This article by Lyman Stone at The Dispatch is certainly interesting, and I think has strong persuasive elements. One has to get to paragraph 32 (I think. It begins "But while I think decadence is a possible explanation...") to get to what I think is the strongest point, but the whole thing seems solid.
We have chosen the wrong extreme measures, he thinks. Because we are a wealthy nation, which can afford medical research and expects first-rate medical care, we have tried to dodge the proven solution to epidemics in hopes that something else, which doesn't involve making people leave their homes, will work instead.
There is good discussion of masks and other related topics, all done in an efficient few paragraphs each. There is history going back to Leviticus and leprosy, and not just for decoration. There's a lot of bang for your buck in this article.
Read that article first. My own thoughts are next and are less valuable.
I wonder, in that context, if the increase in home ownership over the last few generations, including the growth of suburbia and now exurbia, because of reliable auto performance and willingness to drive for many errands, has lead to a different way of looking at our right to get away from problems by moving farther out. "A man's home is his castle" does not mean what it used to. In forcible* quarantine, no one is taking your house from you. You get it back when you get out of quarantine. This was understood in previous eras, but because it is lost now, as we are the ones that are more mobile and have a different attitude toward houses as places we can "get away" to, the rules of quarantine have been reversed. Now you have to stay home, rather than being taken out of your home. We feel differently about that than we did even fifty years ago. It is our era that is out of step with the others. The people from 1950 could completely understand what was done in 1850 or even 1150. We are the outsiders. Because we are rich and have actual health care beyond the rudimentary - a luxury unknown before about 1940 - and can live alone outside of the city, instead of being surrounded by servants and peasants who provided our needs, we have different expectations. Or you could be dirt poor and live in family units. There's that. Yet even that often required significant contact with others to survive. "Livin' off the land" was a Mother Earth News fantasy, and they found some people who actually came close. But there were always exceptions where the missus had a job in town.
I think this is worth sharing widely. Please consider that.
*The article explains how that does not have to mean "at gunpoint." Yet as businesses are being shut down and the proprietors taken at away at gunpoint under our current system, would that be worse even if it were true? But you were supposed to have read the article before you got to that asterisk, so you knew that already. Or I caught you out.
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I promise I'll read the content but wanted to drop in a comment that's a bit of a tangent though related, I think.
I have wondered about the (reported) lack of reaction in 1957 and 1968, especially since in 1957 there still should have been some institutional memory from 1918-1920. Was there more faith in the ability of the health care system to absorb the need to care for additional patients back then? The standards were different, too. I remember a fairly lengthy stay in the hospital after an appendectomy in about 1972. Of course I was an otherwise healthy 9 year old but the facilities were pretty spartan, and the care was mostly bed rest under observation of the nurses. I'm sure today I would have been treated with a more high-tech minimally invasive surgery and out of the hospital in under 24 hours. Observing my mother and father in fairly recent hospital stays it seems we demand a lot more monitoring and observation than I got back in the day. That maybe a good thing but it certainly adds to the workload for nurses even when the patient is relatively uncomplicated. It also feels like people were primed by the debates over health care *spending* to view our health care system as something that was extremely fragile and already in danger of being overwhelmed. That sentiment often came up in discussions of the use of ERs for primary care of those without insurance. If we had not seen the Italian experience, and viewed our health care system as robust, would we have wound up making the same decisions?
Read the content.
Things would be much simpler if COVID caused a purple dot to appear on your forehead.
I made a brief version of this point under "Pertussis." It's well-established that you can quarantine the sick or those suspected of being sick; it's weird to quarantine the whole society. It would be as if the Italians had responded to a merchant ship in the Black Death era not by quarantining the ship for 40 days, but by all of them hiding in their homes for 40 days. For one thing, they couldn't have afforded to do it. Medieval society was much richer than we imagine, but much poorer than we are all the same.
But at the end of the day, police officers have the authority to shoot someone walking around a Walmart waving a gun, and the CDC has the authority to detain someone walking around a Walmart spewing...
A minor quibble: I don't think the CDC itself is empowered to detain people.
I'm under a county-imposed essential-travel only "order", and it is only when you get to the second page of the order as promulgated by the sheriff that you find the consequences of being found in violation: The police will say "stop", and if you don't comply they will say "Stop!" again. I think they are unsure enough of what powers the State government has left to them that they want to be sure that they don't overstep their bounds, although they'll put on a good show of having the authority they won't explicitly assert to having.
That said, the county health department did arrange the rental of a recently vacated nursing home, close enough to another that delivery of meals prepared at the latter is convenient, so that it can be used as a proper quarantine facility. We don't know – and probably won't know – if it actually got used after being provisioned and staffed before we had any suspected cases in the county. They've been quite admirable in maintaining the privacy of those suspected or proven to be positive. We did hear for a bit about frustration with "certain individuals who will not be identified" who would not self-quarantine, and then heard that this was no longer a problem –– so I suspect they relied upon social pressure from those close to the victims in order to gain compliance.
Maybe law-enforcement is just more reasonable in NH. It may make it easier for me to overlook what is happening in other states.
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