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Day 113: COVID-19 We’re All in Exactly What, Together?
The screengrab is from the Rt:Effective Reproduction website. I featured it before in Day 104: COVID-19 It’s Over, But How Do You Convince People That It’s Over?. That was a week ago and if you go to the site and click on older graphs you can see (at least according to their methodology) things are moving in the right direction.
And yet we are constantly serenaded on television with the public service announcements featuring persons who do not live in hovels talking about how “We’re all in this together.” That is, we stay at home, isolate ourselves, keep our shops closed (except for where they are beginning, unevenly, to open under new rules), and sacrifice ourselves for the greater good.
Mind you, I am not against self-sacrifice. Mrs Rodin takes the view that (intellectually) there is no such thing as “altruism”. I concur that people will do things for psychic compensation — emotional, religious, patriotic– that we view as altruism. So people do self-sacrifice for personal reasons, some of which we heartily approve as a society.
But in the strictest sense, it is clear that we are not all sacrificing in the same degree or to the same extent. Thus it is said that we are all in the same “storm” together, just not in the same “boat.” Accordingly, we need to have freedom to navigate through the storm in ways necessitated by the individual condition of our own “boat.” And when you overlay the question of what exactly is the “storm” in which we find ourselves together, things get even more complicated.
It is now evident in hindsight that there were multiple choices that could have been made. The decision to shutter “non-essential” businesses and activities started out as a simple (allegedly) short-term strategy but has now morphed into a power struggle between individual liberty and collective rights with a health component. The “storm” has morphed from a health emergency to a political battle.
If absent bad public policies everyone would live forever, that would be one thing. But the opposite is true: No one lives forever even with good public policies. So why are we destroying our future well-being in the name saving some unknown, incalculable increment of life. The same society that accepts millions of abortions cannot accept hundreds of thousands of premature deaths — the avoidance of which costs so much and gains so little?
If the virus were free to pick its victims unaffected by government policies but hindered only by the decisions and actions of individuals and private organizations, there would be winners and losers as there always are. Sadness would come to many, as it always does. But those victims would be victims of the natural order, not the often wrongheaded actions governments.
If it was really a choice between all tragedy incurred or all tragedy avoided, then broad-scale governmental action might be reasonable. But it isn’t.
This is a challenge to be met with conservative beliefs. Either you believe that life is what it is and people should have the broadest possible chances to make their way through it, according to their own predilections and beliefs, or you feel that populations should be managed toward some ideal goal. History shows that there are sorrows and joys in the former, and widespread despair in the latter.
Let our people go.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
I wonder if any of them realize how wickedly selfish they are being. So they’re retired, presumably on some combination of Social Security, a pension, and retirement savings. They don’t give a damn if their kids and grandkids — who actually work for a living — go bankrupt and have to live through a great depression.
Sorry, I get pretty ticked off at that. I’m not that old — just 52 — but the idea of putting my kids out of work to protect my old self is just unacceptable. The old folks are supposed to be prepared to sacrifice for the young, for crying out loud.
But then, they’re the Boomers. I know, there are plenty of good ones. But as a group, they’ve been the most selfish generation that I’ve seen. I should know, as they killed about 1/3 of my generation so they could destroy family values and sexual morality.
I agree with Kozak. Would you compare COVID-19 to a month of outpatient chemotherapy, very unpleasant, but doable?
What I liked about this post is that it is so understandable. I really like the new ability to post on Facebook. I hope that we can grow Ricochet through sharing on Facebook.
Sure. That’s absolutely true. But this is the thing. Cancer doesn’t stop doing what cancer does simply because Covid is a nasty new risk to cancer patients. Send a cancer patient home? The cancer patient is still dying. It’s a cost versus reward analysis, I suppose. Kill the cancer patient quicker? But isn’t the risk just to the cancer patient? So shouldn’t the cancer patient decide?
Well, I agreed with Kozak, too. I think Covid is very bad. But I don’t think it’s just about a month of outpatient chemotherapy because I know for a fact that some cancer patients can’t get chemo right now. And that is also unpleasant.
I guess what you’re looking for is a hospital and doctor who say, “Okay, we can treat cancer patients in the midst of this virus wave as long as they sign a waiver about getting the virus.”
I suspect they wanted to. In Massachusetts, the original shutdown of schools and other places was a two-week time period. I don’t think any of the hospitals and doctors thought it would go to the six or eight weeks it has lasted.
I don’t think this will happen again because states will be figuring out ways to treat infectious disease patients in isolation from the rest of the hospitals. In Massachusetts they are opening entirely separate facilities.
It’s been pretty interesting to watch the country respond to a crisis in real time. Everyone’s systems were thrown off.
I’m sorry about your dad. That’s gotta be very frustrating.