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Day 79: COVID-19 Putting a Smiley Face on Martial Law
I was at a bit of a quandary as to what graphic to display today. So I decided just to highlight the current IHME COVID-19 death projection for the US. Notice anything? It’s about two-thirds the estimate a week ago. Some in the press want you to pat yourself on the back for being good little citizens and staying home, thus reducing the death rate. Except that the model always assumed we would be good little citizens and stay home. So why the change? Don’t know, other than reality intruding on prediction.
The United States today is under a form of martial law. Actually it is under about 42 state martial laws and six local jurisdiction martial laws — about 95% of the population. Of course, there has been no declaration of martial law. Instead, the restrictions imposed have been health emergency declarations going by some euphemisms like “safer at home” and “shelter in place.” But the net result is that 95% of American citizens are at least temporarily having their civil rights abridged.
What rights are those? Right of assembly — the governments have banned crowds, small groups, and even entertainment of non-resident persons in your home. Freedom of religion — pursuant to the bans on crowds, church congregations are not permitted to…congregate. Right to keep and bear arms — governments are closing gun stores having deemed them “non-essential.” Right of property — orders to close businesses not deemed “essential” by the government is a form of taking from the business owners and the employees. The recent worker relief legislation (to the extent it actually compensates business owners and employees for lost income) is not welfare it is payment of a debt owed. Freedom of travel — governments are restricting movement except for essential activities, e.g., food, medicines, health care.
Are restricting these freedoms justified? Unclear. Most of us want to give the government the benefit of the doubt for a short-term denial of rights in an emergency. Uncertainty about the health threat certainly justifies caution. The highest priority is to assure that local/regional health care systems are not overwhelmed and that traumas and diseases could no longer be treated. While that system is under threat, government control is most justified. But once it becomes clear that the local/regional health care system can manage the health challenges, what is the rationale for continued deprivation of liberty?
There are those that might argue that it’s to save lives. Except that we don’t save any lives. Death is inevitable. The timing of death is variable and it is not within the control of the government to extend life.
Then it must be to protect individuals from bad actors within the community — those that irresponsibly spread disease. Well, OK. In general, I am of a mind that your liberty ends at the tip of my nose. But we all know that isn’t quite true. Government is a poor arbiter over the inconveniences that people impose on one another and functions best only in post facto imposition of punishment as a deterrence to future outrages. And government is not securing maximum health for all of its citizens unless it is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omni-beneficent. Governments are never any of these.
How about “national security?” The argument is that to preserve the nation the citizenry must be controlled. Isn’t that kind of like “burning the village to save it?” And yet that seems to be what (Obamacare architect) Zeke Emmanuel is calling for; imposing “social distancing” for 18 months until a coronavirus vaccine is ready. If what Emmanuel has in mind is what Sweden is doing, fine. But if he believes that we should just stay in our homes, out of work, out of business, for the next 18 months, then sorry. That’s just martial law with a smiley face.
[Note: Links to all my CoVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
we do have a treatment that works for some people, hcq, which was FDA approved in 1955!
We are under martial law. We are under quarantine law. We have done these things in the past. But we havent had to do them in such a long time we have forgotten whats it like. I remember growing up and hearing about the Polio epidemics that used to strike large portions of states, and hearing about summers for kids being shut down and businesses suffering as a result.
Sure this is a nation wide one, which is unprecedented, but these used to be quite routine and like a lot of things that used to happen we have forgotten what its like. I wish people were not dramatic about what was for our grandparents a much more common ocurence.
http://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sokol.html
Well 5.56, .308, and 12ga are back in the stores so that’s good.
Here’s a more granular way of charting the story, from Singapore, where a pushier and nosier government (Don’t want to cooperate and be truthful? Loose your visa and be deported!) is tolerated:
https://www.againstcovid19.com/singapore/dashboard
Well said.
Uncertainty is a large part of the problem today. We are not debating the necessity of martial law to contain epidemics. We are debating foremost the severity of COVID-19 relative to previous mass casualties by disease. Even political allies disagree about the basic facts, statistics, and objective comparisons.
That “fog of war” is complicated by common mistrust of sources. Recent years have called into doubt the reliability not only of news organizations but also of government agencies tasked with our common defense. No agency is immune.
Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that the Left desires a model of centralized government with expansive powers in contradiction to the US Constitution and American history. So even a better justifiable claim to temporary suspension of civil rights (emergency powers) would seem a nefarious power grab; a revolution of sorts.
Martial law requires tremendous trust to avoid revolutionary disobedience. I’m not sure how long such trust will hold under the present circumstances. A month is pushing it.
That’s the part that is frustrating me. It’s been two months: why dont we have better clearer data yet on these basic questions?
I fully understand and support all the unease, irritation, and even the umbrage expressed here — in principle.
In practice, since making an emergency relocation from Tokyo to my hometown in the Boston area, and staying with/helping out my parents, I’ve got very limited reserves of patience for grumbling about herd immunity development being unnecessarily stymied and all that.
My mom has COPD (not the smoker’s variety, and weirdly enough it doesn’t seem to be the genetic variety either), and in tandem has pulmonary hypertension, and shortly prior to my last move to Tokyo in early Spring 2016, I was witness to her nearly dying as a cold evolved quickly into bronchitis that in turn rapidly became heavy-duty pneumonia. She’s had some other, similar close calls since then as well.
She’s in her late 70s and is still highly active and successful as a residential real estate agent, she and my dad remain as devoted to one another as the day they married over 55 years ago, and she has always been an incomparably loving and selfless mother to my sister and me.
Absent current Wuhan Virus circumstances, there’s no significantly compelling reason to think she couldn’t make it to her mid- or even late 80s, keeping all her marbles all the way to the end.
*With* current Wuhan Virus circumstances, I’m terrified for her, and suffice it to say that she and my dad are pretty spooked themselves. Yes, ultimately this is all in God’s hands, but our Sages (in Judaism) teach that “we do not rely upon a miracle” all by itself to rescue us from a peril we ourselves are eminently capable of at least warding off (even if we can’t yet eliminate or cure it).
What I’m trying to convey here is my unyielding refusal to let my mom be consigned to an unfavorable column in a statistical analysis, however much I respect and support that analysis during our present ordeal. Dispassionately expatiating about comorbidities, and meticulously constructing the case for advancing the date we might get to herd immunity simply will not make the sale with me at the selfish, individual level as concerns the fate of my mom.
I’m not advocating for 18 months of what we’re enduring currently as a nation — hardly. But an immediate snap-back to the status quo ante, without a vaccine in sight for 18 months by the same token, might well kill my mom (Ch”v). Her blood is not redder than anyone else’s, but it shouldn’t just be free for the spilling either.
I don’t know that anyone is suggesting otherwise. The question is whether there is a better way to protect people like your mother without harming everyone else in the meantime. I believe there likely is. In fact, you would probably already be engaging in that sort of protective behavior even without government mandate.
“China lied” would be the quickest answer here, in that information on COVID-19 that could have been gleamed in December and January before the outbreak really spread couldn’t be, because Xi and the Chinese leadership hid the initial outbreak, and then lied about the ability of it to spread from person to person, based on what they already had seen in Wuhan.
Toss in the ‘disappearing’ of doctors and reporters who tried to tell the truth, and the fact they’ve rolled out v2.0 of their PR effort to claim there are zero new causes of COVID-19 being reported in the country, and it’s forced the U.S. and the Europeans to take a lot of the early information with a grain of salt,, and build up the database, unfortunately, based on in-country personal experience.
The voters in every state have the ability to launch a referendum and special election at any time. That’s what needs to happen. It could start as an online petition.
#38 Hammer, The
The question is not what protective behavior *I* would be engaging in absent government directives — it’s what behavior other people would willingly engage in, grounded in some measure of consideration for unknown third parties physically more vulnerable than they are, notwithstanding their own possibly differing interpretation of the threat the pandemic poses as well as their pocketbook concerns. Ditto for business establishments, particularly at SMB scale.
I’m the designated grocery shopper in these circumstances, and even so, we’re agreed that I should space out the excursions to every two or preferably every three weeks. Under Massachusetts state-level directive (to the best of my knowledge), our go-to supermarket mandates a social-distancing-spaced queue to enter the store, limiting shopper numbers to 175 persons within the store at any one time (I don’t know what the normal capacity is supposed to be, but this definitely spreads out the space between patrons), and I go there wearing a proper mask and latex gloves — plus I Clorox-wipe everything that I haul back and change my clothing out in the garage before coming back inside the house.
And still I’m terrified of potentially bringing the Wuhan Virus into the home and being responsible for in effect killing my mom (and possibly my dad too).
This state (Massachusetts) is not exactly chock-a-block with considerate, empathetic denizens in the first place. Absent some strictures (which Dr. Birx emphasizes are instrumental in constraining the virulence — for everybody — of a highly likely second wave), the dangers imposed on my mom by widespread social nonchalance could push the deadliness factor almost past the point of coping.
When I heard Zeke Emmanuel pontificate, I thought loudly in my head, “Zeke, stfu.”
Please do not read my comments as cold-hearted, as that is not my intent. Personalization seems to transform any “statistic” into actual tragedy, but nothing changes. Virtually every loss is tragic for someone. I can read about death on a large scale and barely bat an eye, but I’ve witnessed death a number of times and have been moved beyond words. With something on a national scale it is absolutely necessary that we compartmentalize – but that doesn’t change the nature of individual loss, and I do recognize that.
Consider this: There is one way that we could absolutely protect at-risk individuals. Think of something like a “bubble boy” situation … someone with no immune system who could die from exposure to pretty much anything. You could physically isolate that individual in a literal plastic-encased environment and fully protect him against covid and anything else that might harm him. Historically, that’s been done, and that is obviously one extreme – but it is illustrative. Would your mother choose to live like that? Would you? Would any of us? Obviously, we accept some level of risk in our lives (which is why we fly in planes, ride in cars, and walk down the street every day). People accept risk because the trade-offs are too great to justify risk-avoidance in most cases.
What we’re doing with these lockdowns (even “social distancing”) is choosing to implement a sort bubble in order to protect some unknown number of people. Except, instead of putting an at-risk person in the bubble, we’re trying to put everyone into their own (much less effective) bubbles. The problem is, right now, we don’t really fully understand how effective those bubbles are, if at all, nor do we fully understand the harm that we’re causing as part of the trade-off (although that is becoming more clear by the day). As tragic as every individual loss is, it is still worth our while to have discussions about what those trade-offs actually are.
With something like this virus, there is simply no way to eradicate it completely. None of this “social distancing” was intended to stop people from getting ill – just to spread it out so that it wouldn’t overwhelm our hospital systems. The wisdom of that is dubious, and the notion of hitting “pause” until a vaccine is found is simply fantastical. The danger to your mom is present – as you pointed out, it exists with the cold or the flu as well – and it won’t go away. You can put her in a bubble, but that would require a pretty serious cost/benefit analysis for both her and you … similar to the one we’re engaging in right now.
Also – it is worth asking; do you go to these extreme measures to guard against the flu or any other respiratory illness? If not, why not? I am not saying that you should or should not – only that you are the best equipped to assess your own individual level of risk and act accordingly.
#44 Hammer, The
Flu precautions = We get our yearly flu shot, and otherwise just try to keep vigilant.
To the best of my understanding, virulence/transmissibility of “typical” flu variants (both those covered by each year’s shot and those that the shot fails to account for) falls notably short of the contagiousness we’re seeing with the current pandemic.
If there were a vaccine, obviously that would dramatically change the story in our household, and alter our risk calculus.
80-90 percent of the population will be immune and/or negative despite exposure.
Herd immunity is closer than we think.
Look at California.
California was supposed to be worse than NY and Italy according to the ‘experts’.
That’s a great post over there. Admittedly, he states that there are some factors that can’t be accounted for in his analysis, but by reviewing the deaths over time, and including the information for each state about which ones implemented which of the 3 primary restrictions, and when, and then reviewing the resulting deaths – well, it says that aside from the school closings everything else is pretty much a zero in terms of death reduction.
All the flattening does is spread the same number of cases out over time, with the benefit being touted of not overwhelming the hospitals. But only the “hot zone” areas are overwhelmed, like New York. Here in Charlotte, they’re sending nurses home due to lack of anticipated COVID-19 activity (beds) in the hospitals.
Sending nurses home. This was as of a week ago. So no, shutting the entire economy down, everywhere, was not a good choice. It was a catastrophic choice, and the costs of which need to be acknowledged as part of the calculus. Especially when compared to other traditional death numbers (suicides, normal flu season, auto accidents, heart attacks, etc) – we don’t shut down the entire economy for those deaths (granted, they’re not all transmissible things, too). But if the cost of one life is too much to bear, then you can shut the entire American experiment down, because people will always die, and no level of government intervention is going to stop those things from happening.
The dollars being lost due to the shutdown are in the trillions. In the space of weeks.
A friend of mine died of the flu last year, his wife barely survived it.
I won’t pussy-foot around. The freedom of our people, the vitality of our economy is much more important than your mother. If your mother is particularly vulnerable, she needs to act to protect herself, as should anyone in her situation.
As Scott Adams asked, how many grandmothers dying is worth restoring the economy. My answer, most of them. And many children, and everyone else. Soon there must come a point where we take our losses. We cannot persist in this nonlife perpetually.
Besides, if everyone dies but me, I get all their property.
Or, just spitballing here, California is not as densely populated, even in their cities.
Because those restrictions lag school closures by about a week. Those effects would be just starting to appear.
That’s true, but non-Chinese have been dealing with this for two months now.
The reports I’ve seen have pointed out that the best reactions to COVID-19 have come from countries within the immediate vicinity of China, like South Korea and Taiwan, who in turn were among the earliest impacted from previous new virus strains originating in China.
Basically, they saw the Wuhan outbreak and immediately assumed even if they weren’t sure Chinese leadership was lying about its severity and virulence, they needed act like lying was China’s default position, and establish a proactive response. The U.S. didn’t make that same assumption right off the (Wuhan) bat, in part because even Trump’s travel ban in late January got met with howls of racism by the woke progressive types who politicized the response.
President Trump has wisely left the imposition of covid-19 restrictions to the states. That means that most of people’s concerns and frustrations can be addressed at the state and local levels. I think he has done exactly the right thing in maintaining a firm stance on the side of saving lives if we can. Sometimes what we say really does matter more than what we do. A leader’s job is to lift our eyes up.
The fact is that what we are really looking at is a transformation, not the end of times.
Consumers and employees are spooked right now. Even if all of the restrictions were lifted immediately, life would not return to normal immediately. My mind keeps going to all of the consumer mass reactions I’ve witnessed in the last thirty years: The Tylenol scare. The cantelope scare over listeria. Most recently the romaine lettuce scare. The Boeing Max 737 scare. The financial losses were tremendous. It will take a while for covid-19 fear to calm down.
We have to change the way we do things. And while we are working out new systems and procedures, we’ll have a lot of starts and stops. We need to trust each other and be patient a little longer, or go down to our local town hall and work to change what our state and local leaders are doing this week.
While we figure out better ways for individuals to protect themselves against viruses and bacteria, we need to stay the course on what we value the most. There is far more danger ahead in writing off the country’s old people than there is in doing what we’re doing.
It’s important to remember that this is not an American or even a Western phenomenon. Even Africa is under lockdown right now. This moment will be included in world history centuries from now.
Above all, the sources of information which must be reviewed after this event are global sources, like the World Health Organization. We now realize how incredibly influential such organizations have become.
I don’t see tanks in the streets or soldiers patrolling the neighborhoods, so it’s not martial law.
I have all the sympathy in the world for cabin fever crazed conservatives. I’m a bit crazed and testy myself. My wife asks me when this is going to be over a billion times a day.
But complaining about violations of civil rights, which this is not, doesn’t help. State and local governments have had the power to do this sort of thing from even before the Constitution was written. Our doctrine of civil rights is not a suicide pact.
Yes, the rate of growth of numbers of infected people has been going down. I suspect this reality is the reason for revised projections because it’s one thing to hope that growth will go down and another to see it happening.
It sounds to me, brother, like you are doing everything you can to keep your parents safe. I pray for your family. As horrible as it is, your mother is undoubtedly needing to self-inflict a form of home imprisonment for a number of months. It is the same thing that every single elderly person living in senior care facilities is suffering as well. My mother-in-law and many other people I know and love are in the very same predicament.
Our country will find a path back to normalcy. We have to and we have to sooner, rather than later. If not, we won’t have a country left for your mother to break out and begin selling real estate once more. There have always been hidden viral and bacterial killers lurking for the weak amongst us. I am truly sorry about your Mom’s condition. It cannot be the most persuasive fact in our decision to go forward.
The national panic and shut down has probably contributed to medical workers being put at larger risk; for instance, my niece only has level 3 ppe, and the CDC recommends level 4. And she is helping intibate people in the heart of Detroit. She isn’t the only one. She said she is being offered an ungodly sum to work more hours, but said they don’t have enough money. The solution of throwing money at problems, or claps and cheers are meaningless as motive to risk this type of exposure.
Exactly right. If the federal government imposed the sort of restrictions that the states are using now then it would be unconstitutional. That’s what some Democrats are calling for, criticizing Trump for not being the sort of dictator that they have always accused him of being.
Just look at that range of uncertainty! It’s worse than climate change forecasts!
@roderic, I don’t think I have made the argument that the federal government is violating the constitution. And I readily acknowledge that the state and local orders are “reserved” rights under the 10th amendment. But recall that the 10th amendment reservation is “to the States respectively, or to the people.” I think I am making a broader argument that at some point these restrictions of natural rights by state government become unjustified. I leave it to you to decide for yourself as to whether that time has come and, if not, when exactly that would be. And, although tanks are not in the street, arrests have been made. State government in places have evidenced that they have the power to coerce compliance. So I think the broader point is accurate.