The Middle Of History
How the narratives that are obvious today collapse when the numbers come in tomorrow.
This was intended to be a coda to the previous newsletter on the European second wave, but I’m increasingly passionate about the topic of how we determine a “good” COVID response against a “bad” one and how we need to divorce ourselves from the normal strategies of taking whatever the numbers happen to say today and delivering a crowd-pleasing dunk-o-rama from it.
Three Stories About One Region
The Narrative Makes Fools Of Us All
The Last Day Of History
Disney Shorts: Mickey’s Mechanical Man
Three Stories About One Region
Let me tell you a set of stories about a region.
We’re entering June and several states along the southern border of the US (CA, AZ, NM, TX, LA) have been in various stages of lockdown for almost two months but have managed to keep COVID cases to a minimum. There was an serious outbreak in Louisiana that many suspected had to do with Mardi Gras, but it was hard to fault them for that because Mardi Gras took place weeks before any region had begun to really lock down over COVID.
Cases in these states were well below a danger zone and this was reinforced by their death rates. Two months into this crisis and it looked like only Louisiana had gotten hit. Maybe the knowledge of the virus and the initial lockdown had allowed them to avoid the worst of this virus before it took hold in the region. Things looked pretty good in these states.
Until they didn’t.
The hot summer months came in and cases began to rise. But they didn’t rise evenly. Things got worse first in Arizona and then Southern California and Texas quickly followed as COVID spread through the region. But, nestled between two states that were seeing surges, New Mexico was able to avoid the COVID crisis that afflicted its neighbors.
Why was this? What made New Mexico so special that it could keep cases so low while the disease raged around it? A plausible suggestion was that New Mexico instituted a mask mandate in May. This is in contrast to Texas, where Governor Abbott banned local governments from enforcing mask mandates with fines or fees (a position that was later reversed as Texas instituted a state-wide mask mandate).
It is possible that this early action on masks managed to save New Mexico from a summer surge. This is an excellent example of public policy showing concrete and beneficial results.
Until it didn’t.
In the last two months, despite having a mask mandate in place, New Mexico has seen a COVID surge that may well exceed the summer surge in Texas while its neighboring states are not.
(Now, to be fair, there is a very serious COVID surge in El Paso, which sits at the corner of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, so it would be inaccurate to say that this is a state-by-state issue. But the states end up being good proxy indicators for the regions through which COVID spreads.)
Depending on when your chart ends, one region can deliver these three different stories
Warm weather states are immune
The hero state with mask mandates
The virus that mocks mask mandates
These are three different narratives that tell coherent stories with excellent evidence… as long as the narrative stops at a certain point and we decide we’re done collecting the information and time refuses to move forward. But time moves relentlessly forward.
The Narrative Makes Fools Of Us All
When COVID first hit the United States, there was some surprise among careful observers at how overwhelmed the northeast was by the initial wave of infections. New York City is well known for being crushed by infections in April and May, but that first wave tore through most of the northeast (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey) as well as lower but still substantial rates of death in the Midwest (Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio).
It was in this environment that I first noticed that the pandemic was *not* sweeping the United States the way some people predicted. While COVID landed early on in Washington and California, neither state suffered the case loads that the northeast and midwest did. As we can see above it didn’t even really hit the southern states for months after the northeast crisis. As the summer revealed heavier infection clusters in these states, there were many expressions of disdain and derision that, despite sufficient warnings and enough time to prepare a comprehensive response, these states were still seeing infections rise.
The oft-repeated argument was that the northeast and the midwest couldn’t have known about COVID. They were taken by surprise and therefore not responsible for the infections and deaths that they suffered while these southern regions should have been prepared and the resulting sickness and death was their fault.
This always struck me as a slightly convenient rationale and I’ve been beating a drum for some time that we shouldn’t attack groups or regions when a deadly disease tears through their communities. This is not a moral disease. It does not exclusively attack the reckless while sparing the cautious. Showing disdain for entire communities or regions based on COVID infection numbers is an implicit endorsement of the sort of collective morality that we would normally associate with the Old Testament in which entire nations are punished for collective sins.
This disdain has diminished substantially as COVID surges again in Europe. I’ve seen very few people blame Spain or France or Belgium for not taking the virus seriously or opening too soon or being maskless idiots who want to kill grandma by going out to eat. It could very well be that the people arguing that Floridians were responsible for getting sick and dying have since come to see the light and abandoned the idea that this disease is a moral punishment for not believing in science, which would be a welcome development.
But a practice that has stood out to me in all this has been the inclination to take whatever is happening today (or this week) as the final word on COVID.
It’s July and Florida cases are surging while New York is doing well? Well that just goes to show that New York is morally superior and has good policies while Florida is bad and filled with bad people making bad decisions.
It’s October and cases are surging in Europe and the Midwest while Florida and Georgia are showing reduced infections? Obviously that means that whatever Europe was doing doesn’t work and masks are pointless.
There is this persistent idea that whichever region or state is on the upside of a curve did the “wrong” thing and is “losing” while whoever is on the downside of the curve is doing the “right” thing and “winning”. Whatever happened this week spells out the story and defines the narrative. Wherever the line on the graph ends is the final truth of the matter.
The Last Day Of History
Except that today is not the last day of history. The endpoint of today’s graph will be a middle point next month. The trends will change and a place that was getting worse this week will get better next week. If we stopped moving now, I could describe the space around me quite well but it would be hard to say what the finish line looks like.
When we realize that pandemic curves are going to be a reality for some time in the future, we can adopt a view that rejects the inclination to dunk on others, a view that causes us to wait for new information, to hold off when we see the unexpected. It causes us to suspend our flash judgements because we don’t know what is coming next.
It is, even now, hard to say who is “doing well” with COVID because different regions are on different points of the infection curve. If COVID takes a hold of the northeast in a serious second wave, there will be some in the south who want to crow about how the northeast couldn’t hold off infection despite mask mandates and heavily enforced lockdowns. But today is not the end of history. It could be that second wave is going to hit the south even harder. Maybe the northeast *is* doing a good job holding down infections as positive tests rise. Maybe these increases were always going to happen but their policies are keeping it from being worse and we just don’t have enough data to do a quality long-term comparison yet.
We can’t gauge what is “good” or “bad” until we have all the data in and we won’t have all the data in for months, possibly years, to come. This means we’re also unable to pass judgements on the tradeoffs different regions choose to make. When all this started, almost no one was suggesting that we should keep lockdowns in place for 9-18 months.
If this continues through 2021, it is legitimate to ask what levels of lockdown people should be asked to endure and for how long. If the southern states are largely open, if kids are going to school, if people are having parties, planning weddings, going to church, and hosting concerts in 2021 but their COVID numbers are 10% higher, does that mean they failed? We can’t take any single moment in time and declare victory or defeat off the numbers we are seeing. This means we need to think about what the trade-offs are. It means that the COVID infection numbers are not the end-all-be-all of policy making.
It’s difficult to determine what the true “best” policy is because we’re still in the middle. Determining a “best” policy based on the raw numbers so far misses what is going to happen tomorrow. We are all in a fog and we will be for some time yet.
Disney Shorts: Mickey’s Mechanical Man
This short is a classic sports story with Mickey as the coach for a robotic boxer to be pitted against a very large gorilla. It’s the sort of story that is perfect for animation were you can capture the necessary unrealism and comic absurdity that would be impossible in live action film.
The animation is inventive and elaborate… to a point of being unnecessarily show-off-ish. Just like Real Steel isn’t at all about Hugh Jackman, this short barely even needs Mickey Mouse. All of the entertainment is in the complex and elaborate jokes and gags given to the two boxers. There is a sparse narrative to go along with it, but it’s mainly a line upon which to string more interesting robot boxing gags.