Looking back, I think we forgot about the hammer part of 'the hammer and the dance'
If you only think about COVID in terms of how sick it would make you, I probably can't explain why that's amoral (at best)
I've been thinking about hammers and dances lately. Not the literal tool and moving-to-music, but the essay half the free world seemed to read at the start of the pandemic. Remember it? It was published on Medium in March of last year, just as the bottom was falling out in North America. Author Tomas Pueyo recapped where we were with the novel coronavirus's spread, laid out what we knew about it, examined the various strategies we could have taken to combat it, and noted that a rapid, hard lockdown at the outset (the hammer) would buy time for a population to be educated and prepared for many months of mitigation measures that got life as back to normal as possible while keeping the viruses spread under control. That latter phase was what Pueyo called the dance.
I read the essay at the time, and thought it was a disjointed mess, to be honest, in need of a good edit. It hasn't improved with age. But it was still useful and I agreed with the basic suggestion: swift and hard action at the very outset to crush the virus before it could spread widely, followed by a return to life something like normal for as long as possible. But when I read it almost a year ago, I remember thinking that it was probably ambitious to think that a single hammer blow would suffice. There needed to be a failure contingency for the dance phase. And that failure contingency was pretty clear: bring down the hammer again, hard and fast. And then resume dancing.
The essay sort of recognizes this, noting that governments in the dance phase could "tighten up when needed." I think that's harder than Pueyo realized, especially as COVID fatigue set in. Too many people are too tired of this all to play ball with half-measures. It's always too easy to cut yourself an excuse to bend a rule. Scale that up to a population of millions all giving themselves a break and you've got ... well, this. Over and over. Besides, if we've learned anything in the second wave in Canada, it's that gradually and incrementally trying to tighten up in specific places didn't really work. We tried limited, smarter lockdowns, and they failed, so we had to do another big, dumb one. I wrote about that in a Twitter thread not long ago.
There's still a ton we don't know about this virus. It continually surprises us. It has since the beginning. Rereading Pueyo this weekend reminded me how grim things looked in the first wave, when it looked like this thing really did kill 3-4 per cent of those it infected. Even then we were smart enough to know that that was probably an overestimate, since some infections were going undetected (a lot were, as we know now, thank God). But when the essay was published, death tolls in the hundreds of thousands or millions seemed possible. Even likely. It's been bad, but it hasn't been that bad. (The U.S. is something of an outlier here, and if trends hold will cross the eye-watering mark of a half-million dead sometime this month.)
Still, overall, the initial worst-case scenarios didn’t come to pass. (I remember doing the math on what killing three per cent of three-quarters of Toronto’s population would mean, and not liking the answer.) That’s the good news. The bad news is that it's been bad enough, and worse than some people continue on insisting. COVID-19 seems to have achieved the incredible balance of being just deadly enough to irrationally alarm some people while also being not quite deadly enough to properly alarm everyone.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: this has been a tragic event, but by pandemic standards, we are very, very lucky. It could easily have been worse. I was expecting, and planned for, worse. But we haven't handled it well. Federal, provincial and municipal leadership has consistently fallen short; reacting too slowly even when they ultimately make the correct decision. And a critical mass of the public has continued to either underestimate the danger or simply to decide that they're willing to accept the risk it poses to them, and to hell with the broader community.
There's probably a column or essay to be written about that issue alone — how different people have viewed COVID-19. For some, it's clearly a self-centred view. They considered their own circumstances, what that meant in terms of their personal risk, and acted accordingly. For most people, especially the young, that means COVID-19 is a minimal threat ... to them. Others among us viewed COVID differently from the outset, and understood that whatever the risk would be to us, if we are part of a transmission chain, we are also responsible for the fate of everyone further down the chain, and that will inevitably include some people who will not survive. That latter mindset is certainly my own. COVID-19 poses very limited risk to me, and those in my household (another 30-something adult in good health and two young children). But every outing out raises the chance that I unwittingly infect someone else with a virus I might not ever realize I have been infected with. And that person could die.
If you don't see it that way, if you see it only through the lens of the danger it poses to you, I grant that's rational. But I think it's also (at best) amoral, and I'm not sure I could ever explain why to someone who'd need it explained.
In any case, the situation in my hometown seems to be improving fairly rapidly, which is a pleasant surprise. The lockdown should be lifted by week after next, if the leaks can be believed. It can't come a moment too soon. I somehow talked myself into never trimming my beard during lockdown and I won't go back on that now, but man, this is itchy and I can't wait to hack it back to a proper, short length. Toronto's second application of the hammer has done its job, and now I guess we go back to the dance.
But as our vaccine woes continue, there's a real chance that a third wave will come, possibly due to emerging variants who pose as-yet-unknown dangers. I'd like to believe that we have finally learned, and will react with vigour and speed when it does — a quick whack of the hammer to knock things back to a safe level, and then a return to the dance.
I don't believe that, alas. But I'd like to!
OK, let's recap the week:
The big news for me, of course, is that I've started my new radio show on SiriusXM's channel 167 (Canada Talks). The Daily Edition is live every weekday morning from 10 a.m. until noon (Eastern time). Last week was a doozy as I was still doing the morning show, too, while my successor as host gets some technical issues sorted out. Moving the entire radio station to remote operations was a tremendous feat last year, but it has added some complications, which made the traditional real-time handover impossible. Two radio shows at a time is a lot! I'll be pleased this week to just have the one to worry about! I hope you can tune in.
In the Post, I was writing about Canada's deal with Novavax, to make desperately needed doses here. It's good news! But it's not going to actually make a difference for many months. If I'm wrong about this, I wrote, if there is a better plan, Ottawa should share it. Now.
I had two videos in the Post this week, as well, and they were both, unsurprisingly, about vaccines. (That's going to be a common theme for many months, I suspect.)
Here's one from Tuesday:
And then, later in the week, here's Thursday's:
I was doing my usual columns at TVO.org, as well.
On Monday, I was notably unimpressed with the non-announcement of anything in particular by Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce. Oh, that's a bit unfair — he made some spending announcements, sure, but kept us waiting two extra days for news on when the kids would be going back to school (Tuesday after next, for my two barbarians). It was a damn weird sight, and one that left Doug Ford basically backfilling for the announcement via a Twitter video later. I'm still not sure what they were thinking with that one.
Later in the week, I took some time to write a column thanking the many experts who have volunteered their time and expertise to help the public (this writer very much included) understand the pandemic. I recapped how an expert had gently and politely told me, before I published anything, that my understanding of a pretty important issue was wildly inaccurate. "I was spared public embarrassment thanks to someone taking time out of their day, for free, to tell me how and why I was wrong," I noted. "Worse than to my own ego, of course, would have been the damage to our public discourse I'd have inflicted on an already fatigued, data-drunk population."
Folks, that's it for me. Enjoy the Super Bowl, if you plan to watch. And stay safe in any case.
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