Here on a foggy mountaintop in Marshall, Arkansas (population 1300 and change), I'm preparing my family's bags to return to our disparate homes - Vermont, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brooklyn and London. The kids are adults with careers and degree studies in Europe, my partner has a continued sabbatical in Spain. I should have more time to blog when I'm on my own again, though re-making this thing over and pruning back to the best branches seems daunting.
So let's try this. I can explain and represent the views of my conservative red-hat Trump was robbed family members to my more educated, more erudite liberal relatives. First, let me explain something to blog readers - the reddest of states has both.
Here is a conservative in my family who I wuld not want to become sick. He's 89. He loves oysters. He lives in the South of France, where vaccine hesitancy is highest. Today's blog will use CV-19 policy and opinion variance to illustrate how there is not "one correct answer".
(Publishing prematureley as a place holder, last post of 2021 Coming back to edit, time to pack the car).
A state which has 40% knee-jerk dyed-in-the-wool Democrats is labelled a "red state" by the press, because the vote is predictable. That becomes short-hand for an assumption that 100% of people from that state share the majority view, and the assumption that even people who vote that way hold the view strongly rather than once every 4 years. Most people have so many other things going on in their lives - health, career, child care, quarrels - that they don't really have the time to read the Great Barrington debate on Pandemic Policy. Most people don't even have time (or true interest) in the sports teams they say they root for. If people really did have time to thoroughtly weigh all the alternative sports teams, we would not all favor the local one, and there wouldn't be several morning channels devoted to Cliff Notes on Last Night's Game. People adapt political opinions, opnions on infrastructure spending, opinions on sports teams, based on their desire to fit in with their work or church or other community. When the daily center of gravity shifts to draw people from different geographies to socialize together based on past childhood experiences and bloodlines, germs and politics begin to mix.
I've described Dr. William Stephenson and Q Method several times over the years, you can find better summaries than mine on Wikipedia. The Q Method is a "deep dive" in opinion research, one which was the center of the nation's top Journalism School (U of Missouri Columbia) a few decades ago. The theory was that Editors and Reporters need to understand the psychology and dynamics of opinion polling, in order to understand the data as well as the pollsters themselves, which would allow a good writer to make better sense of the conflict they need to report on to sell the news.
How quaintly sophisticated by today's cable news standards. Today's talking heads gather the weakest possibly straw man arguments to quickly serve up bias-confirmation. Seven ads for insurance, pillows, and obscure prescription medicines (and your cable news provider running sds for itself in the blank spots in between) are the source of revenue for the cable news. No Q method necessary if the entire point is to provide anger and self righteousness, empty calories of moral licensing and bias on political topics. That's the Olympic Squad of Journalism today... and when they try to report on SCIENCE, like PANDEMICS, the well-trodden "whattaboutism" of political reporting is apparently good enough.
Ok, here's my point. Take a Q method approach to facts used to build the opinions - and yes there are opinions in between "science" and "public policy" - and have people rank their importance from 1-100. The weighted importance of each fact tells the story about the opinion and the policy. That does not mean to say all the policies are equal, but to better inform and achieve consensus, you need to know what facts your opponent holds dear, and what facts you may not be addressing.
The weight of these will differ, I predict, based not just on information and education and intelligence, but also on the differences in risk tolerance. I will start off with one long paragraphic fact, then go to one liners.
- Human response to risk is embedded in the brain's amygdala.
- Over 100,000 years, we've evolved to experience fear and anger (flight or fight) in response to risks like lions chasing us.
- Excaping a lion was, for millions of years, more evolutionarily significant than nurture and procreation.
- The gross number of threats - stuff that might kill us today - has declined enormously across the entire globe during the last 0.01% of human evoloution. The list of risk just 500 years ago was far longer than today's - but the amygdala's capacity for fear and anger remains at full tank.
- Risk and risk tolerance varies according to age group.
- Risk and risk tolerance vary according to geography.
- Risk and risk tolerance vary according to other factors (gender, economic class, etc)
- "Fight" vs. "flight" responses, while chemically identical, are culturally and collectively managed by leaders according to multitudes of factors, including the self-interest of the leaders.
- The CDC has for decades kept an annual list of statistically "predicted deaths" from all risks factored by the age of population. In any given month - September 2021 - the CDC will have predicted a certain number of deaths to occur from heart disease, alzheimers, cancer, etc.
- The gross prejected deaths per capita predicted by the CDC is based on risk (above, age, geography, class etc) allows CDC to tabulate "excess deaths" when there is a spike due to a new risk factor such as Covid-19.
- The average number of days of "sooner than expected" or "early" or "ecess" deaths is finite (I read it is 65 days on average, a matter of hours for people under age of 35).
- The disaster is when huge number of deaths, even if most were expeced in weeks or months - occur at once, is that hospital are overrun, staff quit, people can't get treated for unrelated (car accidents, heart attacks) causes or preventative treatments because of a lack of hsopital beds.
- Social panic - fear that social order is caving in - is the biggest fear of politicians and most comfortable people in society (most of us, in fact).
- Humans historically tend prefer authority to anarchy, when authority is measured. (Nazi Germany calculated they could wage extreme authoritative violene on 5% of the citizenry to mazimize fear and compliance - but if they tried to arrest and send a higher precentage to death camps, a tipping point would encourage revolt among more of the 95% - there is an art to totalitarian authority, much of it described in Mein Kampf).
- Totalitarian and Authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc. benefit if free market democracies are imploding... they don't want to look bad, so emphasize news about USA and EU and Japan and Hong Kong and Taiwan's fear and conspiracy theories).
- The USA and other democracies also use propaganda against totalitarian regimes... "ditto".
- The culmination of propaganda makes information suspect, and the internet is far superior to printing presses at multiplying nonsense and propaganda and conspiracy theories.
- freedom of expression societies are at a disadvantage to disinformation - in the short term - as compared to totalitarian societies that give control and censorship of the press to the totalitarian.
- Common coronaviruses (common cold) and influenzas are not newsworthy because the risk is already factored in, and health care capacity in developed nations is established to cope with annual predicted cases (risk is factored in).
- Novel (new) coronaviruses from other species can occasionally "cross over" to humans, and because they are novel there is little herd immunity or spreading-out of the cases to be managed by the health care system.
- World Health Organization Center for Disease Control, NIH, and yes the Wuhan Virus Lab are scienctific organizations which study these "novel" or potential cross-over viruses (SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc) both to manage spread.
- World Health Organization Center for Disease Control, NIH, and yes the Wuhan Virus Lab are scienctific organizations which study these "novel" or potential cross-over viruses (SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc) both to prevent panic. (Notably two separate concerns)
- The City of Wuhan has both "wet markets" that sell rare and endangered species "bush meat" to the general population (high risk of cross-over) and a lab to study those diseases in other species. Both risks are more represented in that city than in most other ciiies.
- No one is engineering new viruses from scratch.
- Labs like Wuhans do study what makes viruses more contagious, making a "lab leak" or accidental escape possible.
- Even if the disease did come from the lab and not the wild species market, the fact that there are wild species crsos-over diseases makes pandemics inevitable (it would eventually reach us one way or the other, arguing about which only matters to the calendar).
- Symptoms like coughing are more contagious than non-symptoms (not caughing).
- Symptoms "creep up" during the day for the infected, and someone not showing symptoms when they leave for work at 8AM may start to manifest slowly during the day.
- Masks contain symptomatic droplets to a shorter space, like a "speed bump" for spread.
- Speed bumps are intended to "flatten the curve" of the spike, to protect essential capacity of hospitals, food distribution, services, etc.
- "Flattening the curve" means that the deaths still do occur, but not all at once... having 100,000 fatalities over 3 moths is much more manageable.
- Natural antibodies - those in the people who get and get over covid, 99% of the time - should be counted similar to a vaccine.
- Diseases naturally tend to evolve to be more transmissible and less deadly to the host organism. This would possibly be evidenced by South Africa, which has 2-3% vaccination rates, evolving Omicron edition to be faster spreading but more like the common cold coronavirus.
- Sweden didn't anticipate vaccines being available as quickly, and failed to priotitize strict measures at nurshing homes, but the science was accurate. If you have plenty of excess hospital and health care capacity, allowing young people to get infected is less risky than the social costs of locking them down in that environment (not acceptable in NYC or Italy, btw, see opening facts on risk variance).
- The cost of wearing a mask in a public place is very very small. It is not a slippery slope to losing your Bill of Rights.
- The benefits of wearing a mask outdoors are very, very small. It is not worth "pushing the buttons" of "sheeple skeptics".
- A simple and coherant Pandemic Response Policy is more effective that a nuanced one with lots of variables.
- The job of 80 year old CDC veterans like Collins and Fauci is to run policy around a once every couple of decades pandemic that soicety is not accustomed to, to mitigate the risks above.
- The job of 80 year old CDC veterans like Collins and Fauci is not to police groupthink or to orchestrate ad hominem attacks on academics (Great Barrington) as "fringe" scientists.
- Condescending and bullying communications are ineffective. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."
We could go one. I was taught that Q Method actually uses 100 responses to be ranked, and some "dummy" responses that almost everyone agrees or disagrees with should be tossed in as a control group.
This is the last post of 2021. I'll probably post it in draft form to reserve the December spot (it's 12/31/2021 but I'll be traveling to Memphis most of the day). I may come back to edit it and to bring some additional important facts into my "actuary" analysis of this Pandemic and the political response.
At a historical, meta-level, Collins and Fauci will probably get mixed reviews. They have a difficult task, which is to elevate something important to execute very rarely to mitigate potential disastrous snowballing into more deaths and social stress - but to do so without becoming ego involved or taking shortcuts.
It's really easy if everyone thinks - mistakenly - that the coronavirus CV-19 (the 12th one identified, named for 2019) is 5% fatal. It was never remotely close to that among young healthy people. In the developing world and emerging markets, the young "ten foot tall and bulletproof" population has evolved over thousands of years to be less risk-averse, to take chances on war and mating and lion-fighting, and to reward curiosity.
There is also the tendency (I learned about in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" this month) of herding communities who have livestock that can be stolen (goat herders in Europe, sheep farmers in Scotland) to be more pride-fight-honor-code culture than crop growing communities. It's harder to steal a field of corn than a prized Ox. That's part of the "red state" culture. Urban dwellers are less historically documented in Gladwell's book, but they tend to prize conformity I would imagine, and to have more aversion to "fighting oor feuding ut of principle".
In eithe rcase, the majority of people doesn't have time to do their own research. We watch ESPN to get the score from the night before so we can fit in with friends at work and church or whatever.
I can, with the facts enumerated above, build a convincing case for or against Fauci, and for or against mandates and lockdowns. In a city with a few hospitals, one case will be easier to convince people of. In a rural area, another set of facts will more quickly arouse the amigula. In an African city with almost no hospitals, ventilators, or vaccines, masks are stupid and a Sweden herd immmunity reesponse to get it over with and evolve the less deadly more transpissable common cold is going to cause the same historical "survivor bias" as those here in Arkansas that don't remember or haven't heard of their relatives who died during the Spanish Flu. We just learned my mom had an aunt who died of Spanish Flue in childhood - my Mom had never heard about it until just recently. That's the way the Pandemic will be remembered in young, virule Africa which has a lot more things that can kill you today, and whose amigula fear is sliced into much smaller pieces to share with Covid.
Let's give Fauci's CDC an A for planning and a C for execution. Primum non nocere - first do no harm. The shortcut of simplifying a message to better cover their asses, to make the young and poor who could not afford lockdown pay the highest price possible when hospitals were NOT in danger of being overrun in th summer months, to stay silent about inconvenient things in order to let the slippery slope of press panic aid in adaptation of prudent policy, is going to be tarnished by the ad homioem attacks on "fringe" and "anti-science" red staters.
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