Middle Pandemic3
2020-04-19
This has turned into a series (1) (2). It’s been a couple weeks, but I wanted to go over more recent news, and what might happen.
Dissent
A week ago, in a place I used to live, people were fined for sitting in a church parking lot, listening to the pastor give his sermon. A week or so ago, Californian police found that they could get away with ticketing people who were at a beach (possibly the easiest place to stay six feet away from each other). And a protest to reopen the city of Raleigh led to arrests because the police department decided that "Protesting is a non-essential activity".
People have started to become restless. They want their lives back, their livelihoods. They’ve been government-mandated to stay indoors, isolated, unemployed. People don’t do well in these conditions, these are drivers of suicide. Rich coastal folk, on the other hand, have responded by deriding low class people;
Reopening
Eventually, possibly even soon, some states and cities will begin to reopen. The news has spun this narrative for a few days now, citing a reduction of cases in the most major-hit places (like NY). For an idea of this, just look at the first few entries of my news feed this morning (not inline because it takes too much space).
Too soon! Don’t reopen! Conditionally reopen! It changes practically by the hour. But that’s the point in the conversation we’re at.
And, as I’ve reiterated, it’s not surprise. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend that this will go away if we just spend enough time on Pornhub. It is here forever. We cannot eradicate it, we cannot control it, we cannot stop it. The human race will need to deal with SARS-CoV-2 for the rest of history, barring some kind of species-changing medical procedure.
"Second Wave"
The underlying fear of reopening is that a second wave of infections will occur as soon as people start to act like people again; leading to a situation where we might as well never have locked down in the first place, because the situation we were trying to avoid (widespread infection) comes to pass. Thus leading to the worst case scenario, where we both wrecked our economy, and we all got infected.
No shit.
That is the choice we made when our governors and officials decided to cripple the economy. It’s not a "second wave", it is an unending miasma of infection, and it has been that way since February. The lockdown was never going to protect anyone, it was never going to save anyone. The people who would die from covid-19 will still die from it, just a few months later. The lockdown was a pointless waste of life.
Theoretically, the lockdowns could have been used to organize the necessary steps to fight this thing (see "Pandemic Response"), but it wasn’t. An argument could be made that, if we had done that, the lockdown would have been a crucial way to buy time. But it wasn’t, and it was never intended to. It was done out of fear and ignorance, deference to epidemiologists concerned only with a single metric, unconcerned with the second- or third-order consequences of these actions. There was never a plan, there is no plan currently.
I want to quote some things from what I said in March.
Knowing that the chinese coronavirus spreads about twice as fast as the flu, and stays quiet without showing symptoms for 3-4x as long as the flu, what possible reason could we have to think it could be eradicated or contained? If we could do something like that, we would have done it to influenza
There will be a second "wave". There might be a third "wave". At that point we’ll probably figure out that lockdowns don’t work, and that this won’t go away.
Accepting Hardship
I’ve been repeating the same thing for at least a month now. But I should add that it’s not all doom and gloom.
The biggest issue I’ve seen in the way the West has handled this is the assumption that we can skate through it without hurting anyone. This is a mentality borne of a culture wherein no living person has known hardship. For real, how many people do you know that grew up without running water, without electricity? Who had to grow their own food, who scraped out a living by banding together with their family and neighbors? That’s not America anymore. The capitalist system under which we operate has erased poverty in any meaningful sense, the impoverished we have today have clean drinking water, electricity, cars, fridges, usually a cell phone, clothes, and so forth.
Contrast that to, say, China, whose population were majority dirt-poor until the 90s. People working factories there right now remember what life was like before the factories. Their parents remember Mao’s purges and the Great Leap Forward which killed millions. They know hardship. Or Russians, who spent the 20th century under the rule of Bolsheviks, in famine and fear. And they spent the century before that under the thumb of a series of Tsars who inflicted fairly awful (though not as bad as the Bolsheviks) conditions of alcoholism, poverty, and war.
The first sign I saw that we might actually be capable of having an honest conversation about sacrifice came with a Freakonomics podcast discussing the ethics and economics of which patients should get ventilators. I don’t think that kind of conversation could have taken such a national stage before now. And the fact that, even in this small nerdy corner, people are starting to openly talk about who will live and who will die, is (genuinely) heartening.
Further Federal Action
Rumors are circulating about further stimulus. This will probably happen, because lawmakers are generally resistant to being seen as unwilling to "help" people in need. Stimulus is pointless, though, because without a functioning economy, nobody has much to do with it. We’re really just a step away from announcing breadlines, and we’re squandering the biggest benefits of the systems we have.
At some point, people will look at the debt, look at the lockdown, look at the second wave, and say "what the fuck have you all been doing up there? Nothing is improved, you’ve only made it worse for us". I expected this to happen in late April, but I dramatically underestimated how much Americans are willing to obey perceived authority, and how much they’d enjoy the pandemic. People are really into it; wearing masks, making a show of washing their hands, trying to figure out if they know how far six feet away is, and other pointless gestures.
Divided dissent
Future dissent will be bitterly divided between two camps, unfortunately along partisan lines. Right-leaning folks will want their jobs back, their life back, their country back. They’ll recognize the lockdown was pointless, and be angry that the authorities are not fighting the virus in any meaningful way. Left-leaning folk will agree on the latter point, but demand that right-leaning folk (working class people, that is) don’t get their jobs back, that we not bail out businesses, and will complain that government needs to be given more power, more money, and a "better" leader in order to do its job of saving the country.
These two forms of dissent will fight with each other, and far from uniting us, it’ll just further divide us.
