sense in quarantining the young and healthy.  As Dr. Shapiro also observes:

Our outcomes are similar to the state of Pennsylvania, where the median age of death from COVID-19 is 84 years old.  The few younger patients who died all had significant preexisting conditions.  Very few children were infected and none died.  Minorities in our communities fared equally well as others, but we know that this is not the case nationally.  In sum, this is a disease of the elderly, sick, and poor.

Here’s another thing you likely already know.  Politicians and the media are committing to damage control to hide all of these facts from you.  In fact, finding any news relating to Dr. Shapiro’s somewhat revelatory comments online is, so far, quite difficult.

That’s because, for the people who pushed “social distancing” and destroying the economy as an absolutely necessary evil, this is a matter of self-preservation.  If this information were widely known, citizens might be more inclined to demand that schools and parks and restaurants and malls be opened.  But if schools open tomorrow, without testing, and there is not a surge in hospitalizations or deaths, then the obvious question is why the schools closed in the first place.  If restaurants and other shuttered businesses open without a spike in hospitalizations and deaths, then why did they ever close?

There’s value in the media and government officials maintaining the public perception that the costs of “social distancing” have been offset by its benefits.  But while those benefits are elusive in the data, and require mountains of presumption to imagine that they even exist at all, the costs of “social distancing” couldn’t be clearer.

As Dr. Steven Shapiro concludes:

What we cannot do, is extended social isolation. Humans are social beings, and we are already seeing the adverse mental health consequences of loneliness, and that is before the much greater effects of economic devastation take hold on the human condition….

In this particular case, the problem we’re not going to be able to fix in the short term is the complete eradication of the virus. The problem we can fix is to serve and protect our seniors, especially those in nursing homes. If we do that, we can reopen society, and though infectious cases may rise as in the Theodore Roosevelt, the death rate will not, providing time for the development of treatments and vaccines.

At this point, this is little more than common sense, and the truth can’t continue to be suppressed for much longer.  It’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s well past time to take a more tactical approach to mitigation, as Dr. Katz suggested back on March 20, allocating resources and efforts toward protecting and caring for those most at-risk, and ending this soul-crushing and economy-crashing experiment with holistic “social distancing.”

 

 

Originally posted 2020-05-12 10:38:16.