The Two Covids
There is Covid the virus... then there is Covid the mass psychotic event. Guess which one has been more impactful?
There is no better way to restart A Moment with Mumma then with Covid. Our whole world’s topic du jour over the past two years. Let’s jump in!
Covid: The Virus
Here’s the thing we’ve gotta start with: yes, Covid is real. I was early to warn about it and was what can only be described as a Covid Hawk in February, March, and April of 2020. On March 7th of 2020, I wrote:
Many people have been poo-pooing the potential impact of the Coronavirus on the U.S. As I alluded to above, this is unwise and shows an inability to understand exponential trends. The American Hospital Association recently put out a slide that takes all of these assumptions into account. What's the best estimate currently?
96 million cases
4.8 million hospitalizations
1.9 million ICU admissions
480,000 deaths
I mean, that seems pretty on point, right? As more data came in, I refined my views, writing this on May 3rd of 2020:
Broadly speaking - it is time to open back up because Covid-19 is more contagious, more widespread, but far less deadly than we initially thought. The evidence for this comes from serological surveys. These tests reveal the presence of antibodies in the bloodstream that indicate whether this person's body has already seen the coronavirus and responded to it.
These tests in a couple cases now have revealed a 8-10 fold undercount of reported cases vs. actual instances of infection. As noted above, this means the virus is much more contagious than we thought: one of the aforementioned surveys has measured New York City's true case count at 21% of the population, while only 2% of the city has officially tested positive at this point.
Of course, this also means that the disease is an order of magnitude less deadly than initially thought. Death rates calculated off of confirmed cases have tended to cluster around 3 to 6% on average, so this would mean a proximate death rate from Covid-19 of 0.3% to 0.6%.
This statement also has aged quite well, and isn’t at odds with the first. In that piece, I also go into the age stratification and note the disparate impacts: Covid adds about 3 years of driving risk for 18-40 year-olds, while it would add 112 years of driving risk for those 65+. And of course, as more data came out it was clear that high risk conditions further stratified risk by about a factor of 10, meaning the risk for someone young and healthy was only ~4 months of driving risk.
The impact of all this to any rational mind was that it was basically time to open back up, remain cautious. Indeed, my five conclusions on that May 3rd piece were:
We cannot contain the virus
Provide age-tiered recommendations
Open all outdoor spaces immediately
Indoor public spaces should open cautiously
Wear Masks, Help the Elderly, and Support Local Businesses
So I won’t belabor the next 18 months further, but it is suffice to say that I had a relatively early and accurate beat on Covid the virus and it’s impacts. This is because I did what any scientist should do: follow the data.
From a big picture, not much has changed about the virus in the past 18 months. So let’s talk about the other Covid… the mass psychotic event.
Covid: The Mass Psychotic Event
When the Covid Era is written about in the history books of the future, it will likely focus much more on the human response to the virus rather than the virus itself. And when those books do write about it, they will write about the psychosis that manifested itself across society and across nations. Psychosis sounds loaded, so let’s define it:
mass psychosis - a situation in which a large portion of society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions.So what qualifies as “losing touch with reality” and “descending into delusions”. Who did the descending? Here’s the hard truth: pretty much all of us did at least for a little bit! This was a society-wide phenomena. I’ll take a hit: this was me back in April of 2020 getting ready to go to the liquor store.
I mean, come on. I look like an idiot! Or at least I do now that we know that surface transmission is basically not a thing and that masks do nothing to prevent the spread of the virus.
If you see what I did there: yes, I said it. Masks don’t work. They never did. They didn’t work in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and they still don’t work 100 years later. Your loose-fitting cloth mask that just pushes air up instead of forward doesn’t do anything except make you feel safer and more virtuous, presumably.
Mask efficacy is just one of many delusions that are a part of the ongoing mass psychosis.
But what about Long Covid? Yeah, there isn’t really a basis for it if you actually design a thorough scientific study.
Let’s go next to another example: hospitalization rates. When polled by Gallup, most people dramatically misjudged the likelihood that a case of Covid would land someone in the hospital. Close to 60% of the people thought the odds were over 20% while 30-40% of the population thought it was over 50%.
Meanwhile, the correct answer was between 1 and 5 percent (and closer to the 1% mark, by the way). The vast majority of people who get Covid (and this is even before vaccination) can stay at home and recover just fine without ever needing to go near a hospital.
Yet some people will likely still bristle at hearing about this huge gap between belief and reality. Some would even equivocate, “well, it’s still bad for some people.” Which of course it is, but that’s not the freaking point! The point here is the clear separation between what people believe is happening in their minds, and what is actually happening in reality.
And finally we come to the piece that inspired me to write this in the first place. Let’s take it over to Mr. Madrigal writing at the Atlantic, who was… how do I put this… bringing the crazy hard and fast:
If I’m honest with myself, once I decided to go, it felt like I’d committed to taking on some risk. At the same time, my wife and I had been in lockstep on COVID stuff for so long that I don’t think I had the courage to really say: Hey, I want to go to this wedding, and it’s probably going to be maskless and … are we really okay with that? I don’t think she wanted to be the one to say no to seeing such good friends, if I was willing to do it.
And so I boarded my flight without the kind of real conversation and—as important—return plan that we should have made. I spent hours in an N95 mask in the Las Vegas airport and on planes before arriving in Louisiana and heading to the welcome drinks.I walked in and saw that people were all inside, fairly densely packed in a big room. No one was wearing a mask. Everyone was celebrating like people who haven’t seen one another for a long time, ready for a wedding weekend in the greatest city in America. For some reason, I was shocked.
I don’t know why I didn’t expect it to look like that. Maybe I thought we’d be in a garden under some nice string lights, mostly keeping masks on, in that maybe it helps way. I almost turned around and begged off the night of drinks, figuring that the next day would be less risky.
I mean, read the whole article… the neuroticism is strong with this one. Long story short, the dude got Covid even though the wedding was “mostly be New York and California people” and “there would be no anti-vaxxers among the guests”. But, spoiler alert: he was fine. So was his whole family. But perhaps the craziest thing though was how his kids took it. Here again, Mr. Madrigal:
My nonbinary 8-year-old was so mad and maybe so scared that they could barely look at me. My 5-year-old daughter proved her status as the ultimate ride-or-die kid. She brought a chair down the street so she could sit 20 feet away from me outside in her mask, as I sat on the porch in an N95. I’m not sure which reaction was more heartbreaking. It was as if one never wanted to see me again and the other didn’t want to let me out of her sight.
Without attacking the parenting too much here, let’s just say that the abnormal reactions of these kids is emblematic of a family that is all suffering from a mass psychotic event. I don’t want to pin this all on Mr. Madrigal - this is a society-wide phenomena. Mr. Madrigal resides in the Bay Area, which is basically the Mecca of Covid-driven psychosis.
And yet, try as we might, we also can’t obviate personal responsibility away. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for escaping the psychosis and hopefully pulling some others out along with us.
I’ll leave it with this: the reason we need to break out of this mass psychosis we find ourselves in is that we are already making tremendously bad policy as a result of our mass delusions. Masking kids all day at school? It’s flat out insane, but it satisfies the mass delusions still circulating in society (and actually one that is particular to the U.S.). And that’s just one example out of many both here in the U.S. and worldwide. Just wait until you hear about perception vs. reality when it comes to the vaccines!
It is not the virus that has restructured our laws and put so many of our heretofore rights in jeopardy. It is not the virus that has destroyed friendships and family ties over vaccination status. No. All of this is the work of the mass psychosis. It’s time to snap people out of it, and the time for doing that delicately is over.