Did you catch it ?

In the specific instance of Covid-19, for example, I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns, which followed a few weeks later in most states after the mobility data has a sharp downturn. Many people I have discussed this with just assume that the slowing of the rate of growth of cases which has occurred was the result of the coercive lockdowns in cases where it occurred.

I really think you are incorrect there. Your comment above doesn't even really makes sense to me - how could people not be aware that they were voluntarily social-distancing before stay-at-home orders? A LOT of folks in California were social distancing well before the stay-at-home order. I know many people that started their own distancing and increased hygiene practices a few weeks earlier - late Feb/early March. The mobility data don't tell the full story. Many of us were still going places, but just keeping our distance from people we met in person.
 
I really think you are incorrect there. Your comment above doesn't even really makes sense to me - how could people not be aware that they were voluntarily social-distancing before stay-at-home orders? A LOT of folks in California were social distancing well before the stay-at-home order. I know many people that started their own distancing and increased hygiene practices a few weeks earlier - late Feb/early March. The mobility data don't tell the full story. Many of us were still going places, but just keeping our distance from people we met in person.

It this some kind of devious mental curveball you going for here ?

You are claiming he is incorrect and then proceed to restate his very position...
 
It this some kind of devious mental curveball you going for here ?

You are claiming he is incorrect and then proceed to restate his very position...

"I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns".

It is his statement, above, that is contradictory. He is implying people aren't aware of their own actions.
 
"I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns".

It is his statement, above, that is contradictory. He is implying people aren't aware of their own actions.

I don’t have an actual survey on this so this is anecdotal observations. However I don’t think it is necessarily contradictory.

It could simultaneously be true that people think they were social distancing but that most other people were not, correct?

This would be generally consistent with tending to view oneself as more virtuous than others.

There might also be an element of forgetfulness in what I hear now about social distancing from people and what happened some 8 weeks ago. People may simply not remember the sequencing of when they started social distancing and when the coercive lockdown orders were enforced.
 
"I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns".

It is his statement, above, that is contradictory. He is implying people aren't aware of their own actions.
No. It’s not contradictory. Read it again.
 
I agree with you that a greater degree of care is needed by those of us who are professional scientists.
Disagree. A greater degree of care is should be expected of everyone. What a scientist does in their personal life should have no impact on their professional career. And that works both ways. What you do for a job doesn't have to have any impact on the validity of your opinions as an individual unless you yourself make such a claim. IOW if you don't want to exercise a greater degree of care, you don't have to. Just don't claim that you know what you're talking about because you're a scientist and you'll be fine. OTOH if you are going to hang your hat on 'I'm right because I'm a scientist' then yeah, you'd better have your game tight and in a line 100% of the time or your credibility will quickly come into question. In my opinion anyway.
 
I really think you are incorrect there. Your comment above doesn't even really makes sense to me - how could people not be aware that they were voluntarily social-distancing before stay-at-home orders?
I think you're misreading the context of the statement. People absolutely know what they as individuals have done voluntarily. But I read the statement as more in the context of it was the perception of many i.e. the public as a group, is that many of the actions of lock downs were not voluntary when in fact, they were.

Case in point, the big 4 automaker shut down all production on their own before any government lock downs came into play. As a result, many of the auto makers tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers did the same. That was announced on the news at the time, but if you don't happen to work in that sector, you probably don't remember it and therefore you may have the perception that automakers closed because the government ordered it to happen. That is only one example but I'm sure there are more.
 
Thanks for the response... makes sense. However, thinking further since, as you say, we here in NY have only achieved 15% exposure and are still at risk for additional waves that we would not be at risk for had we simply not "flattened the curve" and reached 70%, would not we have to take into account the area under the second (and third) waves until we reach 70% anyway? 70% is still 70%, no matter how long it takes to get there..... notwithstanding the great news and possibilities of vaccines you've shared, and the already stipulated benefits of making sure our healthcare system is not overwhelmed.

You've identified the basic concept. Getting to herd immunity in one go has a tremendous human cost for an infectious agent with a fatality rate as high as COVID-19. If you interrupt transmission, you reduce that cost, but are vulnerable to additional waves unless transmission reduction is continually addressed, or permanently eliminated by medical intervention (e.g. vaccine program). History is instructive. The 1918 pandemic came in multiple waves until herd immunity was reached, at a terrible cost. There was no vaccine for influenza in 1918, so humanity was at the mercy of achieving natural herd immunity.

Fast forward to NY, 2020. Comprehensive personal distancing was required to blunt uncontrolled spread. This effort was demonstrably successful. However, this success doesn't mean there is an all clear and we can just go back to January 2020, because 85% of the population is still immunologically naive. SOME personal distancing will have to remain, or the spread will just start again, and again. If numbers can be kept small, you can play whackamole with small outbreaks. Once numbers get large, its mathematically impossible to control with tracing and isolation.

It's amazing how fast an outbreak can build. In our little county, we had pretty much snuffed out Covid-19 spread, then a food processing plant blew up with about 100 cases. Fastidious testing, tracing and isolation has managed to squash that problem...but without the knowledge of testing, we could have gone back to square one, or worse.

The threat is just as serious in less densely populated areas if NO efforts are taken to reduce spread. It will just take longer to wind up. Analyzing logistic growth curves for cases and deaths, the maximum doubling time in the logistic growth curves in NY was around 10 days. In the US as a whole it is about 4-5 days slower, which is likely a reflection of average population density differences.

Things won't be "normal" again until we have a vaccine. And I think we will have viable vaccines before we have truly effective therapeutics, just based on research, development, and regulatory considerations.
 
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"I imagine most people are unaware that the majority of social distancing that occurred was apparently voluntary prior to government lockdowns".

It is his statement, above, that is contradictory. He is implying people aren't aware of their own actions.

I don't think that's the case. Around here, people just started acting the same way as when any other flu or "bug" is going around. The post office drew a line on the floor and asked people to stand behind it, people stopped shaking hands, stores started putting hand sanitizer at the entrances, and the local tire shop started asking people to pull onto the lift themselves and stay in their cars while their tires were being installed. But no one called it "social distancing." It was more along the lines of a "there's a bad bug going around so let's not shake hands" kind of thing.

The precautions here were heavily contact-oriented. No one wore masks until the federal government reversed itself and Cuomo made them semi-mandatory. But the touch precautions long preceded anything that came out of DC or Albany. One would think we all had OCD from all the cleaning of things like shopping cart handles that went on. But that could also be one of the reasons we've had so few cases. Most places under-emphasize contact spread in favor of the media's mask obsession. We over-emphasized contact spread from the start and added masks when we were told to.

Of course, we don't have a subway. For places that do, any talk of social distancing will always be a farce.

In any case, I think it's a nomenclature thing. Ordinary flu-season precautions are usually not referred to as "social distancing," but lots of people did them anyway long before they were told they had to.

Rich
 
A modeling study but not empirical evidence on the possible benefits of the public wearing cloth masks.

As we have been discussing in the masking thread, the reviews of the evidence regarding whether the public wearing cloth masks are at best mixed, and in my opinion, actually quite weak evidence that this will help slow the spread.

There are quite a few studies, including a recent meta-analysis of prior individual smaller studies, that show that wearing ordinary masks can reduce both viral transmission and, specifically, exhalation of respiratory droplets. The protective capacity of masks is not absolute, but can reduce respiratory disease transmission by as much as around 50% with good compliance. Because viral diseases grow exponentially, even a small reduction in transmission can have a large effect on spread. It is important to understand that the mechanism by which non-medical masks work is by reducing spread of respiratory droplets, so it is primarily protective of others, not yourself. Non surgical masks do not impede the exhalation of aerosols, which are much, much finer, than respiratory droplets. So masks are not 100% effective. When we are around others outside the home, it seems a reasonably courteous thing to do to slow viral spread for now. I despise wearing a mask when necessary (of course they are uncomfortable) but I will do so for now.
 
Disagree. A greater degree of care is should be expected of everyone. What a scientist does in their personal life should have no impact on their professional career. And that works both ways. What you do for a job doesn't have to have any impact on the validity of your opinions as an individual unless you yourself make such a claim. IOW if you don't want to exercise a greater degree of care, you don't have to. Just don't claim that you know what you're talking about because you're a scientist and you'll be fine. OTOH if you are going to hang your hat on 'I'm right because I'm a scientist' then yeah, you'd better have your game tight and in a line 100% of the time or your credibility will quickly come into question. In my opinion anyway.

I think this hits on an important distinction. IIRC, this subject arose previously in this thread when a poster attempted to make an argument from authority combined with a number of attacks on the speaker. I said essentially -- well, all right, if you are going to do that, then since you are writing under a pseudonym, who are you and what are your credentials? I agree that if one does not make an argument from authority, then one's credentials should not matter in terms of the argument.

Avoiding such issues is why I always try to avoid both fallacies, the appeal to authority and the ad hominem, when discussing things on public fora. More important here because we often don't really know the people we are discussing with and lack the normal social cues which are present in personal conversation. In my view, makes for more informative, polite, and enjoyable discussions.

I most certainly also agree that everyone posting about significant matters such as Covid-19 should try and be careful about sources, and particularly when citing them to support a specific point of argument, actually read and understand them first.

I do understand there is a further issue here when someone is employed professionally and the employer explicitly or implicitly effectively bans the employee from certain types of public speech. Then the ability to post anonymously is an important safeguard of free discourse. Those of us in the academic world have somewhat greater freedom in this regard, though less so in the biomedical sciences. Of course we pay for that freedom in terms of salaries and other benefits.

Re-reading this, I was just trying to figure out, do we actually see mostly eye-to-eye on these points? ;-)
 
Re-reading this, I was just trying to figure out, do we actually see mostly eye-to-eye on these points? ;-)
I'll be honest, once it became apparent that you were laser focused on lock downs being pointless and proving that to all who will listen, I kind of stopped paying attention to most of what you've said. Nothing personal, just a not my clown not my circus kind of thing. You can be right all day long, but nothing you nor I are ever going to do is going to impact when the US reopens. Pick your battles and all that.

So do we agree? I dunno, maybe. I'm inclined to say that you'd do better to hope we don't agree because I'm probably wrong way more than I'm right. :oops:
 
Things are starting to ease up here.

Coronavirus: All Bay Area counties to allow storefront retail pickup, associated businesses to reopen

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05...etail-pickup-associated-businesses-to-reopen/

"Santa Clara County, which once accounted for the most cases in the state, now has just 3% of the cases and 4% of the deaths statewide, according to Cody, and with more than double the number of tests conducted in the county since the middle of March, the rate of positive tests has declined from 9% to 1.5%."
 
Ultimately, the data is going to tell us if we are on the right path. The virus doesn't have opinions or belief, it just does what it does. If transmission abatement is relaxed too much you will see it reflected in increased caseloads and increased death rates. (Unless, of course, your regional government is restricting access to or fudging the numbers.) There is a lag, measured in weeks, between the inputs and the outputs. If you do it right, economic activity increases while maintaining caseloads at a controllable level. The data will speak to you. And economic activity will not bounce back until a large fraction of the population has confidence in their safety. If you don't feel safe in a bar or restaurant or recreation facility, it won't matter if they open up.

Depending on what the actual R0 is for SARS-CoV-2 herd immunity will not be achieved until somewhere between 55-85% of the population is immune through exposure or vaccination. (If you care, the value is 1-1/R0) Until then, we are still at risk for future outbreaks. It's that simple. As a nation, we are likely not even at 15% exposure at this point. That is the nut of the current problem. I don't envy those trying to find the right balance.
 
Ultimately, the data is going to tell us if we are on the right path. The virus doesn't have opinions or belief, it just does what it does. If transmission abatement is relaxed too much you will see it reflected in increased caseloads and increased death rates. (Unless, of course, your regional government is restricting access to or fudging the numbers.) There is a lag, measured in weeks, between the inputs and the outputs. If you do it right, economic activity increases while maintaining caseloads at a controllable level. The data will speak to you. And economic activity will not bounce back until a large fraction of the population has confidence in their safety. If you don't feel safe in a bar or restaurant or recreation facility, it won't matter if they open up.

Depending on what the actual R0 is for SARS-CoV-2 herd immunity will not be achieved until somewhere between 55-85% of the population is immune through exposure or vaccination. (If you care, the value is 1-1/R0) Until then, we are still at risk for future outbreaks. It's that simple. As a nation, we are likely not even at 15% exposure at this point. That is the nut of the current problem. I don't envy those trying to find the right balance.

At this point, I'd be happy if they just stopped making so many wrong decisions.

Rich
 
At this point, I'd be happy if they just stopped making so many wrong decisions.

Rich

This would be more easily achieved if they would just obey the idea of not using coercion to make people do things they don’t otherwise want to do unless you have clear evidence that what the people are doing is either harming others or imminently about to do so.

Stop coercing people based on guesses and theories and hopes.
 
This would be more easily achieved if they would just obey the idea of not using coercion to make people do things they don’t otherwise want to do unless you have clear evidence that what the people are doing is either harming others or imminently about to do so.

Stop coercing people based on guesses and theories and hopes.
Lmao. This is funny.

Tim

Sent from my HD1907 using Tapatalk
 
This would be more easily achieved if they would just obey the idea of not using coercion to make people do things they don’t otherwise want to do unless you have clear evidence that what the people are doing is either harming others or imminently about to do so.

Stop coercing people based on guesses and theories and hopes.

In general, I agree. In this particular instance, however, I am equally disappointed by my own state's failure to impose restrictions when they should have as I am with the imposition of coercive measures whose efficacy is questionable, at best. New York has done almost everything wrong, starting on March 10th, when the virus was first detected in New Rochelle.

On that day, Governor Cuomo called in the National Guard to set up a "containment area" around that city, and set the troops to work cleaning up common areas. Unfortunately, that was the last thing the state did right because the actual vectors -- the people -- were still allowed to move about freely both within and outside the community; and the most important conduit of all, the MTA (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority), was not shut down.

The right thing to do at that point would have been to shut down and disinfect MTA (the conduit), and quarantine the people (the vectors) in all of the counties served by MTA. It was the one instance of authoritarian coercion that actually would have made sense.

To better understand my thinking, you have to understand that in a practical sense, "Downstate" New York is best defined as being the 12 counties that comprise the "Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District" (MCTD) served by MTA. Specifically, we're talking about the five counties of New York City, as well as Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, and Putnam counties.

The MTCD counties outside of New York City can be schematically visualized as the circumference of a wheel, the city as the hub, and the MTA as the spokes. People from any of the counties can infect each other because they all converge in the hub every working day, using the MTA to get there and back; as well as to move around within the hub (the New York City buses and subways are also operated by the State MTA). The MIT study identified the subways as the primary conduit, but the MTA commuter railroads are how people from the surrounding counties get to and from the subways.

The sensible thing to do would have been to shut down all of MTA for disinfection and keep it closed for a few days to a few weeks to both assess the existing spread and prevent any additional spread. A quarantine should also have been imposed on the entire 12-county area, for the same reasons. Yes, it would have been draconian -- but less so than the state-wide and nationwide lockdown that eventually had to be implemented, largely as a result of not taking the right actions on March 10th.

Because the MTA was not shut down and the 12-county MTCD not quarantined, the virus was then able to spread throughout the United States by way of the airports and long-distance train and bus lines that share junctions with MTA trains and buses. What had been regional endemicity became a nationwide epidemic, with the majority of cases throughout the United States except for those on the West Coast now having been genetically identified as originating in New York.

This isn't a benefit-of-hindsight sort of thing. Shutting down the MTA and quarantining the MTCD were the obvious things to do even then, and literally everyone I know simply assumed that they would be done. The governor had to go out of his way to stress that restricting the movement of people was not part of his "containment plan," as this article (and many others) pointed out. What is the point of disinfecting a city without quarantining the vectors and shutting down the conduit?

My brother summed it up best in a text message he sent to me on March 10th: "This is the beginning of a disaster."

The counties outside the MTCD probably didn't need to be quarantined because the travel is more seasonal in nature; and on March 10th, we were between those seasons. The hunting season was over, and the trout season hadn't begun. The accelerated exodus of Downstate residents to their Upstate summer homes also hadn't begun. But imposing precautions on those who'd traveled to or from the belly of the beast (including myself, as I'd visited the Micro Center in Yonkers, New York, which is in Westchester County) was certainly in order.

I took precautions voluntarily and without fanfare; but because my ordinary life is pretty socially-distanced anyway, it mainly consisted of telling family and friends not to visit for a while because I'd been to Westchester County. Social distancing is easy when your regular lifestyle borders on that of a hermit.

There have been many, many other things the state did (or didn't do) that were dead wrong, but the most notorious was the March 25th directive forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients.

Like many stupid ideas, The March 25th directive was based on a noble ideological principle taking precedence over common sense. In order to protect COVID patients from being discriminated against, they were essentially made a protected class, which prevented nursing home operators from "discriminating" against them by exercising the common sense infection precaution of not housing sick people in close quarters with vulnerable people. That would have been unthinkable anyway. It's just something no responsible nursing home operator would ever do.

Except when the state compels them to.

It was an ideological victory. It also caused the deaths of thousands of elderly people in nursing homes. It has since been retracted (finally), without so much as an acknowledgment that it was a stupid directive to begin with, much less an apology. The state has now about-faced and is compelling robust infection-control precautions at the same nursing homes. But they have never come out and admitted that the March 25th directive was a deadly mistake. The blood on their hands says otherwise.

I could (and may some day) write a book about all the stupid things New York State has done in mismanaging this pandemic. If I also include New York City government's idiocy, it will wind up being a modern-day version of War and Peace. It's actually hard to find anything that they did right. I would have thought that the laws of probability being what they are, they would have done something right, even if only by accident. But I search in vain for that something.

Actually, now that I think about it, they did do one thing that made sense: They waived the law requiring reusable grocery bags. Of course, that begs the question of why they even enacted a law that was so stupid and dangerous that they had to waive it for public health reasons; but such is government in New York. The law is still on the books. We've just been ordered not to obey it. That somehow makes sense here.

In the end, I don't disagree with you at all about the folly of imposing coercive measures that lack clear scientific evidence of efficacy. But I'm equally disgusted by failure to impose extreme measures for which there does exist evidence, such as quarantining areas where a virus is known to be endemic; and in the specific case of New York, the abject irresponsibility of imposing measures that anyone who even knew what a virus was should also have known would kill people.

Rich
 
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Depending on what the actual R0 is for SARS-CoV-2 herd immunity will not be achieved until somewhere between 55-85% of the population is immune through exposure or vaccination. (If you care, the value is 1-1/R0) Until then, we are still at risk for future outbreaks. It's that simple. As a nation, we are likely not even at 15% exposure at this point. That is the nut of the current problem. I don't envy those trying to find the right balance.

Wouldn't R0 (or effective R0) be a function of population density? So the appropriate action necessary to achieve s rate <1 would be very different in a big city compared to a small town. The lockdown may well have been necessary in NYC but have insignificant effect in Podunk.
 
Wouldn't R0 (or effective R0) be a function of population density? So the appropriate action necessary to achieve s rate <1 would be very different in a big city compared to a small town. The lockdown may well have been necessary in NYC but have insignificant effect in Podunk.

R0 is a transmission measure. The population reaction and behavior changes required can vary on population density. e.g. even if a lock down is required. But population density has no material delta on the calculation or definition of R0.
Note: many Asian cities have higher population densities than we do in NYC; and yet they maintained a lower R0. Population density is only one factor.

Tim
 
Lmao. This is funny.

Tim

Sent from my HD1907 using Tapatalk

Well, one can always dream.

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible." T. E. Lawrence - aka Lawrence of Arabia.
 
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...
The right thing to do at that point would have been to shut down and disinfect MTA (the conduit), and quarantine the people (the vectors) in all of the counties served by MTA. It was the one instance of authoritarian coercion that actually would have made sense.

...
In the end, I don't disagree with you at all about the folly of imposing coercive measures that lack clear scientific evidence of efficacy. But I'm equally disgusted by failure to impose extreme measures for which there does exist evidence, such as quarantining areas where a virus is known to be endemic; and in the specific case of New York, the abject irresponsibility of imposing measures that anyone who even knew what a virus was should also have known would kill people.

Rich

Nice analysis of a bunch of problems with the response in NY. And I think it raises a few issues to think about from a liberty perspective:

The broadest one is how dangerous does an illness have to be in order to qualify coercion being used to control it as essentially self-defense or defense of others? How much risk of significant harm to others does a person of unknown Covid-19 immunologic status have to represent to justify using coercion against them -- either quarantine or a forced vaccination? I am actually discussing this in the context of forced vaccination at a talk this evening with a bunch of libertarians and it is an important theoretical issue for them. In the case of self defense with firearms we understand the defense standard fairly well -- how does that translate to an infectious disease situation like the present?

Another issue is whether one should regard New York's governments shutting down the public transportation which they own as a form of coercion? That strikes me as less coercive than many measures which have been taken. Certainly the original enforcement of the monopoly and use of tax dollars to pay for public transportation is coercive -- but what about then suspending normal operations of a system constructed and run by those means?

Finally I think there is an interesting argument here for the free market in transportation. NYC used to have a variety of privately owned systems. If that were still the case one of the advantages in this situation might be that the different owners would then be free to make their own decisions about closures based on the liability stemming from continued operation in the face of a pandemic. Some might have closed earlier than the government chose to, others later, we don't know. It might have spread the blow out and softened the edges even if not earlier decisions on average. I think this is just a specific form of Adam Smith's argument for the invisible hand of the market arising from the actions of a multitude of actors.
 
I wonder why it is that people don't use the term "coercive" in relation to laws that they approve of.

Because they aren’t being coerced?

Someone else is, perhaps... but not them.

(Isn’t this kinda a “duh” thing? Holding a gun to my head to do something I was doing anyway isn’t coercion. :) )

“You must eat that cookie!”

“Got milk?” :)
 
Because they aren’t being coerced?

Someone else is, perhaps... but not them.

(Isn’t this kinda a “duh” thing? Holding a gun to my head to do something I was doing anyway isn’t coercion. :) )

“You must eat that cookie!”

“Got milk?” :)
All laws are backed by the possibility of enFORCEment, i.e. coercion. The fact that some individuals are not likely to violate certain laws does not alter the basic principle behind all laws.

To me, the repetitive and selective harping on coercion comes across as an emotionally-loaded argument.
 
Nice analysis of a bunch of problems with the response in NY. And I think it raises a few issues to think about from a liberty perspective:

The broadest one is how dangerous does an illness have to be in order to qualify coercion being used to control it as essentially self-defense or defense of others? How much risk of significant harm to others does a person of unknown Covid-19 immunologic status have to represent to justify using coercion against them -- either quarantine or a forced vaccination? I am actually discussing this in the context of forced vaccination at a talk this evening with a bunch of libertarians and it is an important theoretical issue for them. In the case of self defense with firearms we understand the defense standard fairly well -- how does that translate to an infectious disease situation like the present?

Thanks.

It's a difficult question; but even as a libertarian-leaning independent, I believe that there are some threats to public health that are serious enough to justify quarantines. I also believe, however, that individuals should be compensated for lost income, or businesses for lost revenue, in the event of a forced quarantine. Aside from being the principled thing to do when taking away a person's or business's income, it also helps limit abuse of quarantine by putting government on the hook for those losses.

Another issue is whether one should regard New York's governments shutting down the public transportation which they own as a form of coercion? That strikes me as less coercive than many measures which have been taken. Certainly the original enforcement of the monopoly and use of tax dollars to pay for public transportation is coercive -- but what about then suspending normal operations of a system constructed and run by those means?

I don't consider shutting down MTA to be coercive so much as simply the common-sense thing to do during a pandemic of a respiratory pathogen. Anyone who ever actually rode the subways knows that. Unfortunately, New York City in particular considers the very idea anathema. That was never an option as far as Cuomo and de Bozo were concerned. Anything to save lives was justified, they said -- except shutting down the subways. That was off-limits.

Having survived six total shutdowns of the system and many more partial ones, I agree that shutting down MTA is a major pain in the ass. But we coped, and life went on. But now it's now been formally established -- it was always obvious, but now it's official -- that mass transit was the primary conduit for the virus: and for many of those patients, life did not go on.

As for the ownership, the fact that the state owns the system and could have shut it down with a snap of their fingers just makes it all the more unconscionable that they didn't, in my opinion. It was the first thing they should have done, and the first thing that everyone I know thought they would do.

Finally I think there is an interesting argument here for the free market in transportation. NYC used to have a variety of privately owned systems. If that were still the case one of the advantages in this situation might be that the different owners would then be free to make their own decisions about closures based on the liability stemming from continued operation in the face of a pandemic. Some might have closed earlier than the government chose to, others later, we don't know. It might have spread the blow out and softened the edges even if not earlier decisions on average. I think this is just a specific form of Adam Smith's argument for the invisible hand of the market arising from the actions of a multitude of actors.

The privately-owned IRT and BMT subways were intentionally put out of business by New York City, first by the introduction of a competing system (the IND); and when that didn't work, by denying them a fare increase from $0.05 to $0.07. Once they'd bankrupted them, the city took over operations under the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA), and promptly ran the system into the ground. By 1965, the NYCTA was hopelessly insolvent.

MTA came about as an attempt by NYC Mayor Lindsay and NYS Governor Rockefeller to get their hands on the Tribororough Bridge and Tunnel Authority's money. TBTA was perhaps the only public agency left in the state that was solvent; but it was controlled by Robert Moses, who had made sure that the bonds that funded his many projects were worded in such ways as to guarantee that the money would actually be used for the bonds' stated purposes.

That, of course, was unacceptable to Lindsay and Rockefeller, as was the common conception that Moses was the most powerful man in New York. So as many before had tried, they decided to stage a coup and oust him. This time, however, they had an ace in the hole: Governor Nelson Rockefeller's brother John just happened to run the Chase Manhattan Bank, which held most of the TBTA bonds.

When all the smoke settled, the TBTA and the NYCTA were rolled into the MTA, Robert Moses was removed from power, and the era of the most inefficient, inept, and unaccountable agency in the history of government began. Despite the MTA's staggering revenue from the farebox, tolls, advertising, rentals, and concessions, they are forever in financial trouble and seeking bailouts.

I for one would love it if MTA's operations were privatized. But that will never happen. Most people don't even know that the buses and subways were once private enterprises, so the idea seems bizarre to them.

But hey, I don't live there anymore. Let them do what they want.

Rich
 
All laws are backed by the possibility of enFORCEment, i.e. coercion. The fact that some individuals are not likely to violate certain laws does not alter the basic principle behind all laws.

To me, the repetitive and selective harping on coercion comes across as an emotionally-loaded argument.

The reason to emphasize the coercive nature of laws is that many people forget that coercion is being used when laws are passed, and with the possibility of up to lethal force being used to enforce them.

In this case, if you pass a law saying people have to close their businesses when the Governor says so due to a virus, it is important to note that means a SWAT team might be used to enforce the order, or people be held down by LEOs and beat over it. Best to be willing to do that if you pass the law.

And then if generally people don’t want that sort of force to be used and the laws not be enforced even when they are passed, that provides a selective enforcement regime which has at least two negative consequences - it erodes respect for laws and increases the power of LEOs and prosecutors since they now effectively control who had to obey them.

So I think those who are unwilling to face the coercion and possible violence of laws are trying to hide something and avoid responsibility for the laws they advocate for. Many people try to do this. And putting it explicitly out there is one way to persuade.
 
The reason to emphasize the coercive nature of laws is that many people forget that coercion is being used when laws are passed, and with the possibility of up to lethal force being used to enforce them.

In this case, if you pass a law saying people have to close their businesses when the Governor says so due to a virus, it is important to note that means a SWAT team might be used to enforce the order, or people be held down by LEOs and beat over it. Best to be willing to do that if you pass the law.

And then if generally people don’t want that sort of force to be used and the laws not be enforced even when they are passed, that provides a selective enforcement regime which has at least two negative consequences - it erodes respect for laws and increases the power of LEOs and prosecutors since they now effectively control who had to obey them.

So I think those who are unwilling to face the coercion and possible violence of laws are trying to hide something and avoid responsibility for the laws they advocate for. Many people try to do this. And putting it explicitly out there is one way to persuade.

Respect for law and law enforcement also results when the laws (or in this case, pronouncements) are patently idiotic. For example, one governor in particular has made many names for herself by prohibiting things like mowing a lawn or planting a garden, all in the name of fighting a virus. Unfortunately, none of those names would make it past the content filters.

Rich
 
(Said I wasn’t sure which thread to pop these tidbits into in the mask thread but what the heck, putting them here also for completeness.)

CDC now saying the thing doesn’t transmit via surfaces nearly as easily as initially thought.

That changes things fairly dramatically.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/cdc-now-says-coronavirus-does-not-spread-easily-via-contaminated-surfaces

Also seeing a new inflammatory disorder in kids who’ve been exposed to Covid. That’s not good.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health...e-in-kids-and-teens-likely-linked-to-covid-19
 
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...I don't consider shutting down MTA to be coercive so much as simply the common-sense thing to do during a pandemic of a respiratory pathogen. Anyone who ever actually rode the subways knows that. Unfortunately, New York City in particular considers the very idea anathema. That was never an option as far as Cuomo and de Bozo were concerned. Anything to save lives was justified, they said -- except shutting down the subways. That was off-limits.....

Another great post. To interject my own simplified take on it, I, too, wouldn't find shutting down a government-provided service to be coercive. Being forced to change MY actions is coercive. Shutting down the MTA, a government-run entity, is within the government's purview, and they should have done so. Heck, there are LOTS of government-run programs that I would GLADLY see shuttered... many permanently. Not mass transit, of course, although I agree that privatization would be a better approach.
 
Another great post. To interject my own simplified take on it, I, too, wouldn't find shutting down a government-provided service to be coercive. Being forced to change MY actions is coercive. Shutting down the MTA, a government-run entity, is within the government's purview, and they should have done so. Heck, there are LOTS of government-run programs that I would GLADLY see shuttered... many permanently. Not mass transit, of course, although I agree that privatization would be a better approach.

Thanks.

Rich
 
Rd is a measure of the rate of growth of deaths, analogous to Rt for cases. Dashed vertical gray lines show the date of the lockdown in a state if a coercive lockdown was used. The question -- do you think coercive lockdowns slowed the rate of Covid-19 deaths?

RdVsDate.png

Data source: covidtracking.com. Calculation of Rd starts when a state has 0.3 deaths/million people.
 
It would be more interesting if you add movement based on cell phone data.
There have been some pretty interesting analysis based on relative cell phone mobility. e.g. The first month Georgia re-opened saw a minor increase in cell phone mobility, hence even though Georgia was "open" no one was going out.

Tim
 
To see only the effect of the lockdown...

You’d also have to remove murderers like these:

https://kdvr.com/news/problem-solve...ing-at-cherry-creek-nursing-center-in-aurora/

(The article is two months old. They’ve killed more now. Nursing facilities were 50% of deaths during the initial ramp on those graphs here.)

You also have to remove any Covid cases contracted by “essential” workers who had no choice in the lockdowns and any cases caused by contact with them.

A medical worker catching it while working with infected patients, can’t be included in the numbers assessing the rate of R change in a locked down population vs not. They’re in a different category altogether.

Remove all of those and I bet the graphs look even more interesting.
 
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