Protesting during a pandemic (split)

[JQH]

BoaF, I think you’re right and that there’s a complete disconnect between those perceiving themselves as unaffected by the BLM issues and focussing on the pandemic, and those for whom the pandemic is just another injustice.

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.

[EllyCat]

BoaF, I think you’re right and that there’s a complete disconnect between those perceiving themselves as unaffected by the BLM issues and focussing on the pandemic, and those for whom the pandemic is just another injustice.

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 absolutely agree that the best solution should not involve mass gatherings during a transmissible disease pandemic! But when a person in a position of power is giving a dismissive response to a cause which people are clearly willing to risk lives for...I don’t think it’s helpful. Maybe just adding an invitation for organisers to get in touch to find an alternative which the Met would find appropriate would be more constructive than “stop that at once do you hear”.

[EllyCat]

Stuff

Ah, death, just another injustice. "Sad news, Grandma suffered injustice far too young last night, only 71. The funeral's next week."

I know you’re making a joke, but I didn’t mean deaths; I was actually harking back to a comment you made ages ago in the pandemic thread about how we’re WFH in our secure middle class jobs, whereas others in the gig economy or from less affluent backgrounds (disproportionately BAME) are taking packed tubes to their minimum wage, higher risk jobs, whilst facing poorer outcomes if they do catch the disease.

[Gfamily]

Today's email from the organisers of the Covid Symptom Study has a reminder

If you joined any peaceful protests this weekend, please don’t forget to quarantine yourself afterwards to protect others. As researchers and scientists we have a huge role to play in the future of health equity for all, you can read our pledge here. We have a long way to go.

[Gentleman Jim]

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

[JQH]

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

It's certainly not a simple binary position. We agree that some sort of protest is necessary - silence would be condoning racist violence.

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

I don't dispute this.

[Gentleman Jim]

I don't dispute this.

Don't answer if the question is too personal but do you, yourself, get abuse for being in South Africa, for being in a mixed marriage?

I know I have been, in the US

[JQH]

I don't dispute this.

Don't answer if the question is too personal but do you, yourself, get abuse for being in South Africa, for being in a mixed marriage?

I know I have been, in the US

Not abuse exactly but have had some whites (never blacks) make their displeasure at our existence obvious.

[Gentleman Jim]

I don't dispute this.

Don't answer if the question is too personal but do you, yourself, get abuse for being in South Africa, for being in a mixed marriage?

I know I have been, in the US

Not abuse exactly but have had some whites (never blacks) make their displeasure at our existence obvious.

In the US it has been from both sides, although more vocal from the white side.
Being called a "N-lover"had never crossed my mind before

[Millennie Al]

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 isn't necessarily as much of a contradiction there is there appears to be. America is seen to be handing Covid-19 spectacularly badly with uncoordinated and half-hearted efforts across the country. Hence an American might perceive the risk of gatherings to be lower, since avoiding gatherings there might be hopeless, while the benefit is greater because the protests in America are about a well defined American problem that can be solved by Americans. People in other countries might assess the risk of gatherings to be higher, while the benefits lower (especially since America is a notoriously insular country and often pays little attention to foreign opinion.

[EACLucifer]

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.

[lpm]

I've done a bit of time travel. I can inform you that the mass gathering of 200,000 people for a noble reason in Philadelphia goes on to cause 4,500 immediate deaths, possibly 11,000 eventually.

So clear is the link between the mass gathering and cases, this event will go on to be used 102 years later in another pandemic. It will become an eternal example of what not to do.

[bmforre]

Latest from Norway in Norwegian.
Three times as many new infections as preceding week, after stable low numbers for a while. Highly concentrated in/around Oslo.

Oslo had demonstrations. In Trondheim planned demonstrations were put on hold following appeals from health authorities and police. We shall soon be able to compare numbers.

[purplehaze]

A person who misses the point of Orwell's 1984

https://twitter.com/BenGoldsmith/status ... 4365148160

[Millennie Al]

I've done a bit of time travel. I can inform you that the mass gathering of 200,000 people for a noble reason in Philadelphia goes on to cause 4,500 immediate deaths, possibly 11,000 eventually.

So clear is the link between the mass gathering and cases, this event will go on to be used 102 years later in another pandemic. It will become an eternal example of what not to do.

I don't need to go time travelling to say that the most important lesson we could learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

[EACLucifer]

In the least surprising news ever, the neo-nazi tw.ts who have gathered are unmasked and not distancing. Not sure it counts as a mass gathering, though, given how few people have turned out to support the hateful a..eholes.

[jdc]

In the least surprising news ever, the neo-nazi tw.ts who have gathered are unmasked and not distancing. Not sure it counts as a mass gathering, though, given how few people have turned out to support the hateful a..eholes.

They might not have done a very good job of social distancing but tbf they've done a terrific job of protecting our memorials by standing next to Churchill while making Nazi salutes and pissing on the PC Keith Palmer memorial. Oh, and having a f.cking good ruck with the left wing scum Met Police.

[Opti]

In the least surprising news ever, the neo-nazi tw.ts who have gathered are unmasked and not distancing. Not sure it counts as a mass gathering, though, given how few people have turned out to support the hateful a..eholes.

They might not have done a very good job of social distancing but tbf they've done a terrific job of protecting our memorials by standing next to Churchill while making Nazi salutes and pissing on the PC Keith Palmer memorial. Oh, and having a f.cking good ruck with the left wing scum Met Police.

Aaaaaah. It's just a bunch of Leeds (and every other team that has an away crowd of tw.ts) fans with no game to go there. If they could just get a better press officer ...

[jdc]

Apparently a load of the f.cking lairy a..eholes went to Manchester and found the trouble they'd been looking for when a small group of Wrexham fans arrived and kicked the sh.t out of them. I know we shouldn't condone violence but...

[tom p]

For birds, and any other tone police, the picture on this page shows a non-stupid black lives matter demo

[Bird on a Fire]

Some potentially good news in Time: Nationwide Protests Haven't Caused a COVID-19 Spike (So Far.) Here's What We Can Learn From That

But public health officials have spotted at least one bright spot amid all the discouraging data: the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which began after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, so far do not seem to have been dreaded “superspreader” events, as some feared they might. Several cities that saw major protests, including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, have not experienced a new surge in cases in the days and weeks following. And in cities and states that specifically set out to test protestors, like Massachusetts, Seattle, and Minnesota, the results have shown that demonstrators were not considerably more likely to test positive compared to the general population.

However, a note of caution:

We may yet see a protest-related spike in coronavirus cases. Many of the demonstrators were young, and thus likely to develop only mild symptoms from COVID-19, if any at all. But even asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people can carry the virus to older, more vulnerable people in their homes or communities. If that’s happening, it would take more time to show up in the data.

Still, the lack of notable protest-related spread so far offers valuable lessons for managing the ongoing pandemic. It’s further evidence, for instance, that being outside with other people is relatively safe. Furthermore, many of the protestors wore masks to protect themselves and the people around them, which experts say significantly reduces the risk of transmission.

“What I’ve seen supports things that we already knew, which are that if you’re going to gather, being further apart is better than being stuck close together, that being is masked is better than being unmasked, and that being outside is better than being inside,” says Janet Baseman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington.

Interestingly, while complaints generally targeted protestors, it's those tasked with repressing them that seem to have failed to take adequate precautions:

This isn’t to say that the disease didn’t spread at all during the protests. In Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., respectively, several police officers and members of the D.C. National Guard tested positive following the demonstrations; law enforcement groups nationwide have been criticized for failing to wear masks during the demonstrations.

The article also tentatively suggests that the presence of protests in a city may have encouraged non-protestors to stay at home more, with a knock-on reduction in community transmission.

[Gfamily]

Some potentially good news in Time: Nationwide Protests Haven't Caused a COVID-19 Spike (So Far.) Here's What We Can Learn From That

But public health officials have spotted at least one bright spot amid all the discouraging data: the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which began after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, so far do not seem to have been dreaded “superspreader” events, as some feared they might. Several cities that saw major protests, including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, have not experienced a new surge in cases in the days and weeks following. And in cities and states that specifically set out to test protestors, like Massachusetts, Seattle, and Minnesota, the results have shown that demonstrators were not considerably more likely to test positive compared to the general population.

Good news.

Philly positives.PNG (52.51 KiB) Viewed 3504 times

from https://www.phila.gov/programs/coronavi ... -and-data/

Bad news - someone needs a refund from their time machine supplier

I've done a bit of time travel. I can inform you that the mass gathering of 200,000 people for a noble reason in Philadelphia goes on to cause 4,500 immediate deaths, possibly 11,000 eventually.

So clear is the link between the mass gathering and cases, this event will go on to be used 102 years later in another pandemic. It will become an eternal example of what not to do.

[dyqik]

Also no spikes in NYC, which had the biggest protests, or Boston.

[Gentleman Jim]

Perhaps lpm's time machine had not gone anywhere, and the figures she "quotes" are from Liverpool - a couple of weeks after they won the premiership

[EllyCat]

Didn’t we already establish lpm took her time machine back to 1918 and the Spanish Flu?

https://fullfact.org/online/1918-philad ... t-checked/

I can’t tell what’s a joke and what’s deadly serious policy in [insert country here] there days...

Edited to add: although I think the suggestion that she took her machine to Liverpool is amusing, with her “full“ name in a former parish