The professor returns to ponder.
I don't want to suggest here that I know what the best approach to combating COVID 19's spread is. What is clear, at least right now, is that a majority of those who are well informed are taking the view that shutting everything down as much as possible is the correct approach, and this appears to have been the successful approach for China.
Successful?
Yes, I'd say successful. The disease broke out, but they flattened their curve in a country where the potential death toll was colossal. Italy has now surpassed China in the death toll, and when we further consider the statistical difference in percentages of the overall population infected and killed in China with Italy, well there's no comparison. And it looks to be certain that Spain will soon surpass China as well. The US is frankly likely to, and has already surpassed China in the number of infections, which frankly doesn't surprise me as its much easier to shut the spread of a disease down in a country that has no history of individual freedom whatsoever as compared to one where that is a societal value.
So, anyhow, with the example of a success in front of us, how could anyone doubt the lock down approach?
Well, some days ago here I raised some questions about it in this post here:
The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Free Society
My comments were based on a couple of things, one thing being views I've picked up as a long student of human behavior. I didn't go after it directly, but I questioned, among other things, our ability to really shut things down.
Frankly, I've been hugely surprised that American society has in fact shut things down a lot more than I imagined it could. Indeed, it's been impressive, irrespective of the repeatedly pathetic nature of the current crop of New York politicians who constantly act like scared little girls and whose first instinct is always to blame the Administration. The days of Al Smith, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt are clearly long over.
New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt who counselled that "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself", as opposed to current governor of New York Andrew Cuomo and current mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, whose apparent motto is "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
At the same time, what I should have been aware would be the case for a society that's gone from valuing individual freedom to abhorring individual self responsibility, there's a fair number of people who view any restriction of any kind as applying only to other people. I'll avoid going into it in detail but I'm already familiar with a person who was leading the charge on how businesses ought to be planning for shutdowns and had an obligation to have a plan, to pretty much 100% failing to apply the very plan that he urged everyone to adopt, and even arguing that rather brazen violations of it didn't really apply to that person on an individual level. Things like that are pretty common. It's sort of a COVID 19 example of the old story who campaigns for personal morality and is later arrested in an opium den attempting to procure the services of a lady of doubtful virtue.
Indeed, example of this already abound in the closure orders we've seen imposed here and there. Nobody's closure orders that I'm aware of shut down liquor stores even though, save for alcoholics, they aren't a critical business of any kind. Colorado, having encouraged a generation to become marijuana addicts, left their weed dumps open as they really can't close them. These are examples of a certain species of societal hypocrisy, particularly the latter, which involves impairing your lungs to start with, and we know it. We just close a blind eye as even though we can imagine closing corner news stands, lest the literate congregate and get COVID 19, we can't imagine closing pot shops where the doped up with impaired lungs will definitely congregate.
Anyhow, what I didn't directly address in print, but something I've known about, is what infectious disease specialist call "herd immunity". I wasn't aware that is what it was called, but I was aware of it.
Cattle. Apparently longhorns, in the foreground, believe in self isolating rather than herd immunity.
What herd immunity is that state which is achieved when a sufficiently large percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease sot hat it can no longer effectively be transmitted. That is 100% of the population, but it's a high percentage, such as 70%.
All viral diseases of this type are in the end defeated by herd immunity. What occurs, in a state of nature, is that sooner or later almost all of the "herd" are infected and the survivors now have immunity. At that point, the few members of the heard that escaped being infected have very low risk of infection.
An example of that would be that of the 1918-19 Flu. It was a pandemic, such as that which we are currently experiencing, and there was no way to immunize for it at the time. It cycled the globe twice, or perhaps even three times (it may have in fact evolved during its first trip around the globe as it seems to have gone from bad to really deadly in that trip). But by 1919 so many human beings had it that it just petered out. The virus in the 18/19 form still exists, it just doesn't do much due to the oddly inherited immunity that human populations pass on for certain viruses. We have, therefore, herd immunity to that version of the flu.
Now, I've used the term "state of nature" here as there is another way to achieve "herd immunity" and that's artificially.
This in fact was understood well before viruses were known of. Smallpox, for example, was endemic in the human population due to the two smallpox viruses that transmit it and in the 18th Century vaccination with live vaccines, which is very risky, was known to be effective. For this reason, when there were large numbers of people at risk of smallpox it was common for people to seek immunization, even though it was in fact a very risky thing to do.
Something that hasn't been explained much about "flattening the curve" of COVID 19 is that it depends on the combined impact of herd immunity with the expectation of a vaccine. So, if we flatten it enough, by next year, probably, we will probably have a vaccine and, for those who are getting infected, maybe effective antivirals for it. So while most who speak of flattening the curve simply speak o in terms of leaving resources open, some also discuss this. The hope is not to be overwhelmed, and, as the same time, buy time for a vaccine.
Makes sense.
But a few people hold the opposite view.
I first read of this a few days ago when a relative linked in an article from the Atlantic.
Let me first say here that I generally, but not always, like the the Atlantic, but Coronavirus reporting demonstrates the usual thing most reporting does, which is writers know how to write but they don't generally know very much about anything else. This has made much of the pandemic reporting wildly wild and of little practical content, unfortunate.
Anyhow, the article ironically went after President Trump and the New York Times, or more accurately a New York Times columnist for being "right wing" individuals who were weighing in economic concerns more than human ones.
The NYT Columnist is Thomas L. Friedman who has probably never before been called a right wing conservative in his entire life. If Friedman is right wing, Bernie Sanders is a flaming conservative, and Andrew Yang a charter member of the Young Republicans. The Atlantic should be ashamed of itself.
Friedman is an original thinker, however, and says some really uncomfortable things. I'm not endorsing his views on anything, but I am noting that he's definitely not a conservative. Anyhow, the column that the Atlantic referred to by Friedman was called:
Frieman admits in the column that he's not claiming to know what's best. Rather, he was riffing off an earlier NYT Op-ed. Friedman noted:
These are days that test every leader — local, state and national. They are each being asked to make huge life and death decisions, while driving through a fog, with imperfect information, and everyone in the back seat shouting at them. My heart goes out to them all. I know they mean well. But as so many of our businesses shut down and millions begin to be laid off, some experts are beginning to ask: “Wait a minute! What the hell are we doing to ourselves? To our economy? To our next generation? Is this cure — even for a short while — worse than the disease?’’
I share these questions. Our leaders are not flying completely blind: They are working off the advice of serious epidemiologists and public health experts. Yet we still need to be careful about “group think,’’ which is a natural but dangerous reaction when responding to a national and global crisis. We’re making decisions that affect the whole country and our entire economy — therefore, small errors in navigation could have huge consequences.
And Friedman is definitely right that there's a lot of "group think" going on.
Indeed, no matter what, I think the group think is now so strong that we're going down the close everything down route no matter what.
Anyhow, Friedman was referring to another article by a Dr. Katz, entitled:
Dr. Katz is a bold man, we have to admit, and he's taking some heat for his opinion. But his opinion is basically what I pondered last week.
Dr. Katz feels that the real strategy is to isolate the highly at risk and then let the disease cycle through everyone else. Isolate those whose health and age cause the real risks and the go back to life as normal. Don't close anything, except as noted. We'll achieve herd immunity quickly, and the whole thing will be over.
Now Dr. Katz also makes some negative assumptions. That is, he claims we don't know a lot of things so we just shouldn't plan for them. We don't know the death rate, for example, so we shouldn't assume that its as high as claimed.
This gets into the paradox of knowing what we don't know, which is something that most people don't grasp and which is outside of the common understanding that "you can't know what you don't know". You can, and in fact do, know what you don't know. That is, you know where your knowledge is lacking and incomplete. Dr. Katz argues that wall we really know is who is very much at risk and who isn't, and we should isolate the former and the latter should charge on, so we achieve herd immunity quickly. At the same time, he argues we will likewise avoid destroying the economy and, he suggests, a destroyed economy has its own health risks.
The latter comment is completely true, no matter what people might like to claim. People out of work over a prolonged time don't do well with a lot of things, including health. People turn to drugs and alcohol, and people at home, desperate, with nothing to do, turn to violence as well. Employees of universities spending their paid quarantines in their apartments might not, but then they're paid and have something to do. Not everybody is in that class by a longshot.
Dr. Katz has received a lot of criticism for his op-ed, not surprisingly. And he may flat out be wrong. The death rate we don't know might turn out to be higher, perhaps a lot higher, than we thought it was. And maybe the at risk population is a lot broader than we thought it was. Perhaps the Chinese example is a bad one as their social control kept us from knowing what would happen in a broader epidemic. The example of Italy gives us a lot of reason to suspect all of these things. In that case, Katz's gamble would be a disaster.
Beyond that, by this point, the ball is rolling so fast that it's probably too darned late to call a big time out really. Every day a neighboring state here completely closes down and at this point I'll actually be surprised if our state doesn't.
But that doesn't mean that some serious pondering isn't in order. The longer things go on the worse the economy will be and at some point that becomes a wider and wider societal disaster. And it also becomes one that's harder and harder to climb out of. The government is just going to create money to try to float the economy out of thin air as it is, with very little thought to what that even does to the economy.
Maybe this is the exactly correct thing to do as its the only way to save lives. But simply wondering if it is or isn't, isn't necessarily unwarranted.
Something to ponder.
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