[uupretirees] On taking precautions . . . or not

From: Eric Russell <ericprussell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Uupretirees Yahoogroups <uupretirees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 23 May 2021 14:52:50 +0000

The data are so corrupted that we really don't know why things seem to be
improving or at least staying stable.  Eric

<http://www.theatlantic.com/>
[The Atlantic]
The Atlantic
The Texas Mask Mystery
Derek Thompson - Friday
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<mailto:?subject=The%20Texas%20Mask%20Mystery&body=I%20thought%20you%20would%20be%20interested%20in%20this%20story%20I%20found%20on%20MSN%3A%20The%20Texas%20Mask%20Mystery%20-%20https%3A%2F%2Fa.msn.com%2F01%2Fen-us%2FAAKeG9t%3Focid%3Dwinp-se>

[cid:7867c453-ae61-4686-96d2-fd74ba267605]

In early March, Texas became the first state to abolish its mask mandate and
lift capacity constraints for all businesses. Conservatives hailed Governor
Greg Abbott’s decision, while liberals predicted doom and death and President
Joe Biden disparaged it as “Neanderthal thinking.”

Nine weeks later, the result seems to be less than catastrophic. In fact, in a
new paper<https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28804/w28804.pdf>,
economists at Bentley University and San Diego State University found that
Abbott’s order had practically no effect on COVID-19 cases. “The predictions of
reopening advocates and opponents failed to materialize,” the authors concluded.

How could a policy so consequential—or at least so publicly contested—do so
little?

One possible interpretation is that lifting mandates did almost nothing because
masks in particular do almost nothing. This viewpoint enjoys widespread
popularity among conservative outlets such as Fox
News<https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-the-great-unmasking-is-finally-upon-us-but-not-everyone-is-happy>,
and is likely behind Abbott’s more aggressive
decision<https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/texas-gov-abbott-threatens-to-fine-cities-and-local-officials-if-they-impose-mask-mandates.html>
to ban mask mandates in Texas.

[Dana Stevens: Excuse me if I’m not ready to
unmask<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/mask-wearing-cdc-guidelines/618916/?utm_source=msn>]

This explanation has a few holes. Plenty of evidence suggests that masks almost
certainly do something, even if they’re not perfect. Research in the Journal of
the American Medical Association, for instance,
found<https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536> that masks
“limit both exhalation and inhalation of infectious virus” and that universal
masking<https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768532> “can help
reduce transmission.” A meta-analysis in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences
concluded<https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118#sec-22> that “places
and time periods where mask usage is required or widespread have shown
substantially lower community transmission.” And
several<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8>
analyses<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7> published in
Nature reported that surgical masks and unvented KN95 respirators reduce
particle emission by up to 90 percent.

A subtler possibility is that Abbott’s decision didn’t matter very much because
other factors—such as weather, accelerating vaccinations, and a bit of
luck—mattered more at the time. The coronavirus seems to spread less
efficiently in hot and humid
environments<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/hygiene-theater-still-waste/617939/?utm_source=msn>,
which could partly explain why states such as Texas and
Florida<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/the-curious-case-of-floridas-pandemic-response/618360/?utm_source=msn>
have managed to avoid higher-than-average COVID-19 deaths, despite their
governors’ famous aversion to restrictions. Add this to the pace of
vaccinations in March, and it’s possible that Abbott just got lucky, by lifting
restrictions at a time when cases were destined to decline, no matter what.

Yet another explanation is that Abbott’s decision didn’t matter because nobody
changed their behavior. According to the aforementioned Texas paper, Abbot’s
decision had no effect on employment, movement throughout the state, or foot
traffic to retailers. It had no effect in either liberal or conservative
counties, nor in urban or exurban areas. The pro-maskers kept their masks on
their faces. The anti-maskers kept their masks in the garbage. And many
essential workers, who never felt like they had a choice to begin with,
continued their pre-announcement habits.The governor might as well have shouted
into a void.

Across the country, in fact, people’s pandemic behavior appears to be
disconnected from local policy, which complicates any effort to know which
COVID-19 policies actually work.

In November, for instance, a team of
economists<https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tracker_paper.pdf>
using private data to survey all 50 states concluded that state-ordered
shutdowns and reopenings had only “small impacts on spending and employment.”
Colorado and New Mexico both issued stay-at-home orders at the end of March
2020. Colorado partially reopened that May, several weeks before New Mexico,
but this divergence resulted in no measurable difference between their economic
recoveries. "Spending evolved nearly identically in these two states,” the
economists wrote. Another
paper<https://email.mg1.substack.com/c/eJwlkcmKhDAQhp-mc1OSmEUPOQwM8xqSpdTQmkiWFt9-0t1Q1F788JXVBdaYbnXGXNDbzeU-QQW48g6lQEI1Q5q9U4RLLghyCktqpUE-z0sCOLTfFTqr2b3Vxcfw3h34wDja1CAnacDhkXMY9cKnhdhRaG1ALFgy-VXU1XkIFhS8IN0xANrVVsqZH8PPg_41u66rDwZSH9PaSudXyKUluq4Ut2hjyPWAlLsFdOpePtXcxVou8OuWuz3ap4tXyJ0_Tm1LZ2r2AXJGXlFMCeZEYsFGKnrSO-kstsxaxxfgwjIzTsYyORo2LtOCHwwfK-lzNblo--xtPFBSv8-yxeNsw_VN5NNtUOYWjxp8uWcI2uzgVEkVUPkC_9CbVwiQ2iPcrIsighI6MELINIkvnzdQQSeJ-YiarIvtKqgQ9Xb60Ij_A-xlmtA>
focused on the Illinois-Iowa state line. Last spring, Illinois towns issued
stay-at-home orders, while Iowa towns a few miles away did not. The decline in
economic activity was just about the
same<https://email.mg1.substack.com/c/eJwlkcmKhDAQhp-mc1OSmEUPOQwM8xqSpdTQmkiWFt9-0t1Q1F788JXVBdaYbnXGXNDbzeU-QQW48g6lQEI1Q5q9U4RLLghyCktqpUE-z0sCOLTfFTqr2b3Vxcfw3h34wDja1CAnacDhkXMY9cKnhdhRaG1ALFgy-VXU1XkIFhS8IN0xANrVVsqZH8PPg_41u66rDwZSH9PaSudXyKUluq4Ut2hjyPWAlLsFdOpePtXcxVou8OuWuz3ap4tXyJ0_Tm1LZ2r2AXJGXlFMCeZEYsFGKnrSO-kstsxaxxfgwjIzTsYyORo2LtOCHwwfK-lzNblo--xtPFBSv8-yxeNsw_VN5NNtUOYWjxp8uWcI2uzgVEkVUPkC_9CbVwiQ2iPcrIsighI6MELINIkvnzdQQSeJ-YiarIvtKqgQ9Xb60Ij_A-xlmtA>
on both sides of the border.

Decrees from the federal government may not affect Americans any more than
local rules do. In a recent announcement, the CDC reversed its guidance for
vaccinated individuals in a manner so dramatic that it struck some as the V-E
Day of the pandemic. But survey results from The Economist and YouGov show that
the big pivot hasn’t dramatically changed people’s masking behaviors. The main
drivers of mask wearing have been ideology, partisanship, and vaccination
status—which is itself highly, if imperfectly, correlated with ideology. Most
people aren’t waiting on the CDC.

Governors don’t reopen or close economies. The CDC doesn’t put masks on or take
them off citizens’ faces. A small number of elites don’t decide when everyone
else feels safe enough to shop, eat inside, or get on a plane. People seem to
make these decisions for themselves, based on some combination of local norms,
political orientation, and personal risk tolerance that resists quick
reversals, no matter what public health elites say.

If governor mandates don’t change behavior, and state shutdowns don’t change
behavior, and CDC guidance doesn’t change behavior (so far), then where do our
beliefs about this virus come from? Who shapes the way we think, feel, and act
in response to complex and consequential things like a global pandemic?

[Read: The liberals who can’t quit
lockdown<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/liberals-covid-19-science-denial-lockdown/618780/?utm_source=msn>]

I’ll first answer for myself: Skeptical of some official narratives from the
Trump administration to the CDC, I’ve become my own private investigator on all
things COVID-related. (It helps that I’m paid to be one.) I track what
public-health officials say about the pandemic, but I don’t wait with bated
breath for their pronouncements. Months before the CDC acknowledged that
surface transmission of the coronavirus is vanishingly rare, I
wrote<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/?utm_source=msn>
that surface transmission is vanishingly rare. Weeks before the CDC
acknowledged that outdoor mask mandates make no sense, I
wrote<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/are-outdoor-mask-mandates-still-necessary/618626/?utm_source=msn>
that outdoor mask mandates make no sense. I’m not bragging; I’m … well, all
right, I’m bragging a little.

But my private-detective work isn’t so special. At at time when citizens don’t
trust their government and when information is abundant, anybody can, like me,
become their own sleuth on all things COVID-related, piece together their own
theory about what this virus is and how it spreads, and come up with their
individual risk level. Many remote workers, hunched behind their laptops for 16
months, have had the opportunity to steep themselves in modern epidemiology.
Meanwhile, a lot of essential workers never had a choice: They were flung into
the teeth of the pandemic, without the protection of a computer screen, and
some of them have
developed<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/the-people-who-wont-get-the-vaccine/618765/?utm_source=msn>
their own general theories of risk and resilience.

So perhaps the Texas mystery isn’t much of a mystery at all. It’s just the
latest piece of evidence that many Americans used the last year to seal
themselves inside pandemic-information silos of their own construction—some for
better, against tardy and tangled public-health
guidance<https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1393312530932670476>, and some for
worse. Their settled views are now somewhat resistant to official utterances,
which would explain both why rule-following liberals are having a hard time
letting the pandemic
go<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/mask-wearing-cdc-guidelines/618916/?utm_source=msn>
and why many people who have downplayed the risk of the pandemic don’t want to
take an extremely effective
vaccine<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/the-people-who-wont-get-the-vaccine/618765/?utm_source=msn>.
The calendar has flipped, but for many people, the traumas and outrages of
2020 haven’t quite gone away.

[uupretirees] On taking precautions . . . or not

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