Covid-19 and Discipline

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Here are four things to consider in the final runup to election day:

1. You could fly next to the corpse of a person who died of Covid-19 and never know. This actually happened on a Spirit Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Las Vegas. The plane diverted to Albuquerque to unload the dead woman’s corpse, but no passengers were informed. No systematic testing, contract tracing and quarantining arose from this incident, except among the flight crew.

In mid-June I wrote a post explaining why I won’t fly. This incident encapsulates the reasons: there is no effective control over virus transmission on aircraft. No enforced law. No uniform rules. No government oversight. Nothing but chaos, profit seeking and random risk. My wife and I together used to travel by air between a dozen and two dozen times per year, but we haven’t set foot on a plane since February. It’s just not safe.

No one takes responsibility because there’s no leadership from the top. The TSA won’t help check passengers. The FAA has no rules on testing or contact tracing, even though it meticulously records (and controls!) the history of every working part on the aircraft. Rules vary by airline and probably by flight. So your chance of catching Covid-19 on a flight is a crap shoot. Welcome to the Las Vegas of the pandemic!

Recently we traveled by car from Santa Fe, NM to Berkeley, CA. We would much rather have traveled by plane, if only we could have done so safely. As we neared Tehachapi along I-40, we saw a huge lot full of idled airplanes parked in the California desert. The airline industry is crippled and needs a massive bailout. Why? Because what may be the most disciplined and highly regulated industry in the history of commerce has no discipline, plan or leadership from the top regarding this pandemic.

2. Why masks are vital. Forty percent of people infected with Covid-19, on average, have no symptoms. But that’s just on average. In cases studied—involving groups as varied as cruise-ship passengers, prison inmates, Japanese evacuees from China, and homeless shelter residents—the rate of symptomless carriers ranged from a low of 6.3 % in a nursing home to 94.6% in a Tyson Foods plant. [Scroll down to table.]

That’s why masks are vital. These figures make the temperature checks still used at gateways to airports, planes and hospital emergency rooms next to useless. A temperature is a symptom. So 40% of Covid-19 carriers, on average, don’t have a temperature because they don’t have any symptoms. How good is a screening tool that lets 40% of spreaders through?

Not only are masks the only known way of preventing Covid-19 carriers from spreading the disease to others unknowingly. There’s also evidence that they protect mask wearers from serious disease. In two well-studied cases of cruise-ship infections, the ship that gave everyone N-95 masks reported 81% of infections without symptoms, while the ship that didn’t reported only 47% of cases without symptoms.

That’s a reduction in symptomatic cases of 58%. In comparison, the “gold standard” for a vaccine—the protection that experts hope and pray we some day will attain—is about 70%. The difference: we have plenty of masks right now.

Masks work. They prevent the virus from spreading indoors and in close encounters among people. They are cheap and simple and easy to use. Unlike vaccines or therapies, they have no side effects and no risk of complications. Yet our president, in a show of crazy bravado, ripped off his mask on the White House balcony, immediately upon his return from the hospital.

Think that was the right message to send our nation—or the right example of care and discipline? More generally, is “discipline” an attribute you associate with Donald J. Trump?

3. Mussolini. Our president is a great actor. You can lose yourself in his exaggerated facial expressions and forget what he’s saying. In that respect, he’s like another powerful leader from the last century: Benito Mussolini.

PBS recently re-aired an 2018 feature on twentieth-century fascism, focusing on Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini) and Spain (Franco). Set the timer to 10:00 and watch for two or more minutes, as Mussolini addresses a massive, adoring crowd from his balcony in Rome. Pay particular attention to his acting, his antics and his extreme facial expressions. Doesn’t il duce remind you of someone we all know today?

Then set the timer at 1:56 in this video, showing Rome’s condition after the Allied bombardment at the end of the war. Now no one is going to bomb us like World War II’s Rome; we’re much stronger militarily than Italy ever was, let alone toward the end of World War II. But right now, our health-care system and our hospitals are on the verge of collapse. This is so not just in cities, but in many small towns and rural areas, where hospitals have been closing and downsizing for years for lack of funds and leadership, in the wealthiest nation on Earth.

Is Trump our Mussolini? You decide. But before you do, take another look at the video of Rome, with the timer starting at 1:56, and think about overflowing hospitals with exhausted and infected medical staff.

4. Expertise. All the experts say it’s going to be a hard, painful winter, as people hide indoors from the cold with no masks. The economy will take yet another big hit. Why? Because the “freedom” not to wear masks will dissuade a lot of cautious people from going to the bars, restaurants, movie theaters and sports events that Trump wants to open up long before getting the virus under control.

I recently had a Zoom meeting with my fellow matriculants in physics graduate school in 1966. One of our group was a known (and rare) conservative, who saw Trump as a “fine” man. I asked him what he would do to fight the pandemic if he were in charge. He said honestly, “I don’t know.”

The group’s conversation moved on, be here’s what I would have asked if I’d had the time:

“You don’t know, even though you’ve got a Ph.D. in physics and have worked as a scientist for half a century. So who would you rather have making the decisions: scientists like you who’ve worked as long and as hard as you have, but on fighting disease, or a businessman whose sole successes were a “reality” show and a few hotels and golf courses?”

Just in case you haven’t heard, here’s what our nation’s foremost expert says. Again, you (the reader) decide.

But remember that your health, your family’s health, and the economy’s health may turn on your answer. “Freedom” is fine. But chaos and disorder are not. We’ve got no cure for this disease and no vaccine. The only things that we know work now are masks, testing, contact tracing and quarantining.

If you want to see a society that’s already going back to work, take China, where the virus started. Its crowded pedestrian walkways look like this. A little science and a bit of discipline, or a lot of “freedom,” pain, idled businesses and death. The choice is yours, and it’s on the ballot.

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