While they are few in number, those who’ve decided it’s their duty as Americans to protest coronavirus lockdowns are putting their self-interest over the health of others. Period.
You can disagree with me and call me a liberal schmuck and stand by President Donald Trump and the protesters he’s egging on all you want, but that won’t change the fundamental facts of the coronavirus, how it spreads and where our country stands in dealing with the pandemic.
In fact, by violating social-distancing rules, not wearing masks and encouraging like-minded folks to follow their lead, anti-coronavirus protesters are likely delaying the very thing they claim to desire: a reopening of America.
Here are some facts the virus doesn’t care whether or not you believe.
Until there’s widespread testing and contact tracing (tracking down and isolating everyone an infected person has come in contact with), it will be hard to prevent additional outbreaks or measure how many Americans have been infected.
One of the most nettlesome problems with this virus is it can be spread by people who aren’t showing symptoms.
A new study of a town in Italy found 43.2% of people diagnosed with the virus were asymptomatic.
According to an NPR report earlier this month, a third of the 82 people who tested positive for the coronavirus at a Washington state nursing home were “free of fever, malaise and coughing when they were swabbed for the virus, though most went on to develop symptoms.”
There are people in parts of the country saying “Well, no one around here has it.” That’s a statement based on zero factual evidence.
People crowding around state capitol buildings calling for lockdowns to be lifted have no clue whether they’re standing next to fellow protesters carrying the virus. As a country, we don’t have the data to say any place is virus-free.
Say you live in a small town in downstate Illinois. Nobody you know has gotten sick. That’s certainly a positive sign. But do you have gas stations and restaurants in your town? Are you near an interstate that carries people from areas that have higher infection rates?
Suppose someone from St. Louis is infected but not showing any symptoms, and that person decides to drive to Chicago and, on the way, pulls into at a truck stop just outside your town. Say two of your friends are there and they get exposed to that infected person in the truck stop diner.
That’s the first problem — an asymptomatic person spreading the virus.
The next problem is that coronavirus is highly contagious. Too many have equated the virus with the flu, thanks in part to Trump and other Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits making such comparisons.
Hugh Montgomery, director of the Institute for Human Health and Performance at University College London, told a British television network the virus that causes COVID-19 is three times as infectious as the flu.
That doesn’t sound that bad, until you crunch the numbers. On average, a person with the flu will infect 1.3 people. So if you take that through 10 transmissions, one person will have infected about 14 people.
“This coronavirus is very, very infectious, so every person passes to it three,” Montgomery said. “Now that doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but if each of those three pass it to three and that happens in 10 layers, I have been responsible for infecting 59,000 people.”
The “one passing it to three” is considered a high estimate. So say a person with coronavirus, on average, infects two people, a figure lower than epidemiological estimates. In 10 transmissions, one person would still be responsible for 1,024 other people getting the virus.
“If you are irresponsible enough to think that you don’t mind if you get the flu,” Montgomery said, “remember it’s not about you — it’s about everybody else.”
In February, a 61-year-old woman in South Korea tested positive for the coronavirus, at a time when the country had only 30 other cases. Hundreds from the woman’s church wound up testing positive for COVID-19 and that one patient led to a massive outbreak.
Just recently there have been coronavirus outbreaks at three Iowa food processing plants, a pork factory in South Dakota, a meat packing plant in Colorado and a wind power plant in North Dakota. What happens when there’s an outbreak at a plant? It gets shut down.
If one asymptomatic person at one protest has the coronavirus and spreads it to two more, then those two return to their hometowns and each spreads it to two more, you have the potential for another outbreak. And how will any state respond to a surge of new infections? By shutting down.
I understand the worries protesters and many others are facing. My industry is being walloped by the coronavirus shutdown. Pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs are either happening or being weighed at news organizations across the country, including this one. I’d give anything for a swift return to normalcy.
But until there’s enough testing nationwide to allow public health officials to smartly and confidently start slowly easing restrictions, a rushed “great reopening” will almost certainly be followed by a less-great re-closing.
If you want to protest something, protest the lack of adequate testing. Listen to governors, Democratic and Republican, saying it’s the key to the realm. Help them push the federal government to recognize the urgency.
But protest via phone calls and emails. Don’t go out in large groups and think your chants will repel a virus.
You put yourself at risk. You put others — possibly hundreds of others — at risk. And the end result may well be a longer lockdown time for everyone.