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So a Person Is Vulnerable to the Virus; What’s Their Responsibility?
There’s a letter to the editor published in the Fairbanks News Miner by an elderly individual with bad lungs, which makes her (the name is Robin; could be a guy) vulnerable to the virus.
She was on a rant that the in the store she entered, Fred Meyer, one of the brands that the Kroger chain runs, had many people running around without masks. I go into that store every few days, and I confirm that roughly half the customers aren’t wearing masks. I’ll add that the vast majority of those, are wearing cloth masks, which the CDC says is better than nothing (which equals a false sense of security).
I did reply in the comments section that the store she went into has a program where you can order their stuff online, park at the store in a designated spot, and they will deliver the items to your car (or for a lot of us in Fairbanks, your pickup truck). I also said that they also have a phone number, and you can talk to a real person. (I think; I hope that the local number isn’t a digital menu.) Fairbanks is a smallish town. I posit that there probably isn’t a business here that won’t deliver purchases to the parking lot if you call and ask, especially if you explain you are vulnerable if you catch the virus.
The big point I wanted to make is that she has to take responsibility for her own health, and that includes asking for help if she needs it.
In a town like Fairbanks, with a low population density, a person can walk outside and easily maintain the 6ft social distance when they encounter people here and there. And you can get the essentials of life, and also non-essentials, without entering a store. You can do it with a dumb phone, though it helps to have a smartphone, tablet, or computer to go online.
People talk about protecting the vulnerable as if they have to be coddled, and they have to be isolated. Well, it depends. A lot don’t need coddling, and the isolation need not be restricted to their own homes. They can still get about, and not depend on everyone to wear masks.
It’s probably that way in the suburbs too. But they have to take responsibility too.
Published in General
There is a practical reason why people at the bottom of society get away with not following nuisance laws. They have nothing more to lose, and it’s not worth it to put them in jail.
And it is a tacit admission by those authorities that not wearing a mask is a nuisance and not really essential to public health.
#27 Lois Lane
The OP, you, and others here make an awful amount of assumptions about the vulnerable woman’s options and life circumstances on the one hand.
And on the other hand, the OP, you, and others here make a considerable number of assumptions about what y’all are entitled to, public behaviors-wise, in a context of a pandemic that is guaranteed to reach pretty much every zone of American habitation (even if the reach and severity levels do exhibit variation and — rightfully — justify locality-optimized responses).
I don’t read this woman’s indignation as translating into demands that are in any way extreme or an imposition on others — not in terms of Constitutionally-guaranteed rights, and not in terms of libertarian live-and-let-live thought and pragmatism.
However, the OP reacts with: a) a level of fury redolent of someone with unresolved adolescent angst from when mom set foot in one’s room during the school day; and b) a degree of near-existential dismissiveness on par with a high school junior who’s just read a couple of chapters of Nietzsche.
Worse, the OP and others here are rattling off a variety of lame excuses pertaining to perceived local and/or Federal tyrannies and trampling of rights, as well as livelihood endangerment — and in the process, hypocritically, failing to acknowledge the very real possibility that the woman in question could, for instance: a) end up taking a hit to *her* finances if forced to order her groceries sight unseen; and b) end up taking a further hit to her physical health if she gets saddled, due to order-taker/picker error, with multiple items in her grocery order not actually corresponding to what she needed to purchase and not returnable.
All because of a moderate request for a modicum of consideration — and common-sense behaviors in the context of a virus whose lethality and hyper-transmissibility are becoming increasingly clear — that others can’t be bothered to attempt.
”Waaahhh — we got distorted advisories from the CDC!… Waaahhh — figuring out how to protest against my governor’s decrees and agitate for their change is hard!… Waaahhh — but I don’t *wanna* maintain several cart-lengths from other shoppers!… Waaahhh — masks hurt my soul!…”
That’s about the level of seriousness so much of this so-called principled stand conveys. “Suck it up, buttercup” is what the astonishingly un-self-aware reaction to this woman amounts to.
Same with the clamor for a rollback to the status quo ante: I can never dispute the economic-hardship (indeed, economic endangerment) issues driving the calls for rollback (irrespective of the form of rollback being called for); I will *always* dispute a bunch of BS-bravado tough guys predicating their calls for rollback on a self-delusions-of-grandeur-based “rugged individualism.”
To borrow a phrase: Your freedom to take your chances with that woman’s life ends at the inside of your mask, plus 6 to 10 feet.
Maybe you should re-read my post. I make very few assumptions. I don’t know the lady who went into Fred Meyer, and I know I don’t know the lady who went into Fred Meyer.
Based on her letter to the editor, I came up with some alternative suggestions, and that if she needed help, she should ask. It was all based on her letter, nothing more or less.
I have also stated that not all people vulnerable to the virus need to be coddled. That’s not an assumption about her. A few posters who stated they’re vulnerable agreed.
I have implied some snark about cloth face masks, but I haven’t said that the states requiring them was unconstitutional. As it happens, Alaska is not requiring them.
So why can’t you argue like an adult, and not engage in personal attacks?
If you have contempt for us, as that blurb above indicates, why engage with us at all?
#33 Al Sparks
Sorry, there’s that disconcerting shortage of self-awareness again: I’m not the one repeatedly using the word “coddle” — which fairly drips with contempt; I’m also not the one saying, on the one hand, that you don’t know this woman and also know that you don’t know her, and yet at same time saying she’s seeking to be coddled.
Adult argumentation doesn’t admit of such gaping logical holes.
Moreover, this is a sauce-for-the-goose-sauce-for-the-gander situation: The woman is simply asking for cooperation in a set of common-sense behaviors, by adults living on Planet Earth and thus cognizant that there is currently this pandemic introducing a variety of risks and challenges for *all* of us, and she is predicating her request on the belief (more likely guidance from her physician, underlined by public health authorities’ recommendations) that this cooperation can make it possible for to do her own shopping inside the store — just as you or any other self-sufficient patron is privileged to do — and she is not asking to displace anyone else.
You are presuming to dictate what her shopping options should be — all involving displacing *her*, and among other side-effects likely poleaxing both her budget and her dignity — if she wants to live.
Concomitant with this, you are whining — it’s whining masquerading as a principled stand against those who would seek to introduce tyrannical measures from whatever quarter, but it’s whining nonetheless.
She’s a woman who, thanks to the hyper-transmissibility and unusual lethality of the Wuhan Virus’s spread, had a tripwire suddenly introduced into her health situation where previously none like it existed. That said, she owes you no obligation to “quarantine” herself at home (as Lois Lane has recommended); she’s at substantially increased *risk* of getting the virus and thus getting sick, which is not the same thing as having the virus — should be an obvious point, but a number of people on this thread are turning it on its head.
At the same time, a potentially very large percentage of any given state’s population may have picked up the virus but carry on with their lives asymptomatic and unaware. By rights it is *they* who should self-quarantine, but a next-best set of mitigating countermeasures is adjustments to one’s public-setting behaviors. Taking umbrage at being asked (and I’m saying “asked,” considering the AK situation you describe regarding, for example, mask-wearing) to make such accommodations with others in mind is repugnant enough — self-congratulatory “principled refusal” to help out in this regard is akin to walking up and down Main Street continually firing a Kalashnikov in the air.
Perversely, though, the OP and a number of thread participants take such need for adjustments as an opening to engage in what I’d have to characterize as “Comorbidity-Shaming.”
Would you say that that’s an adult thing to do?
Good heavens. Did we read the same OP?
I understand the tacit admission. That’s the reason that it matters to me. It’s an indication of some sort about the seriousness of the ordinance, and it does make me very resentful because it undermines that seriousness to me.
Forgive me, but I think you are making a considerable amount of assumptions yourself, and I am entitled to take the information I’ve been given about a pandemic and have “locality optimized responses” that take into account the general health context. The city in which this guy lives does not even have any mask requirements. It’s a judgement call for individuals.
That doesn’t mean he–or anyone else–thinks that one should discard all social distancing guidelines or go up to strangers and cough in their faces or not be sympathetic to neighbors. (He actually says that neighbors need to ask for help, which implies he thinks help should be given.) I give all people a pretty wide berth at the moment, and that’s fine with me.
My father has cancer. He doesn’t go to the grocery store at all because we feel his health is too fragile, whatever pieces of cloth people have put on their faces. (They won’t even give him chemo, so he can skip the ride to Kroger.)
That’s just nonsense, so I wonder if you have had some issue in whatever place that you are living that makes you feel more fearful or attacked or dismissed or… something. The level of anger responding to this article is strange to me unless there is some sort of personal experience that creates this reaction. The specificity of grocers not putting the right food into a bag especially makes me think this is the case.
So, let me say this with all sincerity: I am sorry that you are struggling. This is a struggle for everyone. It is. It feels good to get angry at someone. Okay. Let that be us.
Oh! And when I said the lady should self-quarantine, I should have said “stay at home.”
If you look at the CDC guidelines, that’s what the CDC recommends for anyone with a risk factor. While everyone is told to stay home if possible, we are told to take extra precautions. I say we because I fall into the described lady’s group. Ironically. I am a severe asthmatic. I have weak lungs like the lady!!!!
Bless.
If she’s at “substantially increased risk”, then yes, she does have the obligation to quarantine herself.
That’s turning reality on it’s head.
My apologies to all commenters on this topic. I may have pushed a certain person over the edge in comments on another post. It was necessary, but appears to have spilled over. /:
FWIW, y’all are doing a fine job pushing back on said person’s tyrannical desires.
I mean, what’s not logical about “I may have picked up the virus but I don’t have any symptoms, so I’ll self-quarantine?”
Everybody who is healthy/not having symptoms needs to lock themselves in the house so that high risk/sickly people can wander the streets at will.
That’ll work.
I never said she was seeking to be coddled. And this is my last reply to you.
Without replying to anyone in particular, I thought I’d expand on why I used the word coddled, and what I was thinking.
I’ve worked on the margins of health care, volunteer firefighter/EMT (and as an aside, I’ve worn medical PPE). And from time to time I helped people who needed help when they felt, well, helpless. But I also helped people that weren’t, and could snap at me if I were overly helpful It could be a disabled person who could still walk on her own, for example. She still had her pride, and it costs someone like that to ask for help.
So when I used that word, I was directing it at the coddlers, not the “coddled.”
Masks don’t help much in preventing you from getting the infection out in public. They won’t stop the <5 micron droplets responsible for aerosol transmission over 6 feet. This kind of transmission is probably rare.
Masks help prevent spreading a lot if you’ve got the infection because they stop the large droplets. They are good for people working directly with COVID-19 patients because they stop the large droplets responsible for short range transmission (under 3 feet). This is all from the CDC web page.
That is a reasonable and nice response, @Roderic that attempts to lay out an exact reason why masks, which were very recently described as “not useful” are now viewed as “essential.” Thank you. But I am confused about the implications for masks everywhere, so let me see if I’m bright enough to extrapolate appropriate actions from this information.
So, if you’ve got the infection, you need to be in close proximity with another person–at least half the recommended “social distancing” space–for transmission to take place. Thus the CDC is saying masks are useful for people to wear when those people are going to be in close proximity to others who must work with them.
Since some people have no symptoms, we can assume we are saying masks are very important if one has an occasion to be within 3 feet of another human.
Okay. That makes total sense, and it is specific reasoning.
Apt.
@dannyalexander, you need to take it down a notch or two. The people you are bashing are able to discuss this without being insulting, you would do well to treat them with more consideration.
Yes, and we don’t know when we might be infected without knowing it. You don’t have to be coughing to produce air droplets. Merely talking in a normal voice will do it.
#47 Randy Weivoda
When I was in elementary school, Massachusetts state government ran a memorable PR campaign that — Massachusetts being Massachusetts — was one of a string of well-intentioned failures; this one in particular attempted to dissuade the archetypal Boston driver from following his/her upbringing with the slogan:
”A little courtesy won’t kill you.”
The OP and most of those piling on in the thread didn’t take into account that that (a little courtesy, in the form of public-health-minded behavior accommodations in certain settings) is what the elderly person was hoping to find in her shopping excursion — and, not finding it, given that the absence of a little courtesy could very possibly kill *her*, she registered her indignation.
There is a self-righteousness to the reactions in the OP and the thread — a sufficiency of condescending and assumption-laden counter-propositions about what is best for the elderly vulnerable person, coupled with prickly assertions that for her to insist on a modicum of cooperation with her original request is to be inconsiderate of the freedoms and economic burdens of others, foolhardy as to her own health risks, and likely a sign that she(?) is a control freak in any event.
To me, the irony is colossal, and the tyranny (to borrow Phil Turmel’s helpful term) of supposed good intentions unleashed here is repellent.
I took things up a notch in the first place because the OP from its very title onwards announced open season on this vulnerable elderly person, and it absolved *everyone else* in the community from the bare minimum of public-health-minded responsibilities that coincidentally keep a particular community member from having to become a sacrificial-lamb shut-in (bearing in mind that pre-Wuhan s/he was not facing such circumstances). The subsequent thread took things up a notch quite readily itself, resulting in a mass verbal beat-down of someone who merely asked to maintain her dignity (and maybe also her shopping finances) through the opportunity to patronize a store without mortal terror, and to do so in very much the same way as any other patron is privileged to do.
As an aside, apropos of irony: Wariness on this thread towards CDC guidance seems to be on an extended coffee break when it comes to the topic of determining who it is who should be quarantining themselves at home and on what basis.
If she’s really in “mortal terror”, then this (from the OP) seems reasonable:
#50 Miffed White Male
I read the OP.
In part because of this conversation, I became a mask spotter and wrote about what I have observed where I am. This is not meant to be an opinion piece but a report of sorts about what I am seeing in the state where I am.
Thanks @alsparks for your original post.
Nothing magical about healthcare workers.
They happen to be people. And are more likely to exposed so if they got 80% results, should at least be that good for the public.
I certainly don’t support mandatory mask laws.
I would hope the vast majority would do it because its not an onerous burden and its helpful.
Please show me where we have had 60000 suicides in the last 45 days.
Good for you!
What a rebel you are,
I am sorry. My mind was going faster than my fingers. You are right to call me on that!!!!
I am talking specifically about the area in which I am living. There have been 9 suicides, 4 Covid deaths.
That’s what I meant.
Obviously, the virus has impacted different areas differently. For sure. New York City is a much different place at the moment–my heart goes out to them and my friends who are there–than it is in Knoxville, TN.
Also, I am glad you don’t want mandates. The masks have served to scare my elderly mother more–and she finds it hard to breathe in one–than help make her feel protected. But she is essentially staying in her house, so it’s a moot point. And I am certain there are other people who find them a comfort.
The utility is certainly there, as established, in certain scenarios. I own one for this reason.
Sorry missed the “county” .
That’s great.
But suicide isn’t an infectious disease that can grow exponentially.
I would hope people are willing to put up with some inconvenience to avoid being a hot spot.
Hmmm….. That’s an interesting comment. I do think people are willing to put up with some inconveniences to avoid being a hot spot. I feel as if people are putting up with quite a few inconveniences that go far beyond masks… inconveniences that aren’t inconveniences at all but serious personal costs for themselves and their families.
Perhaps this is unavoidable. Maybe they are not heroic even because they are being forced in many ways to pay those costs. (The truth is that many would have to pay some even if the government didn’t require such per the way people react to a pandemic, and the fact that this virus isn’t a fiction but a very real threat to health.)
But when the cure for Covid-spread is very probably causing the type of depression/hardship that spikes the suicide rate in an area, there are more serious things on people’s minds apart from whether or not Aunt Nancy is just being a butt for not pulling up her bandana when walking ten feet away from her neighbor at the Home Depot…. (She was a different story when she was doing jelly shots off Uncle Jerry’s stomach at the beach during Spring Break.)
I think, actually, those other, bigger sacrifices may be a source of some of this pushback on masks.
Perhaps it is completely illogical to not wear one all the time in public now and during flu season and when suffering from other infectious diseases per how masks are worn routinely in Asia.
I accept this. I can see this. I think that’s probably right.
If we’d started with masks as a preventive measure–or not had so many mixed messages about masks that could give one mental whiplash–I think the argument to wear one would be easier to make.
And I say this as someone who has a mask. Polka-dotted. Very cute. Bought it from the local pharmacy as soon as there were masks available.
What type of mask? What exactly does it “help” as much as 80%? In what setting?
Do you have a citation to support that claim? Because it’s absurd.
If you are spreading false information, you are part of the problem.
For the record, I don’t think Kozak is spreading false information. I do think masks are of varying quality and can be much, much less effective per user error.