Elizabeth Kolbert’s lovely essay in the New York Review of Books, “Chemical Warfare’s Home Front,” describes Fritz Haber’s contribution to the use of toxic gas in war.
Haber orchestrated the use of chlorine to suffocate all animal life – including soldiers – downwind of his nation’s troops. And his plan succeeded. After unleashing 300,000 pounds of chlorine gas, huge numbers of people died. Soldiers– some of whom suffocated, some whose lungs burned, some who committed suicide when enveloped by the gas – as well as horses, cows, chickens, wildlife.
Chemical warfare is horrible, but Haber’s battlefield “experiment” was considered a success. Military researchers then concocted more dangerous chemical agents, like DNA-crosslinking mustard gas and muscle-clenching Sarin nerve gas.
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Fritz Haber’s other ideas were seemingly more beneficial for humanity. Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for making synthetic fertilizer.
Synthetic fertilizer let us grow more crops.
We could feed billions more people!
The global population soared.
If we hadn’t invented synthetic fertilizer, the global population would still be under four billion people.
Climate change would still be a huge problem – the most outrageous polluters haven’t been the most populous nations. Climate change was caused primarily by the United States and other wealthy nations, whereas overpopulation will first devastate equatorial nations.
A seemingly good idea – more fertilizer! – has greatly exacerbated the scale of suffering.
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Kolbert discusses the invention of chlorofluorocarbons, which seemed like great coolants. With CFCs, Frigidaire could build cheaper refrigerators! Regular families could keep their ice cream cold without spending as much on electricity.
Unfortunately, CFCs also dissolve our ozone layer. More dangerous ultraviolet radiation began to reach us from the sun, causing horrible skin cancers.
CFCs seemed like a good idea — they do work great as coolants — but they caused awful problems as part of a bigger system.
Kolbert quotes the chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, who said, in reference to his studies of CFCs, “The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.”
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Anthropologist Joseph Tainter argued civilizations collapse when overwhelmed by complexity.
Like the children’s nursery rhyme about the old lady who swallowed a fly — then a spider to catch the fly, then a cat to catch the spider — our complicated solutions can create new, perhaps worse, problems.
This is the theme of Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat. Kleeman investigates several industries that purport to solve our world’s problems – You can eat meat without killing animals! You can make a baby without a mother’s body! – without addressing the fundamental causes of these problems.
Describing her travels, Kleeman writes:
I head back to my hotel as the reassuring cloak of darkness falls on Las Vegas. I’m exhausted. Music is thumping out of huge speakers mounted on the building’s exterior: throbbing, pounding beats that are supposed to entice gamblers into the hotel’s casino. I wipe my key card and flop down on the giant bed.
On the bedside table, there’s a metal dish full of individually wrapped pairs of earplugs: wax ones, foam ones, silicone ones – a profusion of solutions supplied by the management to the noise pollution problem caused by the management.
They could just switch the music off, of course, but they have provided a little piece of technology instead so they don’t have to.
My head is full of Eva, [a prototype interactive sex doll] who has the body of a real woman, but can be beaten without feeling a thing. Rather than dealing with the cause of a problem, we invent something to try to cancel it out.
Perhaps we should eat different foods. Perhaps our attitudes about sex or the importance of a sociable community are making our lives worse. Perhaps if we addressed these issues directly, we wouldn’t need sex robots or vegan meat.
Clean meat is one of many possible futures of food, so long as we continue to eat meat. We will always have the power to not want it anymore, or to want it much less.
That is where the real power lies: in harnessing our desires, rather than in mastering technology. Until we do, we will be even further removed from where our food comes from, and will feel even less responsible for it.
We will be perpetuating the kind of thinking that caused the meat mess in the first place.
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In April 2020, I described two major drawbacks to our efforts to “slow the spread” of Covid-19 instead of providing targeted protection for the people at high risk of severe illness.
2.) Each infection encompasses some number of viral replications and thus genetic drift. If a population of 20 people transfers a virus between themselves one by one, rather than all catching it from the same initial carrier, the virus has 20-fold more generations to mutate and better evade our immune systems.
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Admittedly, my April 2020 prediction about the timeline for vaccine development was quite wrong – I thought this might take three to five years. I’m thankful that I was wrong. I’m obviously grateful for the fantastic work done by vaccine developers so far.
For these vaccines to effectively staunch viral transmission, we’ll need to vaccinate large numbers of people – immunity from prior infections won’t necessarily help much because immunity to this particular virus lapses so quickly, and because people’s prior infections were staggered in time. (Indeed, we’ll probably need to vaccinate large numbers of people repeatedly, because some of our data suggests that vaccine-derived immunity to this also lapses on a timescale of months.)
Unfortunately, we live in a country where large numbers of people distrust the medical establishment. Even if we had sufficient doses of the vaccines available today, I don’t know what percentage of our population would choose to get them.
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Masks definitely reduce viral transmission. It was obviously a good idea for everyone to wear masks anywhere that high risk and lower risk people share the same space.
Cooperation definitely makes for a better place to live. In places that enacted mask orders, it’s obviously a good idea to follow them.
It’s worth remembering, though, that any fix – even something as simple as this piece of cloth covering my nose and mouth – can have unintentional consequences. New virus variants – which our current vaccines may be less effective against – are a predictable result of our effort to “slow the spread” with masks.
And yet.
I volunteer with Pages to Prisoners, an organization that sends free books to people who are incarcerated. We’ve included a sheet of information about Covid-19 with each package recently, helping to explain that Covid-19 is not a hoax, that it’s a dangerous respiratory disease, that masks and social distancing can help people reduce their risk.
I’m currently revising this information sheet – it was put together months ago, when we understood less about this virus – and I’m still recommend that everyone wear masks.
Not just because prisons are places where many low risk and high risk people are confined together — although, they are. Outrageous sentencing practices have led to a large number of elderly people being stuck in prison.
But also, anecdotal evidence suggests that people are more likely to develop severe illness from Covid-19 when they are exposed to a large number of viral particles at once.
Viruses reproduce exponentially – you can get sick if you inhale even one capsid. But you’re more likely to get seriously ill if you inhale a whole bunch of viral particles. If you’re initially exposed to a small number of particles, your body will have more time to fight off the infection before it makes you feel sick.
Research studies from military bases have shown that Covid-19 will continue to spread even when everyone wears masks and tries to stay six feet away from each other. But we haven’t tested – an experiment like this would be totally unethical – whether we’re more likely to see asymptomatic or mild cases when people’s initial exposure is to a small number of viral particles.
It’s quite likely, though.
So, although I think our efforts to “slow the spread” weren’t the best plan last year, I’ll still be recommending masks.
At the end of “Just Use Your Thinking Pump!”, a lovely essay that discusses the evolution (and perhaps undue elevation) of a particular set of practices now known as the scientific method, Jessica Riskin writes:
Covid-19 has presented the world with a couple of powerful ultimatums that are also strikingly relevant to our subject here. The virus has said, essentially, Halt your economies, reconnect science to a whole understanding of yourself and the world, or die.
With much economic activity slowed or stopped to save lives, let us hope governments find means to sustain their people through the crisis.
Meanwhile, with the din of “innovation” partially silenced, perhaps we can also use the time to think our way past science’s branding, to see science once again as integral to a whole, evolving understanding of ourselves and the world.
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True, the world has presented us with an ultimatum. We must halt our economies, reconnect science to a whole understanding of ourselves and our world, or die.
Riskin is a professor at Stanford. Her skies are blackened with soot. In the words of Greta Thunberg, “Our house is on fire.”
For many years, we’ve measured the success of our economy in terms of growth. The idea that we can maintain perpetual growth is a delusion. It’s simple mathematics. If the amount of stuff we manufacture – telephones, televisions, air conditioners – rises by 3% each and every year, we’ll eventually reach stratospheric, absurd levels.
In the game “Universal Paperclips,” you’re put in control of a capitalist system that seeks perpetual growth. If you succeed, you’ll make a lot of paperclips! And you will destroy the planet.
Here in the real world, our reckless pursuit of growth has (as yet) wrought less harm, but we’ve driven many species to extinction, destroyed ancient forests, and are teetering at the precipice of cataclysmic climate change. All while producing rampant inequality with its attendant abundance of human misery.
We must reconnect science to a whole understanding of ourselves and the world, or die.
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We are in danger. But Covid-19 isn’t the major threat we’re facing.
I consider myself to be more cautious than average – I would never ride a bicycle without a helmet – and I’m especially cautious as regards global pandemic. Antibiotic resistance is about to be a horrific problem for us. Zoogenic diseases like Covid-19 will become much more common due to climate change and increased human population.
I’m flabbergasted that these impending calamities haven’t caused more people to choose to be vegan. It seems trivial – it’s just food – but a vegan diet is one of our best hopes for staving off antibiotic resistant plagues.
A vegan diet would have prevented Covid-19. Not that eating plants will somehow turbocharge your immune system – it won’t – but this pandemic originated from a meat market.
And a vegan diet will mitigate your contribution to climate change, which has the potential to cause the full extinction of the human race.
Make our planet uninhabitable? We all die. Make our planet even a little less habitable, which leads to violent unrest, culminating in warring nations that decide to use nukes? Yup, that’s another situation where we all die.
By way of contrast, if we had made no changes in our lives during the Covid-19 pandemic – no shutdown, no masks, no social distancing, no PCR tests, no contact tracing, no quarantines – 99.8% of our population would have survived.
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Indeed, we often discuss the Covid-19 crisis in a very imprecise way. We say that Covid-19 is causing disruptions to learning, that it’s causing domestic violence or evictions. On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times business section, the headline reads, “The Other Way that Covid Kills: Hunger.”
Covid-19 is a serious disease. We need to do our best to avoid exposing high-risk people to this virus, and we should feel ashamed that we didn’t prioritize the development of coronavirus vaccines years ago.
But there’s a clear distinction between the harms caused by Covid-19 (hallucinogenic fevers, cardiac inflammation, lungs filling up with liquid until a person drowns, death) and the harms caused by our response to Covid-19 (domestic violence, educational disruption, starvation, reduced vaccination, delayed hospital visits, death).
Indeed, if the harms caused by our response to Covid-19 are worse than the harms caused by Covid-19 itself, we’re doing the wrong thing.
In that New York Timesbusiness article, Satbir Singh Jatain, a third-generation farmer in northern India, is quoted: “The lockdowns have destroyed farmers. Now, we have no money to buy seeds or pay for fuel. …. soon they will come for my land. There is nothing left for us.”
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Covid-19 is awful. It’s a nasty disease. I’m fairly confident that I contracted it in February (before PCR tests were available in the United States), and my spouse says it’s the sickest she’s ever seen me.
Yes, I’d done something foolish – I was feeling a little ill but still ran a kilometer repeat workout with the high school varsity track team that I volunteer with. High intensity workouts are known to cause temporary immunosuppression, usually lasting from 3 to 72 hours.
My whole family got sick, but I fared far worse than the others.
It was horrible. I could barely breathe. Having been through that, it’s easy to understand how Covid-19 could kill so many people. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone.
And I have very low risk. I don’t smoke. I don’t have diabetes. I’m thirty-seven.
I wish it were possible to protect people from this.
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Obviously, we should have quarantined all international travelers beginning in December 2019. Actually, ten days probably would have been enough. We needed to diecitine all international travelers.
By February, we had probably allowed Covid-19 to spread too much to stop it.
By February, there were probably enough cases that there will always be a reservoir of this virus among the human species. 80% of people with Covid-19 feel totally fine and don’t realize they might be spreading it. By talking and breathing, they put viral particles into the air.
By the end of March, we were much, much too late. If you look at the numbers from New York City, it’s pretty clear that the preventative measures, once enacted, did little. Given that the case fatality rate is around 0.4%, there were probably about 6 million cases in New York City – most of the population.
Yes, it’s possible that New York City had a somewhat higher case fatality rate. The case fatality rate depends on population demographics and standard of care – the state of New York had an idiotic policy of shunting Covid-19 patients into nursing homes, while banning nursing homes from using Covid-19 PCR tests for these patients, and many New York doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine during these months, which increases mortality – but even if the case fatality rate in New York City was as high as 0.6%, a majority of residents have already cleared the virus by now.
The belated public health measures probably didn’t help. And these health measures have caused harm – kids’ schooling was disrupted. Wealthy people got to work from home; poor people lost their jobs. Or were deemed “essential” and had to work anyway, which is why the toll of Covid-19 has been so heavily concentrated among poor communities.
The pandemic won’t end until about half of all people have immunity, but a shutdown in which rich people get to isolate themselves while poor people go to work is a pretty shitty way to select which half of the population bears the burden of disease.
I am very liberal. And it’s painful to see that “my” political party has been advocating for policies that hurt poor people and children during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Because we did not act soon enough, Covid-19 won’t end until an appreciable portion of the population has immunity – at the same time.
As predicted, immunity to Covid-19 lasts for a few months. Because our public health measures have caused the pandemic to last longer than individual immunity, there will be more infections than if we’d done nothing.
The shutdowns, in addition to causing harm on their own, will increase the total death toll of Covid-19.
Unless – yes, there is a small glimmer of hope here – unless we soon have a safe, effective vaccine that most people choose to get.
This seems unlikely, though. Making vaccines is difficult. And we already know that most people don’t get the influenza vaccine, even though, for younger people, influenza is more dangerous than Covid-19.
Look – this is shitty. I get an influenza vaccine every year. It’s not just for me – vaccination protects whole communities.
Yes, there are clear positive externalities to vaccination, but I think this sounds like a terrible idea. Ethically, it’s grim – the Covid-19 vaccines being tested now are a novel type, so they’re inherently more risky than other vaccines. By paying people to get vaccinated, we shift this burden of uncertainty onto poor communities.
We already do this, of course. Drug trials use paid “volunteers.” Especially phase 1 trials – in which drugs are given to people with no chance of medical benefit, only to see how severe the side effects are – the only enrollees are people so poor that the piddling amounts of money offered seem reasonable in exchange for scarfing an unknown, possibly poisonous medication.
Just because we already do an awful thing doesn’t mean we should make the problem worse.
And, as a practical matter, paying people to do the right thing often backfires.
To illustrate, consider the recent introduction, in many Indian states, of schemes of cash incentives to curb sex-selective abortion. The schemes typically involve cash rewards for the registered birth of a girl child, and further rewards if the girl is vaccinated, sent to school, and so on, as she gets older.
These schemes can undoubtedly tilt economic incentives in favor of girl children. But a cash reward for the birth of a girl could also reinforce people’s tendency to think about family planning in economic terms, and also their perception, in the economic calculus of family planning, that girls are a burden (for which cash rewards are supposed to compensate).
Further, cash rewards are likely to affect people’s non-economic motives. For instance, they could reduce the social stigma attached to sex-selective abortion, by making it look like some sort of ‘fair deal’ — no girl, no cash.
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What happens if it takes a few years before there are sufficient doses of an effective vaccine that people trust enough to actually get?
Well, by then the pandemic will have run its course anyway. Masks reduce viral transmission, but they don’t cut transmission to zero. Even in places where everyone wears masks, Covid-19 is spreading, just slower.
I’ve been wearing one – I always liked the Mortal Kombat aesthetic. But I’ve been wearing one with the unfortunate knowledge that masks, by prolonging the pandemic, are increasing the death toll of Covid-19. Which is crummy. I’ve chosen to behave in a way that makes people feel better, even though the science doesn’t support it.
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We, as a people, are in an awful situation right now. Many of us are confronting the risk of death in ways that we have not previously.
More than 37 percent of deaths in 1900 were caused by infectious diseases, but by 1955, this had declined to less than 5 percent and to only 2 percent by 2009.
Of course, this trend will still hold true in 2020. In the United States, there have been about 200,000 Covid-19 deaths so far, out of 2,000,000 deaths total this year. Even during this pandemic, less than 1% of deaths are caused by Covid-19.
And I’m afraid. Poverty is a major risk factor for death of all causes in this country. Low educational attainment is another risk factor.
My kids am lucky to live in a school district that has mostly re-opened. But many children are not so fortunate. If we shutter schools, we will cause many more deaths – not this year, but down the road – than we could possibly prevent from Covid-19.
Indeed, school closures, by prolonging the pandemic (allowing people to be infected twice and spread the infection further), will increase the death toll from Covid-19.
School closures wouldn’t just cause harm for no benefit. School closures would increase the harm caused by Covid-19 and by everything else.
We are wearing masks. At school, at work, at the grocery store. I jog with a bandanna tied loosely around my neck, politely lifting it over my face before I pass near other people.
Slowing the spread of a virus from which we have short-duration immunity is dangerous, as I’ve described at length previously, but one consequence of universal mask orders is unambiguously good – the herd immunity threshold to end the pandemic is lower in a world where people always wear masks around strangers.
We all want to get through this while causing as little harm as possible.
Covid-19 is real, and dangerous. Some of the data are complicated, but this much is not: to date, ~200,000 people have died from Covid-19.
Covid-19 is extremely easy to transmit. Because our behaviors so readily affect the health of others right now, we must decide collectively how to respond. My county has decided that we should wear masks. And so I do.
Only those with whom we are closest will see us smile in person. Family. If we’re lucky, a close group of friends.
We share the same air.
During the pandemic, those we love most are our conspirators.
Our conspirators are the select few whom we breathe (spirare) with (com).
I live in a college town. Last week, students returned.
Yesterday’s paper explains that dire punishment awaits the students who attended a Wednesday night party. In bold letters atop the front page, “IU plans to suspend students over party.”
In the decade that I’ve lived here, many parties have led to sexual assaults, racist hate speech, and violence. The offending students were rarely punished. But this party was egregious because “there were about 100 people there.”
IU officials “have seen a photo … that shows a large group of young people standing close together outside a house at night, many of them not wearing masks.”
I’ve seen the images – someone filmed a video while driving by. There they are – a group of young people, standing outside.
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Science magazine recently interviewed biologist Dana Hawley about social distancing in the animal kingdom.
When spiny lobsters are sick, their urine smells different. Healthy lobsters will flee the shared den. Leaving is dangerous, since the lobsters will be exposed to predators until they find a new home, but staying would be dangerous, too – they might get sick. To survive, lobsters have to balance all the risks they face.
My favorite example of social distancing in the animal kingdom wasn’t discussed. When an ant is infected with the cordyceps fungus, it becomes a sleeper agent. Jennifer Lu writes in National Geographic that “as in zombie lore, there’s an incubation period where infected ants appear perfectly normal and go about their business undetected by the rest of the colony.”
Then the fungus spreads through the ants body, secreting mind control chemicals. Eventually, the fungus will command the infected ant to climb to a high place. A fruiting body bursts from the ant’s head and rains spores over the colony.
Infection is almost always lethal.
If an ant notices that a colony member has been infected, the healthy ant will carry the infected ant away from the colony and hurl it from a cliff.
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The FDA will approve any Covid-19 vaccine that cuts risk by half. It’s very unlikely that a Covid-19 vaccine will cut the risk by more than about two-thirds, and the vaccine will work least well for people who needprotection most.
The herd immunity threshold isn’t an inherent property of a virus – it depends upon our environment and behaviors. In prisons, we’ve seen Covid-19 spread until nearly 90% of people were infected. In parts of New York City where many essential workers live in crowded housing, Covid-19 spread until 50% of people were infected.
In a culture where everyone kissed a sacred statue in the center of town each morning, the herd immunity threshold would be higher. If people wear masks while interacting with strangers, the herd immunity threshold will be lower.
In a world that maintains a reservoir of the virus, though, someone who hasn’t yet been exposed will always be at risk.
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The New York Times recently discussed some of the challenges that colleges face when trying to reopen during the epidemic.
Most schools ban … socializing outside “social pods” – the small groups of students that some colleges are assigning students to, usually based on their dorms.
Most administrators seem to believe that a rule banning sex is unrealistic, and are quietly hoping that students will use common sense and refrain from, say, having it with people outside their pod.
In 2012, The Huffington Post published a list of the “Top 10 sex tips for college freshmen.” Their fourth piece of advice (#1 and #2 were condoms, #3 was not having sex while drunk) is to avoid having sex with people who live too close to you. “Students in other dorms = fair game. Students in same dorm = proceed with caution.”
I had a big group of friends for my first two years of college. After a breakup, I lost most of those friends.
This is crummy, but it would be much worse if I’d lost my friendships with the only people whom the administrators allowed me to spend time with.
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We can slow the spread of Covid-19, but slowing the spread won’t prevent deaths, not unless we can stave off infection until there is a highly effective vaccine. That might take years. We might never have a highly effective vaccine – our influenza vaccines range in efficacy from about 20% to 80%, and we have much more experience making these.
Our only way to reduce the eventual number of deaths is to shift the demographics of exposure. If we reach the herd immunity threshold without many vulnerable people being exposed, we’ll save lives.
A college would best protect vulnerable students and faculty by allowing the students who are going to socialize to host dense parties for a few weeks before mingling with others. This would allow the virus to spread and be cleared before there was a risk of transferring infections to vulnerable people.
I’d draft a waiver. Are you planning to socialize this semester? If so, come do it now! By doing so, you will increase your risk of contracting Covid-19. This is a serious disease – it’s possible for young, healthy people to die from it. But, look, if you’re gonna socialize eventually, please just get it over with so that you don’t endanger other people.
With this plan, some young people might die of Covid-19. But some young people will die of Covid-19 even if everyone practices social distancing – slowing the spread of infections doesn’t save lives, it delays deaths. And fewer young people would die of Covid-19 than die of influenza each year.
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When confronting cordyceps, which is almost always fatal, ants throw sick colony members off cliffs.
When ants confront less lethal fungal infections, they protect the colony by shifting the demographics of exposure and by ramping up to the herd immunity threshold as quickly as possible.
Malagocka et al. discuss demographics in their review article, “Social immunity behavior among ants infected by specialist and generalist fungi.”
Outside-nest foragers, who have the highest risks of acquiring pathogens from the environment, have limited access to the brood area with the most valuable groups, and are recruited from older individuals, who are less valuable from the colony survival perspective.
Konrad et al. discuss intentional exposure in their research article, “Social transfer of pathogenic fungus promotes active immunization in ant colonies.”
When worker ants encounter an infected colony member, they intentionally inoculate themselves. “Social immunization leads to faster elimination of the disease and lower death rates.”
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It feels disquieting for me to defend the behavior of frat guys. Personally, I’d like to see the whole fraternity system abolished. And in March, when we knew less about Covid-19, I was appalled that people went out partying over spring break. But I was wrong. Perhaps inadvertently, those young people were behaving in the way that would save most lives.
the nurse called back and told us to use bleach on anything we touch, she said wash everything in hot water, insisted we won’t treat you if you’re asymptomatic, we won’t, and made us an appointment anyway. so we waited and waited with the dog-eared magazines and recall posters
It’s horrible to face the end. It’s almost worse to know that the things you fear are harmless to others. All the asymptomatic cases are like a slap in the face to those whose friends and family have died.
Braun et al. recently published a study in Nature showing that a large number of people who’ve never encountered Covid-19 may already have significant immunity. Parts of the Covid-19 virus are similar to the viruses that cause common colds, and exposure to those viruses might provide the immunity that lets people recover without ever feeling sick.
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I believe we should be doing more to protect young people. Gun control, ending farm subsidies, fighting climate change. Enacting privacy laws to reign in the surveillance capitalists. Breaking up monopolies. Providing good careers despite automation. Making sure that everyone has clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. Getting nutritious food into our nation’s many food deserts. Providing equitable access to health care.
But, punishing young people for socializing?
We’re not making them safer. And we’re not making ourselves safer, either.
Seriously, I know we humans are selfish, but we have to be able to handle an epidemic better than ants.
My family had spring break travel plans for before the shutdown.
We canceled them.
At the time, we feared for our safety. My spouse said to me, “You caught the flu twice this year, even after you were vaccinated, and the second time was the sickest I’ve ever seen you. I’m really worried about what will happen if you catch this new thing, too.”
She wanted me to cancel my poetry classes in the local jail. My father, an infectious diseases doctor and professor of immunology, thought I should still go in to teach. “If somebody’s in there coughing up a lung, you should recommend he skip class next week,” my father told me.
But I was spooked. I felt glad when the jail put out a press release saying they’d no longer allow volunteers to come in – I didn’t want to choose between helping the incarcerated men and protecting my family.
My spouse is a high school science teacher. She felt glad that her biology classroom has over a dozen sinks. During the final week of school, she asked all her students to wash their hands for 20 seconds as soon as they walked into the room.
My spouse and I are both scientists, but it wasn’t until a week into the shutdown that I began to read research papers about Covid-19. Until then, we had gotten all our information from the newspaper. And the news was terrifying. Huge numbers of people were dying in Italy. Our imbecilic president claimed that Covid-19 was no big deal, making me speculate that this disease was even more dangerous than I’d thought.
Later, I finally went through the data from Italy and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. These data – alongside the assumption that viral exposure should be roughly similar across age groups, if not higher for school children and young people who are out and about in the world – showed my family that our personal risk was probably quite low.
Still, we stayed inside. We were worried about harming others.
When I saw photographs of beaches packed with revelers, I felt furious. Did those selfish young people not realize that their choices could cause more people to die?
So it was shocking for me to learn that those selfish young people were actually doing the thing that would save most lives.
If we, as a people, had acted earlier, we could have prevented all these deaths. In January, it would have been enough to impose a brief quarantine after all international travel. In February, it would have been enough to use our current strategy of business closures, PCR testing, and contact tracing. In March, we were too late. The best we could do then – the best we can do now – was to slow the spread of infections.
Unfortunately, slowing the spread of infections will cause more people to die.
There’s an obvious short-term benefit to slowing the spread of infections – if too many people became critically ill at the same time, our hospitals would be overwhelmed, and we’d be unable to offer treatment to everyone who wanted it. We’d run out of ventilators.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that we, as a people, are terrible about talking about death. There’s no consensus about what constitutes a good life – what more would have to happen for you to feel ready to die?
Personally, I don’t want to die. As my mind stopped, I’d feel regret that I wouldn’t get to see my children become self-sufficient adults. But I’d like to think that I could feel proud that I’ve done so much to set them on the right path. Since my twenties, I’ve put forth a constant effort to live ethically, and I’d like to imagine that my work – my writing, teaching, and research – has improved other people’s lives.
I’ve also gotten to see and do a lot of wonderful things. I’ve been privileged to visit four countries. I visited St. Louis’s City Museum when one of my kids was old enough to gleefully play. I have a bundle of some two dozen love letters that several wonderful people sent me.
I’ve had a good life. I’d like for it to continue, but I’ve already had a good life.
Many medical doctors, who have seen how awful it can be for patients when everything is done to try to save a life, have “do not resuscitate” orders. My spouse and I keep our living wills in an accessible space in our home. But a majority of laypeople want dramatic, painful measures to be taken in the attempt to save their lives.
Still. Even without our reluctance to discuss death, there would be a short-term benefit to slowing the spread of infections. The American healthcare system is terrible, and was already strained to the breaking point. We weren’t – and aren’t – ready to handle a huge influx of sick patients.
But the short-term benefit of slowing the spread of Covid-19 comes at a major cost.
The shutdown itself hurts people. The deaths caused by increased joblessness, food insecurity, educational disruption, domestic violence, and loneliness (“loneliness and social isolation can be as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day”) are more difficult to measure than the deaths caused by Covid-19. We won’t have a PCR test to diagnose which people were killed by the shutdown.
Those deaths won’t all come at once. But those deaths are no less real, and no less tragic, than the immediate horror of a person drowning from viral-induced fluid buildup in their lungs.
And, perhaps more damning, if the shutdown ends before there’s a vaccine, the shutdown will cause more people to die of Covid-19.
Without a vaccine, slowing the spread of Covid-19 has a short-term benefit of reducing the rate of hospital admissions, at the long-term cost of increasing the total number of Covid-19 cases.
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All immunity fades – sometimes after decades, sometimes after months. Doesn’t matter whether you have immunity from recovery or from vaccination – eventually, your immunity will disappear. And, for a new disease, we have no way of predicting when. Nobody knows why some antigens, like the tetanus vaccine, trigger such long-lasting immunity, while other antigens, such as the flu vaccine or the influenza virus itself, trigger such brief protection.
We don’t know how long immunity to Covid-19 will last. For some coronaviruses, immunity fades within a year. For others, like SARS, immunity lasts longer.
The World Health Organization has warned, repeatedly, that immunity to Covid-19 might be brief. But the WHO seems unaware of the implications of this warning.
The shorter the duration of a person’s immunity, the more dangerous the shutdown. If our shutdown causes the Covid-19 epidemic to last longer than the duration of individual immunity, there will be more total infections – and thus more deaths – before we reach herd immunity.
This is, after all, exactly how a one-time “novel zoogenic disease” like influenza became a permanent parasite on our species, killing tens of thousands of people in the United States each year. Long ago, transmission was slowed to the point that the virus could circulate indefinitely. Influenza has been with us ever since.
That’s the glaring flaw in the recent Harvard Science paper recommending social distancing until 2022 – in their key figure, they do not incorporate a loss of immunity. Depending on the interplay between the rate of spread and the duration of immunity, their recommendation can cause this epidemic to never end.
And, if the shutdown ends before we have a vaccine, the lost immunity represents an increased death toll to Covid-19. Even neglecting all the other harms, we’ll have killed more people than if we’d done nothing.
This sounds terrifying. And it is. But the small glimmer of good news is that people’s second infections will probably be less severe. If you survive Covid-19 the first time you contract it, you have a good chance of surviving subsequent infections. But prolonging the epidemic will still cause more deaths, because herd immunity works by disrupting transmission. Even though an individual is less likely to die during a second infection, that person can still spread the virus. Indeed, people are more likely to spread the virus during subsequent infections, because they’re more likely to feel healthy while shedding infectious particles.
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This calculation would be very different if people could be vaccinated.
Obviously, vaccination would be the best way to end this epidemic. In order to reach herd immunity by a sufficient number of people recovering, there would have to be a huge percentage of our population infected. Nobody knows how many infections it would take, but many researchers guess a number around 60% to 70% of our population.
Even if Covid-19 were no more dangerous than seasonal influenza (and our data so far suggest that it’s actually about four-fold moredangerous than most years’ seasonal influenza), that would mean 200,000 deaths. A horrifying number.
But there’s no vaccine. Lots of people are working on making a vaccine. We have Covid-19 vaccines that work well in monkeys. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of human protection. We’ve made many HIV vaccines that work well in monkeys – some of these increase the chance that humans will contract HIV.
It should be easier to make a vaccine against this coronavirus than against HIV. When making a vaccine, you want your target to mutate as little as possible. You want it to maintain a set structure, because antibodies need to recognize the shape of external features of the virus in order to protect you. HIV mutates so fast that its shape changes, like a villain constantly donning a new disguise. But the virus that causes Covid-19 includes a proofreading enzyme, so it’ll switch disguises less.
Still, “easier to make a vaccine against than HIV” is not the most encouraging news. Certain pharmaceutical companies have issued optimistic press briefings suggesting that they’ll be able to develop a vaccine in 18 months, but we should feel dubious. These press briefings are probably intended to bolster the companies’ stock prices, not give the general public an accurate understanding of vaccine development.
Realistically, a Covid-19 vaccine is probably at least four years away. And it’s possible – unlikely, but possible – that we’ll never develop a safe, effective vaccine for this.
If we end the shutdown at any time before there is a vaccine, the shutdown will increase the number of people who die of Covid-19. The longer the shutdown, the higher the toll. And a vaccine is probably years away.
The combination of those two ideas should give you pause.
If we’re going to end the shutdown before we have a vaccine, we should end it now.
For a vaccine to end the Covid-19 epidemic, enough people will need to choose to be vaccinated for us to reach herd immunity.
Unfortunately, many people in the United States distrust the well-established efficacy and safety of vaccines. It’s worth comparing Covid-19 to seasonal influenza. On a population level, Covid-19 seems to be about four-fold more dangerous than seasonal influenza. But this average risk obscures some important data – the risk of Covid-19 is distributed less evenly than the risk of influenza.
With influenza, healthy young people have a smaller risk of death than elderly people or people with pre-existing medical conditions. But some healthy young people die from seasonal influenza. In the United States, several thousand people between the ages of 18 and 45 die of influenza every year.
And yet, many people choose not to be vaccinated against influenza. The population-wide vaccination rate in the United States is only 40%, too low to provide herd immunity.
Compared to influenza, Covid-19 seems to have less risk for healthy young people. Yes, healthy young people die of Covid-19. With influenza, about 10% of deaths are people between the ages of 18 and 45. With Covid-19, about 2% of deaths are people in this age group.
I’m not arguing that Covid-19 isn’t dangerous. When I compare Covid-19 to seasonal influenza, I’m simply comparing two diseases that are both deadly.
The influenza vaccine saves lives. The data are indisputable.
But people don’t choose to get it! That’s why I think it’s unfortunately very likely that people whose personal risk from Covid-19 is lower than their risk from influenza will forgo vaccination. Even if we had access to 300 million doses of a safe, effective vaccine today, I doubt that enough people would get vaccinated to reach herd immunity.
Obviously, I’d love to be wrong about this. Vaccination saves lives.
Please, dear reader, get a flu vaccine each year. And, if we develop a safe, effective Covid-19 vaccine, you should get that too.
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We don’t have a vaccine. The shutdown is causing harm – the shutdown is even increasing the total number of people who will eventually die of Covid-19.
Is there anything we can do?
Luckily, yes. We do have another way to save lives. We can change the demographics of exposure.
Our understanding of Covid-19 still has major gaps. We need to do more research into the role of interleukin 6 in our bodies’ response to this disease – a lot of the healthy young people who’ve become critically ill with Covid-19 experienced excessive inflammation that further damaged their lungs.
But we already know that advanced age, smoking status, obesity and Type 2 diabetes are major risk factors for complications from Covid-19. Based on the data we have so far, it seems like a low-risk person might have somewhere between a hundredth or a thousandth the chance of becoming critically ill with Covid-19 as compared to an at-risk person. With influenza, a low-risk person might have between a tenth and a hundredth the chance of becoming critically ill.
The risk of Covid-19 is more concentrated on a small segment of the population than the risk of influenza.
To save lives, and to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed, we want to do everything possible to avoid exposing at-risk people to this virus.
But when healthy young people take extraordinary measures to avoid getting sick with Covid-19 – like the shutdown, social distancing, and wearing masks – they increase the relative burden of disease that falls on at-risk people. We should be prioritizing the protection of at-risk people, and we aren’t.
Because this epidemic will not end until we reach the population-wide threshold for herd immunity, someone has to get sick. We’d rather it be someone who is likely to recover.
Tragically, we already have data suggesting that a partial shutdown can transfer the burden of infection from one group to another. In the United States, our shutdown was partial from the beginning. People with white-collar jobs switched to working remotely, but cashiers, bus drivers, janitors, people in food prep, and nurses have kept working. In part because Black and brown people are over-represented in these forms of employment, they’ve been over-represented among Covid-19 deaths.
There is absolutely no reason to think that poor people would be more likely to safely recover from Covid-19 – indeed, due to air pollution, stress, sleep deprivation, limited access to good nutrition, and limited access to health care, we should suspect that poor people will be less likely to recover – but, during the shutdown, we’ve shifted the burden of disease onto their shoulders.
This is horrible. Both unethical and ineffective. And, really, an unsurprising outcome, given the way our country often operates.
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If we want to save lives, we need for healthy younger people to use their immune systems to protect us. The data we have so far indicates that the shutdown should end now — for them.
It will feel unfair if healthy younger people get to return to work and to their regular lives before others.
And the logistics won’t be easy. We’ll still need to make accommodations for people to work from home. Stores will have to maintain morning hours for at-risk shoppers, and be thoroughly cleaned each night.
If school buildings were open, some teachers couldn’t be there – they might need substitutes for months – and neither could some students, who might switch to e-learning to protect at-risk family.
We’ll need to provide enough monetary and other resources that at-risk people can endure a few more months of self-isolation. Which is horrible. We all know, now that we’ve all been doing this for a while, that what we’re asking at-risk people to endure is horrible. But the payoff is that we’ll be saving lives.
Indeed, the people who self-isolate will have lowest risk. We’ll be saving their lives.
And no one should feel forced, for financial reasons or otherwise, to take on more risk than they feel comfortable with. That’s why accommodations will be so important. I personally would feel shabby if I took extreme measures to protect myself, knowing that my risk is so much lower than other people’s, but you can’t look at someone in a mask and know their medical history, much less whom they might be protecting at home.
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All told, this plan isn’t good. I’m not trying to convince you that this is good. I’m just saying that, because we bungled things in January, this is the best we have.
My spouse posted my previous essay on social media, and I’d like to address some of people’s comments. There were some excellent points!
My apologies if I failed to address everything that people said, but I tried my best.
Scroll to find my responses to:
A shutdown could have prevented the Covid-19 epidemic.
We know that the current shutdown is either delaying or preventing deaths due to Covid-19.
Ending this epidemic with a vaccine would be ideal.
Ending the shutdown while requesting that at-risk people continue to self-isolate would save lives.
Why is it urgent to end the shutdown soon?
Why might more people die of Covid-19 just because we are slowing the spread of the virus?
How is the shutdown causing harm?
What about the rate at which people get sick? Isn’t the shutdown worthwhile, despite the risks described above, if it keeps our hospitals from being overwhelmed?
Don’t the antibody tests have a lot of false positives?
What about the political ramifications of ending the shutdown?
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1: “A shutdown could have prevented the Covid-19 epidemic.”
If we’d acted early enough, we could have isolated all cases of Covid-19 and prevented this whole debacle.
2: “We know that the current shutdown is either delaying or preventing deaths due to Covid-19.”
To date, the data suggests that the virus has only reached saturation inside a few closed environments, such as prisons. In Italy, both the timecourse of mortality and the results of antibody studies suggest that infections were still rising at the time of their lockdown.
Among the passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, deaths peaked 21 days after infections peaked – if the virus had already reached saturation in Italy, we’d expect to see deaths peak sooner than 21 days after the lockdown began. They did not.
So, again, this much is clear: worldwide, there was a significant new cause of death. When we look at mortality data, we see the curves suddenly rise in many locations. Some researchers, such as John Ioannidis, have speculated that Covid-19 causes death primarily in people with low life expectancy, in which case we would expect to see these mortality curves drop to lower-than-average levels after the epidemic ends. But even then, it’s unprecedented to see a number of deaths that would usually occur over the course of a year all within a matter of weeks.
Covid-19 is killing people, and the shutdown is either delaying or preventing people’s death from Covid-19.
For the shutdown to actually prevent death, one of the following needs to happen:
1.) We create a vaccine, allowing our population to reach 70% immunity without as many people contracting the illness.
2.) We take action to change which segment of the population is exposed to the virus, allowing us to reach 70% immunity without as many at-risk people being exposed.
See #3 and #4, below.
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3: “Ending this epidemic with a vaccine would be ideal.”
Vaccination is great science. Both my spouse and I love teaching about vaccines, in part because teaching the history of vaccine use is a good component of anti-racist science class.
Developing vaccines often takes a long time. I’ve read predictions of a year or two; my father, an infectious disease doctor, epidemiologist, research physician who runs vaccine trials, and co-developer of Merck’s HPV vaccine, guesses that it will take about five years.
And then, for the vaccine to end this epidemic, enough people will need to choose to be vaccinated that we reach approximately 70% immunity.
The reason it’s worthwhile to compare Covid-19 to seasonal influenza is that a vaccine will only end the epidemic if enough people choose to get it. Many people’s personal risk from Covid-19 is lower than their risk from seasonal influenza. Will those people choose to be vaccinated?
Obviously, I would be thrilled if the answer were “yes.” I’d love to live in a nation where people’s sense of altruism and civic duty compelled them to get vaccinated. My family is up-to-date on all of ours.
But many privileged families in the United States have elected to be freeloaders, declining the (well tested, quite safe) measles vaccine with the expectation that other people’s immunity will keep them safe. And, despite the well-documented dangers of influenza, only 40% of our population gets each year’s influenza vaccine.
A vaccine with low efficacy will still offer better protection when more people get it. If a higher percentage of our population were vaccinated against influenza, then influenza transmission would drop, and so each person’s immunity, whether high or low, would be less likely to be challenged.
The influenza vaccine saves lives. In Italy, where fewer people choose to get vaccinated against influenza (about 15% compared to our 40% of the population), the death rate from influenza is higher. Although it’s worth noting that this comparison is complicated by the fact that our health care system is so bad, with poor people especially having limited access to health care. In the United States, people between the ages of 18 and 49 comprise a higher proportion of influenza deaths than anywhere in Europe. Either our obesity epidemic or limited access to health care is probably to blame; possibly a combination of both.
In summary, for this plan to help us save lives, we will need to develop an effective vaccine, and then people will have to get it.
I am quite confident that we can eventually develop a vaccine against Covid-19. The virus includes a proofreading enzyme, so it should mutate more slowly than most RNA viruses. We don’t know how long it will take, but we can do it.
I am unfortunately pessimistic that people will choose to get the vaccine. And, unfortunately, when a low-risk person chooses to forgo vaccination, they’re not just putting themselves in harm’s way, they are endangering others. Most vaccines elicit a weaker immune response in elderly or immunocompromised recipients – exactly the group most at risk from Covid-19 – which is why we spend so much time harping about herd immunity.
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4: “Ending the shutdown while requesting that at-risk people continue to self-isolate would save lives.“
This plan has major downsides, too. Because we didn’t take action soon enough, every plan we have now is bad.
Low-risk people can still die of Covid-19. Even if they don’t die, Covid-19 can cause permanent health effects. Covid-19 reduces your ability to get oxygen to your body and brain. Even a “mild” case can leave your breathing labored for weeks – you’re not getting enough oxygen. Your muscles will ache. Your thoughts will be sluggish.
With a more severe case, people can be looking at heart damage. Renal failure. It would be cruel to look at all these long-term consequences and blithely call them “recovery.”
If our health care system were better, we’d treat people sooner. The earlier you intervene, helping to boost people’s oxygen levels, the better outcome you’ll have. There’s a great editorial from medical doctor Richard Levitan recommending that people monitor their health with a pulse oximeter during this epidemic.
If you notice your oxygen levels declining, get help right away. Early intervention can prevent organ damage. And you’ll be helping everyone else, too – the sooner you intervene, the less medical care you will need.
Because medical debt can derail lives, many people in this country delay treatment as long as possible, hoping that their problems will go away naturally. That’s why people are often so sick when they show up at the ER. I imagine that this is yet another reason – alongside air pollution, food deserts, sleep loss, and persistent stress exacerbated by racism – that poor communities have had such a high proportion of people with severe cases of Covid-19.
And I imagine – although we don’t yet have enough data to know – that financial insecurity caused by the shutdown is making this worse. It’s a rotten situation: you have a segment of population that has to continue working during the shutdown, which means they now have the highest likelihood to be exposed to the virus, and they’re now under more financial strain, which might increase the chance that they’ll delay treatment.
We know that early treatment saves lives, and not everyone is sufficiently privileged to access that.
All this sounds awful. And it is. But, if we took action to shift exposure away from high risk groups, the likelihood that any individual suffers severe consequences is lower.
And there is another caveat with this plan – some people may be at high risk of complications for Covid-19 and not even realize it. In the United States, a lot of people either have type 2 diabetes or are pre-diabetic and don’t yet realize. These people have elevated risk. Both smoking and airpollution elevate risk, but people don’t always know which airborn pollutants they’ve been exposed to. (Which, again, is why it’s particularly awful that our administration is weakening air quality standards during this epidemic.)
Even if we recommended continued self-isolation for only those people who know themselves to have high risk from Covid-19, though, we would be saving lives. The more we can protect people in this group from being exposed to the virus – not just now, but ever – the more lives we will save.
We won’t be able to do this perfectly. It’ll be a logistical nightmare trying to do it at all. People at high risk from Covid-19 needs goods and services just like everybody else. We might have to give daily Covid-19 PCR tests to anyone visiting their homes, like doctors, dentists, and even delivery workers.
At that point, the false negative rate from Covid-19 PCR tests becomes a much bigger problem – currently, these false negatives reduce the quality of our data (but who cares?) and delay treatment (which can be deadly). A false negative that causes inadvertent exposure could cost lives.
Some people will be unable to work, either because they or a close relative has high risk of Covid-19. Some children will be unable to go to school. We will need a plan to help these people.
We will have to work very hard to keep people safe even after the shutdown ends for some.
But, again, if everyone does the same thing, then the demographics of people infected with Covid-19 will reflect our population demographics. We can save lives by skewing the demographics of the subset of our population that is exposed to Covid-19 to include more low-risk individuals, which will require that we stratify our recommendations by risk (at least as well as we can assess it).
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5: “Why is it urgent to end the shutdown soon?“
1.) By delaying Covid-19 deaths, we run to risk of causing more total people to die of Covid-19.
2.) The shutdown itself is causing harm.
See #6 and #7, below.
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6: “Why might more people die of Covid-19 just because we are slowing the spread of the virus?“
[EDIT: I wrote a more careful explanation of the takeaways of the Harvard study. That’s here if you would like to take a look!]
This is due to the interplay between duration of immunity and duration of the epidemic. At one point in time, seasonal influenza was a novel zoogenic disease. Human behavior allowed the influenza virus to become a perpetual burden on our species. No one wants for humans to still be dying of Covid-19 in ten or twenty years. (Luckily, because the virus that causes Covid-19 seems to mutate more slowly than influenza, it should be easier to design a single vaccine that protects people.)
In the Harvard model, we can see that there are many scenarios in which a single, finite shutdown leads to more deaths from Covid-19 than if we’d done nothing. Note the scenarios for which the colored cumulative incidence curves (shown on the right) exceed the black line representing how many critical cases we’d have if we had done nothing.
Furthermore, their model does not account for people’s immunity potentially waning over time. Currently, we do not know how long people’s immunity to Covid-19 will last. We won’t know whether people’s immunity will last at least a year until a year from now. There’s no way to test this preemptively.
If we could all go into stasis and simply not move for about a month, there’d be no new cases of Covid-19, and this virus would be gone forever. But people still need to eat during the shutdown. Many people are still working. So the virus is still spreading, and we have simply slowed the rate of transmission.
This seems good, because we’re slowing the rate at which people enter the hospital, but it’s actually bad if we’re increasing the number of people who will eventually enter the hospital.
Based on our research with other coronaviruses, we expect that re-infection will cause a person to experience symptoms less severe than their first case of Covid-19. But a re-infected person can still spread the disease to others. And we don’t know what will happen if a person’s risk factors – such as age, smoking status, diabetes status, etc. – have increased in the time since their last infection.
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7: “How is the shutdown causing harm?“
If you turn on Fox News, I imagine you’d hear people talking about the damage we’re doing to our economy. They might discuss stock market numbers.
Who gives a shit? In my opinion, you’d have to be pretty callous to think that maintaining the Nasdaq bubble is more important than saving lives.
At the same time, I think you’d have to be pretty callous to not feel extremely concerned by the United Nations’ policy brief, “The impact of Covid-19 on children.”
In this report, they estimate that the shutdown we’ve had so far will cause hundreds of thousands of children to die, many from malnutrition and the other health impacts of poverty. The longer the shutdown continues, the more children will die.
That’s a worldwide number, and most of those children live outside the United States. But I’d like to think that their lives matter, too.
The report also discusses the lifelong harm that will be inflicted on children from five months (or more!) of school closure. Drop-outs, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, recruitment of child soldiers, and the myriad health consequences of low educational attainment.
I live in a wealthy college town, but even here there is a significant population of students who don’t have internet access. Students with special needs aren’t getting the services they deserve. Food insecurity is worse.
You’re lucky that privacy protections prevent me from sharing a story about what can happen to poor kids when all the dentists’ offices are closed. I felt ashamed that this was the best my country had to offer.
As the shutdown continues, domestic violence is rising. We can assume that child abuse is rising, also, but we won’t know until later, when we finally have a chance to save children from it. In the past, levels of child abuse have been correlated with the amount of time that children spend in the presence of their abusers (usually close family), and reporting tends to happen during tense in-person conversations at school.
The shutdown has probably made our drug epidemic worse (and this was already killing about 70,000 people per year in the U.S.). When people are in recovery, one of the best strategies to stay sober is to spend a lot of time working, out of the house, and meeting with a supportive group in communal space. Luckily, many of the people I know who are in recovery have been categorized as essential workers.
A neighbor recently sent me a cartoon suggesting that the biggest harm caused by the shutdown is boredom. (I’m going to include it, below, but don’t worry: I won’t spend too much time rattling sabers with a straw man.) And, for privileged families like mine, it is. We’re safe, we’re healthy, we get to eat. My kids are still learning – we live in a house full of computers and books.
But many of the 75 million children in the United States don’t live in homes like mine, with the privilege we have. Many of our 50 million primary and secondary school students are not still learning academically during the shutdown.
Whether the shutdown is preventing or merely delaying the deaths of people at risk of serious complications from Covid-19, we have to remember that the benefit comes at a cost. What we’ve done already will negatively impact children for the rest of their lives. And the longer this goes on, the more we’re hurting them.
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8: “What about the rate at which people get sick? Isn’t the shutdown worthwhile, despite the risks described above, if it keeps our hospitals from being overwhelmed?“
In writing this, I struggled with how best to organize the various responses. I hope it doesn’t seem too ingenuous to address this near the end, because slowing the rate of infection so that our hospitals don’t get overwhelmed is the BEST motivation for the shutdown. More than the hope that a delay will yield a new vaccine, or new therapies to treat severe cases, or even new diagnostics to catch people before they develop severe symptoms, we don’t want to overwhelm our hospitals.
If our physicians have to triage care, more people will die.
And I care a lot about what this epidemic will be like for our physicians. My father is a 67-year-old infectious disease doctor who just finished another week of clinical service treating Covid-19 patients at the low-income hospital in Indianapolis. My brother-in-law is an ER surgeon in Minneapolis. These cities have not yet had anything like the influx of severe cases in New York City – for demographic and environmental reasons, it’s possible they never will. But they might.
Based on the case fatality rate measured elsewhere, I’d estimate that only 10% of the population in Minneapolis has already been infected with Covid-19, so the epidemic may have a long way yet to go.
If we ended the shutdown today for everyone, with no recommendation that at-risk groups continue to isolate and no new measures to protect them, we would see a spike in severe cases.
If we ended the shutdown for low-risk groups, and did a better job of monitoring people’s health to catch Covid-19 at early, more-easily-treatable stages (through either PCR testing or oxygen levels), we can avoid overwhelming hospitals.
And the shutdown itself is contributing toward chaos at hospitals. Despite being on the front lines of this epidemic, ER doctors in Minneapolis have received a 30% pay cut. I imagine my brother-in-law is not the only physician who could no longer afford day care for his children after the pay cut. (Because so many people are delaying care out of fear of Covid-19, hospitals are running out of money.) Precisely when we should be doing everything in our power to make physicians’ lives easier, we’re making things more stressful.
We could end the shutdown without even needing to evoke the horrible trolley-problem-esque calculations of triage. Arguments could be made that even if it led to triage it might be worthwhile to end the shutdown – the increase in mortality would be the percentage of triaged cases that could have survived if they’d been treated, and we as a nation might decide that this number was acceptable to prevent the harms described above – but with a careful plan, we need not come to that.
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9: “Don’t the antibody tests have a lot of false positives?“
False positives are a big problem when a signal is small. I happen to like a lot of John Ioannidis’s work – I think his paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” is an important contribution to the literature – but I agree that the Santa Clara study isn’t particularly convincing.
When I read the Santa Clara paper, I nodded and thought “That sounds about right,” but I knew my reaction was most likely confirmation bias at work.
Which is why, in the essay, I mostly discussed antibody studies that found high percentages of the population had been infected with Covid-19, like the study in Germany and the study in the Italian town of Robbio. In these studies, the signal was sufficiently high that false positives aren’t as worrisome.
In Santa Clara, when they reported a 2% infection rate, the real number might’ve been as low as zero. When researchers in Germany reported a 15% infection rate, the real number might’ve been anywhere in the range of 13% to 17% – or perhaps double that, if the particular chips they used had a false negative rate similar to the chips manufactured by Premier Biotech in Minneapolis.
I’m aware that German response to Covid-19 has been far superior to our bungled effort in the United States, but an antibody tests is just a basic ELISA. We’ve been doing these for years.
Luckily for us, we should soon have data from good antibody studies here in the United States. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want to see the results of those. I’m not a sociopath – I haven’t gone out and joined the gun-toting protesters.
But we’ll have this data in a matter of weeks, so that’s the time frame we should be talking about here. Not months. Not years. And I’ll be shocked if these antibody studies don’t show widespread past infection and recovery from Covid-19.
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10: “What about the political ramifications of ending the shutdown?“
I am, by nature, an extremely cautious person. And I have a really dire fear.
I’m inclined to believe that ending the shutdown is the right thing to do. I’ve tried to explain why. I’ve tried to explain what I think would be the best way to do it.
But also, I’m a scientist. You’re not allowed to be a scientist unless you’re willing to be proven wrong.
So, yes. I might be wrong. New data might indicate that writing this essay was a horrible mistake.
Still, please bear with me for a moment. If ending the shutdown soon turns out to be the correct thing to do, and if only horrible right-wing fanatics have been saying that we should end the shutdown soon, won’t that help our current president get re-elected?
There is a very high probability that his re-election would cause even more deaths than Covid-19.
Failing to address climate change could kill billions. Immigration controls against migrants fleeing war zones could kill millions. Weakened EPA protections could kill hundreds of thousands. Reduced access to health care could kill tens of thousands.
And, yes, there are horrible developments that neither major political party in the United States has talked about, like the risk that our antibiotics stop working, but I think it’s difficult to argue that one political party isn’t more dangerous than the other, here.
I feel pretty confident about all the scientific data I’ve discussed above. Not as confident as I’d like, which would require more data, but pretty confident.
I feel extremely confident that we need to avoid a situation in which the far right takes ownership of an idea that turns out to have been correct. And it’ll be dumb luck, just a bad coincidence. The only “data” they’re looking at are stock market numbers, or maybe the revenue at Trump-owned hotels.
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EDIT: I also wrote a more careful explanation of the takeaways of the Harvard study. That’s here if you would like to take a look!
My spouse recently sent me a link to the article “Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence” by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. From reading this article, I got the impression that Gelman is a good mathematician. And he raises some legitimate concerns.
First, some background: in case you haven’t noticed, most of the United States is operating under a half-assed lockdown. In theory, there are stay-at-home orders, but many people, such as grocery store clerks, janitors, health care workers, construction workers, restaurant chefs, delivery drivers, etc., are still going to work as normal. However, schools have been closed, and most people are trying to stand at least six feet away from strangers.
We’re doing this out of fear that Covid-19 is an extremely dangerous new viral disease. Our initial data suggested that as many as 10% of people infected with Covid-19 would die.
That’s terrifying! We would be looking at tens of millions of deaths in the United States alone! A virus like this will spread until a majority of people have immunity to it – a ballpark estimate is that 70% of the population needs immunity before the epidemic stops. And our early data suggested that one in ten would die.
My family was scared. We washed our hands compulsively. We changed into clean clothes as soon as we came into the house. The kids didn’t leave our home for a week. My spouse went to the grocery store and bought hundreds of dollars of canned beans and cleaning supplies.
And, to make matters worse, our president was on the news saying that Covid-19 was no big deal. His nonchalance made me freak out more. Our ass-hat-in-chief has been wrong about basically everything, in my opinion. His environmental policies are basically designed to make more people die. If he claimed we had nothing to worry about, then Covid-19 was probably more deadly than I expected.
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Five weeks have passed, and we now have much more data. It seems that Covid-19 is much less dangerous than we initially feared. For someone my age (37), Covid-19 is less dangerous than seasonal influenza.
Last year, seasonal influenza killed several thousand people between the ages of 18 and 49 in the United States – most likely 2,500 people, but perhaps as many as 5,800. People in this age demographic account for about 10% of total flu deaths in the United States, year after year.
Seasonal influenza also killed several hundred children last year – perhaps over a thousand.
There’s a vaccine against influenza, but most people don’t bother.
That’s shocking.
Seasonal influenza is more dangerous than Covid-19 for people between the ages of 18 and 49, but only 35% of them chose to be vaccinated in the most recently reported year (2018). And because the vaccination rate is so low, our society doesn’t have herd immunity. By choosing not to get the influenza vaccine, these people are endangering themselves and others.
Some people hope that the Covid-19 epidemic will end once a vaccine is released. I am extremely skeptical. The biggest problem, to my mind, isn’t that years might pass before there’s a vaccine. I just can’t imagine that a sufficient percentage of our population would choose to get a Covid-19 vaccine when most people’s personal risk is lower than their risk from influenza.
When I teach classes in jail, dudes often tell me about which vaccines they think are too dangerous for their kids to get. I launch into a tirade about how safe most vaccines are, and how deadly the diseases they prevent.
Seriously, get your kids vaccinated. You don’t want to watch your child die of measles.
And, seriously, dear reader – get a flu vaccine each year. Even if you’re too selfish to worry about the other people whom your mild case of influenza might kill, do it for yourself.
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We already know how dangerous seasonal influenza is. But what about Covid-19?
To answer that, we need data. And one set of data is unmistakable – many people have died. Hospitals around the world have experienced an influx of patients with a common set of symptoms. They struggle to breathe; their bodies weaken from oxygen deprivation; their lungs accumulate liquid; they die.
Many people have been put on ventilators, but that’s often the beginning of the end. Most people put on ventilators will die. Among patients over 70 years old, three quarters who are put on ventilators will die.
For each of these patients saved, three others are consigned to an agonizing death in the hospital, intubated among the flashing lights, the ceaseless blips and bleeps. At home, they’d die in a day; in the hospital, their deaths will take three weeks.
And the sheer quantity of deaths sounds scary – especially for people who don’t realize how many tens of thousands die from influenza in the United States each year.
Or, consider: cigarette smoking causes 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including 41,000 people who die from second-hand smoke exposure. Those 41,000 aren’t even choosing to smoke! But cigarettes kill them anyway.
Indeed, when people die of Covid-19, it’s often because their lungs fail. Smoking is obviously a major risk factor for dying of Covid-19 – a significant portion of reported Covid-19 deaths could be considered cigarette deaths instead. Or as air pollution deaths – and yet, our current president is using this crisis as an opportunity to weaken EPA airquality regulations.
Air pollution is a huge problem for a lot of Black communities in the United States. Our racist housing policies have placed a lot of minority neighborhoods near heavily polluting factories. Now Covid-19 is turning what is already a lifelong struggle for breath into a death sentence.
I would enthusiastically support a shutdown motivated by the battle for clean air.
But if we want to know how scary this virus is, we need to know how many people were infected. If that many people died after everyone in the country had it, then Covid-19 would be less dangerous than influenza. If that many people died after only a hundred thousand had been infected, then this would be terrifying, and far more dangerous than influenza.
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Initially, our data came from PCR testing.
These are good tests. Polymerase chain reaction is highly specific. If you want to amplify a certain genetic sequence, you can design short DNA primers that will bind only to that sequence. Put the whole mess in a thermocycler and you get a bunch of your target, as long as the gene is present in the test tube in the first place. If the gene isn’t there, you’ll get nothing.
PCR works great. Even our lovely but amnesiac lab tech never once screwed it up.
So, do the PCR test and you’ll know whether a certain gene is present in your test tube. Target a viral gene and you’ll know whether the virus is present in your test tube. Scoop out some nose glop from somebody to put into the test tube and you’ll know whether the virus is present in that nose glop.
The PCR test is a great test that measures whether someone is actively shedding virus. It answers, is there virus present in the nose glop?
This is not the same question as, has this person ever been infected with Covid-19?
It’s a similar question – most people infected with a coronavirus will have at least a brief period of viral shedding – but it’s a much more specific question. When a healthy person is infected with a coronavirus, the period of viral shedding can be as short as a single day.
A person can get infected with a coronavirus, and if you do the PCR test either before or after that single day, the PCR test will give a negative result. Nope, no viral RNA is in this nose glop!
And so we know that the PCR test will undercount the true number of infections.
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When we look at the age demographics for Covid-19 infections as measured by PCR test, the undercount becomes glaringly obvious.
Consider the PCR test data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. To date, this is our most complete set of PCR data – everyone on board was tested multiple times. And from this data, it appears that very few children were exposed to the virus.
Friends, it is exceedingly unlikely that such a low percentage of children were exposed to this virus. Children are disgusting. I believe this is common knowledge. Parents of small children are pretty much always sick because children are so disgusting.
Seriously, my family has been doing the whole “social distancing” thing for over a month, and yet my nose is dripping while I type this.
Children are always touching everything, and then they rub their eyeballs or chew on their fingers. If you take them someplace, they grubble around on the floor. They pick up discarded tissues and ask, “What’s this?”
“That’s somebody’s gross kleenex, is what it is! Just, just drop it. I know it’s trash, I know we’re not supposed to leave trash on the ground, but just, just drop it, okay? Somebody will come throw it away later.”
The next day: “Dad, you said somebody would throw that kleenex away, but it’s still there!”
Bloody hell. Children are little monsters.
It seems fairly obvious that at least as high a percentage of children would be infected as any other age demographic.
But they’re not showing up from the PCR data. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the lockdown began on February 5th, but PCR testing didn’t begin until February 11th. Anyone who was infected but quickly recovered will be invisible to that PCR test. And even people who are actively shedding viral particles can feel totally well. People can get infected and recover without noticing a thing.
We see the same thing when we look at the PCR data from Italy. If we mistakenly assumed that the PCR data was measuring the number of infections, and not measuring the number of people who were given a PCR test while shedding viral particles, we’d conclude that elderly people went out and socialized widely, getting each other sick, and only occasionally infected their great-grandchildren at home.
Here in the United States, children are disgusting little monsters. I bet kids are disgusting in Italy, too. They’re disgusting all over the world.
A much more likely scenario is that children spread this virus at school. Many probably felt totally fine; some might’ve had a bad fever or the sniffles for a few days. But then they recovered.
When they got their great-grandparents sick – which can happen easily since so many Italian families live in multigenerational homes – elderly people began to die.
So we know that the PCR test is undercounting the true number of infections. Unless you’re testing every person, every day, regardless of whether or not they have symptoms, you’re going to undercount the number of infections.
In a moment, we can work through a way to get a more accurate count. But perhaps it’s worth mentioning that, for someone my age, Covid-19 would seem to be about as dangerous as influenza even if we assumed that the PCR data matched the true number of infections.
If you’re a healthy middle-aged or young person, you should not feel personally afraid.
That alone would not be an excuse to go out and start dancing in the street, though. Your actions might cause other people to die.
(NOTE & CORRECTION: After this post went up, my father recommended that I add something more about personal risk. No one has collected enough data on this yet, but he suspects that the next most important risk factor, after smoking and age, will be type 2 diabetes. And he reminded me that many people in their 30s & 40s in this country are diabetic or prediabetic and don’t even realize it yet. Everyone in this category probably has elevated risk of complications from Covid-19.)
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After you’ve been infected with a virus, your body will start making antibodies. These protect you from being infected again.
Have you read Shel Silverstein’s Missing Piece book? Antibodies work kind of like that. They have a particular shape, and so they’ll glom onto a virus only if that virus has outcroppings that match the antibody’s shape. Then your body sees the antibodies hanging out on a virus like a GPS tracker and proceeds to destroy the virus.
So to make an antibody test, you take some stuff that looks like the outcroppings on the virus and you put it on a chip. Wash somebody’s blood over it, and if that blood contains antibodies that have the right shape to glom onto the virus, they’ll stick to the chip. All your other antibodies, the ones that recognize different viruses, will float away.
An antibody test is going to be worse than a PCR test. It’s easier to get a false positive result – antibodies are made of proteins, and they can unfold if you treat them roughly, and then they’ll stick to anything. Then you’ll think that somebody has the right antibodies, but they don’t. That’s bad.
You have to be much more careful when you’re doing an antibody test. I wouldn’t have asked our lab tech to do them for me.
An antibody test is also going to have false negatives. A viral particle is a big honking thing, and there are lots of places on its surface where an antibody might bind. If your antibodies recognize some aspect of the virus that’s different from what the test manufacturers included on their chip, your antibodies will float away. Even though they’d protect you from the actual virus if you happened to be exposed to it.
If you’re a cautious person, though – and I consider myself to be pretty cautious – you’d much rather have an antibody test with a bunch of false negatives than false positives. If you’re actually immune to Covid-19 but keep being cautious, well, so what? You’re safe either way. But if you think you’re immune when you’re not, then you might get sick. That’s bad.
Because antibody tests are designed to give more false negatives than false positives, you should know that it’d be really foolish to use them to track an infection. Like, if you’re testing people to see who is safe to work as a delivery person today, use the PCR test! The antibody test has a bunch of false negatives, and there’s a time lag between the onset of infection and when your body will start making antibodies.
If you use the antibody test on a bunch of people, though, you can tell how many were infected. And that’s useful information, too.
In the town of Robbio in Italy (pop. 6,000), the PCR test showed that only 23 people had been infected with Covid-19. But then the mayor implored everyone to get an antibody test, and 10% of people had actually been infected with – and had recovered from – Covid-19. Most of them couldn’t even recall having been sick.
I don’t know who made the tests used in Robbio – maybe they were a little better, maybe they were a little worse. Based on my experience, I wouldn’t be so surprised if the true infection rate with Covid-19 in that town was really just 10% – nor would I be surprised to hear that the chips had a high false-negative rate and that the infection rate was 20% or more.
If you calculate the fatality rate of Covid-19 in Italy by assuming that the PCR tests caught every infection, you’d get a terrifying 10%.
If you instead assume that many other towns had a similar infection rate to Robbio, you’ll instead calculate that the fatality rate was well under one percent.
Italy has higher risk than the United States due to age demographics, smoking rates, and multigenerational households – and even in Italy, the fatality rate was probably well under one percent.
When researchers in Germany randomly chose people to take a Covid-19 PCR test (many of whom had no symptoms), they found that 2% of the population was actively shedding virus – a much higher number of cases than they would have found if they tested only sick people. And when they randomly chose people to take an antibody test, they found that 15% had already recovered from the infection (again, many of whom had never felt sick). According to these numbers – which are expected to be an undercount, due to false negatives and the time lag before antibody production – they calculated a case fatality rate of 0.37%.
That would be about three-fold more dangerous than seasonal influenza.
In the United States, our bungling president gutted the CDC, leaving us without the expertise needed to address Covid-19 (or myriad other problems that might arise). During the first few months of this epidemic, very few people managed to get a PCR test. That’s why our data from the PCR tests is likely to be a dramatic undercount – indeed, when we finally started producing accurate tests, the apparent growth in Covid-19 caseload superimposed with the growth in test availability.
In the absence of good PCR data, we have to rely on antibody data to track infections after the fact. Which is why a town in Colorado with zero reported infections, as measured by PCR, had sufficiently widespread exposure that 2% of the population had already recovered from Covid-19.
Yes, there were problems with the Stanford study’s data collection – they displayed advertisements to a random selection of people, but then a self-selected subset responded. The pool of respondents were enriched for white women, but Santa Clara’s outbreak probably began among Asian-Americans. And we all know that random sampling doesn’t always give you an accurate depiction of the population at large – after all, random polling predicted that a competent president would be elected in 2016.
Now look at us.
It’s also likely that people with a poor understanding of the biology could misinterpret the result of the Stanford study. They found that PCR tests had undercounted the infection rate in Santa Clara county, at the time of this study, by 85-fold.
It would be absurd to assume that you could simply multiply all PCR results by 85 to determine the true infection rate, but some people did. And then pointed out the absurdity of their own bad math.
In places where more people are being tested by PCR, and they’re being tested more often, the PCR results will be closer to the true infection rate. If you gave everyone in the United States a PCR test, and did it every day, then the PCR data would be exactly equal to the true infection rate.
If we had data like that from the beginning, we wouldn’t have been scared. We would’ve known the true case fatality rate early on, and, also, at-risk people could’ve been treated as soon as they got infected. We’d be able to save many more lives.
In Italy, it seems like Covid-19 is three- or four-fold more dangerous than seasonal influenza. My guess is that Italy might have had about 50,000 deaths if they hadn’t enacted the lockdown.
In the United States, on a population level, Covid-19 is probably also more dangerous than seasonal influenza. But there’s a big difference in terms of the distribution of risk.
10% is roughly the proportion of young people who die of seasonal influenza. But only 1% of Covid-19 deaths are people younger than 35. The news reports don’t always make clear how much the risk of Covid-19 is clustered in a small segment of the population.
This has serious implications for what we should do next. If we were dealing with a virus that was about three-fold more dangerous than seasonal influenza for everyone, we might just return to life as normal. (Indeed, we carried on as normal during the bad years when seasonal influenza killed 90,000 people instead of last year’s 30,000.)
Because the risk from Covid-19 is so concentrated, though, we can come up with a plan that will save a lot of lives.
Healthy people under retirement age should resume most parts of their lives as normal. Schools should re-open: for students, Covid-19 is much less dangerous than seasonal influenza. I think that people should still try to work from home when possible, because it’s the right thing to do to fight climate change.
At-risk people should continue to isolate themselves as much as possible.
This sounds crummy, but at-risk people would just continue to do the thing that everyone is doing currently. And the plan would save many lives because the epidemic would end in about 3 months, after the virus had spread to saturation among our nation’s low-risk cohort.
Their data are easy enough to understand. In each of these graphs, they show a blue box for how long social distancing would last, and then four colored lines to represent how many infections we’d see if we did no social distancing (black), medium quality social distancing (red), good social distancing (blue), or excellent social distancing (green).
So, from top to bottom, you’re looking at the graphs of what happens if we do a month of social distancing … or two months … or three, or four … or forever.
And you can see the outcomes in the panels on the right-hand side. The black line shows what would happen if we did nothing. Infections rise fast, then level off after the virus has reached saturation. There are two important features of this graph – the final height that it reaches, which is the total number of severe cases (and so a good proxy for the number of deaths), and the slope of the line, which is how fast the severe cases appear. A steeper hill means many people getting sick at the same time, which means hospitals might be overwhelmed.
So, okay. Looking at their graphs, we see that social distancing saves lives … if we do it forever. If you never leave your house again, you won’t die of Covid-19.
But if social distancing ends, it doesn’t help. The slopes are nearly as steep as if we’d done nothing, and the final height – the total number of people who die – is higher.
(Often, one of their curves will have a gentler slope than the others — usually the good-but-not-excellent social distancing seems best. So you’d have to pray that you were doing a precisely mediocre job of not infecting strangers. Do it a little better or a little worse and you cause people to die. This isn’t an artifact — it’s based on the density of uninfected people when social distancing ends — but let’s just say “mathematical models are wonky” and leave it at that.)
In a subsequent figure, the Harvard team tried to model what might happen if we occasionally resumed our lives for a month or so at a time, but then had another shutdown. This is the only scenario in which their model predicts that social distancing would be helpful.
Even in the extreme case that we mostly stayed in our homes for the better part of two years, social distancing would case more deaths from Covid-19 than if we had done nothing.
That’s not even accounting for all the people who would die from a greater risk of domestic violence, hunger, drug addiction, suicide, and sedentary behavior during the shutdown.
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When our data was limited, the shutdown seemed reasonable. We wouldn’t be able to undo the damage we’d done by waiting.
Except, whoops, we waited anyway. We didn’t quarantine travelers in January. The shutdown didn’t begin March, when the epidemic was well underway in many places.
Now that we have more data, we should re-open schools, though. For most people, Covid-19 is no more dangerous than seasonal influenza. We already have enough data from antibody testing to be pretty confident about this, and even if we want to be extremely cautious, we should continue the shutdown for a matter of weeks while we conduct a few more antibody studies. Not months, and certainly not years.
At the same time, we need to do a better job of protecting at-risk people. This means providing health care for everyone. This means cleaning our air, staunching the pollution that plagues low-income neighborhoods. This might mean daily medical checkups and PCR tests for people who work closely with at-risk populations.
Our country will have to be different in the future, but mostly because we, as a people, have done such a shitty job of creating justice and liberty for all. We need to focus on addressing the inequities that we’ve let fester for generations. That’ll help far more than using a bandanna to cover up your smile.
Given that our bizarre medical spending practices could doom the U.S., it feels strange to write about this topic as a participant-observer. So let me state upfront: I tried! I argued with my medical care providers for several minutes, trying to keep them from wasting money. I used logic. I cited evidence. I lost the argument. They stuck to their position with the unwavering intransigence of bureaucratic rule-followers.
They were probably right to ignore me. If a bigwig in a suit writes guidelines saying, “Do it this way,” a nurse or doctor might be fired for doing things differently.
The background: many people in my hometown recently contracted mumps. Those who work with young people were instructed to get a “mumps titer” — this means measuring the concentration of mumps antibodies in a person’s blood — and those with low readings would be told to get vaccinated.
Sounds sensible enough. But the titer is more expensive than the vaccine, and we have the vaccine in abundance, so I went in and asked them to just vaccinate me. Yes, I was vaccinated already as a child, but it doesn’t hurt to get a booster.
They refused. It’s a live vaccine, see? To vaccinate you, they inject the actual virus. The goal is to produce a “subclinical infection.” But some adults have an adverse reaction — they get sick. To minimize risk, our health care provider wanted to vaccinate only those people who seemed to need it.
The problem with this logic is fairly clear — although some people may get sick from the vaccination, the people who get sick are going to be those who were not yet immune. By screening people with high titers, the total number of patients suffering an adverse reaction won’t go down at all.
The faulty logic would be problematic even if the mumps titer was a good assay. But it’s not. It’s fairly well known that it produces many false negative results — people who appear not to be immune to mumps, but are. According to my health care provider’s policy, many people who are already immune to mumps will be vaccinated again.
This is fine from a health perspective, of course. A second immunization will not hurt. These people are very unlikely to get sick from the attenuated virus. The only problem is that money was wasted on the titer.
Worse, common titer assays have a fairly high false positive rate: that is, people who appear to be immune, but aren’t. Under my health care provider’s plan, these people won’t be vaccinated. Now, these are people who might get sick from the vaccine — but they’d get much sicker if exposed to the actual virus. If they’re not vaccinated, they’ll be left at high risk.
Compared to simply vaccinating everyone, testing everyone by mumps titer costs somewhere around twice as much. Add in the number of vaccines that have to be given after the tests and the plan is even more expensive — even if everyone in the population already is immune to mumps and you’re only giving booster shots to those with false negatives, that could easily be twenty percent or more. If you’re dealing with a mixed population where some people aren’t immune, the outlook is worse. Then you’re also risking that someone with a false positive result, whom you decline to vaccinate, gets sick. Mumps can make you very sick, especially adults. It can cause brain inflammation — my father, who contracted mumps as a child, needed a spinal tap to get through it. A scary procedure. Much more expensive than the vaccine.
(Well, a spinal tap now is much more expensive than the vaccine now. For my father to have been vaccinated, someone would have had to build a time machine and launch the shot into the past. Time travel takes huge amounts of energy & is rather more expensive than a spinal tap.)
Nobody at my health care clinic was convinced. They were adamant. No vaccine without phlebotomy!
At least the universe has a sense of humor. After all that, of course my titer would be a false negative. Their money wasted, they called me back and had me get the unnecessary shot. Just like I’d requested from the beginning.
Frank Brown Cloud 
