What’s Wrong with the World

I for one do not have a facebook account and at this point will not get one. Since it seems to be slowly dying the same death as Yahoo and other forerunners, investing time and energy into it seems less than ideal. I would definitely find it useful to have links to your posts.

Twitter is for twits, and whatever my shortcomings, that's not one. Human communication, even before Twitter, was suffering from an immense superficiality. That medium, with its premium on short messages and photos, and the impossibility of saying anything that takes more than a few sentences, adds to the problem, as does its scattershot model.

I enjoyed (and learned a lot) from your two prior books, so I am looking forward to the one on the Gospel of John. It amazes me, though, that even in this day, it takes that long to get a book from "finished" content to actually published. I don't know a thing about the publishing business, but I just heard this week about some publisher being able to go from receiving some comments that "we need more X title" to getting them out within weeks - of course, that's for a title that has already been published.

As we are winding down from what I fervently hope is an isolated singleton of "our summer of discontent", I too have been sickened by seeing the level of degeneracy that our society has fallen to. If we cannot turn away from the degeneracy, our society cannot last, the only question would be what form of insanity it devolves into. And little that has happened in 6 months gives us confidence that we are prepared to reverse direction from the ongoing slide into depravity. Ben Franklin and half of our other Founders mentioned the difficulty of keeping our "enlightened" form of government, as it depends on the citizenry being virtuous. Well, I don't see how any independent observer could be fooled into thinking we are now a virtuous people, so the natural implication is that the Founders were wrong or we are going to lose it. We can hope for the grace needed to enable us to recover; we cannot assume it.

As to the particulars of the "lockdown(s)": I have suffered from it probably as little as anyone around, and yet I doubt the need or even benefit of the ongoing requirements as structured. I doubt that the kinds and degrees of compliance we are getting to the stated rules is very high, and I doubt that no better-designed measures could have been figured out and implemented by this point, with higher actual compliance and equal or better effects. The toll on certain kinds of businesses (and their contribution to society) will be found to have been far harsher than the ongoing lockdown benefits can offset, not to mention non-business effects. And the state-level authorities seem to be unable to grasp the damage to the social fabric. I fear that most of them don't even grasp that there even IS such a thing as the social fabric, believing only in material aspects of reality.

On a more pro-active side, I wonder that nobody has yet suggested allowing (and even urging) cadres of young people voluntarily get the virus, quarantine themselves for the (usually very modest) period of transmission risk, and come out the other end (a) innocculated from it, and (b) able to freely interact with both the sick and the healthy. At this point we are pretty clear that at least according to the averages, the effect on young people is minimal; the effect on toddlers seems to be virtually unnoticeable, but even for youths, teens, and tweens it is very modest. A family of 2 young adults and 2 small kids could "take a week off" and just get the disease and then be free to move about the country. Sure, there are some who would not do so well, but you have to make policy on the statistics.

I'm a little curious: Are there readers who 1) don't want to join Facebook (and hence cannot "follow" to see all public posts automatically but 2) are willing to click on a link to a specific post that is set to public and 3) would like to know when something really meaty goes up in that form?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!!

Tony, people *have* talked about that, but of course it's considered unethical. Moreover, there is so much controversy about how long-lived the immunity is, and so much politicization to the answer, that (literally) a local lab that had an antibody test available couldn't get enough interest in it to manufacture them. When you mention to anybody that you think you've had the illness, they just casually state as if it's a known fact, "Wellll, but you can get it again, you know." The question of whether you can "get it again" is a very live one, and we get crossed signals all the time about how long-term the immunity is. Indeed, it's highly weird for there to be all this effort put into developing a vaccine if you're literally able to get ill again a few months later (as some of the more pessimistic reports have stated). The claim is that a vaccine would somehow cause longer-term immunity than getting ill, but I have not seen even a mechanism suggested for this distinction. It has something of the look of a medical urban legend.

Scott, for some of the past posts I'll put up some links and unformatted quotes, as in the body of this one, in a new post. And I'll try to get off my duff to put links on a more on-going basis. For my Facebook posts that went along with my summer blog series, I think that content ended up making it into the blog posts over at Extra Thoughts.

My publisher is actually much faster than a lot of other presses that do academic books. The chief reason for delay is that we want to give blurbers lots of time. It's a hefty book, and if a busy scholar accepts a review copy and you want his endorsement, it's best to give him a generous amount of time. That also makes it clear that you're seriously wanting him to have a good look at it. Not necessarily to read every word but to read a decent portion of it, possibly even all of it. This shows that I'm not asking just for a "social endorsement" where everybody is just supposed to "understand" that the endorsement doesn't mean anything. So many reviewers refuse to read manuscripts on the grounds that if they said "yes" they'd never do anything else, because everybody is writing books and everybody wants endorsements, especially from named scholars. So we try to be really courteous about that and give them plenty of time. In the meanwhile, we work on things like the cover design and (biiig project) the indexing. I do all my indexing myself. TMOM had three indices, and Eye of the Beholder probably will as well--a subject index, Scripture index, and author index. But we have to get the pagination down solidly after checking the proofs again before I can begin indexing.

I tried to register for Facebook but screwed up the photo part and now I apparently can't get past the Level 5 security clearance to have an account. Probably just as well. Another place I can't be tempted by Wrath if I can't see it.

The question of whether you can "get it again" is a very live one, and we get crossed signals all the time about how long-term the immunity is.

Yeah, I have heard that debate a little, but I tuned it out very quickly. It was manifest that it was cooked up, out of whole cloth, by those with an agenda - perhaps several different agendas, I don't know. It hasn't a SHRED of basis for it, and EVERYTHING we know about the mechanisms of vaccines stands against it. As far as I am concerned, people who want to make a mountain of this microscopic bump are to be accorded all the time and interest that we give Flat-Earhers who are sure we are being controlled by space aliens among us.

people *have* talked about that, but of course it's considered unethical.

I suppose that all the moms in the 1980s to early 2000s who intentionally exposed their kids to the chicken pox (at an opportune moment, during summer vacation) should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. We all KNOW that there are a few bad outcomes from chicken pox, right?

Right now, there isn't any provision in the current mandate even for people who can show by copious documentation that they have had and recovered from Covid-19 to "live normal lives." E.g. There is no exception in the face mask requirements or the social distancing requirements in executive orders and other rules. OSHA won't refrain from fining a small business if it doesn't require masking but can show that all its workers have had and recovered from the disease, etc. And just yesterday a news story emerged that the head of the CDC suggested that perhaps even vaccinated people should continue wearing masks if a vaccine is "only 70% effective." So it appears that the powers that be may be gearing up to require everyone in the country (practically) to wear masks everywhere permanently. Which is a little unnerving.

It's interesting how much experience varies based on what state you're in. In Georgia, where the lockdown began easing in late April, all the grueling stuff appears fairly distant in the rearview mirror. My children have been in school for a month, with sports practices beginning a month before that. I called the lines at a daughter's volleyball match and ran the pitching machine at Little League earlier this week. The school still restricts the crowd to immediate family, but even that has eased a bit to allow grandparents. Everything could go south in a hurry, of course, but so far, so good.

Our church reopened for in-person worship in early June, though we backed off attending (returning to the livestream) for a number of weeks mid-summer due to the alarming spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Gov. Kemp strongly recommends masks, but refuses to mandate them. Having read, back in 2015, this monster article on airborne transmission, droplets, aerosols, and masks ( https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-ebola-gamble ), I started wearing them in indoor public settings in March, WHO and CDC recommendations be damned. It was clear to me that, in addition to a possible noble lie to preserve PPE for medical personnel, these experts were also letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. There's a gradation of protection. The analogy is to a seat-belt: sure, a head-on collision at 70 mph will kill everyone, seat-belt or no seat-belt, but its foolish to count that as an argument against seat-belts; in many other, less traumatic accidents, the seat-belt will save your life.

The lassitude in assimilating what we learn about the virus remains frustrating. For instance, it's pretty clear that the risk of contagion, from sick person A, to a surface, and then on to healthy person B, is very low. Primary transmission is close human contact: direct infection from person A to B. CV-19 is not a hardy virus; it perishes very quickly outside human cells. We can probably lay off soaking every surface with Lysol, deep-cleaning offices, classrooms and gyms every hour, wiping down groceries, and so forth. Resources would be better used on improving indoor ventilation sanitizing methods.

I've also been frustrated by the reluctance or incapacity of the government to distribute rapid tests to the public. It would be a rounding error on these gigantic relief bills Congress has passed to purchase rapid tests for any American who wants them. The usefulness seems so obvious to me. Say a family from several areas wants to meet at the beach: Let each household procure some rapid tests and test everyone before they leave and when they get there. At ~90% accuracy the risk migration is enormous, not to mention the peace of mind. If someone pops a positive, immediately seek out the more sensitive PCR test. The paternalism which characterizes some expert responses to this idea appalls me. A population that routine manages to use pregnancy tests, blood-sugar tests, biologic medicine injections, etc., won't be able to figure these tests out? Please.

As for the immunity, there is some doubt that antibodies constitute the chief means by which it is achieved. I don't claim to fully understand the science here, but some evidence suggests the real action is with T-cells: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/immune-cells-common-cold-may-recognize-sars-cov-2

Finally, I would say, gently, that it is incumbent upon "COVID doves" to reflect on the fact that some countries have handled this much better than we have. Taiwan, right next door to the original outbreak, and with one of the densest populations on earth, barely crested 500 cases and 7 total deaths, a remarkable feat that has still not been explained to my satisfaction. But all over Asia and the Pacific islands, short but full-scale lockdowns, combined with real contact tracing and universal masking (it also helps being an island), resulted in a return to almost-normalcy by early summer. Perhaps this was never a realistic option for us, but if so, it's worth examining why.

I have a much stronger negative view of the effects of "universal masking" on freedom, society at large, etc.

And the whole "real contact tracing" thing is dystopian and is precisely the problem with casual testing of apparently healthy people. If the family wanting to visit the beach gets tested "just because" or "for peace of mind," and one child tests positive, they massively disrupt not only their own lives but the lives of all sorts of perfectly healthy children who just happened to be unlucky enough to sit near their child at school. People who have "been in contact with" someone who tested positive are required to quarantine just as if they themselves had tested positive, which is frankly ridiculous and massively disruptive to society. Such unnecessary tests also increase the "case count" numbers even if not a single member of their family shows any symptoms, at any time, which in turn leads to arguments for re-locking-down entire counties and states, even when hospitals are nowhere close to being overwhelmed and death counts are not rising. If anything, increasing testing is doing a lot of harm, given that our leaders are making distinctions based entirely on case counts, not on death counts or hospital capacity or strain. If the virus *did* mutate to the point of being significantly less dangerous, we'd never even be taking that into account in our public policy, as long as all of our policy is being made on the basis of case counts discovered by testing! I would at this point *strongly* advise anyone who asked me against testing an apparently healthy person just for "peace of mind."

This isn't the bubonic plague, and we need to stop treating it as if it is.

And if it were the bubonic plague, the horrific isolation we have imposed on sick people, denying them even the presence of a family member when they are dying, denying them the Sacraments, etc., is inhuman to the point of being evil. Denying human contact, Sacraments, and religious meeting even to *healthy* people in the form of lockdown is both evil *and* insane.

Agreed on that last point. The isolation is indeed horrific and needs to stop.

I also agree that focusing on the case count in most situations is less than useless. Changes in case counts over time provide some valuable data -- rolling 7-day averages and so forth -- but hospital utilization and deaths are the key measures. That said, we have good reason now to believe that even many "mild" cases are only mild in a clinical sense -- they required no hospitalization. To the person infected there's nothing "mild" about it. Weeks and even months of ruined health with all sorts of frightening symptoms. And we have minimal visibility on truly long-term health effects. In light of these things, I find very puzzling the suggestion that it would be better not to know where the virus is spreading. Operating in the dark means every sore throat or mild fever has to be treated with a superabundance of caution, or alternatively with a callousness that ill-becomes a responsible citizen.

In my mind we want to get to testing that is cheap, easy and ubiquitous. That combined with masks amounts to the best option to avoid the more draconian measures, such as what Europe is re-imposing right now. The sports leagues have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach.

For instance, our church asks everyone to take their temperature before attending, and stay home if it hits triple digits. The school checks everyone's temperature at every entrance. That is a very blunt approach. We don't even know how reliable fever is as an indicator of CV-19. Supplement this with a rapid test and you've gone from having to rely on a broadsword for precision work to having available a scalpel as well.

No, this is not bubonic plague, but there was a 2013 study which estimated that, were the 1918 influenza to emerge today, as a novel pathogen, it would inflict 188,000 - 330,000 deaths in America. In other words, COVID range. Our medical advances have been enormous, and are often taken for granted. 1918 had no method of artificial oxygen of any kind, no steroids, no anti-viral drugs, no antibiotics for secondary bacterial infection, and only rudimentary anti-inflammatory treatments. Throw COVID-19 back to 1918 and it may have been markedly worse than that flu virus. Throw it back to 5th century BC Greece and maybe it's worse than the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

"In light of these things, I find very puzzling the suggestion that it would be better not to know where the virus is spreading."

If we had greater wisdom and fewer totalitarian instincts among our leaders, maybe it wouldn't be. It would just be neutral information. But even you and I disagree about what counts as "wisdom" and "totalitarian" in this context, so all the more so I disagree *strongly* with the actual governors and health officials who are making use of that information. Information is power. We should already have known that in the 21st century. And this is private information that informs moment-to-moment judgements about what is more important than what, which is not something that scientists have any special expertise in. Heck, I'm not at all sure they're even doing a good job drawing conclusions about what they *do* supposedly have expertise in, much less the further decisions about what is most important, what is worth giving up or harming, etc. Collecting and giving that information out unnecessarily is *before our very eyes* causing immeasurable harm via meddling with things that these officials manifestly do not understand and do not know how properly to value (like economic effects, psychology, religious practice, and many more). Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Anyone who continues to advocate doing more and more unnecessary testing and handing the private information about individual people's test results and everywhere they have been in the past two weeks to powerful bureaucrats and saying, "What's the harm? Shouldn't we want to know?"...I'm sorry, Paul, but IMO that person isn't really paying sufficient attention to what has been going on for the past six months. Or isn't evaluating it correctly.

It pretty much defines "dystopian" for innocent people, not even accused of any crime whatsoever, to feel that they have a moral obligation (much less for them to be coerced by legal sanctions of any kind) to tell the government (!) the names of *every person with whom they had a 15-minute face-to-face conversation recently*. It's all the more dystopian for people to be pressured to do this when they know full-well that those officials will then make contact with those also-innocent friends, acquaintances, people whom you helped, etc., and attempt to use heavy pressure if not coercion *on them* to engage in major disruption of *their* lives, merely because they *might* have an illness of which they are not even showing any symptoms. That's "real contact tracing." And that's a level of violation of privacy and un-sentenced curtailment of personal freedom that I frankly could not have imagined any conservative or lover of the American republic advocating even a year ago, much less ten or fifteen years ago.

I will go farther: The shutdowns shouldn't even be an option. They are blatantly unconstitutional and wrong on so many fronts that I probably can't even list them all. Right on their face, the shutdowns are in flagrant violation of the due process clause, the takings clause, freedom of religion, and the freedom of assembly clause. It's not a matter of "let's force everybody to do x so we don't 'have' to do more draconian things." Bullshit. The "more draconian things" shouldn't even be on the table.

And I strongly question whether forcing every innocent adult in the country to wear a particular item of clothing for most of their daily activities can be justified constitutionally either, and all the less so when carried out by executive rather than legislative action. We are talking here about the government's literally trying to tell you *how far you have to stand* from everybody outside of your own "household," if you're lucky enough to have a household, whom you can *touch* (literally, whom you can touch), with whom you *may* have an in-person conversation in which the two of you can see each other's faces uncovered. That this degree of micromanagement of the entire citizenry across the board, accused of no crime at all, the vast majority of whom are not (as far as evidence shows) even ill, does not violate due process is highly doubtful, and yet that is the *less* draconian approach, because the government is graciously *allowing* people to go out at all, to open businesses at all, to have some (small) number of people into their private homes at all, etc. While being told whether or not they can touch them or talk to them without masks on.

When done by sheer governor's fiat, such "less draconian" policies are pretty obviously unconstitutional both under the federal guarantee of a republican form of government to every state and under the separation of powers guaranteed in (as far as I know) every state constitution.

This should just be basic if one has been cherishing the country the founders founded. You can't just throw out everything you knew and believed before about not giving up freedom to the government because THERE'S A PANDEMIC, and suddenly the government gets to micromanage everybody's life from day to day (literally) in the most intimate ways imaginable.

Your concerns are entirely legitimate with respect to government mandates, but again I'm struck by the variance across regions. Georgia's mandates, since late April, are minimal, with almost all public health orders now on the order of a recommendation. Gov. Kemp has regularly used legal devices to undermine municipal mandates.

How do you feel about mask mandates emanating from private enterprises? Those are the ones I encounter, though I have never personally seen an attempt at enforcement.

The shutdowns shouldn't even be an option. They are blatantly unconstitutional and wrong on so many fronts that I probably can't even list them all.

You may be right on the constitutional question. It would be interesting to see this tested in court. The vast majority of these government mandates do arise from statutory laws of some antiquity. Here's the relevant statute in Georgia law, last revised ten years ago: https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-38/chapter-3/article-3/part-1/38-3-51

To be clear about my point about rapid testing: I want no part of mandated testing. I want the tests made available. I think Congress should appropriate funds to purchase them for anyone who wants them. I'd love to have them for our school, our church, my place of business, my household. The Atlanta Braves could probably bring back fans to their games with a robust rapid testing regime. All kinds of public entertainment could begin to resume. The inconvenience would be noticeable, but hardly insurmountable.

But this is 2020, so I have almost zero hope that it will happen.

Well, I mean, no, that wouldn't happen, even if the tests were made widely available for voluntary use. For many reasons. For one thing, widespread testing would probably lead to higher case counts, leading to greater restrictions on everybody. For another thing, widespread testing (including voluntary) would mean that a bunch of people were forced either by their employers, children's schools, or by government to be quarantined. And that would include tons of people who were merely "contacts," not just those who tested positive. For a third thing, you could be infected the day after you got tested just by going to the grocery store or whatever, so the extent to which widespread available testing would bring peace of mind and normalcy would be extremely limited.

I should add, Lydia, that I thought very highly of your "Live right on" post.

Here's an anecdote that may be of interest. For several years until he left the company, an employee with decades of service reported to me; often in his review session, he would boast of having never called out from work. To him this was emphatically a badge of honor. To a degree it was. But never in 30 years? Calling out from work for dishonest or frivolous reasons, like ... say, a hangover, works out as jackass conduct in my firm opinion; but so does showing up for work when you're unmistakably sick. I make exceptions, of course, for truly essential posts and for jobs that do not permit time off. But regular old office work? Dude, stay home. We don't want your flu, we don't want your stomach bug, we don't even want your damn common cold. And you sure as hell don't want to pass it to the guy who just returned from work from long-term leave for cancer treatments, or the pregnant lady you sit next to. Call out if you're sick.

What bothers me about some among the COVID hawks, when they're in certain moods, is rhetoric which it is difficult to distinguish from a declaration of a right to infect people rather than be inconvenienced. Leave COVID out of it, even. I was of this opinion before this particular plague afflicted us. To the extent possible, confine yourself to quarters when ill with an infectious pathogen.

There are times when a man, of necessity, must power through public activity despite knowingly carrying such a pathogen. There are other times when he judges the severity of the pathogen, let us say, below the threshold of ceasing public activity even of an optional sort. All these judgment calls depend on circumstances.

But in the end, there are many, many situations where the kindly thing to do, the neighborly thing to do, indeed the responsible thing to do, is to quarantine yourself and convalesce at home for a time: not so much because you feel really miserable and bedridden, but because you desire to minimize the spread of the illness.

To put the fine point on it, "don't get other people sick" hardly strikes me as inherently totalitarian.

Sorry, I meant "what bothers me about some among the COVID doves" and it occurs to me that the whole terminology itself may be obscure.

COVID hawks want strong anti-pandemic measures, including tests, masks, contact tracing and even, off at the end, lockdowns.

COVID doves, suspicious of all that, think the situation, while serious, is very much overblown.

But that principle allows for all manner of fine-grained prudential decisions on the part of the person in question who has a common cold, etc. If nothing else, it allows him to decide to stay home for only a couple of days, not *fourteen days*. It also allows him to decide to go to the grocery store if he has no family to bring him food, taking legitimate precautions like hand-washing, rather than literally quarantining. It allows his own friends to decide to see him if they want to risk his cold (which he informs them about), or hug him, or whatever. In other words, it leaves these decisions to the normal risk-benefit calculation of all sorts of different people, which is highly complex, and which will vary enormously. Being literally quarantined for fourteen days is far more than merely a minor personal inconvenience. And being literally quarantined for fourteen days when you have zero symptoms and have not even tested positive for an illness, just because you sat next to someone and had a conversation with him and *he* tested positive for an illness, is nuts. All of these complicated, varying risk-benefit decisions are being flattened out. And the rhetoric of "rather than being inconvenienced" or "be a good neighbor" applied to the draconian, unnatural, one-size-fits-all rules, which are massively altering civil society, is ridiculous in itself. Nonsense. My neighbor may need a hug. My neighbor may need to see people without masks. My neighbor may need incarnate friendship and worship, which he can't get when everybody is "practicing social distancing" and wearing masks and quarantining. When "don't get other people sick" takes the form of the rules we actually have, yes, it is very much inherently totalitarian. And frighteningly so.

Lydia should just openly post a "Don't tread on me" flag as the banner on her blog. :)

At ~90% accuracy the risk migration is enormous, not to mention the peace of mind. If someone pops a positive, immediately seek out the more sensitive PCR test.

The only thing with 90% detection is a CT scan of the lungs. The PCR is technically accurate but only somewhat sensitive, approx. 30% of tests give false negatives. A related factor regarding testing is that after exposure it takes at least three days for the viral load to accumulate to a level it can be detected. So if you are exposed to someone who was sick you would need to quarantine at least four or five days to wait for the virus to buildup and then a day or two for test results. From what I've read, the antibody test is very inaccurate (with false negatives and positives) and should only be used as a gauge of spread through a population, not as an individual diagnostic.

This isn't the bubonic plague, and we need to stop treating it as if it is.

I heard a joke about this: Americans can no longer use the phrase "avoid X like the plague." Because we clearly cannot.

So "draconian measures" would be acceptable if it was the bubonic plague? You cannot seriously talk about dystopian loss of American freedoms and then turn on a dime to say, "Of course I would sacrifice those for the greater good if only...".

I'm old enough to remember when the entire conservative media hyperventilated over eleven American Ebola patients. Now with 200,000 Americans dead and counting there is instead attacks against any attempts to contain or prevent this disease. I will also dispute the notion that only a high death count is deserving of imposing restrictions. Long-term and crippling health effects are also deserving. Keep in mind that about half of asymptomatic people have some (presumably mild and recoverable) level of lung damage from this cursed disease.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/covid-19-heart-pots-myocarditis/616021/

You cannot seriously talk about dystopian loss of American freedoms and then turn on a dime to say, "Of course I would sacrifice those for the greater good if only...".

I actually kind of went on and addressed that in the very next comment there. Yes, the legal imposition of the things would still unconstitutional power-grabs even if it were the bubonic plague. *Some* things vaguely *in this neighborhood* might make more sense as *voluntary* risk-mitigation strategies if it weren't. Others wouldn't.

But frankly, I regard such hypotheticals as unprofitable, because we are in the situation we are in, not one that is radically different. And in the situation that we are in, I frankly feel like I'm occupying the Twilight Zone when the radical measures, imposed upon all *perfectly healthy people*, that are actually in place, are not recognized as the dystopian, society-altering overreactions that they really are, by otherwise, previously sensible people.

I frankly feel like I'm occupying the Twilight Zone when the radical measures, imposed upon all *perfectly healthy people*, that are actually in place, are not recognized as the dystopian, society-altering overreactions that they really are, by otherwise, previously sensible people.

So are you opposed to any and all public safety measures? Because it sure seems like that is where your argument quickly leads. If you want to say there should be no seat belt laws, or limits on building occupancy, or that even private businesses cannot enforce a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" rule on their own premises then your baseline for what counts as an insane overreaction is as opposed to reality as the measures "radically imposed" upon healthy people during a pandemic.

No. I'm not saying that. Obviously. These are matters of prudence and tradeoffs. There are constitutional ways of passing public safety laws. Some of them that you think are not unduly burdensome, I might think are. Perhaps even vice versa. And so forth. That's what we have legislatures for. That's what we have a legislative process for. That's what we have legislative debate for about how burdensome and unnatural a rule is. That's why even public health authorities to whom (in my opinion unwisely and with dubious constitutionality) various legislatures have turned over some rule making will have a period of consideration and public comment for their rule-making.

And "no shirt, no shoes" is much different from "no mask." The face is important to normal social interaction. If you don't think it is, I can't help you. Masking the entire populace is a major social change, and not for the better. Even for some physical health reasons, by the way. But we are talking about governors requiring business to require it in any event, which is not the same thing as individual businesses deciding for themselves. And we are talking about rules literally trying to tell you how far away you have to stand from people in your own home, in churches, etc.. In Canada they just lowered the number of people allowed to gather in private homes *as opposed to* businesses, to ten. Why? Because of a lack of "monitoring" in private homes to make sure that people are "maintaining social distancing." This is insane. But yeah, just go ahead and make analogies to whatever else you want to make an analogy to. I'm sure it'll stick.

Look, I've already had these tedious discussions ad nauseum on social media. Seriously, can't you just think up my reasonable responses to these weak analogies for yourself/yourselves? Do I seriously have to point out the disanalogies? Do I seriously have to point out that one guy deciding to stay home for a day because he has a cold is not even close to requiring all of this two-week quarantining and masking of healthy people? (Not to mention the fact that even Anthony Fauci says the common cold may provide some protection from Covid, so "Don't expose anybody to any common cold germs" is not necessarily a good guide even to private behavior, much less public policy. The immune system needs to build its library, or we're all going to turn into the boy in the plastic bubble.) Turning the entire populace into OCD Mr. Monks, making literal germophobia a great social virtue, is not the world's brightest idea. And saying that doesn't mean "you're opposed to all public health policies." Obviously.

Because you know what, chaps? If I do have to point all this stuff out, then that probably means there's no point in my doing so. If you get my drift.

Which is part of why I don't blog anymore. Now I ignore a lot of these (sorry) clueless questions and extrapolations on social media, too.

These are matters of prudence and tradeoffs.

Fine, name some involuntary tradeoffs regarding COVID you would consider prudential.

And "no shirt, no shoes" is much different from "no mask."

You were the one who originally complained about being forced to wear a particular item of clothing. Businesses can require particular clothing or they can't. The deflection about social interactions doesn't matter a bit in that regard.

But yeah, just go ahead and make analogies to whatever else you want to make an analogy to. I'm sure it'll stick.

Yep, I will. The claim that an analogy must be entirely equivalent to make a general point is mind-numbing from someone who has spent as much time in philosophical circles as you have. Your fundamental error is in thinking that innocent and healthy are related in any form. The virus doesn't care, all it needs are vectors of transmission.

Right now, there isn't any provision in the current mandate even for people who can show by copious documentation that they have had and recovered from Covid-19 to "live normal lives." E.g. There is no exception in the face mask requirements or the social distancing requirements in executive orders and other rules. OSHA won't refrain from fining a small business if it doesn't require masking but can show that all its workers have had and recovered from the disease, etc.

I know. This is another in long train of errors and missed opportunities by the authorities.

In my mind we want to get to testing that is cheap, easy and ubiquitous.

Yet another... wait, I said that already.

Anyone who continues to advocate doing more and more unnecessary testing and handing the private information about individual people's test results and everywhere they have been in the past two weeks to powerful bureaucrats and saying, "What's the harm? Shouldn't we want to know?

I was initially in favor of using technology, such as cell phone tracing, to enable people to know if they were in contact with someone with COVID. Then the privacy issues came up, and I backed away from it. Arguably, if it could be done privately, it would be a good thing. But who can be confident that the information won't be misused? Especially by the government? And (much more seriously), who can imagine that generating the system by which the information is collected will not forge a pathway for a future government mandate to (mis)use that information? Maybe there is a good place to balance the competing needs here, but I am not seeing one.

I will go farther: The shutdowns shouldn't even be an option. They are blatantly unconstitutional and wrong on so many fronts that I probably can't even list them all. Right on their face, the shutdowns are in flagrant violation of the due process clause, the takings clause, freedom of religion, and the freedom of assembly clause. It's not a matter of "let's force everybody to do x so we don't 'have' to do more draconian things." Bullshit. The "more draconian things" shouldn't even be on the table.

I thought that too, until I started looking at actual laws and history. State government powers (such as under martial law) are pretty drastic / exhaustive. Under martial law, the government can order you to stay indoors, or order you not to assemble, or order you to evacuate, and can commandeer your car, or take your house if needed for something. These have ALWAYS been part of emergency powers of sovereign governments. Under emergencies like an invasion, the governor can order darn near anything with regard to property, in dealing with the problem.

Admittedly, martial events like an invasion are different from the current "emergency", but as Paul showed with Georgia law, the LAWS for the two categories are written in the same provisions of state code. So, I am not at all confident that it is TRUE that the requirements under the shut-downs are actually unconstitutional. Maybe they should be, but that's a different story.

(By the bye, the provision in Georgia's code got me to thinking, yet again, how darn STUPID it is that state laws that refer to / allow the authorities to take your property and do something else with it that they need is put under the expression "condemnation". As if taking your house over as a staging point for some attack or a forward depot for supplies is comparable to city health officials finding that it is riddled with termites and is ready to fall down at one good door-slam. I would have thought that someone somewhere would have realized that they can construct a perfectly good term for forcefully taking property for state use in the emergency that ISN'T "condemn", such as "commandeer". But no, I guess the lawyers who write this stuff are too stupid / hidebound to think of that.)

I agree, Tony. These emergency-powers laws are quite comprehensive. Alarmingly so. Maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe public health crises should be excluded. Maybe CV-19 doesn't rise to that level. But the laws are what they are. I suppose it would be possible to challenge them, constitutionally, via the Incorporation Doctrine; possibly a lawsuit along those lines will percolate out of this mess.

Step2: surely you're aware of how thorough has been the discredit of public health authorities vis-a-vis the protests, demonstrations and riots, right? Mayor de Blaiso flat out announced in June that he would exclude BLM demonstrators from all contact-tracing efforts. That at least contained the virtue of honesty. But why bother with transmission mitigation efforts while excluding major concentrations of human close-contact activity? Might as well just go Full Sweden.

But the laws are what they are. I suppose it would be possible to challenge them, constitutionally, via the Incorporation Doctrine; possibly a lawsuit along those lines will percolate out of this mess.

I have a fairly strong sense that this HAS been dealt with in Con Law arenas, and is settled. I can't point to a specific ruling, though. But take the 1st amendment provision for free speech: there is a whole LIST of exceptions to it: lying, libel, incitement, and selling secrets to the enemy are all forbidden by law, and are all accepted in spite of the 1st Amendment. I know that martial law is similarly an allowed category of "we don't follow the usual protections" for at least some of what the Amendments protect - no freedom of assembly, for example, and no freedom from seizure of your property. I strongly suspect the same exception principles will apply to epidemics.

But why bother with transmission mitigation efforts while excluding major concentrations of human close-contact activity?

Who has suggested there should be major exclusions? It certainly wasn't me or anyone else motivated by public health, which clearly does not include the mayor of NYC who is at best an inept, craven politician.

Might as well just go Full Sweden.

As far as I'm concerned that is the official policy of the US federal government. During his recent town hall Trump mangled the concept by calling it herd mentality, but at least it was an admission of the actual agenda. Moreover, the Swedish people in many cases went above and beyond the recommended guidelines and have done better at social distancing overall. Nor did they have a fractured government response where one element was in pure denial and falsely claiming it was a hoax. Yet even with those advantages they are still nowhere close to achieving herd immunity.

Despite the actual misguided policy, here is a little visualizer and math tutorial on the effects of wearing a mask.
https://aatishb.com/maskmath/

Step2, setting aside what our blathering President has said, what specifically is it that you think the federal government should have done differently in these last 7 months? Keeping in mind the difference between federal roles and state roles?

Tony,
The most important thing was to be honest with the public. We know from the Woodward tapes that the White House, including the President, knew specific details about how dangerous the disease was back in early February. All the happy talk since then has been an exercise in deceit. The insipid defense that Trump didn't want to create a panic is absurd, his Twitter feed is filled with panic-inducing conspiracies and wild accusations of every sort.

The next most important thing was to lead a coordinated national response. They instead let the states fight each other for critical supplies, sometimes even on the black market. In some places the feds confiscated those state supplies for their own purposes. While Trump did invoke the Defense Production Act, to the best of my knowledge not a single company has been affected by it.

Another important thing was to model safe behavior that the public should follow. A hopeless cause for sure with the ringmaster of this circus.

So, setting aside what Trump has said,

The next most important thing was to lead a coordinated national response.

But taking into account what is a federal role and what is a state role, what is it that constitutes "a coordinated national response"? That's kind of what I meant. Trump could not, for example, invoke state governors' powers to push a lockdown in NYC and then not in North Dakota, could he?

I have been saying since Day 1 that Trump could have used federal money to get testing kits out and available in the multi-billions. With the fast-working tests possible, we could by now be crafting not "lockdown" regimes but "test and prove" regimes that allow people to go most places with a few minutes of wait time. AND be reducing the spread by leaps and bounds, at the same time.

What else? Is there a federal power to prevent states from "fighting over critical supplies", and if so, how?

Is there a federal power to prevent states from "fighting over critical supplies", and if so, how?

Trump could have invoked and used the authority of the Defense Production Act to prepare back in February so that the shortages would not have been so severe. The feds could also have directed those supplies based on objective criteria of cases per population, hospitalizations, etc.. There are all sorts of situations, and especially emergency situations, where the federal government acts in either a leading or a supporting role with state governments to achieve mutual goals. It isn't strictly or entirely a situation of state vs. federal power, often there is enough overlap for them to act in partnership.

I haven't been around these parts for many a year, and may not be welcome, but I happened upon this post while looking for sensible commentary on the draconian "public health" measures imposed by certain governors, and found Lydia's Live Right On post quite on point. I might quibble here and there, but that would be of no particular merit.

The thing that has really bothered me throughout this entire crisis, such as it is, or has been made, is the moral theory implicit in the ukases issued by public authorities, mandating this and that, all for the ostensible purpose of avoiding transmission of the virus, with the manifest implication that, were one not to need all of the mandates, one would somehow be morally culpable for possibly transmitting the virus. The occasional politician, addled by self-righteousness, has arisen to suggest that, in such cases, one should be criminally charged. Under what plausible theory of the case, I should like to know.

The problem I have with the implicit moral theory is that, at some level, we are proposing moral judgment for what is essentially an aleatory event, something random, and largely beyond human control - and sometimes even beyond human mitigation - *unless* we presuppose a proto-totalitarian level of information gathering, surveillance, and statistical analysis that, hypothetically, could correlate contacts between persons with infections (contact tracing in Minority Report, lets say) with a high degree of accuracy. Now, this is not really possible. But the real issue is that we should not wish it to be possible, nor should we act in such a way as to suggest that we are trying to make it possible, because by doing so we would be obliterating countless other goods of human flourishing that we should wish to preserve, and that can only be preserved by balancing the many such goods that we do, and should value. And, unfortunately for the OCD, that balancing will entail risk of all kinds. There is something satanic about requiring someone to die alone, or even to confront the possibility of death alone, for fear of viral transmission. Yes, satanic. There is something even more satanic, were it possible, to deny a dying person last rites, for fear of viral transmission. There is something satanic about the rush to impose mandatory, involuntary DNRs, and the abrogation of normal CPR procedures, with the recommendation, basically, of 'because covid, just wait for the ambulance', which will mean for many, simply, death. To take just three examples.

The moral theory implicit in this - in my opinion - overreaction either assigns responsibility to people for things that they cannot be responsible for, or assigns them responsibility for things that they *can* be responsible for, but only on the presupposition of both a totalitarian system of biosecurity and the abrogation of all other human goods (including fundamental stability of life: I know people who have had to quit jobs to avoid the possibility of the 14 day quarantyranny *because they cannot afford to simply stay home for two weeks*, and would, if so required, immediately begin the downward financial spiral of this missed bill, and that missed payment) that might be incompatible with biosecurity. It is a crabbed and reductionistic moral theory that is presupposed by this policy overreaction, as crabbed and reductionistic as 'the only obligation of the corporation is to maximize shareholder value', or 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' And while this has been a year of the political Left taking leave of all reason, from covid to riot season, the madness has not been theirs alone; and I am reminded of the grim surveillance and security measures that were imposed after 9/11, and will never go away, because of an earlier unwillingness to actually balance the goods of human civilization among each other.

Jeff, thank you for that unexpected and welcome note of support. I really appreciate it.