We have plenty of problems right here in Montana, especially in my county (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-24/whitefish-montana-coronavirus-outbreak), but one thing our governor did right (in my opinion) was to keep outside recreational opportunities open (except for National Parks, and that was because the gateway communities were becoming overwhelmed and asked to close for a bit) when some states were closing them. Granted, we have gazillions of acres of public land to spread out in, but people do tend to flock to popular trails close to home anyway, and during lockdown and the summer that was even more true. I read a piece where some trails were getting a lot of use, abuse, and disrespect (litter, etc.), but the non-profits who maintain them took it in stride, saying that it was a lot easier to clean up and repair trails than to do the same for people's mental (and physical) health. There is a lot more to learn and navigate, but it was good to know we could get out when we needed.
I appreciate the points about epistemic humility. Sometimes it almost feels like the refrain "there's too much we don't know" is used as a tool to excuse government inaction. Not everywhere, obviously, but heightening the uncertainty can serve some ends--similarly to climate change.
Glad to hear! For the same reason, I've become, rather unexpectedly, somewhat proud of Germany, as our government has -- apart from some early rhetorical convulsions -- never considered outlawing outdoors recreation. Arguably it would be a lot harder to close down forests in Germany, as they cover 33% of the country and have myriad trails and entry points (as opposed to the signature American park with one easy, one medium and one hard trail all starting and ending at the same parking lot). The hotel closures -- which we had in April/May and are now having again -- are making it harder to do anything really serious, and I'm not convinced they are doing much good against the pandemic, but I'm not feeling robbed of the few things that make life worth living as I'd be in some places over in the US (or Italy for that matter).
Zeynep's (almost exceptional for the media) common sense about this was one of the things that made me sign up to this substack. (Cliff Mass is the other writer who has done a great job on this front. He even made an explicit point in https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/05/seattle-parks-without-parking.html that the closures are worsening a class divide, not like the other points aren't strong enough.)
Germany has done such a good job! There is so much reflective of a society's values in all of this, though obviously that's a point anyone on this forum probably knows inside and out. One of the tangential things about "the outdoors" is how few people in the U.S. know what they have access to besides national parks and beaches and so on. Our family mostly does recreation on National Forest or state-owned land. It's interesting to me watching people start to learn about the greater variety of land they legally have access to, and wondering whether that will bear fruit into more people working for conservation of said lands in the future.
Navigating Cliff's writing has been enough of a minefield lately (see his post about Kristallnacht in Seattle) that I've been avoiding his blog these days, but he was right about broadcasting the lack of spread in outdoor environments as darij also points out.
Being a Washingtonian, I thought there was a little bit of a knee jerk among the hiking community about getting out, but I'll say that in the Pacific Northwest our outdoor resources were very well used during the summer. REI has had a banner year in spite of their stores being closed or limited. I got more backpacking trips this year than I have any other, and there have been a lot more people out on the trail than normal.
That said, I have noticed a lefty tendency (around here at least) of the holier than thou attitude towards people who bike without a mask, or do other strenuous outdoor activity without one. I don't think the data has ever been there to show that transmission during those activities with proper social distancing and limited time of close exposure to be an issue.
I could do without the "wear a mask at all times for solidarity" stance that requires one to wear one even in situations where the risk of transmission is extremely low, it opts for manners over pragmatism. Though that starts to introduce more nuance in mask wearing, and Americans haven't been so good at nuance during this pandemic.
There was a certain anti-biker undercurrent in April-May here in Germany (supposedly because their heavy breathing is likelier to spread the virus); nothing against hikers. And yes, our forests were as full as never before back in April (the euphoria has since subsided, and two days ago I was alone on the hill). Looks like the moralists have mostly shut up by now, as the kind of American academic elites infinitely distant from small business owners do not seem to exist here (or at least are much smaller). Just today, Fefe -- a rather influential against-everyone contrarian blogger -- has posted a rather illuminating (if anecdotal) view on what is pushing people over the edge with respect to COVID-19 denialism. Very much worth a read if you know German: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a14969db .
Off-topic: I found Cliff Mass's Kristallnacht comparison way over the top when I first heard of it, but it has grown on me. The similarities between the events themselves are illusory (the Kristallnacht was followed by the government arresting 30 000 Jews; CHOP was at best tolerated by the municipality), but I believe there are real similarities between the sort of person who drives into Minneapolis with bricks and lighter fuel and the sort who takes a hammer to the closest synagogue whenever the political opportunity arises. The Russian word "gromila" (second meaning on https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0 , the kind of person who takes part in a pogrom) describes a type of behavior that transcends political factions. The lack of reaction by police and media until something unequivocally bad happened (the two murders in CHOP) has nothing on the Weimar police's explicit complicity, but this sort of descent into mob rule left unimpeded could ultimately end up in a similar place.
I live in a liberal-leaning small town surrounded by an extremely conservative county, so our struggles are more with anti-maskers. That said, I know a lot of people, including those close to me, whose sense of risk has been extremely heightened, and who have a hard time seeing or being around people without masks. It doesn't help that we don't always have good information, and that many people here proudly refuse to wear masks at all anywhere, but people's feelings about risk seem to be far out of balance with their/our ability to assess risk. There are a lot of things I don't do that *I* gauge are probably low-risk, but that our Covid bubble's feelings of risk can't tolerate.
I guess that gets to your point about nuance. Respecting the feelings of my friends and family is slightly more important to me than following exactly what I think of as appropriate, though it would probably be the opposite if they were anti-maskers or Covid-deniers.
I remember seeing numbers (from very different places) around +30% in domestic violence calls increasing during lockdown. On the other hand, suicides haven't seem to grown much, and to lots of people's surprise, premature births have gone down (though I'm not sure what's being counted: maybe the numbers include medically induced "just-to-be-safe" preemies who would have otherwise had a normal birth?). Unfortunately the most relevant effects are not easily translated into numbers (or take years to do so), and these days it means that they will be ignored by media and politics unless they fit into anyone's specific narratives.
I might have been a bit early with lauding Germany -- the law just introduced ( https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/fileadmin/Dateien/3_Downloads/Gesetze_und_Verordnungen/GuV/B/3._BevSchG_BGBl.pdf ) is too sweeping (potential curfews? this is not how COVID-19 works) and lacks checks and balances (the executive decides when it's over; Weimar says hi I guess?). As it is restricted to COVID-19, I don't expect the ugly parts to actually get applied (at the moment, Germany is hell-bent on keeping schools open, which makes Italian-style curfews essentially impossible), but I'm worried about its very existence setting a bad precedent for next time.
If you like Cliff Mass's post, here is yet another which for some reason he hasn't linked: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-outside-air-is-safe-and-park.html . It's interesting how clear the science on outdoors transmission was already by April to a semi-outsider (Cliff Mass is a climatologist by training).
Oh, yes. I have friends who work at domestic violence shelters. It's ... not good. Weird about premature births. I'm curious about that, though you're right, we probably won't hear much unless they fit into specific narratives (my first kid was a preemie so I've had a lot of relations with that particular realm: C-sections are good! C-sections are bad! Probiotics! Breastfeeding! Breastfeeding not necessary! Pregnancy is natural! Pregnancy is lethal!).
"Weimar says hi I guess?" <<LOL but also chagrin>>. I honestly don't get the curfews. Our state governor just introduced new restrictions where restaurants have to close by 10pm in addition to reducing capacity. I don't really understand what good that does. We had a super-conservative rodeo facility *cancel* all events -- their sole source of income -- for crying out loud, because they were trying to do the right thing for the community. I think I remember reading something sarcastic about the UK's restrictions (my husband is English; his mother is in a lockdown zone there), like "what happens right after the five-mile mark?" and "how exactly is the risk amplified when there are 26 people in the pub rather than 25?" Please someone explain the curfews to me.
Indeed - I think one of the greatest challenges of our time is the "weaponization" of scientific uncertainty... started with the tobacco industry and has been picked up first by the chemical industry and then the fossil fuel industry others. David Michael's first book on the topic was "Doubt is Their Product" -- but his most recent book is "The Triumph of Doubt"... I recently saw an ad for a book "The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science" by Raul Lejano and Shondel Nero that purports to have both and explanation (meta-narratives) and a "solution" to this problem -- does anyone know this work?
I know of the first two but do not know the Lejano/Nero book. Will look at it but it's a really hard problem as the solution requires institutions which people trust which is the problem in the first place... I've increasingly become fond of any step in the right direction, even a little one, since just reversing this is a major challenge.
You are absolutely right. I was slow to make these connections to disinformation, though I've been following the tobacco/climate connection for a long time. Just speaking from where I live and our frustrating county commissioners who are eager to believe the virus isn't real and/or masks don't work, it's *exhausting* to try to work for the common good when these forces are actively working against you. Maybe I was slow to realize the throughline of this to tobacco and climate science because it's disconcerting to try to decipher it as it's happening? I haven't read any of those books but it sounds like I should.
On schools - in our local schools, it is an open secret amongst students and teachers (maybe not administrators...) that many infected kids are not getting tested, and some are even coming to school. Second, while classrooms do not seem to be superspreading, school-related events are another matter completely. At one local school, homecoming - held outdoors - became a superspreader event (they then went virtual until after Thanksgiving). And other schools are still going forward with homecoming. So like colleges, where "off campus" events seem to be driving transmission, I think K-12 schools (especially HS) need to rethink non-classroom activities, like sports, clubs, and dances. But the call to "keep schools open" I think can be easily misconstrued to mean "business as usual" with just a bunch of hygiene "theatre" like temperature checks, wiping surfaces, and the like...
Reading this, I'm thinking a lot about the role the deification of scolding politicians might have played in the way people weren't encouraged to take advantage of the summer. At least in my corner of the internet (urban planning and food focused/moderately left-wing), there was a lot of blending of:
- "look at these irresponsible people picnicking/at the beach/at the hiking trail"; and
- stanning for certain politicians (especially Cuomo).
And of course, Twitter isn't journalistic media isn't the TV news, but I feel a certain amount of the scolding I saw crossed the look at these people with the breathless admiration for Cuomo and such. (IIRC you referenced this crossover in your Atlantic piece too!)
So I'm wondering if some of the hyper-alarmism on beaches and parks might have been reduced had there not been that sort of celebration of inappropriately targeted scolding from certain political figures.
Yeah, good question. I know people who are in a really difficult place because they're exhausted, personally. They had no break over the summer—not even reasonable outings—but now it's a surge again, with shorter, darker days and fewer safe options. And some of that frustration may have gone into being angry at others who disregarded the warnings or the scolding (that were unjustified) and yeah, admiring politicians who appeared to provide a strict, guiding figure as if that would solve the problem. So now what?
This is so tough. NYC parks remained open, even during the most confusing and frightening months, so that those of us who were able to could get some fresh air. Riskiest part of my walks, probably: Taking the elevator in my apt building; was there a virus-miasma hanging in the air, undissipated, like measles?? In those moments, my mask felt very flimsy. Eventually I went hiking a couple of times in New York state parks when it felt safe to travel, anticipating that there probably would be a surge in cases in the fall or winter, best not to wait.
I wish I had a reasonable answer. And of course, all this dovetails with other sorts of emotions on their end. A lot of the people I saw stanning Cuomo are now just simmering/stewing in disappointment at him.
I don't even know what to say with all of this. Right now our county has one of the highest per-capita positive case rates in the U.S., and we have ample outdoor access, including in winter. I live in a ski town! And yet I and everyone I know is just about ready to crack and angry at ... everyone. We get outside, we hike, swim, kayak, ski, hunt, fish, camp, everything, and it's not enough. My father lives in Moscow, Russia, and has none of those outlets, which I'm guessing is more the norm.
One factor that I wonder about is our access to local news. Plenty of people still listen to only-Fox or only-NPR or whatever, but we weirdly have two local newspapers at a time when most rural areas have none. Does access to actual local news make a difference for communities one way or another?
This kind of "Pauli exclusion principle" dynamics is what I've been seeing all along on the media side. In February/March, as left-leaning papers were aggressively downplaying the threat (some will call "aggressively downplaying" an oxymoron, but it's hard to find another word for calling people racist for wearing masks), right-wing bloggers erupted in predictions of doom and calls for aggressive action. Over April(?) everyone switched sides. The most honest among the writers have used this as a learning experience and converged on some balanced opinions, and by now I've seen the mainstream press come around to reason at least in that competent voices are getting a platform (if far from an exclusive one). But the underlying problem -- that a significant number of well-established journalists are viewing the pandemic as an opportunity for moralism and agenda-pushing rather than a news item to be truthfully reported on -- is still there, and almost no one in mainstream media is willing to clean those stables. (And when I say "media", I do mean media -- politicians aren't even close. For any scolding politician, I've seen a dozen scolding journalists.)
Honestly, watching the consensus whiplash has been one of the most instructive and startling experiences of my life this year—I knew about how this happens, intellectually but it's just been something else to live through it. And weirdly, while I did my best to resist it this time around, I am less certain than ever that I—or anyone else—would always be able to resist it without explicitly setting things up to actively fight it. Other people's thoughts and a feeling of consensus is so strong.
Oh certainly. And the moralism often dovetails with other privileges too - e.g. not everyone can just play in their own yard, because not everyone has a yard...
Apparently. And if it's anything like what folks in my old neighborhood said about April, there may also be police shooing people along in parks in certain neighborhoods.
Thank you for this. I was driven batty by the hand-wringing about immunity in particular – "we don't know if you could get re-infected two months after you had it!" True, we didn't (~April) know that for sure, but that would require this virus to be entirely unlike almost every other disease we've ever seen.
Another seasonal thing we may be behind on is whether some masking and social-distancing requirements can be modified in rainy, windy weather. It's important to be outside no matter what the weather is doing (and in rain and wind I feel pretty comfortable without a mask in my not-very-dense neighborhood.) Perhaps even more important is getting some good information on what happens when various types of masks and filters get wet.
I thought the summer surge in the states in the South (TX, AZ) was at least partially due to people heading indoors because it was *too hot*. So there seem to be two aspects of seasonality - one related to the virus (UV, temperature, humidity, etc.) and one related to human behavior (time indoors). Was this "known" and part of the "standard playbook"? How does one predict the "net effect" of those two factors in opposite directions? Of course in winter this means a "double whammy" where both effects are in the same (bad) direction... though maybe it also explains why the surge was "delayed" in southern states... Additionally, how "safe" it is outdoors also depends on density and masking, right? The White House and Sturgis motorcycle festival were mostly outdoors... but it seems it is hard to communicate the continuum of "safer" and "riskier" activities, as opposed to a hard threshold of "safe" vs. "not safe." It's many shades of grey, not black and white -- how do we communicate that effectively?
I think there was a lot of commentary that pointed out that southern state were likely having indoor/AC surges, but somehow that did not properly translate into the messaging. Instead, we got a guy dressed as grim reaper harassing random beach-goers in Florida, and posting it on social media to much cheering on. It has been terrible. I think giving people the right intuition about the transmission would have been the best place to start, and signaling correctly by closing the appropriate things (indoor gyms) while encouraging the safer alternatives (outdoor workouts).
We have plenty of problems right here in Montana, especially in my county (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-24/whitefish-montana-coronavirus-outbreak), but one thing our governor did right (in my opinion) was to keep outside recreational opportunities open (except for National Parks, and that was because the gateway communities were becoming overwhelmed and asked to close for a bit) when some states were closing them. Granted, we have gazillions of acres of public land to spread out in, but people do tend to flock to popular trails close to home anyway, and during lockdown and the summer that was even more true. I read a piece where some trails were getting a lot of use, abuse, and disrespect (litter, etc.), but the non-profits who maintain them took it in stride, saying that it was a lot easier to clean up and repair trails than to do the same for people's mental (and physical) health. There is a lot more to learn and navigate, but it was good to know we could get out when we needed.
I appreciate the points about epistemic humility. Sometimes it almost feels like the refrain "there's too much we don't know" is used as a tool to excuse government inaction. Not everywhere, obviously, but heightening the uncertainty can serve some ends--similarly to climate change.
Glad to hear! For the same reason, I've become, rather unexpectedly, somewhat proud of Germany, as our government has -- apart from some early rhetorical convulsions -- never considered outlawing outdoors recreation. Arguably it would be a lot harder to close down forests in Germany, as they cover 33% of the country and have myriad trails and entry points (as opposed to the signature American park with one easy, one medium and one hard trail all starting and ending at the same parking lot). The hotel closures -- which we had in April/May and are now having again -- are making it harder to do anything really serious, and I'm not convinced they are doing much good against the pandemic, but I'm not feeling robbed of the few things that make life worth living as I'd be in some places over in the US (or Italy for that matter).
Zeynep's (almost exceptional for the media) common sense about this was one of the things that made me sign up to this substack. (Cliff Mass is the other writer who has done a great job on this front. He even made an explicit point in https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/05/seattle-parks-without-parking.html that the closures are worsening a class divide, not like the other points aren't strong enough.)
Germany has done such a good job! There is so much reflective of a society's values in all of this, though obviously that's a point anyone on this forum probably knows inside and out. One of the tangential things about "the outdoors" is how few people in the U.S. know what they have access to besides national parks and beaches and so on. Our family mostly does recreation on National Forest or state-owned land. It's interesting to me watching people start to learn about the greater variety of land they legally have access to, and wondering whether that will bear fruit into more people working for conservation of said lands in the future.
I hadn't heard of Cliff Mass -- thanks! The class divide is a huge point. There was also this thought-provoking piece in Aeon a while back about Italy's lockdown: https://aeon.co/essays/a-bioethicist-on-the-hidden-costs-of-lockdown-in-italy
Not sure whether I agree with all of the writer's points, but it did make me rethink a lot of what I was judging with knee-jerk reactions.
Navigating Cliff's writing has been enough of a minefield lately (see his post about Kristallnacht in Seattle) that I've been avoiding his blog these days, but he was right about broadcasting the lack of spread in outdoor environments as darij also points out.
Being a Washingtonian, I thought there was a little bit of a knee jerk among the hiking community about getting out, but I'll say that in the Pacific Northwest our outdoor resources were very well used during the summer. REI has had a banner year in spite of their stores being closed or limited. I got more backpacking trips this year than I have any other, and there have been a lot more people out on the trail than normal.
That said, I have noticed a lefty tendency (around here at least) of the holier than thou attitude towards people who bike without a mask, or do other strenuous outdoor activity without one. I don't think the data has ever been there to show that transmission during those activities with proper social distancing and limited time of close exposure to be an issue.
I could do without the "wear a mask at all times for solidarity" stance that requires one to wear one even in situations where the risk of transmission is extremely low, it opts for manners over pragmatism. Though that starts to introduce more nuance in mask wearing, and Americans haven't been so good at nuance during this pandemic.
There was a certain anti-biker undercurrent in April-May here in Germany (supposedly because their heavy breathing is likelier to spread the virus); nothing against hikers. And yes, our forests were as full as never before back in April (the euphoria has since subsided, and two days ago I was alone on the hill). Looks like the moralists have mostly shut up by now, as the kind of American academic elites infinitely distant from small business owners do not seem to exist here (or at least are much smaller). Just today, Fefe -- a rather influential against-everyone contrarian blogger -- has posted a rather illuminating (if anecdotal) view on what is pushing people over the edge with respect to COVID-19 denialism. Very much worth a read if you know German: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a14969db .
Off-topic: I found Cliff Mass's Kristallnacht comparison way over the top when I first heard of it, but it has grown on me. The similarities between the events themselves are illusory (the Kristallnacht was followed by the government arresting 30 000 Jews; CHOP was at best tolerated by the municipality), but I believe there are real similarities between the sort of person who drives into Minneapolis with bricks and lighter fuel and the sort who takes a hammer to the closest synagogue whenever the political opportunity arises. The Russian word "gromila" (second meaning on https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0 , the kind of person who takes part in a pogrom) describes a type of behavior that transcends political factions. The lack of reaction by police and media until something unequivocally bad happened (the two murders in CHOP) has nothing on the Weimar police's explicit complicity, but this sort of descent into mob rule left unimpeded could ultimately end up in a similar place.
I live in a liberal-leaning small town surrounded by an extremely conservative county, so our struggles are more with anti-maskers. That said, I know a lot of people, including those close to me, whose sense of risk has been extremely heightened, and who have a hard time seeing or being around people without masks. It doesn't help that we don't always have good information, and that many people here proudly refuse to wear masks at all anywhere, but people's feelings about risk seem to be far out of balance with their/our ability to assess risk. There are a lot of things I don't do that *I* gauge are probably low-risk, but that our Covid bubble's feelings of risk can't tolerate.
I guess that gets to your point about nuance. Respecting the feelings of my friends and family is slightly more important to me than following exactly what I think of as appropriate, though it would probably be the opposite if they were anti-maskers or Covid-deniers.
I remember seeing numbers (from very different places) around +30% in domestic violence calls increasing during lockdown. On the other hand, suicides haven't seem to grown much, and to lots of people's surprise, premature births have gone down (though I'm not sure what's being counted: maybe the numbers include medically induced "just-to-be-safe" preemies who would have otherwise had a normal birth?). Unfortunately the most relevant effects are not easily translated into numbers (or take years to do so), and these days it means that they will be ignored by media and politics unless they fit into anyone's specific narratives.
I might have been a bit early with lauding Germany -- the law just introduced ( https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/fileadmin/Dateien/3_Downloads/Gesetze_und_Verordnungen/GuV/B/3._BevSchG_BGBl.pdf ) is too sweeping (potential curfews? this is not how COVID-19 works) and lacks checks and balances (the executive decides when it's over; Weimar says hi I guess?). As it is restricted to COVID-19, I don't expect the ugly parts to actually get applied (at the moment, Germany is hell-bent on keeping schools open, which makes Italian-style curfews essentially impossible), but I'm worried about its very existence setting a bad precedent for next time.
If you like Cliff Mass's post, here is yet another which for some reason he hasn't linked: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-outside-air-is-safe-and-park.html . It's interesting how clear the science on outdoors transmission was already by April to a semi-outsider (Cliff Mass is a climatologist by training).
Oh, yes. I have friends who work at domestic violence shelters. It's ... not good. Weird about premature births. I'm curious about that, though you're right, we probably won't hear much unless they fit into specific narratives (my first kid was a preemie so I've had a lot of relations with that particular realm: C-sections are good! C-sections are bad! Probiotics! Breastfeeding! Breastfeeding not necessary! Pregnancy is natural! Pregnancy is lethal!).
"Weimar says hi I guess?" <<LOL but also chagrin>>. I honestly don't get the curfews. Our state governor just introduced new restrictions where restaurants have to close by 10pm in addition to reducing capacity. I don't really understand what good that does. We had a super-conservative rodeo facility *cancel* all events -- their sole source of income -- for crying out loud, because they were trying to do the right thing for the community. I think I remember reading something sarcastic about the UK's restrictions (my husband is English; his mother is in a lockdown zone there), like "what happens right after the five-mile mark?" and "how exactly is the risk amplified when there are 26 people in the pub rather than 25?" Please someone explain the curfews to me.
Indeed - I think one of the greatest challenges of our time is the "weaponization" of scientific uncertainty... started with the tobacco industry and has been picked up first by the chemical industry and then the fossil fuel industry others. David Michael's first book on the topic was "Doubt is Their Product" -- but his most recent book is "The Triumph of Doubt"... I recently saw an ad for a book "The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science" by Raul Lejano and Shondel Nero that purports to have both and explanation (meta-narratives) and a "solution" to this problem -- does anyone know this work?
I know of the first two but do not know the Lejano/Nero book. Will look at it but it's a really hard problem as the solution requires institutions which people trust which is the problem in the first place... I've increasingly become fond of any step in the right direction, even a little one, since just reversing this is a major challenge.
"Fond of any step in the right direction" kind of makes me want to weep with despair and solidarity.
You are absolutely right. I was slow to make these connections to disinformation, though I've been following the tobacco/climate connection for a long time. Just speaking from where I live and our frustrating county commissioners who are eager to believe the virus isn't real and/or masks don't work, it's *exhausting* to try to work for the common good when these forces are actively working against you. Maybe I was slow to realize the throughline of this to tobacco and climate science because it's disconcerting to try to decipher it as it's happening? I haven't read any of those books but it sounds like I should.
On schools - in our local schools, it is an open secret amongst students and teachers (maybe not administrators...) that many infected kids are not getting tested, and some are even coming to school. Second, while classrooms do not seem to be superspreading, school-related events are another matter completely. At one local school, homecoming - held outdoors - became a superspreader event (they then went virtual until after Thanksgiving). And other schools are still going forward with homecoming. So like colleges, where "off campus" events seem to be driving transmission, I think K-12 schools (especially HS) need to rethink non-classroom activities, like sports, clubs, and dances. But the call to "keep schools open" I think can be easily misconstrued to mean "business as usual" with just a bunch of hygiene "theatre" like temperature checks, wiping surfaces, and the like...
Reading this, I'm thinking a lot about the role the deification of scolding politicians might have played in the way people weren't encouraged to take advantage of the summer. At least in my corner of the internet (urban planning and food focused/moderately left-wing), there was a lot of blending of:
- "look at these irresponsible people picnicking/at the beach/at the hiking trail"; and
- stanning for certain politicians (especially Cuomo).
And of course, Twitter isn't journalistic media isn't the TV news, but I feel a certain amount of the scolding I saw crossed the look at these people with the breathless admiration for Cuomo and such. (IIRC you referenced this crossover in your Atlantic piece too!)
So I'm wondering if some of the hyper-alarmism on beaches and parks might have been reduced had there not been that sort of celebration of inappropriately targeted scolding from certain political figures.
Yeah, good question. I know people who are in a really difficult place because they're exhausted, personally. They had no break over the summer—not even reasonable outings—but now it's a surge again, with shorter, darker days and fewer safe options. And some of that frustration may have gone into being angry at others who disregarded the warnings or the scolding (that were unjustified) and yeah, admiring politicians who appeared to provide a strict, guiding figure as if that would solve the problem. So now what?
This is so tough. NYC parks remained open, even during the most confusing and frightening months, so that those of us who were able to could get some fresh air. Riskiest part of my walks, probably: Taking the elevator in my apt building; was there a virus-miasma hanging in the air, undissipated, like measles?? In those moments, my mask felt very flimsy. Eventually I went hiking a couple of times in New York state parks when it felt safe to travel, anticipating that there probably would be a surge in cases in the fall or winter, best not to wait.
I wish I had a reasonable answer. And of course, all this dovetails with other sorts of emotions on their end. A lot of the people I saw stanning Cuomo are now just simmering/stewing in disappointment at him.
I don't even know what to say with all of this. Right now our county has one of the highest per-capita positive case rates in the U.S., and we have ample outdoor access, including in winter. I live in a ski town! And yet I and everyone I know is just about ready to crack and angry at ... everyone. We get outside, we hike, swim, kayak, ski, hunt, fish, camp, everything, and it's not enough. My father lives in Moscow, Russia, and has none of those outlets, which I'm guessing is more the norm.
One factor that I wonder about is our access to local news. Plenty of people still listen to only-Fox or only-NPR or whatever, but we weirdly have two local newspapers at a time when most rural areas have none. Does access to actual local news make a difference for communities one way or another?
This kind of "Pauli exclusion principle" dynamics is what I've been seeing all along on the media side. In February/March, as left-leaning papers were aggressively downplaying the threat (some will call "aggressively downplaying" an oxymoron, but it's hard to find another word for calling people racist for wearing masks), right-wing bloggers erupted in predictions of doom and calls for aggressive action. Over April(?) everyone switched sides. The most honest among the writers have used this as a learning experience and converged on some balanced opinions, and by now I've seen the mainstream press come around to reason at least in that competent voices are getting a platform (if far from an exclusive one). But the underlying problem -- that a significant number of well-established journalists are viewing the pandemic as an opportunity for moralism and agenda-pushing rather than a news item to be truthfully reported on -- is still there, and almost no one in mainstream media is willing to clean those stables. (And when I say "media", I do mean media -- politicians aren't even close. For any scolding politician, I've seen a dozen scolding journalists.)
Honestly, watching the consensus whiplash has been one of the most instructive and startling experiences of my life this year—I knew about how this happens, intellectually but it's just been something else to live through it. And weirdly, while I did my best to resist it this time around, I am less certain than ever that I—or anyone else—would always be able to resist it without explicitly setting things up to actively fight it. Other people's thoughts and a feeling of consensus is so strong.
Oh certainly. And the moralism often dovetails with other privileges too - e.g. not everyone can just play in their own yard, because not everyone has a yard...
I just learned that the NYC school closures are also closing sports fields. So kids who overwhelmingly live in apartments can't even play outside now?
Apparently. And if it's anything like what folks in my old neighborhood said about April, there may also be police shooing people along in parks in certain neighborhoods.
Thank you for this. I was driven batty by the hand-wringing about immunity in particular – "we don't know if you could get re-infected two months after you had it!" True, we didn't (~April) know that for sure, but that would require this virus to be entirely unlike almost every other disease we've ever seen.
Another seasonal thing we may be behind on is whether some masking and social-distancing requirements can be modified in rainy, windy weather. It's important to be outside no matter what the weather is doing (and in rain and wind I feel pretty comfortable without a mask in my not-very-dense neighborhood.) Perhaps even more important is getting some good information on what happens when various types of masks and filters get wet.
I thought the summer surge in the states in the South (TX, AZ) was at least partially due to people heading indoors because it was *too hot*. So there seem to be two aspects of seasonality - one related to the virus (UV, temperature, humidity, etc.) and one related to human behavior (time indoors). Was this "known" and part of the "standard playbook"? How does one predict the "net effect" of those two factors in opposite directions? Of course in winter this means a "double whammy" where both effects are in the same (bad) direction... though maybe it also explains why the surge was "delayed" in southern states... Additionally, how "safe" it is outdoors also depends on density and masking, right? The White House and Sturgis motorcycle festival were mostly outdoors... but it seems it is hard to communicate the continuum of "safer" and "riskier" activities, as opposed to a hard threshold of "safe" vs. "not safe." It's many shades of grey, not black and white -- how do we communicate that effectively?
I think there was a lot of commentary that pointed out that southern state were likely having indoor/AC surges, but somehow that did not properly translate into the messaging. Instead, we got a guy dressed as grim reaper harassing random beach-goers in Florida, and posting it on social media to much cheering on. It has been terrible. I think giving people the right intuition about the transmission would have been the best place to start, and signaling correctly by closing the appropriate things (indoor gyms) while encouraging the safer alternatives (outdoor workouts).