Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
I think this is entirely true. But the question remains which approach is better positioned to rebound quickly. My opinion is that an economy responding to market forces of individual decisions instead of government mandate is in a better position to rebound.
This is probably the best justification for a lockdown targeted to preserve the health care system. We are now seeing consequences to the rest of the health care system that put them in the same economic hurt as “non-essential” businesses mandated to close.
There will be thousands of academics in the coming decade(s) trying to figure out the net cost in lives of the epidemic. Direct lives lost to COVID-19 (including presumptive deaths not conclusively verified) vs indirect lives lost to unattended deaths from other causes of the isolated, suicides, domestic violence. There will also be positive data of persons not dying of trauma due to suppression of activities that can give rise to such trauma. Counterfactuals are never documented.
The justification for the economy shutdown was to save lives, but lives lost were never on only one side of the decisions. The officials would have known that the economy shutdown itself would cost lives (and a lot of other things like mental health, drug addiction, lowered quality of life, etc.). So the decision to shut down the economy was a decision to sacrifice one (unknown) set of lives for a different (also unknown) set of lives.
If you were the governor of a state in, say, mid March, that wasn’t the choice before you. There was no option to let the disease spread and keep the economy running. There was no decision to “sacrifice” one set of lives for another. You are going to get considerable economic harm either way you go.
But you’re also thinking the whole time that the shutdown will be temporary, maybe just a couple of months, and the more control you can keep over it, the less chaos, and the more likely it will be possible to ease out of it when the disease finally wanes. You can take action later to allow people to get back to work , etc. and they will be far more likely to do that if you have checked the spread of the disease.
If you decide to do nothing, and the people decide too late to self impose lockdowns, and you get some Lombardy style death rates and hospital system breakdowns, then you’ve blown your chance to do much good. You’re going to get massive deaths and economic chaos as people panic to try to avoid the virus. It would take far longer for people to come out and get back to normal life after that trauma.
I think you have captured the mindset, @daventers. Whether it turned out to be the best decisions or, more importantly, should now be doubled-down by extending the lockdowns for a long time is a different matter.
We were mostly staying home prior to the lockdowns, but it didn’t have a huge effect on the economy in that we were still buying stuff. We weren’t making any travel plans for this fall, so weren’t buying airline tickets, but didn’t cut back much otherwise. Before the lockdown I did make one trip to Menards for a load of trim boards, and went at a time of day when it wasn’t very busy. It seemed a lot of people were staying away, so it was already having a significant effect on Menards’ business, but it wasn’t nearly as severe as after the shutdown. I’d guess for them it was the difference between hard times and disaster. For the airlines, maybe it was already disaster. I don’t remember just when the international travel bans went into effect, but I had already made up my mind not to buy tickets until this all settled down.
It seemed that in Michigan our governor was perhaps going out of her way to make it economically difficult, but what she did was still somewhat reasonable. After the shutdowns were extended, there was no doubt that she was being malicious. I was planning to spend a couple thousand on flooring materials at Lowes about the time she went out of her way to disallow such sales. I would have been a careful shopper, picking my times carefully and minimizing contact with others (otherwise Mrs R might not have let me go). I had already gotten sample materials via mail to avoid a shopping trip for that purpose, and just wanted to verify a couple things in person before making the purchase.
Multiply that by millions of such situations, and the lockdowns had a huge effect compared to more reasonable restrictions.