Neverendemic
When exactly does this clown show end? I’m tired of it and I want to go home.
Pandemic policies are damaging our civil liberties and destroying the economy.
Politicians have discredited themselves with these failing policies.
It is up to us as citizens to decide when and how we want the social crisis to end.
“The following stories also are told by many; that a certain seer warned him to be on his guard against great danger on that day of the month of March, which the Romans call the Ides; and when the day had arrived, as Caesar was going to the Senate-house, he saluted the seer and jeered him saying, “Well, the Ides of March are come;” but the seer mildly replied, “Yes, they are come, but they are not yet over.””
Plutarch: Parallel Lives , circa AD 100
March Madness
Julius Caesar never really saw what was coming, even when it was plainly before him.
Like us today in our time of social panic, the warning signs were there of impending danger, but the comforts of stasis and normalcy kept him (and us) from acting against a coming threat.
At least Caesar had a rather quick, though nasty, end to his troubles — we appear to be stuck in our collective living nightmare with no obvious exit under any plausible timeline or conditions.
We have clocked four full months now since the fateful days of mid-March, when panicked policy makers forced a quarantine on not only the sick, as had been done in prior pandemics, but also on almost every other healthy person on the planet.
That decision, unprecedented in human history, has had a long tail effect beyond anyone’s initial expectation.
It collapsed the economy, led to hundreds of millions of unemployed, massively expanded the welfare state, suspended our freedoms of movement and association, disrupted normal political processes, and turned all against all by creating a culture of shame and fear of others.
What a rotten world has emerged.
Vox Populi
Our political masters have actually benefited in the short term from these adverse developments, as an anxious populace has sought out active leadership in a time of quasi-anarchy and rewarded any diminution of the pandemic growth curve.
This is probably a fleeting political gain, though, since their efforts are visibly failing.
Instead of the pandemic fading from view, we are being treated to a rolling resurgence, with new case upticks in virgin lands (like Latin America, Indonesia, and India) and second waves in formerly becalmed locations (like Israel, Iran, and the Balkans). The US, home of the greatest number of tested cases, is seeing both trends on a regional basis.
Every policy under the sun has been tried, from lockdowns and contact restrictions to masks and social distancing, on voluntary and compulsory bases alike, and there is no correlation between such actions and contagion results around the world.
And there is also this — a disqualifying mountain of incoherent and incompetent policies being built by the ruling class (each one in chronological order and with political pronouncements in quotations):
· Pandemic announced in January, too little preventive action in February, too late lockdowns in March, too little response to case downswings in May, too much reaction to case upticks in July.
· “A few million will die”, “forty million will die”; hundreds of thousands die, please ignore our models.
· Pandemic of the century, everyone’s at risk of dying; the vulnerable elderly are the true risk, so everyone’s not at risk of dying.
· “Flatten the curve”, protect the hospitals, “save every life”, eradicate the virus.
· Some “workers are essential”, some are not, some stores are safe, some are not, some products are for sale, some are not, some activities are allowed, some are not, some people get money, some do not — “we are all in this together”.
· Lockdown for two weeks, lockdown for two months, re-open for one month, re-lockdown for who knows how long.
· “Go home”, it’s safer inside; go out, it’s safer outside.
· Close business, hamper business, downsize business, berate business, bailout business, bankrupt business.
· Masks don’t work, masks might work, we hope masks work, we really don’t know.
· “Don’t wear masks”, please wear masks, “you must wear a mask”.
· Close schools, children are at risk; children are quite safe, keep schools closed.
· “Don’t gather, don’t resist, do protest” (for the right cause).
· “Blame Trump”, “Blame Trump”, “Blame Trump”.
· It’s only: a couple of weeks of isolation, a few months of lockdown, a second wave, a vaccine next year, a perennial coronavirus, a neverendemic.
These are examples of what economists call revealed preferences: understanding what politicians care about by seeing what they actually say and do.
The overall effect is to paint most of our leaders as weak, ill-informed, confused, inconsistent, foolish, and hypocritical partisans — everything that we in fact feared they were prior to the pandemic.
Such people will definitely be punished politically when the time comes, in spite of their recent high standing in the polls. And the first installment is fast approaching with the national elections in the US in November.
Stage Left
So, apart from eventually chastising our purported betters, where is the exit ramp from this madness?
What is the constellation of events that could allow us to return, not to some perverse new normal, but to actually go back to our fondly desired former selves?
In short, who gets to decide how and when to pull the plug on this terrible all-encompassing social experiment?
If this were purely an analytical or data matter, we would end the restrictive policies in most places right now.
The evidence for that is three-fold.
First, national excess deaths, those beyond what we expect for this time of year, are pretty much back to normal levels, with only a few exceptions (Russia, Peru, and Indonesia) for places that measure such things (and that includes the US).
Second, for places with exploding Covid positive cases, like certain US states, there are few signs of increasing hospitalization rates or deaths. The newly found cases are mostly being driven by expanded testing (now over 50 million in the US) and are occurring mostly in low risk younger populations. We simply will not replay the horrendous mortality outcomes previously seen in Wuhan, northern Italy, and New York.
Again, there are exceptions to this rule and Florida is just such a place. It is the only state to see both a sharp rise in positive cases (up 14 times from 725 per day in May to over 10,000 per day in July) and a modest rise in deaths (up 2 times from 38 per day in May to 78 per day in July).
The rise of this mortality rate to 3.6 persons per million is worrisome but it is still very low, not much higher than the negligible rate of 1.9 persons per million in New York and New Jersey where the pandemic is now barely in play.
Third, the pandemic is increasingly revealing itself not to be a world-class mass disease, being miles less severe than other viral outbreaks, like the Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, or AIDS, and somewhat more lethal than influenza epidemics in recent years, including the Swine Flu in 2009 and the annual flu in 2017.
Yes, it is a severe pathogen and worth taking targeted public health precautions against uncontrolled contagion, but no, it is not even close to the danger that requires us to suspend civil liberties and destroy our economic livelihood.
So, if it was up to the data, we would probably end the crisis today.
Sadly, data don’t vote, and those who might make the case for this evidence are the same ones who are compromised by their continuing policies: our beloved politicians.
We know that the political calculus is skewed dramatically in the direction of risk phobia and inertia. As the UK’s NHS founder Nye Beven remarked in the 1940s : “If a bedpan is dropped in a hospital corridor in Tredegar [his political riding in Wales], the reverberations should echo around Whitehall”.
In other words, the blame game where politicians are tied to bad social outcomes, even if they are out of their control and perfectly within traditional norms and bounds, means that we will see only the slowest and most painful return to our former lives.
So, if we leave it up to our feckless leaders, it will be years, if not decades, before society reverts back to its normal pre-pandemic state. That leaves only us, as free citizens, to exert the required pressure in public forums to reverse course on this social panic. It is ours to end.
What We Can Do
Ultimately, there are only three outcomes to the pandemic: it mysteriously disappears, we create an effective vaccine and it downgrades to a less dangerous pathogen, or we reach population immunity and it peters out for lack of additional victims.
The first solution is basically wishful thinking and does not fit the pattern of past pandemics.
The second is hopeful, but takes time. It also faces the unfortunate facts that we have never developed a coronavirus vaccine before and we have never achieved more than about 50% efficiency with the influenza vaccines that are currently in use every year.
The third solution is the likeliest to occur and it is more a matter of how long it takes, than whether it happens. It could already be in place in a number of locations (New York, Sweden), it could take many more months in others (Brazil and many reopened US states), it could take a few years in more controlled locales (much of Europe), and it might never happen in some places (like fortress New Zealand).
This solution requires a massive mental shift for most people, from doing everything to avoid contagion to accepting that each new infection in safe populations is a positive step forward to ending the overall social crisis.
So long as vulnerable people are protected, we actually want people to engage with each other in a normal and natural way, and thus speed the end of this wholly unnatural time.
The end of the pandemic can be now or never, according to how we choose our future.
All we have to do is decide who is in charge of our free society: us, or those who report to us.
What will it be?
