At this point it's mostly about the masks. Your identity is defined by how you feel about masks. Are you careful to wear one everywhere and call out those who don't? Do you not wear one unless told to? Are you a slave to our cultural elites or a nazi? Those are your two choices.
Two sentences: (1)There are not really any replicable and peer-reviewed studies that show masks do any good and note that, early on, we were told they were useless. (2) There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that they do work, and frankly it scores high on the common sense test. Which of those carries more weight with you depends on whether you are a slave to cultural elites or a nazi.
I don't know which is right so I have to do some risk evaluation. I default to wearing the mask indoors unless there is a good reason not to and I am pretty solidly distanced from others. I don't wear the mask in my gym, but it's less a gym than a personal training studio where clients are kept strictly away from each other, the trainers all wear masks, and the equipment is cleaned psychotically, and I need to breathe freely to work out. I didn't wear the mask the handful of times I dined out once I was seated, but on the way to and from the table I did. That's about it. Why do I do this? Not because I think I'd be a nazi if I didn't. It's just risk/reward evaluation.
If wearing the mask saves lives then I'll be glad I wore it. If it doesn't, well, I have been inconvenienced for no good reason. Seems like a good trade to make. Also, I try to be polite. If a place of business requests I wear a mask I do, for the same reason I wear pants. Nevertheless, if you are wandering around without a mask, I don't think that makes you a nazi. You just have a different risk profile than I have. If you are wandering around without pants I might take issue.
More worrisome to me is that political leaders have completely undermined their moral authority to put the brakes on any reopening by supporting massive public protests and rallies. I have the feeling they can make all the decrees they want, be it about masks or anything else but nobody is going to follow them and any attempt at enforcement by the demoralized police forces will be futile. However you feel about the protests, the fact is our leaders made an implied statement that if you really feel strongly about something, you don't need to follow our restrictions.
Here in Michigan, the governor lost (then won) another case. An association of gym owners sued to have the executive order keeping them closed lifted. They won. There is a lot of misrepresentation of what this actually meant, but essentially it is along the same lines as the suit brought by the Rebel Barber of Owosso, which I discussed last month. The courts were not allowing the closing of specific classes of businesses without evidence that the act of the business itself is especially risky. Something to keep in mind here: the courts were not saying gyms are safe, they were saying if you want to treat gyms separately from other businesses you have to show evidence that the acts of business that gyms are involved in are risky -- i.e. lifting weights, running on a treadmill, etc. This is roughly the same thing that happened with the Rebel Barber of Owosso. Also, this didn't mean gyms can open and run as before, it means they can open if they can find ways to adhere to the governor's broader safety guidelines. Essentially, the courts -- both a fed court in the gym case and a State court in the barber case -- seemed to be saying you can't single out certain businesses for different policies without evidence. Anyone who can adhere to safety guidelines should be allowed to open. Then, of course, the Governor won a last minute appeal, and so one day before opening, gyms found out they had to stay closed.
I have been saying that openings or closings should be targeted based on ability to implement safety protocols not by type of business for months just as a matter of good policy, so obviously I'm on board with the original court decision. Before anyone gets their jimmies rustled over this, I freely acknowledge that my opinion means nothing and my words will not convince anyone of anything. Yours too.
A couple of months ago I suggested that we are now a nation of people eagerly hoping that we can be the ones to say "I told you so" 6 months from now. You can see this gearing up with the reaction to re-openings and potential second waves. There are four possibilities:
State reopens fast / no second wave
State reopens fast / second wave occurs
State reopens slow / no second wave
State reopens slow / second wave occurs
I can pretty much guarantee every one of these will happen somewhere. Just point to the States or regions that justify your position and recite the appropriate: "I told you so":
State reopens fast / no second wave: I told you the restrictions did no good
State reopens fast / second wave occurs: I told you it was reckless to lift restrictions
State reopens slow / no second wave: I told you the restrictions worked
State reopens slow / second wave occurs: I told you the restrictions didn't matter
Of course, you know you are under no obligation to word it so reasonably. And feel free to add the appropriate insult to the group you are targeting.
As far as what we can believe, well, who knows? We've seen charts indicating infections are soaring with no sort of acknowledgement, except the finest of print, that it may be due to (hushed whisper) the mass protests since it seems the increase in cases may be mostly among the young. Conversely, the death rate dropping is another indicator that the most vulnerable are keeping safe. None of this is proven or disproven so you get to make it mean you've been right all along. If you're a nazi this just shows how wrong it was to quarantine the masses; if you're a slave to the cultural elites it shows how the nazis have made things worse by not wearing masks. The CDC now thinks that for every known infection there are as many as 10 unrecorded infections. Does that confirm or contradict your feelings? The answer to that will tell you whether the CDC is speaking the truth.
Here is a complicated article on something called T-cell immunity, which suggests we are not yet clear on how resistant people already are to COVID19. Here is an even more complicated Twitter thread on new things we have just begun to model about herd immunity. Here is another complex Twitter thread explaining that while the number of known infections have eye-poppingly soared, the number of deaths has been decreasing on both a relative and absolute basis, even considering the time lag between reports and deaths. Can you incorporate these into your feelings? Can you even understand what they imply? I'm not sure I can, but maybe you're smarter than me.
As far as I can tell, Tyler Cowen may be the only one besides me who is overwhelmed by how inconsistent and random outbreaks and infection rates seem to be. The reaction when you point this out is for someone to propose a possible cause of some dichotomy, usually a solution in which that someone was right along. This misses the point. There are so many different dichotomies, anomalies, and outright contradictions that it seems like there is something we are missing, something important.
The fact remains we simply do not know enough yet to draw anything but the broadest conclusions. In this atmosphere, we need to just do the best we can, which we are probably doing in our own haphazard, inefficient, and outright hostile way. Given the FACT of our uncertainty you would think folks would be somewhat understanding of people on the other side of an argument. You would think wrongly.
I once heard suggested that whenever someone expresses an opinion they should be required to put a percentage on it as to their certainty. Good idea, but it would be futile. Everyone would just put 100% and accuse anyone who disagreed of ignorance and stupidity.
Yeah, I'm a little down on humanity these days.
