I’ve posted here twice before on my friend William Dale’s work in geriatric oncology, once on March 26th, and then again on April 3rd. In the second post, I took issue with William’s insistence on using the phrase “physical distancing” rather than “social distancing.” It’s not that I disagreed with him on the superiority of “physical distancing” over “social distancing”; “physical distancing” is obviously the superior term. But I worried that at that relatively early stage of the game, the change of terminology might dilute efforts at inducing people to engage in distancing. Better to have a single term and really hammer it home than change semantic horses in mid-stream. Continue reading →

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

 –T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton“

When you try to tell people how bad things got here in New York and New Jersey, they have trouble fully comprehending it, and yet more trouble empathizing. I sometimes wonder whether the only people who ever really got it were the victims of the most acute forms of depressive realism precipitated by it. If so, ER physician Lorna Breen and  EMT John Mondello may well have died by over-comprehension of, or over-identification with, the trauma they witnessed during the COVID-19 surge in New York City. And you can be sure that others, though alive, are suffering similar miseries.

I don’t want to valorize suicide, and yet I can’t help wondering whether Breen and Mondello had the courage to stare down realities from which the rest of us prudently avert our eyes. I assume that we’re better off in our ignorance than they were in their knowledge, but I’m not really sure I know, and not really sure I want to.

Requiescat in pace.

Scheming demons dressed in kingly guise
Beating down the multitude, and scoffing at the wise
–Rush, “A Farewell to Kings”

In a 1523 letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, Machiavelli famously asserted that he loved his “fatherland more than his eternal soul.” If we massage this text a bit, as political theorists often have, we get the so-called dirty hands thesis, the idea that a prince or political leader ought to be willing to sacrifice his eternal soul or at least his moral integrity to enhance the power of his polity. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and what’s breakfast without eggs? You can’t run a government without breaking heads, and what’s life without government? Vegans and anarchists might dispute the implications of those questions, but most people are neither. Continue reading →

I happened to attend an excellent webinar the other day organized by The New York Academy of Sciences, “COVID-19: The Road Ahead,” featuring presentations by Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Michael Osterholm (CIDRAP, University of Minesota), and Nahid Badelia (Boston University Medical School). The preceding boldface link takes you to a summary of the webinar, and to a link of a video of the webinar itself (near the bottom of the page). The three presentations are together about an hour long, with 15 minutes or so given to Q&A. Continue reading →

As philosophers from Plato to Popper have argued, there’s enormous value in the dialectical clash of divergent opinions: we learn, and arguably converge on the truth, through the process of disagreement. But there’s also something to be said for the solidarity produced by agreement on basic facts and values, as well as a sense of shared purpose. Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve relied on different people for one or both of those things, but relied consistently on Chris Sciabarra for the latter: for whatever reason, Chris and I basically agree on how to think about the COVID-19 crisis, as well as what to do about it. Continue reading →

I was stunned to discover that an old friend and neighbor, Rob Roberts, is struggling for life–discovered it by accident while scrolling through the news last night (here’s a story in USA Today). Apparently, he suffered cardiac arrest while convalescing at home after a diagnosis of COVID-19. My thoughts are with his wife and the rest of his family. High hopes for a full recovery. There’s a message from the Glen Ridge Police Department (Glen Ridge, New Jersey) below the fold. Continue reading →

I got in the car the other day for what I think is the third time in the last four weeks. I had “essential business” to conduct in New York, so I drove from Readington, New Jersey, where I live, to Washington Heights in Manhattan. I spent a tedious afternoon in Washington Heights engaged in “essential business,” then headed back home, a round trip of about 110 miles. Continue reading →

Via Alyson McClaren (@McclaranAlyson):

Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
Alyson McClaran (@McclaranAlyson) April 20, 2020

I’ve said this a couple of times in the comments, but might as well repeat myself in a post: the basic problem with New Jersey’s “lockdown orders”–Executive Orders 107 and 108–is that they were hastily drafted at the outset. That haste, though understandable, is taking a toll in confusion, chaos, and excess on the enforcement side. Some of the provisions of Order 107 were unclear. But some of them were overly lenient. Now, as if in compensation for that leniency, both orders are being violated both by residents and by law enforcement, an outcome that was fairly easy to predict. I blogged about the law enforcement side of the problem twice, once on March 23rd (suggestion #2), and once on April 2. Continue reading →