Rod Dreher's Blog, page 163

The Long Duration

I watched the president Monday afternoon, and was surprised by how much more sober and realistic he seemed. This story in The New York Times explains why. If this comes to pass, it is impossible to imagine how the world will be changed by what has just started:

Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.

To curb the epidemic, there would need to be drastic restrictions on work, school and social gatherings for periods of time until a vaccine was available, which could take 18 months, according to the report, compiled by British researchers. They cautioned that such steps carried enormous costs that could also affect people’s health, but concluded they were “the only viable strategy at the current time.”

More:

Dr. Birx’s description of the findings were consistent with those in the report, released on Monday by an epidemic modeling group at Imperial College London. The lead author of the study, Neil Ferguson, an epidemiology professor, said in an interview that his group had shared their projections with the White House task force about a week ago and that an early copy of the report was sent over the weekend.

The group has also shared its fatality estimates with the C.D.C., Dr. Ferguson said, including that eight to nine percent of people in the most vulnerable age group, 80 and older, could die if infected.

“We don’t have a clear exit strategy,” Dr. Ferguson said of the recommended measures. “We’re going to have to suppress this virus — frankly, indefinitely — until we have a vaccine.”

“It’s a difficult position for the world to be in,” he added.

Read it all. 

Here is a link to the actual paper from the British scientific panel.

It’s … hard to know what to say about this. We could all be forced to live like this for a year and a half. The alternative is mass dying, and the destruction of our health care system. The Imperial College report is what made the UK government do an about-face, and abandon its “herd immunity” plan, which would have pretty much let the virus run its course.

If we all really do have to live like this for 18 months, it is impossible to comprehend the economic destruction and hardship. The degree to which the state will have to be involved in our lives just to keep life going will make the New Deal seem like nothing. Think of all the unemployed! Think of what it will be like not to be able to go to school, or church for a year and a half, or to a party, a restaurant, or a wedding. If you allow yourself to start thinking like this, it becomes paralyzing.

And to bear in mind that it came upon us all so quickly…

No wonder Trump was a different man at the Monday presser. He even praised the media. Either he is feverish, or he stared into the abyss, and realized that this is a challenge that cannot be defeated by his usual methods.

This is going to take some time to absorb. Let me suggest something to you, though. We are all going to be doing a lot more reading in the months to come. Please buy from your local bookseller if you at all can, or order from small book retailers. As the NYT reports, these decisions are going to be the difference between survival and bankruptcy for these retailers. The world without Eighth Day Books of Wichita, Kansas, would be a much poorer one — please order online from Warren Farha and the gang. 

Seriously, let’s you and me make a commitment right now to stop going straightaway to Amazon.com to mail-order things, and instead make the extra effort, and pay the extra money, to support small retailers who can fulfill the orders by mail. It’s a small thing, but a lot of us doing those small things can save at least some people’s livelihoods. I encourage you, in the comments, to put in links to small businesses that your fellow readers should consider ordering from. Please explain why. I’m not going to approve comments that are nothing but ads for businesses. Make it personal. Tell us why you love this small business, and why you are urging readers to support it through their orders.

UPDATE: A great coronavirus news aggregator I follow summarizes the paper like so:

UPDATE.2: The concluding paragraphs of the paper:

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case

isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general

ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical

care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we

predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates

of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning

estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty

around the limits of hospital surge capacity.

We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The

social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be

profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier

stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.

Our analysis informs the evaluation of both the nature of the measures required to suppress COVID19 and the likely duration that these measures will need to be in place. Results in this paper have

informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks. However, we emphasise that

is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such

disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How

populations and societies will respond remains unclear.

The post The Long Duration appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘The Bliss Of Before, The Tumult Of After’

On Sunday, I received an email from a College Republican who works for the GOP in his ruby-red state. He was close to despair about the idiotic reaction of people in his generation to the coronavirus crisis — hitting the bars for a last hurrah before lockdown — and also about the way older Republicans in his circles have reacted to the virus. He’s left wondering if there is going to be much of a future for the party after the coronavirus crisis has passed.

I verified his identity, then asked him to write an open letter for this blog to fellow conservatives. This young man is a college student, keep in mind. I asked him to protect his own identity, to preserve his job. The day is coming, though, when young conservatives like him will need to speak out publicly.

After noon, he sent this in. He uses the pseudonym “Radio Varsavia”:

Dear Fellow Conservatives,

Following Communism’s fall in Czechoslovakia, politicians called for the banishment of the Communist Party and a purge of Communists and their collaborators. These Czechoslovak avengers had a strong case; Communists had used parliamentary democracy to take over the country, then spent 40 years building a Stalinist dystopia. Czechoslovakia’s President, Vaclav Havel, refused to partake, boldly stating, “We are all responsible, we are all guilty.” Havel, no stranger to the worst excesses of Communist Europe, understood that in any totalitarian regime or failed government, those who “keep calm and carry on” are just as guilty as those who vocally participate. When the dust settles on COVID-19, I fear we Conservatives will confront our guilt in this tragedy: we are all responsible.

As COVID-19 spreads across Europe and America, it is clear that our governments have failed us. Whether those governments are led by pastiches of Tony Blair (France) or low-budget reboots of Churchill (United Kingdom), every government on every side of the aisle has failed.

Most disappointing has been conservatives’ response here in the United States. Now, I’m by no means a liberal or a Never Trumper. I supported President Trump in 2016; I work for the Republican Party in my state, all while attending college, and have served as an officer in of my university’s College Republicans chapter. I’m a Gen Z Republican that was happier to see Trump overthrow the Paul Ryan establishment than I was watching him beat Hillary Clinton–though admittedly, both were extremely pleasurable experiences.

However, I am distraught by watching our side’s response to this outbreak. What began with a measured and responsible approach has morphed into an incompetent jumble of bad calls that only my crackhead aunt would call sane. In our attempt to position ourselves to the right of liberals, we have created a false dichotomy between panic and ignorance–damn the lives that will be lost.

On the side of panic, we have our good friends in the Mainstream media. From the fear-mongering idiots at CNN and MSNBC to the insufferable Twitter Socialists, the coronavirus outbreak has become nothing more than another example of Trumpian incompetence. Fools at The New York Times even proposed calling it the Trump Virus. In Britain, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has responded in the way American liberals say Trump should’ve replied, British liberals attack him in the same vein as American liberals have attacked Trump. These bad-faith commentators will never reject their puritanical zeal, and will always use any crisis to stoke fear and panic.

These liberals should also fall onto the side of ignorance. Unfortunately, we conservatives have chosen to occupy that lane.

From President Trump and Fox News telling people the virus “isn’t that serious,” to one legislator in my home state saying this virus is “payback for electing Obama,” we conservatives have squandered a golden opportunity to save lives and protect the nation we seek to make great. This past week attended a gathering of Republicans in my state’s capital city. Our governor had just reported our state’s first few cases, but due to the rhetoric Republicans have been hearing from our “great leader,” many attendees mocked the severity of this pandemic. I have received word this morning that one of those very attendees is now in hospital being tested for COVID-19.

This ignorant response is not conservatives’ natural disposition. In times of crisis, we usually err on the side of measured caution. Caution and panic are not the same things; panic is the result of a lack of caution. As conservatives, we should have pushed American families to start preparing for an outbreak, encouraged hospitals to prepare, and incentivize American manufacturers to begin producing ventilators and critical medical supplies–just as FDR did before Pearl Harbor. That would’ve been a true Conservative response, dare I even say a Trumpian answer. Was it not President Trump who in 2014 and 2015 called for measured caution in response to Ebola outbreaks in Africa? Was it not President Trump who, since the 1980s, has claimed our economy was too dependent on outsourcing? Where is that President Trump? Where is the Republican movement his election promised?

The American Right’s decision to choose the side of ignorance will not only put lives at risk but threatens to discredit our entire political movement. And frankly, if we can’t protect American lives during a crisis tailor-made for our campaign, we never deserve to wield power again. For every new case, for every new death, we are all responsible, we are all guilty.

Somehow, even more depressing, is how my own generation has responded to this crisis. As a college student, I have seen my peers complain about “Boomer selfishness” for years. On a good day, I’d agree with their critiques–Boomers didn’t exactly make good with their inheritance. My generation has been paraded as the generation which will change everything “They’ll end climate change! Racism! Homophobia! Sexism! Transphobia!” say our cheerleaders in the media. We have been told that we’ll be more caring, selfless, etc.

But that’s not the kind of generation I’ve seen since Trump declared a national emergency. I’ve seen my peers pack into bars and clubs, take group selfies while being covered in sweat and God knows what other bodily fluids, and captioning it all with things like “young and HEALTHY” or calling COVID-19 “the Boomer remover.”

This callousness, arrogance, and bold stupidity is not simply a repetition of the same attitudes we’ve long blamed on Boomers — it’s a horrific exaggeration of them. It’s like if Boomers wrote to JFK in 1962 telling him to nuke Russia because “YOLO!” If we truly are going to be a generation of change, progress, and love, then let’s show it by using our apparent resistance to the disease to help older citizens survive isolation, rather than using it to get plastered in a trashy night club. Let’s use our tech-savvy skills to build new delivery apps, communication networks, and even greater innovations that could help us all survive this pandemic.

Finally, to my fellow conservatives and my Gen Z peers, I want to express that not all is lost. Actions we take now can still slow down the spread of COVID-19, potentially saving thousands of lives. In addition to making sacrifices now so that tomorrow will be better, let’s also prepare to rebuild our world when this pandemic is over. Isaac Newton discovered gravity during a quarantine, helping to launch the Age of Reason! Imagine what things we could create, discover, and build during what will be our own endless summer. It’s time for all of us to shape up, not because it is easy, but because our communities and nation require it now more than ever before.

We are facing a turning point in our human story. This virus isn’t “the flu;” this moment is more 1914 than in 2001. We have lived our lives in the bliss of Before. We will live the rest of our lives in the tumult of After. We must decide what side of After we wish to fall. Do we want to be the people who rebuild things better than they were before? Or do we desire to only destroy more? Do we want to be 20th century Germany or Post-Civil War America? My allegiance lies with the Radical Republicans of yore. If we are to be, as in Havel’s words, responsible for everything that happens, shouldn’t our legacy be something great and noble? When the sun sets on Before and the dawn rises on After, will we cower from light in fear or will we embrace it with the confidence our forefathers had when building the modern world?

Now is the time to decide. I pray we choose wisely.

Sincerely,

Radio Varsavia

The writer has launched a new blog, Radio Varsavia. His Twitter handle is @radiovarsavia89 I look forward to reading the views of this Generation Z Republican as the crisis plays out. The future of conservative politics is being decided in part within the hearts and minds of people like him.

The post ‘The Bliss Of Before, The Tumult Of After’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Germs Of August

Today I received the following e-mail from an academic historian. He asked me to keep his identity protected. He shared with me some personal information about himself and his wife, who works in the medical field, so I would know his bona fides. I’m posting what he sent to me, but scrubbing it lightly to protect his identity. He describes himself as on the left:

My position at the university has given me a good view of what the academy is doing in response to COVID, which is mainly not understanding that a severe disruption is coming. Also, my best friend—also a historian—has been a fellow at [a Roman academic institution] this year, and has witnessed what is taking place in Italy close-up. They just closed the whole [institution] down today. I also correspond with several former students in the Chinese mainland. One actually asked yesterday if I needed him to send me masks and medicine, for (his words) “when the situation deteriorates in America.” What a world.

But the most important thing is that my wife is [experienced in dealing with epidemics, and is now working on her state’s COVID-19 task force]. In effect, I am uniquely placed to see and trained to interpret what is happening now.

You are right that people have not yet understood or accepted what is coming. There won’t be a vaccine soon. Setting up tent cities in Walmart parking lots is not going to do it. Nor will monetary policy, nor fiscal. Our hospitals are unprepared. People really will start suffering and dying. It will seem like it is happening all at once—Wuhans everywhere, out of the aether—but in reality, it has been happening slowly. Our public health officials are and have been working hard, but there are not very many of them and nobody listens to them anyway. Their warnings were dismissed for weeks by the Feds and they have watched the news with incredulity and rage. The CDC has been mismanaged by political appointees. Most importantly, Trump denigrated their expertise and denied that anything was happening while making everybody come to the lectern and wax about his genius and decisiveness. Public health workers are overworked and tired already (my wife is working 70-80 hour weeks while on duty), and it hasn’t even started in earnest yet. They will work hard to the end, and some of them will get sick and die. But they know in their hearts that Trump will lie and blame them for everything. As a consequence, morale is low.

The only tools left to fight the pandemic are the authoritarian ones, and in a time of pandemic, Trump has vast, vast powers. We ought to expect that he will soon start talking about all the powers he has that nobody ever knew about (“People are saying I have tremendous rights….”). Cities will be quarantined, interstate travel halted, et cetera. Expect is a national quarantine by April, with international borders shut down. The greatest source of anxiety is that nobody knows what kind of erratic, destructive things Trump will do next. But everybody knows that nobody can stop him.

I think you misunderstood Trump’s Nero tweet. It was not a demonstration of his ignorance. It was a promise. “Coronavirus” seems a more and more portentous name every day.

Last night, I was rewriting the final chapter of my forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies. My theory about how soft totalitarianism would finally come to America needed updating for this coronavirus time. Watch this interview with Donald McNeil, the chief science correspondent for The New York Times, explaining why China’s harsh authoritarianism seems to be working to arrest the virus:

this guy rules

pic.twitter.com/67pId4kC4i

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) March 13, 2020

China bungled its early response massively, but is proving that its authoritarian system, with its totalitarian surveillance capabilities, could save the nation. China’s tactics are abhorrent to people in liberal democracies … but may not be so once Americans and Europeans, impoverished by collapsed economies, start dropping dead like flies. Americans will discover a Strange New Respect for a strong state.

This news from Israel this morning lit me up:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has authorized the country’s internal security agency to tap into a vast and previously undisclosed trove of cellphone data to retrace the movements of people who have contracted the coronavirus and identify others who should be quarantined because their paths crossed.

The unprecedented move to use data secretly gathered to combat terrorism for public health efforts was authorized on Sunday by Mr. Netanyahu’s holdover cabinet. It must still be approved by Parliament’s Secret Services Subcommittee.

We have the same tracking capabilities here. China has used them in its country to gain control of the epidemic. Eventually, our government will do the same.

It will not end there, though. The system will stay in place after the crisis has passed, and most Americans, traumatized by the pandemic’s destruction, will be happy with that. It will then be deployed to protect the “health and safety” of the body politic by monitoring political and religious dissidents. The logic of what we have all seen on campuses — speakers shut down because their points of view supposedly threaten the health and safety of “vulnerable minorities” — is going to be deployed by the state against dissidents of the political and religious right. The rhetoric of public health is going to be unassailable after this crisis passes — and the political right, having destroyed itself over its Trumpian response to the crisis, will be unable to stand up against it.

It’s coming, eventually. But I also believe that the professor is right for the shorter term about the possibility of Trump seizing emergency powers.

Either way, the end of liberalism is upon us. I don’t think any of us foresaw that it would come from a virus. For that matter, most people on both the left and the right don’t even see how bad it is likely to get. They still think we’re in normal time, but in truth, it’s August 1914.

UPDATE: A political scientist says, “Y’all, come on, chill out”:

You wouldn’t believe how cliched it is for an historian to lose a bit of perspective commenting on the affairs of the day. That’s how I found today’s post.

– It may be the case that in the US vs China battle for global status, this is a bad blow. But that applies only to the American system of government, not liberal democracy writ large. Remember (and believe me, countries in East Asia will), China’s own totalitarian system gave us this disease in the first place, through (I feel probably at this point) a lab safety failure and then through clamping down and failing to deal with the problem. Other liberal democracies (South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Denmark, Germany, etc.) have dealt with things very well, in their own ways.
– It just simply is not the case that this pandemic will create new precedents or tools for future totalitarianism. While emergencies CAN be used to usurp power, the fact is that the vast majority of the time, emergency powers are used for emergencies…and then wax away. This is especially the case for very “sharp” emergencies with clearly defined parameters (think wildfires or pandemics). In our system of government, even with an engorged federal system, there are checks and balances that prevent their abuse, especially again when the shape of the emergency is clear (unlike, say, terrorism). For abuses to become permanentized, it must serve a distinct political interest, be able to overcome checks and balances of other institutions, and gain a permanent organizational form (this process is what I study as an academic). That last one is why I’m so confident nothing of the sort will happen in the US. Federal pandemic response already relies heavily on state and local authorities: because Trump has been so out to lunch, that is even more the case this time. There simply isn’t anyone in the position to build, deploy, and use the kind of thing that Israel is doing. It takes real vision to build an authoritarian system, vision which Trump doesn’t have.
– Same goes for online teaching, by the way. If anything, this may be the final blow against the people who have been trying to push it. Because it is going to suck, and students are going to hate it. There are already plenty of great online options for people looking for that kind of thing: the vast majority of students who are not going “online” are doing so by choice, in many cases for the social benefits/fun of college (and that’s true from your frat boys to your super high achievers- just different social benefits). So having to leave their friends, lose the fun of the spring semester, miss graduation, etc., and to have to take crappy poorly-done online courses in their parents basements…will not be well-received.
– We are already at the point where, outside a handful of major cities (New York, Seattle, Boston, DC, maybe Chicago, San Fran, maybe a few others), the measures taken are more than sufficient to stop the spread of the virus before it exceeds the healthcare threshold. I think things will be just bad enough in those places that you won’t get too much grumbling about whether it was an overreaction, but it will be close. In the vast majority of places, these measures will have stopped massive community spread. And because of the age structure of the US + our patterns of life, you have a smaller and less vulnerable 60+ population (again, outside a handful of big cities). In Italy and Spain, many people live in multi-generational housing and/or see family members frequently because they live where they have always lived. This is increasingly rare in the US. I realize this is not an apocalyptic prediction, but I believe it is closer to the truth based on the evidence. The question now is going to be how to get the economy restarted without starting the spread of the disease up again.

The post The Germs Of August appeared first on The American Conservative.

Save The Federal Judiciary!

Well, well, well:

Running out of federal court vacancies to fill, Senate Republicans have been quietly making overtures to sitting Republican-nominated judges who are eligible to retire to urge them to step aside so they can be replaced while the party still holds the Senate and the White House.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who has used his position as majority leader to build a judicial confirmation juggernaut for President Trump over the past three years, has been personally reaching out to judges to sound them out on their plans and assure them that they would have a worthy successor if they gave up their seats soon, according to multiple people with knowledge of his actions.

It was not known how many judges were contacted or which of them Mr. McConnell had spoken to directly. One of his Republican colleagues said others had also initiated outreach in an effort to heighten awareness among judges nominated by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush that making the change now would be advantageous.

The overt effort by Republicans to create vacancies reflects a realization that Mr. Trump could lose the presidency, or that Republicans could lose the Senate majority and deprive Mr. Trump of his partner on judicial confirmations even if he did gain a second term.

Read it all.

Go, Cocaine Mitch, go! That’s a very smart move. There won’t be much of a Republican Party left after this fall’s election — President Trump’s coronavirus performance guarantees that. Get as many judges on the federal bench as possible before the deluge.

Got a letter last night from a College Republican who is involved with the party in his ruby-red state. He wrote about the virus denialism, even mockery, he’s been seeing among the older members of the party in the last two weeks. He’s also upset over the reckless behavior of his generation, partying in the face of disaster. He’s in despair. I asked him to write about it for this blog. He said he would. I verified his identity.

The post Save The Federal Judiciary! appeared first on The American Conservative.

Letter From A Christian Country Doctor

See that image? It’s a screenshot from a BBC news clip I received from James C., in Scotland. I can’t find a link to it, but I’ll post one if I do. In it, the elderly Spanish woman is gasping for breath outside a hospital. Her husband died yesterday there of coronavirus. She has it too, but they are so overwhelmed that they sent her away. The beds are full of people sicker even than she is. James sent it to me, urging me to share the clip with anybody I know whose older relatives or friends are downplaying the virus. If any of you have seen the report, please post a link in your comment so I can get it embedded here, or at least linked to.

I received this letter tonight from a Christian country doctor I met in my travels last year.

The doctor gave me permission to post this as long as I kept his identity out of it:

It is not just New York, Seattle or other major metros that are headed for trouble. When the virus first showed up outside of China, I and several of my colleagues realized that it would likely make its way to the US.

As soon as I dealt with and discarded normalcy bias, the logical implications of this were terrifying to me. Basically, I independently arrived at the same conclusions as you. And I watched with horror as all those predictions came true — no plane cancellations, no quarantines, ineptness at every level of government, dismal testing rates, false reassurances, no serious containment measures, and the politicization of an existential threat. I felt biblically obligated to share my concerns with others and some, realizing that I am not an alarmist, looked at the data and came to the same conclusion. Others used rationalizing and wishful thinking to mock me.

My colleagues and I raised concerns that we were seeing high levels of flu like illness with neg flu swab (70% sensitive- only misses 3/10 people who really have the flu). We wanted to do a drive through swab clinic for anyone with flu-like symptoms and COVID swab everyone who had neg rapid swabs for flu/strep. We were blocked by our state health department and our local healthcare system who employs us. They both insisted on following the state protocol of only COVID swabbing those who came from endemic areas. This despite the South Korean data that showed that over 80% of their positives were community spread. We were able to swab a few anyways by breaking protocol and using a private lab and are still waiting on the results (4 day turn around).

When we kept pushing for a more serious effort to locate COVID and influence the city/area to lock down, we were met with talks of protocols, workflows, and other standard MBA corporate pre-COVID thinking. We need to go post-COVID NOW. We really needed to do that weeks ago. Now the cases in my state are piling up despite the low testing rate (the state health department lists less than 200 tests in a state with 5 million people). The official numbers are not even up to date (19 at the moment with 6 of those yesterday, but I heard of at least one more near my area before I was done with this email). Not to mention all the suspected cases they refuse to test.

I am now sitting in self-quarantine with a temp hovering in the 99s-low 100s, headache, and generally not feeling well. In 15 years of practicing medicine, I have had a fever over 100 only 2 other times.

If we have Wuhan’s mortality rate (5.8%) and have 55% percent of the population infected (180 million), that is over 10 million dead. I see us doing nothing right now to think that we will have the lower mortalities of S Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. That does not even factor in all those who cannot get care for heart attacks, strokes, surgical emergencies (appendicitis, bowel obstruction, etc). Then you have all the people that will not be able to get their cancer care or other ongoing treatments for chronic diseases. What about all the chemo kids when the system collapses? I saw a patient last week with a cough who turned out to have lung cancer, and I felt like a fraud talking about his next steps.

In a world of arrogant adults who love money and kill children, the Almighty has seen fit to bare his arm and send a virus that will expose the deceitfulness of wealth and kills adults and spares children. The world is coming to its knees, and we need to make sure we articulate and display the Gospel no matter the cost. We were always just a few base pairs away from disaster and had grown too arrogant to realize it.

We need to pray, minister, and start thinking about what kind of rebuilding we can do. The Republican party is likely finished. Perhaps a new party that supports a better healthcare system more local and regional industry so we aren’t so fragile. More supportive of family structure (like the Christian Democrats). Let proven physicians run healthcare systems (like the Mayo brothers), encourage ownership of businesses and not rewarding corporate managers, incentivize real wealth and not leverage. You know, like the “ancient paths” of Jeremiah that follows the “peace peace” when there is no peace.

Please, readers, pray for the health of this doctor, and for all those health care workers who really are on the front lines.

UPDATE: Here’s the clip:

UPDATE.2: A reader sends in this link to a letter from an emergency room doctor in the Bay Area, published at Talking Points Memo. The doctor says that the national media is not reporting on what he/she is seeing. Wyoming Doc has been telling me the same thing. I asked him to write about it. He said on Friday that he would, but wrote on Sunday to say he’s sorry, but he’s simply too exhausted from work. Excerpts from the TPM doctor:

Everyone I work with seems resigned to a sense of impending doom, and an expectation that we will all be infected in the weeks ahead, and that we have no alternative course of action without abandoning our patients.

Many coworkers live with their parents, immunocompromised family members, etc, and are terrified about what they will do when they get sick. Live in a call room? stay in a hotel? not go home for 2 months? We’re slowly changing our operations, adding staffing, infectious screeners, etc – but there is organizational resistance to make the big changes that are already necessary. Despite near-daily reports from Italy of WWII-era triage decisions, shortages of key equipment, PPE, etc – we are still operating as if we can add a couple shifts to the schedule and otherwise operate normally. We’re not isolating URI patients from other patients in the waiting room, nor keeping them out of the “clean” areas of the hospital. We still have zero ability to test anyone who isn’t critically ill. We’re still using PPE for individual patients, discarding it, then using a new set for every patient. This would obviously be appropriate under any other circumstances, however we have recently been told that we will run out of PPE, most likely masks, within several days. Colleagues in the NYC area report that in the last few days there has been a surge of ill ARDS/covid patients, including one facility which intubated 5 of these patients in a single 12 hour stretch. In addition they have been told only to wear masks if intubating because of shortages … Reports from China suggest Covid patients typically require ventilators for 2+ weeks before improving.

There are reports coming out of South Bay that hospitals there are inundated in covid patients – but everything is being kept hush-hush for no discernible reason. All the staff I work with (MD, RN, tech, etc) are quite certain that we are headed for a catastrophe of somewhat epic proportions. Some people in the news have been saying we can do it better than Italy – I think the opposite is likely true. We have less beds per capita than any other industrialized society, and a completely inadequate number of ventilators, prone beds, ECMO circuits, perfusionists, etc for the wave that seems to be coming. We have a population that is half-heartedly pursuing social distancing measures, and no capacity to truly isolate the infected (home quarantine is a joke. the majority of the cases in China were transmitted via family clusters). We have national leadership that is both arrogant, incompetent, and seemingly determined to pursue political advantage regardless of the price to the nation. There will be some extremely difficult decisions ahead for our leaders, and I have less than zero faith they will be able to nimbly guide us out of a crisis.

More:

I’ve cared for loads of patients in situations that were plenty scary. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared for myself, my colleagues, my neighbors, and our country as a whole.

Sorry if this is a bit scattershot, lots of long shifts this past week with not enough sleep – and the wave hasn’t even hit yet.

Read it all. Prepare for what’s coming. And by all means, if you can stay home, then STAY HOME!

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View From Your Pandemic Online Church

All the parishes of the Orthodox Church in America are having the Divine Liturgy today, but parishioners have been asked to stay home, except for a skeleton crew — just enough to celebrate the liturgy. In our little mission parish in Baton Rouge, the priest (obviously) was there, as were a couple of chanters in the choir, a reader, an altar server, and one parishioner.

I appreciated that we were going to livestream the services on Facebook, but I expected them to be unpleasant. There is no substitute for being there. This morning, my wife sat down in the living room with her laptop perching on a stack of books I had been using this past week for research, atop the coffee table, and connected to the livestream. I sat in the kitchen working on my book.

She connected to the pre-liturgy prayers. I could hear them in the next room, and could not concentrate on my work, because I kept saying them in my mind. Finally I decided that it would do me good to go in there and simply be present for the prayers and the liturgy. So I sat down on the couch with my wife and the dog Roscoe — his first Divine Liturgy — and prayed along. Our daughter Nora woke up shortly after the liturgy started, and joined us:

It was an unexpected delight to have our little friend with us during the liturgy:

 

I don’t know how it would be for people in other traditions, but for us Orthodox, we all know the complex liturgy so well that even just hearing it over the computer, with the familiar choir voices, and the voice of our priest chanting the lines that have been sedimented into our bones, was strangely galvanizing. I say “strangely,” because in no way did I expect to be so moved by watching the liturgy on the screen, and praying along with it.

It would not have been like that (for me) had we been watching someone other Orthodox parish’s liturgy. I’m sure that, having come to it with no expectations, I would have been surprised and pleased by how much it meant to me, but it still wouldn’t have been the same thing as liturgy with my church community.

In his sermon, Father spoke in a proper Lenten spirit, encouraging us to interpret this disruption in our normal worship as an opportunity to repent. He said that all of us who have missed church in the past without a good reason should reflect on that, and turn away from the attitude that allowed us to act that way. We take so much for granted, he said. None of us like the fact that we can’t come to church right now, because of the virus, but let this period of deprivation be for our salvation, by driving us to deeper conversion — including a more faithful devotion to communal and liturgical prayer.

As he said that, I thought about this passage from Walker Percy’s Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?

Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.

Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?

Explain.

The plain old Divine Liturgy, held in a small, poor mission church that has to rent commercial space for worship, sure looks and feels different when a global pandemic has forced you to watch it remotely, via Facebook, as you pray for all those who are sick and dying, and who will soon be sick and dying when the plague flames into a consuming fire in the weeks to come.

I can hardly wait until the day when we are able to gather for liturgy together again. There really is no satisfying substitute for being there — but now I know we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough during a time of duress. When we see each other again, will we all be there — even our oldest members? Will all the people whose presence I might have taken for granted be present at the other end of our journey through this valley of the shadow of death? Please God, let it be so. Upon our return, it won’t look the same — and that is one blessing to come out of a hard time.

Did you observe your church’s services this morning via the Internet? If so, what was it like?

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Coronavirus As Nemesis

Here’s a sobering essay by Bruno Maçães about coronavirus, Europe, and cultural identity Excerpts:

In an interview published yesterday, the director of a hospital in Madrid was unusually forthcoming. Still traumatized by the images of the emergency care unit where he works, Santiago Moreno confessed that “we have sinned from too much confidence.” As he explained it, everyone in Spain thought an epidemic such as the novel coronavirus could spread in a place like China, but not “in a country like ours.” It is simple, really. People in Europe still think of China as a developing country. When news started to arrive of the outbreak in Wuhan, they imagined filthy Chinese markets and hospitals, they thought of the spitting and the lack of doctors, and they trembled. They feared for the Chinese people, not for themselves. This perception explains why, as mainstream opinion lambasted China for mismanaging the outbreak, there was remarkably little concern that the mismanagement could have consequences for Europe and other parts of the developed world. There was effectively no planning or preparation.

I should note here that the very limited number of people who have been publicly alert to the great danger facing the world—and who grew increasingly angry at the lack of seriousness in Europe or America—were almost invariably those with some knowledge of contemporary China. If you know what progress China has made and how the country is now ahead of the West on many dimensions of what constitutes a modern society, you are very unlikely to shrug with indifference when Chinese authorities lock down a major megapolis.

It was serious, but no one in Europe took it seriously. The unbearable lightness of being. A week ago, the Spanish government actively encouraged all Spaniards to go to the streets and join dozens of very large marches for gender equality. When asked about the infection hazard, one minister publicly laughed. The images of those marches have acquired a tangible, pungent horror. You see them against the backdrop of the hundreds of dead since and the laughter, the hugs and the claps from the marches stand as a lasting monument to human folly.

More:

The reasons for this cultural difference can, I believe, be explained through history and psychology. The sense of uncertainty and of the fragility of human life that I saw in Asia over the past two months is easy to explain if poverty and disease are still an everyday occurrence or at most two or three generations in the past. Often, that historical experience is reflected in public institutions: the lack of advanced social security and public healthcare systems forces Asians to contemplate in their daily lives the possibility that their world might suddenly collapse. In Europe the general psychology too often reflects the ideology of development, the idea that the most serious threats to individual happiness have been definitively conquered. Why worry about an epidemic if you have excellent public hospitals available more or less for free? What no one considered was that a virus could bring this perfect system to the point of breakdown.

Of course Europeans have their own nightmares and demons. But remember that the tragedy of the World Wars has been interpreted in political terms. They are a reminder of the dangers of nationalism and imperialism. The practical import of our recent history is to confirm our conviction in the rightness of our values, not to force us to doubt ourselves.

Read it all. This is one of the most important essays I’ve read yet about the meaning of this pandemic. Of course every single word he says about Europe applies to the United States.

All day long, I’ve been reading — on social media, in e-mails, in the press — accounts of Americans being defiant in the face of this thing. People angry at their bishop or pastor for cancelling church. People crowding bars and restaurants. People full of hatred for those who are warning about the danger — as if they were nothing but Trump haters or some other kind of spoilsports. And so forth.

What it all comes down to is hubris. The virus doesn’t have any interest in flattering our conceits or obeying our narratives.

Yes, part of this is the eternal hubris of youth: all those people in their twenties and thirties who think they’re going to get through this with just a few sniffles. They should read this:

A friend of mine got #coronavirus. He is younger than me. Played sports in college. Served in the military. As young and healthy as you could be. This is how his wife describes the illness. This is a public health crisis. No one is immune. pic.twitter.com/8dYU61PJMT

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) March 15, 2020

Besides which, if infected but they never get noticeably ill, they are still a carrier who sheds virus everywhere.

A bigger part of it, though, is what Maçães identifies as our cultural hubris. We thought modernity’s gifts of science and wealth had conquered Nature, and we didn’t have to worry about these things. We Americans are every bit as guilty of this. In some of us, it expresses itself as right-wing hubris; in others, it comes out in left-wing ways. But it’s the same thing: the loss of a tragic sense, of the reality of limits.

We are now facing the very real prospect of mass death, and of the destruction of our economies. From this will come, quite possibly, the destruction of liberal democracy. A virus is not going to kill liberal democracy, but the effects of the virus — economic collapse, chiefly, and violent social disorder — very well could. It is not fated, but if you are not thinking of at least this possibility, you are not taking this crisis seriously enough.

We don’t have to go this way, not at all. The decisions we make today, individually, and in our little platoons, will make the difference.

When this thing is over, everybody is going to assess how we dealt with the crisis. We know now how China dealt with it: through denial at first, and then with police state measures, enforced by the surveillance state’s advanced technological capabilities, to arrest the spread of the disease. How will the West fare? Will our free but decadent societies have done better than the Chinese dictatorship? If not, then no one should be surprised if the masses allow themselves to believe that having a strong surveillance state makes the difference between life and death. Those same Millennials and Gen Z people who are drinking in the bars tonight will be clamoring for Big Brother to tell them what to do.

Our civilization is being put to the test. No, this is not going to be the end of civilization, but it could be the end of a way of life, of a way of seeing the world, of a system of government that we in America have come to believe is unquestionably correct.

Philip Larkin’s poem below is spoken to a rabbit poisoned in a campaign by the British government to end wild rabbit overpopulation by infecting them with a disease (which ended by killing 99 percent of them) has wisdom for us today. Larkin writes in the voice of a walker who finds one of the rabbits paralyzed by the infection dying in a field, and puts the creature out of its misery:

Myxomatosis

Caught in the center of a soundless field

While hot inexplicable hours go by

What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?

You seem to ask.

I make a sharp reply,

Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain

Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:

You may have thought things would come right again

If you could only keep quite still and wait.

We can’t live as we always have lived, as if the coronavirus were merely a political problem, or somehow an affront to our dignity and position. This thing is here, and it has come upon us very fast. It feels deeply counterintuitive, but if you want to preserve the way of life in a free, prosperous society, then this kind of thing — from the governor of Oklahoma — is the exactly wrong thing to do right now:

The Governor of Oklahoma tweeted a picture of himself and his kids at a “packed” food hall in Oklahoma City. The tweet has since been deleted. DO NOT go anywhere that is packed right now. The Governor should be ashamed. pic.twitter.com/z9UzuS4pTL

— Scott Stedman (@ScottMStedman) March 15, 2020

My friend Mattia Ferraresi, with whom I dined in Rome last month — it seems like an eternity ago — and who took me, along with his wife and kids, to visit St. Benedict’s cave in Subiaco, writes this powerful essay for the Boston Globe. It’s his warning to Americans not to do what Italians did. Excerpts:

So here’s my warning for the United States: It didn’t have to come to this.

We of course couldn’t stop the emergence of a previously unknown and deadly virus. But we could have mitigated the situation we are now in, in which people who could have been saved are dying. I, and too many others, could have taken a simple yet morally loaded action: We could have stayed home.

What has happened in Italy shows that less-than-urgent appeals to the public by the government to slightly change habits regarding social interactions aren’t enough when the terrible outcomes they are designed to prevent are not yet apparent; when they become evident, it’s generally too late to act. I and many other Italians just didn’t see the need to change our routines for a threat we could not see.

Italy has now been in lockdown since March 9; it took weeks after the virus first appeared here to realize that severe measures were absolutely necessary.

According to several data scientists, Italy is about 10 days ahead of Spain, Germany, and France in the epidemic progression, and 13 to 16 days ahead of the United Kingdom and the United States. That means those countries have the opportunity to take measures that today may look excessive and disproportionate, yet from the future, where I am now, are perfectly rational in order to avoid a health care system collapse. The United States has some 45,000 ICU beds, and even in a moderate outbreak scenario, some 200,000 Americans will need intensive care.

Before the outbreak hit my country, I thought I was acting rationally because I screened and processed a lot of information about the epidemic. But my being well-informed didn’t make me any more rational. I lacked what you might call “moral knowledge” of the problem. I knew about the virus, but the issue was not affecting me in a significant, personal way. It took the terrible ethical dilemma that doctors face in Lombardy to wake me up.

I put myself in their shoes, and realized that everything should be done in order to avoid those ethically devastating choices: How do we decide who gets an ICU bed and who doesn’t? Age? Life expectancy? How many kids they have? Their special abilities? Is the patient’s profession a relevant factor? Is it right to save a middle-aged doctor who will save more lives if he survives as opposed to a younger person who’s been unemployed for the last 12 months? These are the kind of theoretical questions you are asked to weigh in leadership classes at business school. But this is not a personality test. It’s real lives.

The way to avoid or mitigate all this in the United States and elsewhere is to do something similar to what Italy, Denmark, and Finland are doing now, but without wasting the few, messy weeks in which we thought a few local lockdowns, canceling public gatherings, and warmly encouraging working from home would be enough stop the spread of the virus. We now know that wasn’t nearly enough.

Read the whole thing. It is wise, and it is urgently needed. The final line is one that shatters the pride and vanity of us Americans who think we can bluff our way past this thing, because nobody can tell us what to do. Listen to Mattia Ferraresi! His country is flat on its back now, and he says it’s partly the fault of people like him, who did not want to change their way of life when doing so would have saved lives.

We moderns think we control Nature, and have beaten death back to the margins. Nature — and history — would like to have a word with us.

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What It Feels Like To Be On A Ventilator

I continue to be amazed by the number of people who still believe that this is a hoax-panic organized by the media and the Democrats to hurt Trump, or simply that it’s not a big deal, and everybody’s freaking out for nothing. The stuff I’m hearing not just online, but from people in my social circles, talking about friends and family — it’s genuinely scary. The psychological resistance to doing what must be done to protect themselves, and the community, is almost freakish.

If that’s you, or you know somebody who is like this, take a look at this thread.The author is Susan Hennessey, a prominent DC lawyer and analyst:

Keep in mind that if you are hospitalized for coronavirus, you will be lucky if there is a ventilator for you. There probably won’t be enough — that depends on how bad the outbreak gets here. That’s why you need to stay at home.

UPDATE: #CoronaKatie is appallingly selfish and immature:

I just went to a crowded Red Robin and I'm 30.

It was delicious, and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I'll do what I want.

— Katie Williams (@realkatiejow) March 14, 2020

UPDATE.2:

Every restaurant on my block in Brooklyn was packed with people. There’s just a complete state of denial here on the severity of this crisis https://t.co/ZB90Wey7om

— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) March 15, 2020

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Three Years Of ‘The Benedict Option’

Today is the Feast Day of St. Benedict of Nursia in the Orthodox Church — which is to say, my name day. Three years ago, it was a happy coincidence — though I call it God’s winking at me — when my publisher released The Benedict Option on this day. Sentinel is a secular publisher; they had no idea that March 14 is St. Benedict’s feast day. But it is, so today is the third birthday of The Benedict Option too.

What a surprising and gratifying three years it has been for me. The book has sold over 70,000 copies in the US, and has been published in eleven languages. It is currently being translated into Hungarian, which will be the twelfth. It inspired at least one other book, Leah Libresco Sargeant’s wonderful, practical Building The Benedict Option. I have had the opportunity to speak to many people, both in the US and Europe, about the book and its message. I know of at least one lay Christian community, the Cascina San Benedetto in the countryside near Milan, founded by readers of the book.

As I have said here on many occasions, I have found it fascinating that the most enthusiastic audience for the book has been European Christians under the age of 40. The main reason, as far as I can tell: they don’t need to be convinced of the book’s claim that we’re in a time of spiritual catastrophe. If you’re still going to church in Europe today, and you’re a Millennial or a Zoomer, it’s because you really, really want to be there. And you also know that the older generations don’t have much of a clue how to lead the church through this crisis, and to make us more resilient. I wrote The Benedict Option as an attempt to make practical use of ancient monastic wisdom, and to incorporate a monastic way of seeing the world, and living out the faith, into the lives of lay Christians today.

Do you know that after all this time, I still get questions — frequently! — from people who haven’t read the book, but who are sure that Christians should not be heading for the hills? Nothing I can say about what the book actually says can move them off that narrative. Thank God for Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life (now available for purchase), about the Catholic martyr Franz Jägerstätter. It helps me explain what the Ben Op is, to a large extent. Franz and his family lived in the mountains of Austria, far away from the world. But the world — that is, Nazism — found its way to their village. Though it was a churchgoing village, only Franz and his family were able both to recognize Nazism for what it really was, and to find the courage to resist it, even though it meant their neighbors despised them.

The Benedict Option is about living in such a way that when the bad guys show up at your door and command you to blaspheme or apostatize, you can see who they are and what they’re really asking, and find the inner strength to bear witness, even unto death.

Today the entire world — though especially, at this moment, the West — is facing a terrible plague that is going to take the lives of many of us, and that will leave everyone’s lives changed in tremendous ways, ways that we cannot fully appreciate now. It is quite likely that our world will not endure such a convulsive shock — entire national economies shut down, health care systems overwhelmed, the free movement of peoples arrested — without major changes resulting. I invite you Christians who have not read the book to use your time at home in the days and weeks to come to read it — if you don’t want to leave your house, or depend on a hand-delivery, you can buy a Kindle version for $9.99 — and to think, and pray, about what message it has for you and your community as we plan for the post-pandemic future. If you have already read the book, consider going back to it, and thinking creatively about what we as Christian families and communities can and should be doing with respect to the pandemic, and post-pandemic, situation.

I want to leave you with some hope. As regular readers know, last month I visited St. Benedict’s cave in Subiaco — the hideaway into which young Benedict, around the year 500, retreated for prayer and fasting, as he sought God’s will for his life. The Roman Empire had fallen. Vice was everywhere. What should a good man do in a bad time? Benedict retreated from the world and put the question to God. When he emerged, Benedict ended by founding communities of prayer governed by a Rule he composed. In the centuries following his death, those communities spread Christianity and the habits of an ordered, godly life, throughout western Europe. They prepared the barbarian world for life in Christ.

It all came from a hole in the side of the mountain, which enclosed a heart open to the Holy Spirit. From that seed of faith, planted in a rock in a narrow, hidden valley, came the spiritual fruits that changed the world.

Maybe you are the new, and doubtless very different, Benedict that this world awaits. Why not?

Here are sung liturgical Orthodox prayers for Benedict, the Wonderworker of Nursia, via the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese:

Apolytikion of Benedict of Nursia

Plagal of the Fourth Tone

The image of God, was faithfully preserved in you, O Father. For you took up the Cross and followed Christ. By Your actions you taught us to look beyond the flesh for it passes, rather to be concerned about the soul which is immortal. Wherefore, O Holy Benedict, your soul rejoices with the angels.

Kontakion of Benedict of Nursia

Plagal of the Fourth Tone

O sun that shinest with the Mystic Dayspring’s radiance, who didst enlighten the monastics of the western lands, thou art worthily the namesake of benediction; do thou purge us of the filth of passions thoroughly by the sweat of thine illustrious accomplishments, for we cry to thee: Rejoice, O thrice-blessed Benedict.

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This Is Not A Snow Day

This is happening in a lot of places, I bet:

The inconsistencies here are maddening. Shut down colleges, kids pack bars. Shut down elementary schools, kids have massive play dates? You can debate if we should do this or not, but if we do this, shouldn’t we do this? https://t.co/PoWaY0WkUZ

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) March 14, 2020

I think what’s happening is that people are not thinking clearly about what “social distancing” means, or perhaps they haven’t had it explained to them. They’re acting like school is being let out for a snow day. That’s not it! Governments and institutions are doing this so you will stay at home, and avoid catching, and spreading, this deadly virus. Your kids go to a play date, or you go to a bar, you pick up the virus, then you bring it into your house, and to all the vulnerable people you meet. Think about how a visit to grandma by your child, who has been earlier in the day at a playdate, could kill grandma. It really is that serious.

If we don’t take this seriously now, and change our behavior, the government is going to have to mandate curfews, as they have done in Italy. We are a free people, and that means a responsible people. Let’s act like it.

It’s hard to get into this mindset, though. All week, I’ve been thinking about church this coming Sunday, worrying about it. Is it a good idea to go into an enclosed space standing packed in with a bunch of folks? That kind of thing. But I also thought about how important God is to me in this time, and how I shouldn’t let fear keep me away from worship. Was it fear, though, or prudence? Happily, Archbishop Alexander, my ordinary, asked the faithful to stay away from the liturgy for the time being. The priest and a skeleton crew of the healthy will be serving the liturgy; according to Orthodox belief, the Divine Liturgy is something God does through us, and must continue even if no one is in church to hear it. Here’s his statement. Excerpt:

Everyone in the parish or mission, other than the priest (and deacon), a reader, a server, and no more than two (2) chanters or singers (all of whom are physically strong and at low risk for COVID-19), should remain at home, even at the time of the Divine Liturgy. The holy body and precious blood of our Lord can never be a source of disease, it is after all for the healing of soul and body, but the COVID-19 virus can still be passed through the congregation. Out of love for our neighbor, we must do everything we can to protect the vulnerable by slowing the rate of infection not only in our parishes, but in the greater community, and thereby allowing the hospitals and medical community to more adequately care for those most at risk.

It was a huge relief to read this, and not just as a personal matter. I know there are bound to be people, especially older people, who felt bound to go to church as a matter of personal courage, and who feared that their anxiety over getting sick was a sign of little faith. Now the archbishop has taken the burden of that decision away from us. It is a mercy.

I deeply appreciate the way +Alexander phrased it: that we are staying away from church “out of love for our neighbor” — as an act of charity. This is exactly right, and is why it is an extraordinary Lenten sacrifice. By not gathering for worship, we reduce the chances of community transmission of the virus, and do our part to “flatten the curve” — that is, slow the rate of transmission so as not to overwhelm hospitals. I wouldn’t tell anybody that they couldn’t worship God in community on Sunday, but I do ask all of you to consider whether or not it is more charitable to your neighbor to stay home, and pray with your family, than to gather in this crisis. When you see staying home not as an imposition, but as an opportunity to show love for and solidarity with your neighbor, it changes.

Similarly, it may be boring and anxiety-producing to sit at home, especially with little kids bouncing off the wall. But it is selfish to go to the bars and clubs, or to set up play groups. It defeats the purpose of social distancing. It is inaccurate to view what’s happening now as like a snow day, or some other natural disaster upsetting the normal rhythm of life. A blizzard or a hurricane is an external threat to the community, in a sense, but the virus epidemic is both external and internal. It is in its nature to exploit community solidarity to kill us. 

Keep in mind that you, personally, might not be afraid to get sick, and therefore judge the risk of going out to the bar, or to church, worth it. But you are making that judgment for everyone you meet later, if you happen to contract the virus at a group meeting. You won’t get sick for a week or two, but you will still be shedding virus. Your grandmother, and everybody else in your life, can’t know where you’ve been in the past two weeks, and make a call about whether or not to visit with you. Show some love by denying yourself. This is not about you; this is about all of us. Don’t be a kinder, gentler version of these guys. 

UPDATE: What the heck is going on in the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth? Erin Manning e-mails:

Rod, I don’t know if other Catholics from the DFW area have contacted you about this, but we’re in an awful situation here in DFW with the conflicting directions between the Dallas bishop and Bishop Olson of Fort Worth (our bishop).

I summarized the situation briefly on my blog last night, but what it amounts to is this: Bishop Burns of Dallas has cancelled Masses; Bishop Olson of FW is directing pastors to only allow 250 Catholics at a time into churches, and suggests they add Masses or Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest to make this happen.

Our diocese has 90 parishes, 123 priests, and a million Catholics. Out of 4 Masses at my parish only one regularly has fewer than 250 people (and not much fewer–about 200 to 225). People asking our parish via social media how they were going to respond to the bishop’s directives were told, essentially: We’re not. We have no way to do so, especially by Saturday night (directive was issued late Friday, by the way).

A parish in Denton that serves the local university posted a welcome to Dallas-area Catholics looking for Mass on Twitter; Bishop Olson joined the conversation to remind people “Only 250 at a time.” So the bishop is perfectly well aware that some of Dallas’s 900,000 Catholics will be joining us for Mass and that his pastors have no plan to do anything but welcome the extra Mass-goers. What else could they possibly do?

This is beyond irresponsible of Bishop Olson. I don’t think he has the slightest grasp of the gravity of the situation. There’s a stunning article in America magazine in which a scientist is begging bishops to cancel all Masses right now, but Bishop Olson has set up Fort Worth’s Catholics to become the epicenter of the pandemic’s local spread.

I don’t usually ask you directly to write about something, but I’m asking on this, because of the seriousness of the situation. Bishop Olson blocked me on Twitter last year and I’m not the kind of person he listens to. I’ve already tagged our local media on Twitter about this, because Tarrant County has asked churches to limit their crowds to 250 or less or cancel gatherings, and I want to raise awareness that the bishop can repeat “no more than 250” to pastors all he wants but he has given them no help and no realistic way to accomplish this.

I admit it: I was one of those who thought your early alarms on COVID-19 were premature, especially since the data we had coming out of China was not clear. But the picture has clarified dramatically since the middle of February, hasn’t it? It’s too late now for measures like wiping down pews and cancelling the Sign of Peace; we ought to have been doing those things a month ago, but a month ago our family was one of the few who did the “bow of peace” (and boy did we get funny looks for doing that).

Pray for us in Fort Worth, anyway; if Masses begin as usual tonight and crowds from Dallas rush to join us, an awful lot of DFW Catholics are going to have signs of coronavirus in a week or two.

Come on, Bishop Olson, do not put your priests and your people in this position!

UPDATE.2: My wife suggests this article from Ariadne Labs, full of practical advice about what “social distancing” means. Excerpt:

2. No kid playdates, parties, sleepovers, or families/friends visiting each other’s houses and apartments.

This sounds extreme because it is. We are trying to create distance between family units and between individuals. It may be particularly uncomfortable for families with small children, kids with differential abilities or challenges, and for kids who simply love to play with their friends. But even if you choose only one friend to have over, you are creating new links and possibilities for the type of transmission that all of our school/work/public event closures are trying to prevent. The symptoms of coronavirus take four to five days to manifest themselves. Someone who comes over looking well can transmit the virus. Sharing food is particularly risky – I definitely do not recommend that people do so outside of their family.

We have already taken extreme social measures to address this serious disease – let’s not actively co-opt our efforts by having high levels of social interaction at people’s houses instead of the schools or workplaces. Again – the wisdom of early and aggressive social distancing is that it can flatten the curve above, give our health system a chance to not be overwhelmed, and eventually may reduce the length and need for longer periods of extreme social distancing later (see what has transpired in Italy and Wuhan). We need to all do our part during these times, even if it means some discomfort for a while. This won’t be forever, but we need to be committed and intentional about our actions now.

Read it all, share it widely. We can do this!

(I took down the previous Update 2, of the Italian air force, because I just learned that video was actually made last year. Alas.)

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