Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-coronavirus-protests-quarantine.html

by undefined1 • 6 years ago

36 41 6 years ago

r00fus• 6 years ago

One set of protests were against mask-wearing and another involved wearing masks for the most part.

I think the consensus is that outdoor activity is ok if you're distancing or wearing masks (preferably both) but as soon as you come indoors where there is less ventilation, the aerosolization of saliva particles can create a vaporous suspension that lasts a long time - if even 5-10% of the population isn't wearing masks then it could be dangerous.

Miner49er• 6 years ago

Don't forget that many of the anti-lockdown protests were also indoors.

_v7gu2• 6 years ago

Politics, not religion, is the real opium of people. If you have tried to follow the process of the protests from a diverse set of sources, you might have also seen how two parallel worlds exist in the same space. Banach and Tarski would be proud.

Reedx• 6 years ago

Politics have become religion.

AnimalMuppet2• 6 years ago

That explained a lot to me about America in 2020.

chasil4• 6 years ago

I suggest that you review the U.S. presidential election of 1800.

It would be interesting to see the drama of that event replay in our next election.

Our current partisanship would likely be far more destructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_presidentia...

_v7gu2• 6 years ago

The Burr vs Jefferson part or the Jefferson vs Adams part? Most of my eighteenth-century US history knowledge is from Hamilton and some Burr memoirs.

ravenstine4• 6 years ago

If people can gather in the tens of thousands with masks on for a cause, then why couldn't we celebrate July 4th with our masks on? Why does the state get to sponsor a political movement? How dangerous can this virus be if we're willing to allow mass protests, looting, and "autonomous" zones? All it can take is <1% of a crowd to pull down their masks to sneeze to spread the virus and kill more people.

A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no overall rise in infections but could not rule out that infections might have risen in the age demographic of the protesters.

Funny, because that's definitely not what I see on the total infections chart from JHU. How are everyday people supposed to interpret this?

EDIT: Retracted a part I misunderstood.

TMWNN• 6 years ago

If people can gather in the tens of thousands with masks on for a cause, then why couldn't we celebrate July 4th with our masks on? Why does the state get to sponsor a political movement? How dangerous can this virus be if we're willing to allow mass protests, looting, and "autonomous" zones? All it can take is <1% of a crowd to pull down their masks to sneeze to spread the virus and kill more people.

Don't forget how people have to attend funerals via Zoom, but George Floyd had multiple indoor funerals with thousands attending in person for his golden casket!

tych02• 6 years ago

So racism has been killing more than the 130,430 people who have purportedly died from COVID-19 in the United States?

Well, yeah.

Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years. The number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate with approximately 1.2–2.4 million dying during the voyage and millions more died in seasoning camps in the Caribbean after arrival to the New World. Millions of slaves also died as a result of slave raids, wars and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

ravenstine4• 6 years ago

Note the language:

has been

That's present-tense.

Maybe Bassett misspoke. Nevertheless, people need to be careful how they say things or they will get misinterpreted.

Yes, if you go back far enough, you can find a lot of death caused by racism. Nobody disputes that.

slimed• 6 years ago

We're talking about preventing covid deaths in 2020 and you bring up the Trans-Alantic slave trade. This is why no one takes you guys seriously anymore.

voxic11• 6 years ago

Yeah but that is 12 million over 400 years, which is a rate of 30,000 a year. Covid is 130,430 in just over 4 months, which is a rate of 391,284 a year. So covid is about an order of magnitude more dangerous.

opwieurposiu3• 6 years ago

This wikipedia article says the majority of these enslaved Africans were sent to brazil. Serious question, what is the BLM situation like in brazil right now?

NovemberWhiskey• 6 years ago

So racism has been killing more than the 130,430 people who have purportedly died from COVID-19 in the United States? I really doubt that, and I'm seeing why a lot of people don't take public health experts seriously anymore.

It's genuinely unclear to me why you think the quoted speaker is saying that racism is killing more people than COVID-19.

ben_w• 6 years ago

That quote says “killing people a lot longer” not “more than”.

I’m not a sociologist, but how would you measure the number of deaths caused by racism in a fair and unbiased way? I assume it’s something along the lines of the difference between disability-adjusted life expectancy of different ethnic groups, but even then you have a question of are things like poverty and education levels confounding variables or examples of systemic racism?

Likewise, are the healthy life years lost to genetic disorders like sickle-cell anaemia the fault of society for not treating them or the fault of the genes for being adapted to (in this case) malaria when there isn’t any malaria around to protect against?

And even if everyone agrees on the same answer to the above, the fact that racism hasn’t been constant over time makes it unclear what you are integrating over and when you are integrating between — The absolute racism since the Declaration of Independence or the estimated difference between actual history and a hypothetical counterfactual that nothing changed since the race-segregated toilets were drawn into the original design of the Pentagon?

I mean, if you count all the racism in post-Columbus Northern American history, you’d also have to count the literal genocide of how many native Americans tribes, and I’d also argue the slaves. I can even see a way the non-slave deaths during the American Civil War could count.

What I can’t see is a way to be totally clear in advance what the question is even supposed to answer. They’d all be true, but they’d mean different things. If I had to guess, these are all big numbers, but they vary by more than two orders of magnitude.

Like the saying says: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

ravenstine4• 6 years ago

Ah, you're right. I'm going to retract that part because I didn't understand it properly.

opwieurposiu3• 6 years ago

The american civil war killed 750,000. If covid-19 sticks around for 3 years like the spanish flu of 1918, we could reach that number.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up...

awinder• 6 years ago

How are everyday people supposed to interpret this?

I’m just gonna laser focus on this because I think this is the sentiment that the rest derives from. I don’t think most people are supposed to interpret this. It’s a complex multi-actor system with legal entanglements and public health issues at play. Decisions like this are made by teams of dozens with hundreds of years of collective experience. As a person who delegated through taxes to people with this experience, my job is to hear the advice, not to try to pick flaws towards a predetermined world view.

People haggle more with public health people than they would a roofer and I can damn right guarantee you that 99% of people know way more about roofing than these complex issues. The other 1% work in these government/ngo positions.

AnimalMuppet2• 6 years ago

The question is, do those on the team of dozens, with hundreds of years of collective experience, also have a predetermined world view? Probably, in at least some cases. Does that influence their decisions? How could I tell?

But when you see "anti-lockdown protests are bad, epidemiologically, but anti-police protests are fine", it sure looks like their world view is coloring their decisions, because their decisions look insane.

chasil4• 6 years ago

In the United States, it doesn't make any difference if protests are dangerous.

They are protected speech in freedom of assembly, end of story.

EForEndeavour• 6 years ago

Isn't that demonstrably wrong as well as a gross oversimplification? Freedom of assembly is not an absolute right; that would be absurd. No 1st amendment right is absolute.

Are you trying to argue that there are no legal exceptions to freedom of assembly? If so, try protesting in the middle of your nearest freeway without a permit and explain your stance to the police who'd show up to ask you to move along.

chasil4• 6 years ago

The most relevant standard for freedom of speech in the United States is the doctrine of "Imminent Lawless Action."

I'm assuming that it is relevant for the freedom of assembly as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

quicklime• 6 years ago

From the government’s perspective, maybe. People still need to decide whether they want to take on the risk of attending a protest, and they should be informed (by experts) when doing so.

chasil4• 6 years ago

In 1789, the year of ratification of the U.S. constitution, smallpox was still a lethal disease.

Preventative treatment for smallpox was a procedure named "variolation," which involved purposeful infection with smallpox by a scratch.

Variolation had a 3% fatality rate; normal transmission of smallpox was 15-20%.

A person who had recently undergone variolation could transmit the disease normally, and definitely required isolation.

George Washington required all members of the continental army to undergo variolation in our rebellion against the British.

The United States has faced enormous pressure from disease, and no mark of this is in the first amendment.

(p.s. I am surprised that we have not attempted the equivalent of variolation with ancestors of the current corona virus.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation

DubiousPusher• 6 years ago

This just pretty much comports with what we're coming to understand to be the case around the vast majority of human decision making. That is, we choose first and then justify. The process we call "deciding" is really backfilling with reason.

wisemanwillhear• 6 years ago

Makes me wonder if the Supreme Court would have ruled differently in emergency stay requests from churches had they seen the change in responses towards the protest rallys by the same leaders who were restricting religious gatherings.

hpoe• 6 years ago

Those who protested stay-at-home orders were “rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives,” the letter stated.

I feel like we've gotten to a point where "white nationalism" has become a code word for "anyone the disagrees with me" I agree white nationalism and racial justice is an important topic, but by arbitrarily labeling everyone who disagrees as a "white nationalist" it seems to be an intellectually dishonest way of refusing to engage with their arguments and the ultimate example of an "ad hominen" attack. Plus it makes it hard to figure out where to really focus attention because to quote Syndrome "If everyone is a [white nationlist] then no one is".

Am I alone on this, or do we really believe everyone that doesn't agree with one side is secretly just trying to bring back Jim Crow?

mindslight3• 6 years ago

Only some people actually believe that themselves, most of the signers are simply going along with the perceived group consensus. The false induction of outlying opinions into group consensus and especially perceived other-group consensus is one of the fundamental problems of social media amplification that we're dealing with.

Another example is the "terminology debate". Black Lives Matter is protesting deadly violence against Black people. Companies and opportunistic individuals engage with the topic for self-promotion via virtual gestures. And then the whole movement becomes easier to pigeonhole as ridiculous meddlers telling others they can't use various words.

MisterTea• 6 years ago

Two sides of the same coin. They are the same as the highly vocal opposition who use the same tactics. These are people who can't think for themselves and are comfortable with herd mentality. They love the concept of teams and beating the other team is the only goal, even if it means murder. They are easily manipulated and social media has enabled these "teams" to get their tentacles right into the pocket of every person on this planet. And you wonder why we have a political cesspool.

Am I alone on this, or do we really believe everyone that doesn't agree with one side is secretly just trying to bring back Jim Crow?

Watching a video of a black man being choked to death by a police officer, on camera, certainly makes me feel that we haven't completely eliminated Jim Crow.

rbecker4• 6 years ago

Watching a video of a black man being choked to death by a police officer, on camera, certainly makes me feel that we haven't completely eliminated Jim Crow.

The USA is a big country, and you can have your pick of instances of police brutality to support any conclusion you want to draw.

A white man choked to death, on camera, while police laugh? Here you go: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/01/police-laug...

A white six-year-old shot to death by two black police, one of whom only served 21 months in jail for it? Coming right up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jeremy_Mardis

Multiple studies showing police killings (though not violence) are not, on average, racially biased? http://jewishworldreview.com/0620/hughes061620.php3

Will this change your mind? No it won't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23757135

opwieurposiu3• 6 years ago

If the protest has a reasonable chance of increasing the fitness of your group then it may be worthwhile even if it is risky for the individual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection

This logic applies to non-contagious, individual level, hazards such as this 8 year girl shot after her mom inadvertently drove into a mini-CHAZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTEemY1d0dc&t=338s

However in the case of contagious pandemic it seems to be risky for the group to concentrate in one place. Is there a name for this effect? I can not find any papers on it.

rnernento• 6 years ago

In a world where global warming poses an existential threat to humanity, any actions that devalue public perception of experts and scientists are dangerous.

We are in big trouble, and if we don't collectively recognize that, put aside our differences wherever possible, and start acting accordingly, a lot of people are going to suffer.

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

"I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that," Dr. Troisi said. "I have a hard time articulating why that is OK."

and

"But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior. I am still grappling with that."

Sounds like "I do not yet have a justification for why that was okay in one case and not in another." However, tune in later as the rationalization machine grinds out a "reason;" I recollect it was a couple of weeks before the memeplex came up with some kind of explanation for why Rachel Dolezal wasn't trans-racial. Despite being told that singing and chanting for a religious function was a great way to spread the virus, apparently protest yelling and chanting carries no such risk. We're just waiting to hear why, and at some point you can be sure a meme/justification will be along to tell us.

Let's face it -- the messaging as to what was okay and what was not okay was political, which has been par for the course for the whole COVID-19 response. Masks are ineffective, don't buy masks, there's no human-to-human transmission: we all remember these important messages delivered with surety and gravitas.

I've heard a saying that goes "Never let a good crisis go to waste." I think this particular crisis has not gone to waste, as various parties have made quite a lot of hay.

No wonder people have so little faith in science. We've earned it.

Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What

Related Stories