How COVID-19 is affecting society

[Innula Zenovka]

The BBC fact-check some of the wilder claims circulated on social media by Covid-19 truthers, Q-Anon groupies and grifters seeking yet again to prove the old adage about fools and their money.

Coronavirus: Face mask exemption cards and other US claims fact-checked

As the debate over wearing face masks intensifies, fake exemption cards have gone on sale.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I found this particularly interesting, not least since we in the UK came out of lockdown on Saturday, and I'm living through the sort of decision-making process described in the article:

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening

As states ease restrictions on businesses, individuals face a psychological morass.

www.theatlantic.com

Reopening Is a Psychological Morass - The Atlantic

Skip to content Popular Latest My Account Give a Gift Ideas Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening As states ease restrictions on businesses, individuals face a psychological morass. 6:3...

www.evernote.com

 

[Free]

Texas coronavirus cases top 1,300 from child care facilities alone | CNN

Texas, along with 31 other states, is dealing with a new influx of coronavirus cases -- leaving many parents in limbo about when or whether to send children back to day care.

www.cnn.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I watched a movie once; it was about how there was a looming public safety threat in an American town, but some greedy politicians were dead set on ignoring the problem because the necessary measures for dealing with it and saving peoples' lives, like leaving the beaches closed on July 4th, would depress the economy. So they opened everything up, even telling people in news conferences that the threat had been completely solved and the problem exist anymore, over the objections of a scientist and public safety officials who insisted that wasn't true. And people believed the politicians and not the scientists and experts and declared they weren't afraid, and the beaches were absolutely packed with people; but as they'd all been warned, tragedy ended up striking and some people even died.

That was just the first half of the movie. In the second half they killed the shark.

 

[Grandma Bates]

This is a bit off topic since it is an example where the corona virus has not changed anything. Some people are still blazing hypocrites:


Sorry for the double topic post, but this also goes in the category of never letting a tragedy stop you from inflicting harm on others:

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

“We are incredibly saddened by her passing at this young age, but are comforted that she is pain free,” Davis told the News-Press after her daughter’s death.

Fucking ghouls. YOUR NUTSY RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL BELIEFS KILLED YOUR DAUGHTER.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening

As states ease restrictions on businesses, individuals face a psychological morass.

www.theatlantic.com

But Americans’ disgust should be aimed at governments and institutions, not at one another. Individuals are being asked to decide for themselves what chances they should take, but a century of research on human cognition shows that people are bad at assessing risk in complex situations. During a disease outbreak, vague guidance and ambivalent behavioral norms will lead to thoroughly flawed thinking. If a business is open but you would be foolish to visit it, that is a failure of leadership.

Speaking of flawed thinking, "governments and institutions" are comprised of those self-same individuals who are "bad at assessing risk in complex situations" with far more pressure than the average citizen making those choices. In the face of failed leadership, it is even more incumbent on individuals to be capable of making risk assessments for themselves. When a government fails so spectaculary, and individuals do so as well, that is a symptom of a culture that is already in extreme distress.

The bad judgments that really deserve shaming include the failure to facilitate testing, failure to protect essential workers, failure to release larger numbers of prisoners from facilities that have become COVID-19 hot spots, and failure to create the material conditions that permit strict isolation.

Are these really "bad judgments"? The testing fiasco was mismanagement and incompetence, the failure to protect essential workers falls under poor options since PPE was in many instances unavailable or a result of vile priorities where hospital admins placed more value on maintaining face than on worker safety. Releasing prisoners is another case of vile priorities, since the inmates are simply devalued as human beings, and the same can be said for not supporting the ability of workers to isolate. Many of these actions were callous, indifferent and downright evil rather than something as morally neutral as bad risk-assessment.

The fact that "good" verus "bad" risk assessment judgments fell along political lines is a glaring flag that is NOT about general human risk-assessment abilities.

 

[Free]

Translation: Schools should remain closed in the Fall.

 

[Free]

My LOL was for this bit of ironic mouth drool.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I watched a movie once; it was about how there was a looming public safety threat in an American town, but some greedy politicians were dead set on ignoring the problem because the necessary measures for dealing with it and saving peoples' lives, like leaving the beaches closed on July 4th, would depress the economy. So they opened everything up, even telling people in news conferences that the threat had been completely solved and the problem exist anymore, over the objections of a scientist and public safety officials who insisted that wasn't true. And people believed the politicians and not the scientists and experts and declared they weren't afraid, and the beaches were absolutely packed with people; but as they'd all been warned, tragedy ended up striking and some people even died.

That was just the first half of the movie. In the second half they killed the shark.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening

As states ease restrictions on businesses, individuals face a psychological morass.

www.theatlantic.com

Speaking of flawed thinking, "governments and institutions" are comprised of those self-same individuals who are "bad at assessing risk in complex situations" with far more pressure than the average citizen making those choices. In the face of failed leadership, it is even more incumbent on individuals to be capable of making risk assessments for themselves. When a government fails so spectaculary, and individuals do so as well, that is a symptom of a culture that is already in extreme distress.


Are these really "bad judgments"? The testing fiasco was mismanagement and incompetence, the failure to protect essential workers falls under poor options since PPE was in many instances unavailable or a result of vile priorities where hospital admins placed more value on maintaining face than on worker safety. Releasing prisoners is another case of vile priorities, since the inmates are simply devalued as human beings, and the same can be said for not supporting the ability of workers to isolate. Many of these actions were callous, indifferent and downright evil rather than something as morally neutral as bad risk-assessment.

The fact that "good" verus "bad" risk assessment judgments fell along political lines is a glaring flag that is NOT about general human risk-assessment abilities.

As I read the article, she's saying that individually we're none of us very good at assessing risk at the best of times, and certainly not in novel and highly dangerous circumstances, so blaming individuals for their actions misses the point -- the people to whom the remonstrations should be directed are the politicians who have failed to provide the public with clear and consistent advice, and who have failed to sustain public confidence in their attempts to protect public health.

 

[Free]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The resistance from White House staffers materialized shortly after the rollout of the task force, according to the people familiar with the situation. It came from staffers whom one source described as “free-marketeers,” who felt the massive influx of people wheeling and dealing for PPE was a sign that the free market was working efficiently to move materials where they needed to go. One free market tenet is that market forces act as an invisible hand, moving goods and services when and where they need to be in the most efficient way possible and unlocking supplies that may previously have gone untapped. If prices of, say, N95 masks seem exorbitantly high—well, that’s what market conditions dictate. Government intervention, in this view, only gums things up—at best. White House staffers who raised concerns about the task force’s work were of that school of thought.

 

[Beebo Brink]

As I read the article, she's saying that individually we're none of us very good at assessing risk at the best of times, and certainly not in novel and highly dangerous circumstances, so blaming individuals for their actions misses the point -- the people to whom the remonstrations should be directed are the politicians who have failed to provide the public with clear and consistent advice, and who have failed to sustain public confidence in their attempts to protect public health.

I read that article to mean just what you described, but I disagree with her conclusions on several points.

1) Politicians are individuals too, just as flawed as their constituents. There's no reason to expect their risk assessment to be any better. At best one could argue they have better access to expert opinion, but in these days of the internet, that same argument applies to ordinary citizens. We also have access to expert advice, which we can absorb or ignore, just as the politicians do. Holding them to a higher standard makes no sense if poor risk assessment is a general human failing; they're human, too.

2) Many government actions which the author calls out as poor judgment are not that at all. They are conscious and deliberate decisions driven by different priorities than saving lives. Trump and other Republicans are indifferent to the loss of life; risk assessment doesn't enter into their equations.

 

[Beebo Brink]

And here's some substantiating evidence that poor risk assessment isn't a strong factor in what's gone wrong in the U.S. The risks are perfectly well understood, even by Trump. He and the GOP simply don't care.

Anyone who hasn't figured that out, and isn't actively listening to health experts, is being swayed by other failures of critical thinking, not risk assessment.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I read that article to mean just what you described, but I disagree with her conclusions on several points.

1) Politicians are individuals too, just as flawed as their constituents. There's no reason to expect their risk assessment to be any better. At best one could argue they have better access to expert opinion, but in these days of the internet, that same argument applies to ordinary citizens. We also have access to expert advice, which we can absorb or ignore, just as the politicians do. Holding them to a higher standard makes no sense if poor risk assessment is a general human failing; they're human, too.

2) Many government actions which the author calls out as poor judgment are not that at all. They are conscious and deliberate decisions driven by different priorities than saving lives. Trump and other Republicans are indifferent to the loss of life; risk assessment doesn't enter into their equations.

I thought she was saying, as a general point, when we're assessing unfamiliar risks we reach very different assessments depending on whether the question is framed in terms of what we might gain by taking the risk or in terms of what we might lose if we take it, so in a situation like this, the government has to provide clear advice and messages, or everyone's going to end up making what seem to them good decisions based on the information they happen to have encountered, and the whole situation ends up a complete mess.

In a matter like this, I don't want make my own risk assessments -- I want clear advice from the public health authorities about what I should and shouldn't do, and I'll follow it as best I can, but in the US that's not happening at all.

As to her calling out various government actions as bad judgments, I took her simply to be saying that they're very bad judgments because they're based on completely warped priorities -- that is, they're bad judgments not because someone misinterpreted the risks inherent in a particular course of action but because they simply ignored them because they didn't think they mattered or pressed on anyway, to achieve whatever goal they had in mind, regardless of the public health consequences.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I thought she was saying, as a general point, when we're assessing unfamiliar risks we reach very different assessments depending on whether the question is framed in terms of what we might gain by taking the risk or in terms of what we might lose if we take it, so in a situation like this, the government has to provide clear advice and messages, or everyone's going to end up making what seem to them good decisions based on the information they happen to have encountered, and the whole situation ends up a complete mess.

Yes, I agree that this is what she is saying, but as applied to the COVID-19 response, it's simply a non sequitur. It's as relevant as discussing the process of language acquisition or the price of off-season cantaloupes. The human capacity for assessing risk may we be as weak as she asserts, in and of itself, but it's not illuminating for this specific topic. It does not account for the decisions that are being reached in regard to fighting coronavirus.

As to her calling out various government actions as bad judgments, I took her simply to be saying that they're very bad judgments because they're based on completely warped priorities..

That's giving her more of the benefit of the doubt than I did. My interpretation is that she believes we all have the same basic goal -- reducing the loss of life -- and that the failures in realizing that goal are due to poor risk assessment. She's looking at the situation through the lens of her own research, because that's what she knows, and missing a much bigger picture.

I just don't think this is a relevant argument to explain why both individuals and governments/organizations are making decisions that have led to (massive) loss of life. We are indeed making poor judgments at all levels of society, but I think other (very human) emotions and failures of critical thinking are involved.

 

[Free]

Of course they do. Grifters gotta grift.

Trump-connected lobbyists reap windfall in federal virus aid

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forty lobbyists with ties to President Donald Trump helped clients secure more than $10 billion in federal coronavirus aid, among them five former administration officials whose work potentially violates Trump's own ethics policy, according to a report...

apnews.com

Forty lobbyists with ties to President Donald Trump helped clients secure more than $10 billion in federal coronavirus aid, among them five former administration officials whose work potentially violates Trump’s own ethics policy, according to a report.

The lobbyists identified Monday by the watchdog group Public Citizen either worked in the Trump executive branch, served on his campaign, were part of the committee that raised money for inaugural festivities or were part of his presidential transition. Many are donors to Trump’s campaigns, and some are prolific fundraisers for his reelection.

They include Brian Ballard, who served on the transition, is the finance chair for the Republican National Committee and has bundled more than $1 million for Trump’s fundraising committees. He was hired in March by Laundrylux, a supplier of commercial laundry machines, after the Department of Homeland Security issued guidance that didn’t include laundromats as essential businesses that could stay open during the lockdown. A week later, the administration issued new guidance adding laundromats to the list.

 

[Free]

COVID-19 safety: Around the world, many of the elderly can’t be bothered

The population most at risk isn't listening to public health experts.

arstechnica.com

As such, many countries have implemented strategies focused on minimizing the risks for the elderly, and appeals to the public have been made centered around protecting older family members. But are the elderly doing their part to protect themselves? Not really, according to a study that analyzed survey data from dozens of countries.

The work was done by Jean-François Daoust, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Daoust took advantage of a huge collection of survey data obtained by YouGov and Imperial College London. The dataset is enormous. While Daoust had to exclude India and China, where the population surveyed wasn't representative of the country's demographics, he was still left with over 72,000 people in 27 countries (Africa is notably unrepresented, and the only South American country is Brazil.) While his main conclusions are drawn from the data as a whole, Daoust also did country- and region-level analyses to look for differences in attitudes.