Virus Takeaways
2022-03-20
My state has dropped most mandates for showing papers or wearing masks as of this month, it’s one of the last states to make that progress. For the first time in two years, I was allowed to watch a movie in theaters and go to the grocery store without showing documentation or hiding my face.
In celebration of that, and before the topic truly gets buried and forgotten by the midterms, I want to reiterate and make clear three takeaways from the covid regime that I think are the bare minimum "lessons learned" from this whole mess of a pandemic.
There are hard limits to our ability to contain disease
We’re not omnipotent, and all the money, masks, lockdowns, nor mandates in the world can’t stop virulent infections from spreading. We have no weapon to eradicate large categories of viruses. As i said almost exactly two years ago:
Do you think we could eradicate the flu if we tried? It kills ~15k people a year in the USA alone, and we really don’t have to cite how much economic annoyance it causes. People get flu shots every year, but even with a shot you could still come down with a cold at the same time as everyone else.
So 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.
The first takeaway needs to be that we must not lie to ourselves about our capabilities. We are not all-powerful, there are many things in this world that we have no real control over. But our response can be measured.
Governments have no idea what to do with new diseases
And they are overwhelmingly likely to, as the ACLU in 2008 said, treat it as a military or police problem rather than a public health issue.
Government agencies have an essential role to play in helping to prevent and mitigate epidemics. Unfortunately, in recent years, our government’s approach to preparing the nation for a possible influenza pandemic has been highly misguided. Too often, policymakers are resorting to law enforcement and national security-oriented measures that not only suppress individual rights unnecessarily, but have proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of disease and saving lives.
There are some, at least early on, who accused the Trump administration of slashing the budget of an agency responsible for coming up with plans for pandemics. If he hadn’t done that, we would have… done something differently that would have beat this virus, I guess. But this ignores that no nation was prepared, and no plan served to "defeat" the virus in any jurisdiction. Quite frankly, there was no plan to beat this. Nor was there a plan to limit the damage to vulnerable people, or get medical supplies and personnel where they were needed. To its credit, the Trump administration absolutely did the last part (easing onerous regulations on where medical workers could practice).
Our response in the present must be measured by the damage we know it will do to our future
The calculus about what to do in the future has to be informed by ethics. Put simply, QALY is a thing. "One life is too many" is an abhorrent concept. I came up with an earlier thought experiment about this, but let me refine it a little.
Let’s say there is a 99-year-old lady who is about to die tomorrow. You could press a magic button that would give her one more year of life - bedridden and sick, but alive. In exchange, a newborn will be forcibly blinded and never be able to see. One year of life, in exchange for a life-long disability. Do you press the button?
The obvious answer is no of course not. The newborn has an entire life ahead of it, let’s say 80 years more. The old lady only has one year, maximum. One year of life is not comparable to losing a major portion of your quality of life for 80 years. It’s unethical, we barely even have to assign what level of quality damage being blind does to a lifetime - it’s just not right.
Yet, this is anathema to public policy when it came to the virus.
Keeping behavior voluntary does not mean people won’t do what you want
There is a pervasive belief that mandates and lockdowns are required, lest the bad people skip through and ignore the guidelines. Generally, vaccine mandates have followed the line that we must force people to be injected, because they aren’t enlightened enough to do it themselves.
This (rightfully) breeds distrust and discontent. People don’t like to have a gun pushed against their head and a growling voice telling them they have to do something. And the especially don’t like employers being used as political pawns to economically sanction individuals who disobey. It lessens the trust in the measure itself, especially when these measures were questionable to begin with, and have been shown repeatedly to have been completely ineffective at their stated goals. Instead of celebrating everyone doing what you want, you create an underclass that went from "hesitant" to "staunchly opposed".
Let’s contrast this to another nation - Japan. Japan has not had any vaccine mandates of any kind since the 90s, after a particularly bad MMR vaccine killed a number of children. For our favorite coronavirus, Japan notably never mandated injections. Yet they have an 80% injection rate among adults - better than most other nations.
Making something voluntary doesn’t mean people won’t do it, it just reduces harm and makes the process ethical.
