Given that COVID-19, and especially the reaction to it, is going to dominate our lives for the next few months, I thought it's probably time to start a thread. And my apologies for the long post, but as you will soon see, my thoughts are both ambivalent and outside the mainstream, and therefore I feel the need to go into a fair amount of detail.
What prompted it is this post from the Texas Nationalist Movement.
Now, there's been a lot of crazy right-wing conspiracy theories circulating around COVID-19, and when I got the email, I kind of assumed it was more of the same. So, I was about to post it as "hey, look at what the Texas Nationalists have gotten up to now," and figured I owed them the courtesy of reading it first. And, I actually think it's pretty reasonable, or at least three of the major points it makes are:
1. The projections which have led to a global panic come from a single Imperial College study, and more recent models contradict it. As I've made clear elsewhere, I think that when the medical community feels an urgent need to make recommendations for individual action and especially government policy, they tend to have a strong action bias and made decisions on the basis of questionable evidence. So it does not surprise me at all that in a case where the medical community felt that we need to act literally right now, they'd make decisions based on models from one paper.
2. Given that China tried to keep this under wraps for months, it is entirely possible that a first wave has already spread, mostly asymptotically and with those affected diagnosed with something else I already believed that a lot more people were asymptomatic than were being diagnosed, based on the fact that among the rich and powerful, who are getting tested just because, we're seeing asymptomatic cases from Prince Charles to Rand Paul to Sophie Trudeau.
3. This is definitely imposing a cost on both the economy and our personal liberties which may not be worth it. This last point in particular I need to elaborate on. Because my position here has consistently been to the "right" of the mainstream, though I've rejected both the far-right conspiracy theories and the "let's all get together as a fuck you to the coronavirus."
My position currently is that voluntary social distancing is probably a good idea, and that companies should be allowing people to work from home wherever feasible, and should be granting paid sick leave at least for the duration of this outbreak. I am therefore not terribly upset by governments forcing businesses to do these things (though, Congress managed to write a sick leave bill which manages to not apply to most of the US workforce) though I think that forcing all "non-essential" businesses to shut down is likely an overreaction, and saying people shouldn't go out except for groceries under penalty of law is needlessly extreme. I've also been extremely put off by the preachy articles complaining about how selfish American individualism is dooming all our old people.
I have also been saying consistently that I feel the reaction to COVID-19 has been disproportionate, because it is a disease that is most likely to affect the well-traveled and well-connected, and most likely to kill the old. In short, it's a disease that is disproportionately likely to affect the kinds of people making decisions about closures, while the economic impact of such closures leave them largely untouched.
When I started saying this, I was explicitly challenging the "you can't put a price on human life" mentality, but rather amazingly to me, almost nobody is actually making that argument. Instead, the arguments for the draconian economic policies seem to stem from three concerns.
1. We're at risk of overwhelming our hospital's capacities, especially WRT to such things as ventilators, which may lead to a lot of needless deaths.
2. Lots of deaths are bad for our economy. (Though, callous as this may sound, I'm skeptical that that's true when said deaths are mostly old people; generally economists agree that the higher your ratio of working-age people to everyone else, the faster the economic growth.)
3. We don't know about the long-term effects of COVID-19, but there's some evidence that it can produce severe disability.
We're in it right now, and obviously the imagery from Italy has been disturbing, though I'll note that Spain, which is doing nearly as badly per-capita, does not seem to be producing nearly the same horror stories. At this point, I can't say for sure why things seem so dire in Italy, whether those images are isolated cases, and whether there might be other factors explaining why, for example, Italy is running behind on burials. But I can say that I do not like the idea of letting visceral images from Italy guide our policy, nor do I like the idea of taking extremely draconian precautions based on one study.
It becomes clear to me that COVID-19 reveals two views of the precautionary principle. Government officials—who tend to favor government action no matter what the issues is, that's why they're in government—have tended to see taking all possible action to limit the spread as of overriding importance. In this, they've been backed by the medical community and the mainstream media.
Whereas I, being generally skeptical of government action, have favored individual precautions where feasible and limited government action. If it were up to me, I'd require businesses to allow any employee who can feasibly work from home to do so, shutter non-essential government operations, close government-owned facilities like beaches, and and require paid sick leave. This makes me more cautious than many of the most vocal right-wing skeptics have been, but I've still tended towards the "government shouldn't be reacting so swiftly and strongly when it comes to private businesses and organizations."
I think that almost everybody agrees that we need to strike a balance between reasonable precautions and destroying the economy, but I've been inclined to err on the side of not destroying the economy. I'm leaning even more in this direction in light of this email from the leader of a right-wing fringe movement. It feels weird that, on this issue, the people whose position seems closest to mine have mostly been Trump supporters. (Though I still feel that Trump himself has handled this crisis with his characteristic inconsistency, bluster, and ineptitude.)
I also feel like, regardless of where you stand, the high-handed and dismissive response to far-right conspiracy theorists, "under-reactors" (the people who are refusing to change their habits at all), and really anyone who brings up the economy or individual freedom ("We're all in this together you selfish prick! Flatten the curve, dummy!"), has been less than helpful.