Responsible Citizenship in a Pandemic

As restrictions on various activities are eased this month, it will be very important for all of us to adhere to measures recommended to mitigate contagion: wearing masks, social distancing, and meticulous attention to personal hygienic practices such as hand washing.

It is being emphasized that these are necessary to prevent a steep rise in COVID-19 cases - and, ultimately, deaths.

It may be instructive to look a bit further at the practical consequences of doing - versus not doing - what is recommended.  Let us call the recommendations - masks, social distancing, hygienic measures - the "triad."

Scrupulously implementing the triad - or failure to do so - has predictable results.

Of those who get infected with the virus, some will have minimal or no symptoms - referred to as "subclinical" infection.  Many others, however, will feel ill enough to experience definite effects on their ability to engage in all their usual activities.  Some will get sick enough to be hospitalized, and some of those will require intensive care.

Some who get infected will transmit the infection to others, for a "multiplier" effect.

Here are some things that will happen as a direct consequence of not adhering to the triad:

1.  You will be more likely to get sick enough to miss work.  This affects workplace productivity.  It may place an additional burden on co-workers who must pick up the slack.  It is harmful to the employer's bottom line - which is likely, ultimately, to be bad for you and your co-workers.

2.  You will be more likely to get sick enough to require hospitalization, thereby consuming healthcare resources that could otherwise have been devoted to caring for others and driving up society's overall healthcare costs.

3.  You will be more likely to become critically ill, thus requiring intensive care - the most costly utilization of healthcare resources.

4.  You will be more likely to transmit the infection to others, thereby multiplying the effects enumerated as 1, 2, and 3 above.

5.  Among those you may infect will be healthcare workers, despite their best efforts to keep from catching it from their patients.  This may cause them to miss work, placing additional burdens related to cost and productivity on the healthcare system.  (Sickness among employees is costly for hospitals, which must pay premium wages to those working overtime to cover.)  It also increases the risk that healthcare workers will then transmit the infection to others, including their co-workers and their families - and other patients who are in the hospital for unrelated reasons.

In sum, when you fail to adhere to the triad, the risk you are taking goes far beyond misery and expense for yourself.  Responsible citizenship - in other words, behaving as a member of a society, with obligations to act in the best interests of not only yourself but of all members of our society - requires that you do the right things.

Socialism and the Pandemic

The right wing of US politics takes every opportunity to condemn socialism, often citing Venezuela and Cuba as countries where socialism has been associated with economic dysfunction and poor decision making, not merely ignoring the role of authoritarianism but claiming that socialism requires an authoritarian regime to govern.

Conspicuous by its absence is mention of Denmark - you know, that country where McDonald's workers earn a living wage rather than being regarded as kids in their first jobs doing it for pocket money while in reality still financial dependents of their parents.  No, Denmark is not considered a socialist nation, as it has many features of a market economy side-by-side with high taxes and an extensive array of social welfare programs.  And it certainly does not satisfy the classic definition of socialism in which the means of production are controlled by the State.  But there is a great deal about the way Danish society works that Americans - especially those on the right - regard as socialist.

What did Denmark's government do about shutting down its economy for the pandemic?  It told everyone there would be a freeze.  Companies not in essential businesses would simply stop doing business.  They would not terminate or furlough any employees, but instead keep them on the payroll.  Those businesses would receive government assistance sufficient to cover their residual expenses, while employees would receive their paychecks from the government, essentially keeping pace with what they were earning.

Denmark has a strong economy.  Not strong like President Trump says the US economy is, but strong in reality.  The national treasury was brimming with budget surpluses, so there was enough money to cover the financing of the freeze for several months without incurring debt.

And now the Danish economy is reopening, as broadly and widely as any in the West - more so than most - with population-adjusted numbers of COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 deaths comparing favorably with the rest of Europe - and with the US.  Population-adjusted cases for Denmark are 45% of the US number; deaths, 39%.

When the Danish government first announced how it was going to manage the economic shutdown, it was estimated that for the USA to do the same thing, it would cost between $2T and $2.5T.  Perhaps you've noticed that we have already appropriated more money than that, yet the unemployment rate has soared, and other economic indicators are calamitous, with widespread effects on Americans that have people desperate to put an end to restrictions despite statistics that portend disastrous increases in cases and deaths.

Maybe there is no way we could have done what Denmark did.  It would have been so alien to the way our economy operates that a proposal to do such a thing would have been regarded as preposterous in the halls of Congress.

But let us be honest: the approach taken by Denmark is undeniably socialist, and the strength of the Danish economy that made it so easy to decide to do it exists despite the many aspects of that nation's economy that are socialist in character.

Let's broaden our view of socialism beyond Castro's Cuba and Venezuela under Chavez - the "socialism" America's right wing loves to hate - and acknowledge that it can work very well, indeed.

Truth in Science

For my entire adult life I have been a student of the philosophy of science with a keen interest in the subject of truth in science.

In the midst of this pandemic, it has struck me how many people - with no training in scientific disciplines - set forth assertions of what they believe to be facts.

In the Second Century the Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy developed a mathematical model of an Earth-centric universe. Such a model, to gain acceptance as scientific theory, must be consistent with all known observations. To retain its status, it must then predict future observations: as they are made, the model must be consistent with them, too.

Ptolemy's model was complex, but it fit so well that a heliocentric model of our solar system posited a few centuries earlier by Aristarchus was superseded.

The Earth-centric model was very comfortable for humanity, which had long thought of our position in the universe as being at the center, as we believed its Creator had made us in His image.

It was not until the Sixteenth Century that mathematician and astronomer Copernicus developed a compelling heliocentric model. In the following century Kepler set forth a model of elliptical orbits, and Galileo made detailed observations with increasingly powerful telescopes that were consistent with the model of Copernicus, and not of Ptolemy - essentially proving Ptolemy wrong after fifteen centuries.

We have known that certain diseases are caused by infectious agents only since the 19th Century, thanks to the work of men like Pasteur and Koch.

Virology is relatively young. While Jenner (smallpox) and Pasteur (rabies) developed vaccines against diseases now known to be caused by viruses, the infectious agents responsible were poorly understood. The first virus to be studied by electron microscopy - essential because viruses are too small to be viewed with a light microscope - was the tobacco mosaic virus, in the 1930s.
The great influenza pandemic of 1918, then, occurred when virology was in its infancy. We have learned a great deal about viruses in the last century: indeed, we have arrived at a point at which we are able to isolate viruses, study their structure with electron microscopy, and characterize the proteins and genetic material (DNA or RNA) of which they are made. We can even sequence the genome of a virus.

Yet there are still secrets to be elucidated about what makes some viruses use humans as hosts, what factors enable viruses to cross from one host species to another, why some viruses are more lethal than other related strains, and why some are more readily transmitted from one human to another.
Then there is the fascinating subject of how viruses change over time, with genetic mutations and minor modifications of their protein structures.

Now that you have some sense of just how much we know about viruses - and, more important, how much remains to be learned - perhaps you can understand why sometimes expert opinions on specific points may diverge. When you layer over this the complexities of human behavior that influence the interactions between viruses and the host species, you get some sense of the extremely challenging field of the epidemiology of viral diseases.

All of this is what scientists are up against when they try to figure out the best ways of facing a pandemic.

Now imagine that you are an elected official or a government regulator trying to make decisions about protecting the public, completely dependent on advice from experts who are, in turn, frantically gathering and interpreting a constant stream of new data.

In a situation like this it is critically important to recognize what we don't know. Yes, we still have to make decisions. But when the people trying to make the decisions - relying on the best advice available from those who know the most in a discipline full of unknowns - make decisions you don't like, just say you don't like those decisions. Don't imagine you have the knowledge to support a coherent argument that the decisions are wrong - if those decisions are made after careful consideration of the best advice to be had.

And if you believe you know the truth of the science, please remember Ptolemy.