As I
write this, on March 16, 2020, the city of Philadelphia has just announced that
one may not eat in a restaurant or have a drink in a bar until further
notice. The Governor of this state made
a similar decree a couple days ago regarding the four counties surrounding
Philly. Ditto the Governor of New Jersey
regarding all of Jersey. I believe there
are bars open in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about 65 miles away, but there is no
guarantee they will still be open when I get there. Wilmington, Delaware is a bit closer, only 35
miles away, but with all the internets and Googles in the world, I can’t seem
to find out what the rules are down there.
The trip to Wilmington is not that pleasant under the best of
circumstances, but to go there looking for a Miller High Life and find the bars
are closed, well, I’m not sure I could handle it emotionally.
So I’ll
rant instead.
When
was the first time you heard the term “social distancing?” For me, it was about three weeks ago and I
didn’t understand what it meant at first, did you? Your first thought was probably that it meant
you were supposed to stay away from sick people so you don’t get sick or, if you were sick, to stay away from healthy
people so you wouldn’t infect them. I
know a bunch of old people and if I have a cough or a tickle in the throat, I
stay away from them. It’s just
courtesy. It’s common sense.
But
that’s not what social distancing means.
Now it means not allowing young, healthy people to congregate because
even though they are not sick and are unlikely to get sick, they might pick up
a germ from some other young, healthy person at the school or the restaurant or
the Billie Eilish concert or an NCAA basketball game or the Coachella Festival,
and carry that germ back to grandma or the old lady across the street. So it’s important to ban all but the most
essential social interactions among completely healthy people because if
somebody carries a Coronavirus back to an 86-year-old sick person with a respiratory
problem and a weak immune system, she might die.
OK. Then why don’t we do this every Fall and
Winter to stop those who are well-stricken in years from dying of the flu? Flu kills about 40,000 a year in the U.S., so
if we just ban all concerts and basketball games and the NHL and close all the
restaurants and bars from say, September to June, that would save all or most
of our elderly flu victims from dying, wouldn’t it? We could still sneak in a baseball game or
two and a backyard party in July and August.
You could even book a cruise.
It’s an
interesting theory, this mandatory “social distancing.” Plausible, to a point. And as we have seen, it’s possible to hang lots
of anecdotes on it, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. (Have you heard about Patient 31?)
Now, as
a possible alternative to banning everything, you might tell those kids who
went to the Billie Eilish concert that there’s a bad bug floating around so
they shouldn’t visit their 86-year-old sick grandma with the respiratory
problem and the weak immune system for a little while after the concert
but…. Well, no. We can’t just advise people to behave
responsibly because, you know, we just can’t.
I mean, what if they don’t? What
if they don’t listen to geniuses like Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Nancy
Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Andrew Cuomo who know what’s best for
everybody? So let’s just close all the
restaurants and bars and cancel all sports events indefinitely and put millions
of people out of work and shut down vacation spots like Vegas and Disney so all
those people lose their jobs and cut everybody’s 401k in half and plunge the
nation into what will likely be a prolonged recession because we KNOW this
“social distancing” thing will work and will stop this virus because it worked
when we used it on….
On what,
exactly? What disease did we shut down
by shutting down civil society and all its institutions? The flu?
Well, no. We never try it with
the flu. Ebola? Un-uh.
I don’t remember anybody missing a Yankees game for the Ebola social
distancing campaign. What about H1N1,
the swine flu? That killed a bunch of
people! But no. The US government didn’t really do anything
about swine flu until it was mostly over, and then a few schools were closed,
but it didn’t seem to make much difference.
But now
suddenly, “social distancing” is the answer.
Because it’s science, right? I
mean, nobody is allowed to even question it.
It’s like one of those laws laid down by Isaac Newton even though it’s
never been tried before and most of us never heard of it before.
The
primary “authority” for this scheme appears to be an article that appeared in
2007 involving a study of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Looking back ninety years at death records,
medical accounts, newspaper clippings and such, the study concluded that the
Spanish flu hit harder in some cities where population density was higher and
people routinely had more contact with each other. The article noted a higher
death rate in Philadelphia than St. Louis because, the authors believed, Philly
had a large St. Patrick’s Day Parade and St. Louis didn’t. This article was published in JAMA, the
Journal of the American Medical Association, a publication that in recent years
has not seen a central-government, top-down, mandatory public health plan it
didn’t like.
And
that is pretty much where the “science” comes from. Where else could it come from? It’s not like “social distancing” has been
studied because we’ve never tried it before.
We never really tried to shut down American culture, industry, social
life, schools, sports, movies, travel, and the financial world to stop a virus.
There’s
other articles too, of course, and there are plenty of computer models for the
spread of disease. The models are fun,
and they have simulations where infected ping-pongs balls and healthy ping-pong
balls start bouncing around and hitting each other, and then eventually there
are some ping-pong balls that have recovered from whatever the disease was and
they start bouncing around too. And
then, I think, we all die.
Yes,
I’m making fun of the “science” because there isn’t very much of it. But that’s not really my point. I like science. I respect the work of scientists. And there are serious scientists who think
“social distancing” might be a good way to limit the effects of the
Coronavirus. But that doesn’t mean
mandatory social distancing will be effective, that it will “work.” There’s no evidence for that position, but I
don’t blame some scientists for thinking it might.
But in
our complex society, as all of us know, there are no solutions, there are only
tradeoffs, so why are we not permitted to consider what the tradeoffs will
be? Why have our political leaders not
even mentioned them? Why is there no
serious discussion of this in newspapers or on TV? WE HAVE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE, FOR ANY
REASON. And it is already having
terrible consequences.
There
will be people, millions of them, who lose their jobs or their businesses or their livelihoods, so
there will be evictions and foreclosures.
Some will be made homeless, and there will be divorces, and some will be
separated from their children. There
will be suicides. It’s what happens in a
severe recession, or an economic depression.
There will be people (there already are), who lose most of their savings
and will face a more perilous retirement.
Some of them may die prematurely, much like the elderly victims of
Corona. We know these victims will exist, but we will not know their
names. We will know the names, and the
number, of those who die from Corona, but we will not know the unnamed people
whose lives are ruined, or shortened, from the draconian efforts being made to
stop it.
Why? Why can’t this issue even be raised in the
public square? I know it can’t because I
have tried to raise it online, and in a community forum, and even with friends,
and I have been met with rage just for asking the question. Here’s the new
rule: if Corona might infect an old person with serious medical problems and
kill them, the way many other diseases and conditions are known to do, we must now
shut down society in order to protect ourselves and the elderly person from
getting Corona even if the harm we inflict on ourselves dwarfs the danger we
face from the virus itself.
In no
way am I attempting to minimize the potential danger this disease represents,
and the hard choices it may entail for individuals trying to live their
lives. That is the human condition and
it always has been. So if it’s your granny who is 86 and has cancer,
you may have to hide her away in an upstairs bedroom until the danger
passes. But your fears and my fears
cannot justify shutting down life in America for honest, decent people who are
just trying to live their lives, educate their kids, make a dollar or two, and go
to the movies once a month.
The
reason we may not question the destruction of civil society for the sake of
stopping Corona is not because of the virus itself but because of who we are
and what we have become. For years, as a
society, we have seen the emergence of an ethos founded in the idea that any
visible danger must be eliminated no matter the cost. If anyone might have an allergic reaction to
peanuts, peanuts must be banned. If an
unpopular idea might be expressed and upset some listeners, the speaker must be
silenced. Your child car seat must be
approved by all authorized government agencies or you can be punished. Let your 8-year-old ride his bike around the
block by himself and the authorities might take him away from you.
The
Precautionary Principle has won, and our response to this virus is perfectly in
keeping with our surrender to the health-and-safety police. Allowing reason, or
a balancing of costs and benefits, into the calculus would discount the
validity of fear as the deciding principle, and that can no longer be
permitted.
Our
nation, with a lot of help from our political leaders and our media, has gone
mad with fear, which is now the basis of our most important decisions in public
policy. Real dangers exist, but we are
not addressing them in any methodical and rational way. Like helicopter parents, we are not really solving
any problems, we are merely giving in to our anxieties. So far, that has been the primary effect of
the Coronavirus---it has turned us into our own helicopter parents.
Copyright2020MichaelKubacki
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