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Day 87: COVID-19 Return to the “Life We Aspire To”
The screengrab above is from the University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine “Grand Rounds” video of April 9 that @lockeon brought to my attention. This slide inspires the title of this post and the characterization of what it is that we most dearly want: to have a life like we had before the pandemic.
The debate rages on Ricochet on what price to pay in personal autonomy and public policy to contain and/or defeat the virus? Our members scan the data and come to various conclusions. Some feel the crisis is overblown as a means to enact controls on the people that progressives have been seeking for a long time, while others feel that the crisis is exactly as represented and personal liberties and the economy need to be sacrificed in the short term at least to preserve us all.
The truth is … elusive. Liberty is being sacrificed, but is it necessary for the common good? How long and in what ways must it continue to be sacrificed? It does not give one confidence to hear as New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said to Tucker Carlson last night that the “bill of rights” was not part of his consideration in issuing his lockdown decrees. Maybe his statement was an inartful formulation of the balancing of interests he was doing. But it does not inspire confidence when a governor dismisses personal liberty so off-handedly.
The video linked above should be of interest to the Ricochet readers in a variety of ways as it gives us a look at one of our premier medical systems. It lends us the perspective from the inside. There is an expression that “when you are a hammer, everything is a nail.” UCSF is animated to defeat disease in all its forms. It is a research and teaching hospital/system. As you listen to the various presenters in the video, you come to realize that parts of UCSF have been in the game since early January. And much has changed in that time.
As you listen you will hear the biases that inform them: the primacy of the greater good, the comfort with the existing progressive political structure, the self-congratulation of enlightened Silicon Valley companies dispersing their workforces to home environments before the shelter-in-place orders were even considered by the politicians, the relative immunity from economic harm that is being suffered by “non-essential” workers and employers. That they have these biases does not make them wrong. It only makes them partially informed. Just as the biases that many of us may have that militate in the opposite direction: personal agency above community concerns, central planning and collective control inevitably leads to poverty and death, a perfect world is unattainable so risks must be accepted.
But I digress. The question is whether, when and how we get to the “life we aspire to?” When you look at the UCSF slide of April 9 and California Governor Newsom’s “re-opening” criteria of April 14, you see a lot of overlap:
1 Widespread testing that would allow the state to isolate people exposed to the virus and trace people with whom they have come in contact.
2 The ability for the state to care for older and medically vulnerable Californians, who are most at risk of suffering severe effects from the virus, as they continue to isolate at home.
3 The capacity for hospitals to handle a potential surge in patients, plus resume normal preventive and other medical care.
4 The identification of promising treatments.
5 The development of guidelines for businesses and schools to allow physical distancing even as they reopen.
6 The creation of a data-tracking system that provides an early warning if the state needs to reinstate a stay-at-home order.
Nowhere in the guidelines is there any consideration other than for the prevalence and risk of disease. This follows in the same pattern as policies for gun control: eliminating injury and death through limits on lawful access to guns, but no consideration of the value of citizen-owned guns as self-defense or a countervailing force to tyranny.
If this is the attitude of our leaders and influencers, there is no generally recognized return to the life we aspire to. There is only progression to the life our leaders aspire to for us.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
How does one return to something that was only ever an aspiration?
;-)
Another way to put it: The public health technocrats are more narrow-minded than most of us on Ricochet.
Are there state governors who are over age 70? Are they isolating at home during this crisis?
If they are not, then I am not.
I thank you. I believe that under all the word salad from various “authorities” is the same intent: tactically to keep the President from being re-elected and strategically to move the country toward a totalitarian governance. Gates, Pelosi, Newsom, Wolfe, Cooper, Fauci, the lot of them. No individual action or responsibility or authority. Compliance. And with them in charge.
Perhaps this isn’t quite at the level of the measures suggested above, but, for me to return to the life to which I aspire, basic goods need to be made available by the providers of those goods. Although this was a source of humor in the short run, the unavailability of sanitizing products, paper products (yes, TP) and even milk has become a real source of annoyance. I’m surprised and unhappy that, after a considerable period of time, the manufacturers and retailers of those products haven’t developed enough of a system to keep them on the shelves.
I feel better now.
And I was very surprised to find ground beef selling for $6.49 a pound, and that’s 80/20! Evidently, that’s one of the commodities that people were hoarding when stocking up for quarantine. How many people were actually hard-quarantined?
I was willing to blame “ourselves” initially for the hoarding by the panic-prone. But that blame game is getting old. Now we have had a degree of time, purchase limits, etc., and it’s still very difficult to find certain items. I’ve also read very little about attempts to find solutions to the issue, although we’ve certainly been made aware that there is an issue.
Uhmm Hello, what about the great god K… how about ‘morality rate’…I dont see that there?
On par with say a particularly bad flu season , oh 65K……
President Trump is going to have to invoke the Commerce Clause to put people back to work and there likely will be a incredibly huge backlash from the Left. This pandemic is thought to be by the Hard Commie Left their chance to grab a huge amount of permanent control over people’s lives and they will not give that up control without a vicious fight. They are already setting up these State alliances to forge some sort of phony Constitutional cover for their coming intransigent resistance to opening up the economy. The screaming, moaning, shrieking and groaning will be ear piercing in it’s volume. No doubt about it. While mostly minor, innocent and likely lawful protests against the lockdowns have led to almost instant arrests in many a blue locale, the coming protests against letting people go back to work will be monumental in their ferocity and sometimes quite violent likely without any pushback from law enforcement because that is the way things are done now. Antifa on a massive scale here we come.
People’s rights are being violated now and it’s about time that the Department of Justice take care to fulfill it’s duty and defend people’s rights. Local and state governments need to be called on the carpet and their efforts to control people’s lives unlawfully shut down without mercy. The DOJ needs to be clear in it’s defense of the President’s coming opening of the economy, because the Blue State and Local governments are going to fight that opening up of the economy tooth and nail and will use any power at their disposal legitimate or otherwise to maintain these lockdowns.
I don’t think we’re ever going back to the way things were before the pandemic. There will be some semblance of the TSA effect in our lives. :-)
I agree with this prognosis. Particularly in cities and crowded venues such as transportation hubs.
On the other hand, people are realizing the limits of the Internet in terms of providing for some measure of pleasant human contact or productive business meetings. :-) People are eager to resume living normally. So it will come about.
Frankly, the strongest impetus for the return to some sort of normalcy won’t come from the consumers or the government. It will come from the medical profession itself. They have borne the brunt of this disruption. Every medical specialty has been hit hard by this shutdown in the health care sector. I think that is where the new rules for disinfecting buildings and offices, planes and theaters and restaurants, will come from. This is a problem that has to be solved.
I keep picturing the installation of mega-UV lights that will be on tracks in every building and that will run continuously during the building’s closed hours to disinfect everything once every twenty-four hours. :-)
Earthquakes happen, and the engineers come up with ways to build buildings that can withstand those shocks.
It will happen with threat of viruses too.
Yup. The future will resemble science fiction.
The list by Gavin Newsom
Some of these problems were self inflicted or created by the state
1. Widespread testing that would allow the state to isolate people exposed to the virus and trace people with whom they have come in contact.
2 The ability for the state to care for older and medically vulnerable Californians, who are most at risk of suffering severe effects from the virus, as they continue to isolate at home.
3 The capacity for hospitals to handle a potential surge in patients, plus resume normal preventive and other medical care.
4 The identification of promising treatments.
5 The development of guidelines for businesses and schools to allow physical distancing even as they reopen.
6 The creation of a data-tracking system that provides an early warning if the state needs to reinstate a stay-at-home order.
morality or mortality? both are relevant
The installation of UV lights sounds like a good idea to me. Am I being naive?
So – if it is determined that there is a correlation between obesity and susceptibility to this virus – and say Covid20 – will “obese” (as determined by the “experts”) individuals be required to lose weight? How about living in X-proximity to others and with Y numbers of others in the same abode or traveling with Z numbers of people in the same vehicle, public or private? If cities are problematic will we make people move? How many restrictions will Americans accept in the conduct of their lives? And my favorite rant: will I have to show my “papers” to prove I’m not a danger to others. And will illegals also be required to show their “papers?”
I simply don’t see why this virus is being treated as so much more significant than any number of others, including Covid’s #1-18 and Sars, H1N1, HIV, polio, measles and chickenpox to name a few. It seems to be highly contagious – like others – but quite discriminating in who it really threatens: the elderly and fragile, the male of the species, the obese and compromised, smokers, those with otherwise diminished immune capability. That’s not everyone, not even a big majority of the population. It is people who already know they are not sturdy. I think the largest contingent of the medical profession affected are those who are currently sitting on the sidelines because their facilities MAY NOT perform health care not directly related to this virus.
So can we not consider which liberties we are willing to relinquish before someone takes them away?
A contrary view:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/15/how-to-re-open-the-country-and-control-covid-19-coronavirus/
UV radiation is what gives you a sunburn. There will be calibration and exposure time issues. May not be unsurmountable, but HCQ has a better safety profile.
Somehow, the whole return-to-work is constrained by PPE equipment needed to test people. I think the whole medical community needs a rethink on the use of disposable PPE. Even the wash and wear stuff is too slow and introduces risk. I see Korea using hazmat suites and decontamination to run tests quickly. At lunchtime, the local Chick-File-A can serve hundreds of customers in a drive-thru. They people running around with wireless connected pads to take orders and payment and it is very efficient. Can we put Chick-File-A in charge of testing?? Please???
I thought I read an article recently (linked here I think) about low power UV that was enough to kill viruses (virii?) but not powerful enough to pose a health hazard to people.
For milk and eggs there needs to be a fix. The milk supply chain broke when we shifted to eating at home instead of out. It went from something like a 45-55% split to at least 75-25% and perhaps even more. Before the virus, milk bottlers, concentrated in metro areas, were running at capacity. Supplies for other than retail sale, such as restaurants, moved primarily in bulk and not easily shifted to retail packaging. So milk gets dumped. Similar for eggs but not quite as drastic. Probably some similar impacts for other products, although paper products should be much easier to remedy since it’s mainly a storage of supply issue. Anyway, the whole approach needs a fix.
Return to the Life We Aspire To? But MAGA fits better on a cap.
Fully agree with the OP.
Please see my Comment #20 on today’s Al Sparks post.
Many of the comments on *this* post are immensely thoughtful — but a few cause me to think that their authors have a default/go-to “tape” in their minds that they simply rewind and replay in almost any scenario, as if they hadn’t read Rodin’s OP here at all, or parsed it in an unusually selective manner.
Without their restrictions on us, the hospital admins and health experts cannot continue their charade of being in charge of our health. The health system in this country is mostly broken. With a quarter of a million people dying every year inside hospitals from medical mistakes, with patients funneled into misguided therapies, that are always more expensive than alternatives that actually work, more and more people are realizing that the Medical Establishment does not have our health interests at heart.
And that realization was dawning before we woke up to a new world in which our going out for a walk in a park might result in being cited by the same police who earlier in the day were letting indicted crime suspects go free. All of this Bizarro world is due to COVID 19 and our nation’s lame response to it.
We will return to the lifestyle the people want. What we don’t know is the balance between liberty and security they prefer.
We did not get testing kits or masks or the deployment of likely beneficial new uses of existing drugs until CDC/FDA were pushed out of the way. Retailers have found solutions like hanging Plexiglas protective screens at cash registers, provided spacing markers and giving masks to employees so to keep open safely. These kinds of adaptations on the fly are probably more far more effective than social-distancing alone, especially given how porous the shutdown really is.
The time, effort and resources going into enforcement action against churches and feed stores would be better spent on unleashing creative efforts to generate the resources and methods to stay safe in normal activities in lieu of a really stupid indefinite economic shutdown.
The best minds in government decided that controlling what spaces we occupy and use is the only solution and the virus the only concern. Government is cognitively challenged and burdened by the conceit that it has a monopoly on expertise.
Hoarding, or maybe secondary effect?
Herschel Smith at Captain’s Journal writes:
“Testing.”
Testing for what? If it’s finding out who’s immune, at least maybe immune, at least maybe immune right now… Easy to say, not so easy to do.
Yes, this is the BMJ, yes this is the NHS, but it tracks with what I’m reading about problems with antibody testing in the US, which is not only availability problems but validation.
#25 Old Bathos
Agree with all you say.
However, there’s a lot of clamoring for a rollback to the status quo ante based on sheer posturing about threats to liberty — posturing that, at base, merely telegraphs a distressing degree of learned helplessness (on the part of people who claim to be sovereign and self-reliant individuals), combined with a disconcerting amount of insouciance about a virus whose transmissibility and lethality attributes grow more fearsome with each tentative progression in our investigations.
It’s like a bad brew of laziness and narcissism, spiced with BS bravado, only it’s within the ranks of conservatives and libertarians — including within the Ricochet community.
#28 Ontheleftcoast
Highly worthwhile read you provided there — thanks.
Sure, my confirmation bias is showing, but I’ll happily go out on a limb and contend that this underlines my own argument: Namely, that absent a vaccine, only an iterative and incremental approach to economic “re-opening” can offer us a risk-mitigated road to recovery.
I’m more than OK with being illuminated otherwise, but in my view at present, testing is useful for hospital/health system capacity planning — apart from that, it’s an expensive placebo in terms of analysis and deliberation about restarting this or that industry or enterprise.