Another just-so article that works back from different outcomes to assign causality (and blame) to a policy response. But we know coronavirus was spreading in California by January, and it just didn't catch fire like it did in New York City. https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-new-york-suffered-nearly-10-times-the-number-of-deaths-as-california …
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These stories will continue to get written because they offer a cast of heroes, villains, narratives, and above all, the illusion of control. A pandemic that we don't have a great deal of power over is mysterious and frightening. It has to be tamed and made into a story.
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I strongly agree with what I take to be your basic point: that we still don’t know anywhere near enough about how this virus spreads to be able to say why it hits one place hard and another not at all. Also agree that the inevitability thesis is therefore unsupportable. But!
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In defense of what you’re calling “morality tales”: say only 1 in 100 cities get hit hard by COVID. Even if we don’t know enough to say why certain cities are unlucky, isn’t it fair to criticize government officials for not preparing for that slim but devastating possibility?
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Oklahoma wasn’t absent intervention, unless most of us staying at home doesn’t count.
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I like how you tweet some variation of this every day and yet are deeply uninterested in understanding what the actual predictions epidemiologists have been making are or their theories about virus spread.
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I'm interested in both, and if you link me up, I'll be grateful
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You have many examples of places that didn't do anything (officially and compulsory), and where spared (...look at what was unofficial and voluntary), but "none of places that did everything science tells us would work, and yet where hit". Don't we eventually know how it works?
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Coronavirus is mindless but still it exploits our lack of resiliency, all relentlessly strip-mined away by late capitalism
Perhaps we have made ourselves powerless against a variety of existential threats
Less The Earth Dies Screaming, more The Earth Dies Counting Money