Special Note About Reopenings

Apologies, but my next planned post has been pushed aside for today.

Yesterday I got word that four people in my circles have or probably have COVID-19. The rest of the people in these households aren’t symptomatic, as far as I know. These people are in two households in different countries. They have tried to be careful.

Three took COVID-19 tests that produced a negative result, so they thought that meant they only have a common cold. Their tests were at a drive-through center. At one station, someone passed kits into the car. At the next station, someone at a distance told them how to swab themselves. At the station after that, someone collected the kits. My friends didn’t realize what it takes to really do a good swab for the test and didn’t realize how high the false-negative rate is for the test even when the swab is done by a professional. (Officials bother to do this so they can boast about numbers of tests carried out and record misleadingly low positivity rates. Emphasis is on the appearance of doing something, not the efficacy of what is being done.) Unfortunately, their symptoms are classic for COVID-19, but their government’s guidelines omit many symptoms of the disease.

It’s important to note that their household thought they were being obsessively careful, but they were going by government guidelines. The government said they could send their young daughter to the nursery again, so they did, believing the official permission meant it would be safe. They didn’t notice the government is focused on restarting the economy (e.g. USA, UK), not restarting society (e.g. New Zealand, Germany).

There’s a difference.

Ending lockdown involves trade-offs between complete safety and acceptable risks. If you are in a country where the government is focused on reopening the economy, official guidelines are based on acceptable risks to business and to tax revenues, not your life and health. Official permission to interact with more people and to go into more types of businesses means the government thinks the number of people who get sick and become disabled or die from the additional exposure will be an acceptable price for getting more businesses running so more businesses and workers will pay taxes again and political donors will make money again. I hate sounding this cynical, but casting such official behavior patterns in a better light needs powerful rose-colored glasses. In such a country, protecting your safety is up to you.

If you are in a country where the focus is on reopening society, guidelines give more weight to your well-being. If you are in a place such as New Zealand or Germany, those governments are trying to balance risk to health from lockdown confinement with risk to health from lifting lockdown and allowing imports of goods. (It appears that New Zealand’s reinfection may have come from imports.) Perfect safety is not achievable in the absence of an effective treatment or vaccine, but those places respond quickly whenever safety erodes. That’s as good as it gets right now.

One more time: Government permission to ease lockdown does not mean it is safe, especially where the government is more focused on the economy than on the safety of its people. Please look after yourself and people you care about accordingly.