COVID-19 thread

[Nortaneous]

Some commentators have pointed out that the conservative response to Covid has been more or less the same as their response to 9/11: "defy the terror" by not taking any measures against it

This was the progressive response until March or April. Masks are magical thinking! WHO says travel bans are ineffective! Don't spread panic! It's all hysteria! Go on with your lives! The only epidemic you need to worry about is the Tories! Don't change any plans due to misinformation!

The actual epistemic fault with conservatives is that they start with the assumption that there's an 'other side' and that it's wrong, and then decide how. So when progressives changed tack from complaining about how concerns about COVID were "misinformation" to supporting lockdowns and mask mandates, conservatives decided to... adopt the progressives' old position. De Blasio was right the first time!

Americans were allowed back without testing and contact tracing, and they quickly spread the virus. (IIRC it would be legally difficult to prevent Americans from returning to their own country. But having them all come back at once, in crowded airplanes and customs lines, is the opposite of hindering the spread of the virus.)

I don't think "test and trace" was ever a viable option. No American with a smartphone has any privacy, but we don't like to be reminded of it. I assume a mandatory quarantine would've required a state of exception, though, and no one would've let the bad orange man do that. Maybe the response would've been better with a Democrat in the White House after all - what's a little mandatory quarantine compared to what Obama got away with?

[bradrn]

Americans were allowed back without testing and contact tracing, and they quickly spread the virus. (IIRC it would be legally difficult to prevent Americans from returning to their own country. But having them all come back at once, in crowded airplanes and customs lines, is the opposite of hindering the spread of the virus.)

I don't think "test and trace" was ever a viable option. No American with a smartphone has any privacy, but we don't like to be reminded of it.

It was a viable option in Australia. It doesn’t even need a smartphone — over here, we just interview anyone who has COVID-19 to see where they’ve been. Then we list those places publicly and ask anyone who’s been there to get tested. (A smartphone app was tried, but it was a massive failure: it found no contacts who weren’t already found by manual contact tracing.)

[Moose-tache]

I don't think "test and trace" was ever a viable option. No American with a smartphone has any privacy, but we don't like to be reminded of it. I assume a mandatory quarantine would've required a state of exception, though, and no one would've let the bad orange man do that. Maybe the response would've been better with a Democrat in the White House after all - what's a little mandatory quarantine compared to what Obama got away with?

I know this isn't the politics thread, but Obama couldn't get away with giving people healthcare, so I hardly think the Democrats are immune to backlash against heavy-handed government policies. But as a note of reconciliation, I do think that the Democrats would have done marginally better, if that. Many of the failures at the CDC were largely apolitical, and any government response would have faced polarized backlash from one half of the population or the other. The February failure to get large-scale testing up and running before community spread, for example, could easily have happened under a Democrat. Blocking travel from China, and the backlash against it, probably happened exactly as it would have under a Democrat.

But as others have pointed out, there's nothing about contact tracing that's impossible in America. We don't need GPS tracking. In early February, testing meant combing countless people until you find the one person in your town who has the virus. It would have been easy at that stage to simply quarantine their friends and relatives. Heck, in some states the first confirmed Covid case was someone who had recently been to china. It doesn't take a room of CIA hackers to do contact tracing in that scenario. The larger problem was that no government response really got off the ground until very late February, by which point community spread made that kind of tracing logistically difficult.

[zompist]

Some commentators have pointed out that the conservative response to Covid has been more or less the same as their response to 9/11: "defy the terror" by not taking any measures against it

This was the progressive response until March or April. Masks are magical thinking! WHO says travel bans are ineffective! Don't spread panic! It's all hysteria! Go on with your lives! The only epidemic you need to worry about is the Tories! Don't change any plans due to misinformation!

If you're thinking February, there certainly wasn't much panic, but there was concern. I remember being worried in February because my wife was traveling. This was before any lockdowns; as of Feb. 28 there was a grand total of 53 cases in the US. This CDC notice from that date calls Covid a "serious public health threat", and suggest that the CDC actually did think a test and trace program could work at that point.

A little over a week later, it was already clear that we had a global emergency on our hands. None of the above is "the progressive response". Here's a post I wrote on March 10, when there were under 1000 cases. The point isn't that I was particularly smart or prescient; it's that this is what I was hearing from progressive media. The lockdown in Italy was in effect by March 9 and it was clear that nothing stopped the US from having similar problems.

(I'm sure some progressives were idiots in March-- see my post for conservatives being idiots in March. Still, I have to mention that the UK is not the US and US progressives don't get all their information from the Daily Mirror or even the Guardian.)

The mask stuff was another Trump administration misstep, of course, but maybe we'd have been better prepared with masks and ventilators and tests and such if Trump hadn't dismantled our pandemic preparedness team.

I don't think "test and trace" was ever a viable option. No American with a smartphone has any privacy, but we don't like to be reminded of it. I assume a mandatory quarantine would've required a state of exception, though, and no one would've let the bad orange man do that.

The bad orange man didn't fucking try. What makes you think he couldn't do anything? When the bad orange man told people the virus was fake, a third of the country believed him. When he flouted social distancing, they imitated him. When he told them the election was stolen, they believed him. When he called for a coup, they invaded Congress. I know it would be a little out of character for the bad orange man to use his power to save lives instead of end them, but if he had, the bad orange man might be president.

[Travis B.]

I don't think "test and trace" was ever a viable option. No American with a smartphone has any privacy, but we don't like to be reminded of it. I assume a mandatory quarantine would've required a state of exception, though, and no one would've let the bad orange man do that.

The bad orange man didn't fucking try. What makes you think he couldn't do anything? When the bad orange man told people the virus was fake, a third of the country believed him. When he flouted social distancing, they imitated him. When he told them the election was stolen, they believed him. When he called for a coup, they invaded Congress. I know it would be a little out of character for the bad orange man to use his power to save lives instead of end them, but if he had, the bad orange man might be president.

But of course the Donald can't be wrong! Obviously everything is the progressives' fault, and that which cannot be blamed on them (e.g. a complete contempt for any measures to actually prevent the spread of the virus) is simply ignored. So clearly this is all "anti-border activists" fault, and anti-maskers and people with a contempt for social distancing had nothing to do with it.

[Nortaneous]

I don't think "test and trace" was ever a viable option. No American with a smartphone has any privacy, but we don't like to be reminded of it. I assume a mandatory quarantine would've required a state of exception, though, and no one would've let the bad orange man do that. Maybe the response would've been better with a Democrat in the White House after all - what's a little mandatory quarantine compared to what Obama got away with?

I know this isn't the politics thread, but Obama couldn't get away with giving people healthcare, so I hardly think the Democrats are immune to backlash against heavy-handed government policies.

Sure, Obama couldn't get away with making the insurance industry mad, but he got away with a lot else - there are no entrenched interests that profit from not killing US citizens with drones. A Democratic president would've had to deal with backlash from the tourism industry, which has an interest in keeping the airports open no matter who's president, and the GOP, which has a presence of rounding error in the unelected bureaucracy that actually makes the decisions so who cares.

Many of the failures at the CDC were largely apolitical, and any government response would have faced polarized backlash from one half of the population or the other. The February failure to get large-scale testing up and running before community spread, for example, could easily have happened under a Democrat. Blocking travel from China, and the backlash against it, probably happened exactly as it would have under a Democrat.

You're more pessimistic than I am! The bureaucratic failures probably were apolitical, but an earlier and more wide-ranging travel ban is exactly what I think a Democrat could've gotten away with.

A little over a week later, it was already clear that we had a global emergency on our hands. None of the above is "the progressive response". Here's a post I wrote on March 10, when there were under 1000 cases. The point isn't that I was particularly smart or prescient; it's that this is what I was hearing from progressive media. The lockdown in Italy was in effect by March 9 and it was clear that nothing stopped the US from having similar problems.

(I'm sure some progressives were idiots in March-- see my post for conservatives being idiots in March. Still, I have to mention that the UK is not the US and US progressives don't get all their information from the Daily Mirror or even the Guardian.)

The list is UK-centric because some guy in the UK kept better track of the emerging narratives than anyone here did, but I know plenty of Americans who read the Guardian, Bill de Blasio is not the mayor of London, and March 10 is in March. I started driving my metro-riding friends to work in early February, and by March 10 I might've already had a stockpile of rice and beans in the basement. (Which turned out to be unnecessary, but no one knew that at the time.)

There was even self-criticism from some parts of the left-aligned media - in late March 2020 - about how they didn't take COVID seriously enough, and thought that might've hindered the response. Were they just making shit up?

(IIRC Matt Yglesias had a thread about how, when he was telling his readers that experts said masks were harmful, he was buying masks himself. But he deletes his tweets, so all I can find is a disapproving screencap.)

It's also entirely possible that the whole thing is just an argument for getting news from Twitter or whatever instead of articles or TV. But most people don't do that.

The bad orange man didn't fucking try. What makes you think he couldn't do anything?

Do you really think that Donald Trump could've instituted a 14-day mandatory quarantine for all international arrivals in or before mid-February? How do you think the media you follow would've responded if he had?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The bad orange man didn't fucking try. What makes you think he couldn't do anything?

Do you really think that Donald Trump could've instituted a 14-day mandatory quarantine for all international arrivals in or before mid-February? How do you think the media you follow would've responded if he had?

Could a president hypothetically have? Yes. Could Trump? Evidence suggests him not to be capable of the cognitive processes ("I must reduce harm to the populace, even if it causes short-term economic setbacks, and consult with those who know better than I do, because such people do in fact exist and are not there to simply be sniveling sycophants") which would be required of him to do this. If Hillary Clinton were president then, could she have? Probably. The issue is that Trump is a bad orange man by his apparent nature, and appears, especially with encroaching cognitive decline, to be incapable of giving serious thought to what consequences his actions will have for anybody who isn't him. As far as the media goes, he was not all that concerned with public perception of him — his faithful would be faithful no matter what, and he could use negative coverage to rile them up, and he did a huge number of other unpopular things without much more than strongly-worded disapproval for consequences. It was far from a hypothetical impossibility, but it certainly was impossible for him personally.

[zompist]

The bad orange man didn't fucking try. What makes you think he couldn't do anything?

Do you really think that Donald Trump could've instituted a 14-day mandatory quarantine for all international arrivals in or before mid-February? How do you think the media you follow would've responded if he had?

Since when was Donald Trump constrained by what the media said? He can institute a travel ban on Muslims, or lean on foreign leaders for political favors, or sit down for a chat with Kim Jong-un, or shit on the Palestinians, and he got away with it all.

I mean, I don't like the fellow, but if anyone can just shoulder through a media storm, it's Trump. Some things could stop him-- like the courts-- but the media never did.

[Ares Land]

I remember in February people with survivalist leanings were very excited that the shit was finally hitting the proverbial fan.
People were stocking up and preparing for a post-apocalyptic landscape. The following year must have been anti-climatic!

There were solid conservative grounds for a better pandemic response. My own, not very deep analysis, is that it all comes down to Trump being an idiot.

[Raphael]

Repeating myself once again, I was pretty surprised that Trump chose the path that he did - I would have predicted that his approach would have been "It's really extremely dangerous and will kill us all unless I, the only one who can stop it, stops it!" That would still have been perfectly in character for him, and while it would have been completely over-the-top, it might still have done less harm than what he actually did.

[Ares Land]

Repeating myself once again, I was pretty surprised that Trump chose the path that he did - I would have predicted that his approach would have been "It's really extremely dangerous and will kill us all unless I, the only one who can stop it, stops it!" That would still have been perfectly in character for him, and while it would have been completely over-the-top, it might still have done less harm than what he actually did.

Yeah, that would have been very much in character: besides, he's a massive germophobe and he hates China.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don't agree that that would've been in character for him for the simple reason that, for all his mob-boss-wannabe ways, Trump is a grifter, and shutting down the economy simply is not good for him economically in any way he can see. He simply isn't capable of long-term planning, whence his many business failures in the past (also there being apparently no plan for vaccine distribution when Biden took office because Trump cannot plan things out). I also doubt very much that his germphobia extends to anybody but himself, and even then he did, if memory serves, attend rallies unmasked. Calling the virus a "hoax" also does help to shore up support with his conspiracy theorist and antivaxxer fans. He may be generally stupid, but he does know what his audience will like best.

[Raphael]

All good points, but IMO it's still a bit weird how he turned from "I'm the only one who can fix it" to "there's no need to fix anything, because everything is fine".

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I guess agree to disagree?

[Raphael]

OK.

[Nortaneous]

It would be interesting to see a cross-country study of the effectiveness of responses. To some extent, you don't need statistics - New Zealand and Mongolia clearly did something right, and Peru, Bulgaria, and Sweden clearly did something wrong - but to some extent you do. A lot of European countries are clustered closely enough in excess death rate that things like age distribution, obesity rate, average vitamin D exposure, and indoor ventilation could matter. It's probably hard to correct for the effects of indoor ventilation, but age distribution and obesity rate are tractable.

Since when was Donald Trump constrained by what the media said? He can institute a travel ban on Muslims, or lean on foreign leaders for political favors, or sit down for a chat with Kim Jong-un, or shit on the Palestinians, and he got away with it all.

What travel ban on Muslims? At what point was a religious test being enforced? And is being able to shit on the Palestinians - nationals of a state that the US doesn't even recognize - exclusive to Trump?

[zompist]

What travel ban on Muslims?

Before rewriting history, you guys need to remember that not only campaign sites need to be rewritten, you have to take down the Internet Archive.

He said he'd do it, then he did it., Legal challenges were issused on several bases; at least one federal court issued an injunction against the order specifically because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Rather than try to defend the executive order, it was thrown out and a new one written.

And is being able to shit on the Palestinians - nationals of a state that the US doesn't even recognize - exclusive to Trump?

I don't even get this... you're admitting that the policy is bad, but badness is a binary quality? Is the conservative policy now that there is no such thing as the word "worse", or does this semantic nihilism only apply when people criticize Donald Trump?

[Moose-tache]

The following year must have been anti-climatic!

You're damn straight it was!

[Moose-tache]

What travel ban on Muslims?

Before rewriting history...

I always thought it watered down the effect of fulfilling a campaign promise if you then had to insist you didn't fulfill the campaign promise after all in polite society. Maybe if you need to play that game your campaign needs better goals. Oh well, hindsight...

[Ares Land]

The following year must have been anti-climatic!

You're damn straight it was!

Well played sir, well played.