No one wants to be buried in a shroud of irony.
For that reason, I have generally avoided writing about our activities during the time of Covid. What’s more, it seems disrespectful to those who have been touched more directly by this tragedy. We aren’t pandemic deniers; we just happen to live in a part of the world that has been less impacted.
My wife and I have more or less followed the CDC guidelines when it comes to Pandemic-era socializing, but we have refused to hide away in our house. More recently, we have been in restaurants, on airplanes, and in gyms as the state opens up. We see friends. But to talk about it is to tempt the Fates. Britain’s Boris Johnson was the poster child for this: the oafish prime minister who ends up on a ventilator. Who’s laughing now? It’s a Bertie Wooster moment, though inconveniently for the scolds Johnson failed to die. His date with irony remains unconsummated, as Jeeves might say. (Not to be outdone, Trump has pulled well ahead in the schadenfreude sweepstakes with his own case of Covid and hospitalization.)
All this is prelude to confessing that, yes, we went to see two of our three daughters recently – one in Denver the other in Utah. (See King Lear reference here.) The plane was unconscionably crowded – thanks, United – but otherwise the trip was generally uneventful. On the outbound leg we encountered two women at the sparsely populated Raleigh-Durham airport dressed in what appeared to be see-through dry cleaning bags. They were both of a certain age, and beneath the plastic sheathing wore what looked like gym clothes, in retrospect perhaps not the wisest of choices. But such are the times we live in.
We landed in Denver and spent two nights there. Downtown, where we were, was pretty quiet but the restaurants out in the neighborhoods were bustling along. Masks, etc., but people were out. As the pandemic winds on, the world is starting to adjust. The science on this has never been as settled as some would have us believe, and it’s not now. Early on the problem looked like a nail, so we hit it with a hammer. That turned out to be too blunt. Now, as we learn more every day about who’s effected and how the virus is transmitted we also see the enormous collateral damage that has been inflicted on the world by the shutdowns: drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic abuse, depression, heart attacks, undiagnosed cancers. These people aren’t camera ready, they’re not rolling up to the emergency room in ambulances, but they are getting sick and dying nonetheless.
Another casualty: school age children who have been isolated and seen their ability to learn impaired. Unfortunately, public policy has been slow to take all this into account. These, too, are slow-rolling disasters and they mostly take place out of sight.
As a country, we need to adapt our behaviors and our policies as more becomes known. A vaccine may be in the offing; it may not. But either way, human nature hasn’t changed. We have an intrinsic need to congregate, to share ideas, to share laughter, to share meals. If we’re going to succeed in managing and hopefully, eliminating this and future pandemics, we need to find solutions that take this into account. That remains true in spite of the recent uptick in cases.
In Colorado and Utah, we spent most of our time outdoors, hiking in the national parks and walking the sparsely populated streets of Denver. We wore masks when needed and stayed away from people. Most everyone we saw was doing the same. We’re now back home, wrapping up two weeks of quasi-quarantine. We have no interest in getting sick, but even more we don’t want to be a vector in someone else’s illness. We’re not as young as we used to be and neither are a lot of our friends. We take this seriously.
But the dialogue is starting to move a little. You’re no longer automatically accused of devaluing human life if you aver that the issue of lockdown is “complex.” Martin Kulldorff, who focuses on statistical and epidemiological methods for disease surveillance at Harvard and is one of the signatories of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, has written that, “The media suggests there is a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown, but that is not the case. I have two concerns. One is about the collateral damage lockdown causes to other aspects of public health. One of the basic principles of public health is that you do not just look at one disease – you have to look at health as a whole, including all kinds of diseases, over a long period. That is not what has been done with Covid-19.”
His second concern is that the locking things down, contract tracing approach will not solve the problem; it will, he says, “just push it into the future.” Instead, he argues, the “key to minimizing mortality in the long term is to do what we, in the declaration, call ‘focused protection’: focusing efforts on high-risk individuals, and letting young people live their lives normally.”
Let’s stipulate that there is mostly goodwill all around in trying to find the best solution to the problem. There isn’t one group that just wants to make money and another that wants to save lives. Politics aside, the two problems aren’t, to echo a phrase from the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings, severable. We should recognize that with an evolving set of circumstances, individuals can look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions.
If we lock down discussion, fail to consider all possibilities, and therefore overlook the optimal solutions, that would be the ultimate irony.
