Gentleman Jim wrote: ↑Mon Jun 08, 2020 12:06 pm
JQH wrote: ↑Sun Jun 07, 2020 2:01 pm
Before I, as yet another white guy, joined in this [largely] white debate about what black people should do I thought I'd ask MrsH, who is a black South African, what she thinks. Answer:
1. American cops are behaving now as the Apartheid era South African police did; regarding the black population as an enemy.
2. Mass gatherings such as demonstrations are a big mistake right now and other ways of protesting, particularly outside the USA, need to be found.
I asked MrsGJ, a Black American, the same but she had the opposite opinion, that protest was necessary - carpe diem, if you like
There is a good article (for a change), on the BBC web site
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-52892949
We(most) are probably guilty here of seeing all this from a "white privilege" point of view
A bunch of you are also definitely guilty of seeing this from a healthy, able bodied privilege point of view, with particular emphasis on discussion of the copycat protests in the UK, which included 15000 people crammed in like sardines in a region where R had already climbed to above 1. When you are able to work from home and isolate without worrying if your carers will bring the disease, and without worrying that the disease is far more likely to kill you than the average, it becomes a lot easier to dismiss the fears of those who are doing just that, and to accept actions that prolong the pandemic.
And it's worrying to see how incapable some people are of thinking of more than one thing at once, or the taboo that seems to have descended over quantifying harms. For example, the idiot George Monbiot has gone in under a week from calling attempts to open up "culpable homicide" to applauding and attending mass protests. That guy who made the news dressing as death and handing out bodybags on the Florida beaches is now applauding the numbers present at the demos he's been attending. The prevailing narrative is one of bravely definy the virus, without any consideration for the fact that they are not just taking their own risks. Annoyingly, I can't find the poll, but a recent poll did show that a large proportion of the public still don't understand that their actions affect other people's risk, as well as their own.
A lot of people just don't seem to understand that COVID deaths aren't just numbers on a graph. Every one leaves a grieving family, a hole where a person should be, like any other premature death. Nor is the damage from COVID restricted to deaths. The more cases, the more damage to employment and wellbeing, a burden that, just as the deaths do, falls disproportionately on the already marginalised, on ethnic minorities, the poor and the disabled and medically vulnerable.
Trevor Bedford has been attempting to put some numbers of the number of deaths we might see from the American protests. He is estimating somewhere between fifty and five hundred deaths as a result of each day of protest, that's based on R ranging from 0.9 to 0.95, and IFR of 0.5-1%, with his calculations of spread at the protests based on the known outdoor super-spreading event at the Gangelt carnival.
To keep protests running at this level until the election would kill tens of thousands, if his calculations are anywhere close to correct. Obviously they are very crude, but with cases starting to grow in some states as they reopen, his R numbers may well be too optimistic. So far, it looks to be reopening, not the protests that have caused this, and I'm consistently against premature re-opening. While trying to estimate what might have happened without a lockdown is difficult,
this team ended up concluding lockdown saved almost half a million lives in the UK alone. With community transmission still widespread on both sides of the Atlantic, non-pharmaceutical interventions are still essential to save lives. That's the background to these protests - no functional track and trace, and rising R numbers that have in some cases come back up above 1. There is no escaping the need to weigh up the costs with the benefits. This is not so much trying to compare which is more serious overall, rather it is comparing chronic with acute. If it's ok to tell people that their access to medical care for chronic conditions has been put on hold for the duration of the pandemic, it's ok to tell them that pulling down a statue, however vile, can wait too.
Worse, in the US, many in public health have made abrupt u-turns on the safety of mass gatherings, giving them the green light, or even encouraging them, with one open letter claiming that these gatherings are ok, but protests against the lockdown aren't. The politicisation of this advice ruins the credibility of those who need to be basing their advice on what the science itself says, not what they consider politically desirable.
Notably, the author of that piece reported later that he had heard from doctors and COVID experts who felt boxed in, who wanted to warn people of the dangers but worried about how they would be perceived for doing so. Protestors cannot be expected to make informed calculations about risk if they are not given the full facts,
and deserve the unvarnished truth about the risks. Once again, it is difficult to overstate the danger presented by mass gatherings, and any serious attempt to control the pandemic has to halt mass gatherings before almost anything else, and likewise re-open them last.
I've made the point before that the urgency of protest is very different in the States to the UK, and it is, but realistically, protest leaders need to be working out how to best capitalise on the enormous mandate for change they have demonstrated while still safeguarding lives.
