{"id":74190,"date":"2020-05-21T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-21T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=74190"},"modified":"2020-05-21T07:06:42","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T12:06:42","slug":"blue-fragility-part-vi-actual-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=74190","title":{"rendered":"Blue Fragility, Part VI: Lysenkoism Vs. Actual Science!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Those of us who favor a safe, science-driven <\/em>re-opening of the economy are frequently derided by the “shut down until ______” (fill in the blank du jour<\/em>) crowd as either callous or ignorant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But looking at examples of states that have managed to combine generally good public health outcomes with a relatively sane course on economic re-opening, two patterns emerge:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) those paths tend to be steered by governors with experience in the private sector – the likes of Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Doug Burgum of North Dakota and especially Ron DeSantis of Florida) treat science as a way of finding the truth, as opposed it being a tool to coerce compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) The success tends to follow a parade of calumny in the “blue” media – followed by the media moving on to another story when none <\/em>of the predictions pans out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The response to Governor DeSantis’s plans early in the epidemic (the sky was going to fall!) and now (it didn’t!) is illustrative<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An irony of the national coverage of the coronavirus crisis is that at the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.<\/p>

The media didn\u2019t exactly have their eyes on the ball. \u201cThe day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th,\u201d DeSantis recalls, \u201cwhich was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

DeSantis is bemused by the obsession with Florida\u2019s beaches. When they opened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone. \u201cJacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing-home context,\u201d he says. \u201cTheir hospitalizations are down, ICU down since the beaches opened a month ago. And yet, nobody talks about it. It\u2019s just like, \u2018Okay, we just move on to the next target.\u2019\u201d<\/p>

Perhaps more understandably, The Villages, the iconic senior community, was a focus of media worries. According to DeSantis, as of last weekend there hadn\u2019t been a single resident of The Villages in the hospital for COVID-19 for about a week. At one point, the infection rate in The Villages was so low that state officials were worried that they were missing something. \u201cSo I got the University of Florida to do a study,\u201d he says. \u201cThey did 1,200 asymptomatic seniors at The Villages, and not one of them came back positive, which was really incredible.\u201d<\/p>

So how did DeSantis go about responding to the epidemic? It began with the data, and trying to learn the lessons of other countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The “Red” states’ approaches (and to be fair, California’s) spared their states the carnage that befell New York’s nursing homes (and Minnesota’s, as well); a dispassionate, scientific <\/em>approach to the data (as opposed to the governor’s desired conclusions<\/em>, as in Minnesota) led them to protect their most vulnerable – in stark contrast to the policies of New York’s governor (and increasingly, Minnesota’s).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been calling this response “Blue Fragility” – the tendency of our society’s “gatekeepers” to lash out in anger and frustration at the realization that their version of “science” is as much about browbeating and logrolling people into submission as it is about systematic inquiry leading to knowledge. It helps deflect away from several fairly inescapable conclusions one might get from observing this pandemic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. High density “blue city” urban lifestyles – like the Met Council is mandating in the Twin Cities – are not <\/em>“resilient” against pandemics. High density living, transit-centered lifestyles, open plan offices, bars and restaurants are all hotbeds of contagion in a way that, at least anecdotally, lower-density areas – even as in Los Angeles as compared to New York – just don’t.<\/li>
  2. When you mix science and politics, you don’t get scientific politics. You get politicized science – better known as “propaganda” and “logrolling”.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Blue Fragility is causing some shutdown proponents to “kill the messenger”; I had a prominent Saint Paul political operative tell me “small towns are going to get the s**t kicked out of them”, with an almost evangelical glee, like he was looking forward to watching all those MAGA-hatted bitter clingers’ suffereing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And it prompts people to deflect away from the success story to, frankly, “dog bites dog” stories like this<\/a> – where a “covid denier” who is quite visibly high risk of contracting the disease…contracts the disease. Surprise, surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It’s easier to mock and taunt one’s opponent than engage them – when that’s all you’ve got. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Those of us who favor a safe, science-driven re-opening of the economy are frequently derided by the “shut down until ______” (fill in the blank du jour) crowd as either callous or ignorant. But looking at examples of states that have managed to combine generally good public health outcomes with a relatively sane course on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,16,416,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-conservatism","category-covid19","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74190"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74202,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74190\/revisions\/74202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}