This sucks, but enforcing moderate social distancing now can prevent martial law later

I keep coming across memes like one concerning various state-level enforcements of closing schools, nonessential businesses, and social distancing in response to COVID 19.

This quote from Benjamin Franklin often accompanies it:

I love Ben Franklin. He was a kinky, party animal who definitely deserves to be the $100 bill. He knew how to have a Star Spangled Hammering good time. But returning to the subject of liberty, he said this quote on 17 February 1775 in his objections to Barclay’s Draft Articles (which was an attempt to compromise on several issues to alleviate the tensions between Britain and the colonies after the Boston Tea Party):

“Massachusetts must suffer all the Hazards and Mischiefs of War, rather than admit the Alteration of their Charters and Laws by Parliament. They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” (Franklin, 1775)

Now, I am not the biggest fan of government, to put it mildly…

So are these measures giving a “false of security?” Are we surrendering “essential liberties”? I argue no. To see why, let’s take a look at the situation, and then I come back to this in the closing thoughts.

COVID 19 math without hypothetical social distancing

COVID 19 is not the flu. It spreads more easily than creamy peanut butter on a stripper pole. I just had a mental visual of Ben the Frankinklin licking this, and now I can’t shake it.

It’s hard to be absolutely precise, but COVID 19 has an infectious rate (an R0) of about 2.5 without social distancing (Sanche et al., 2020; Wu, Leung, & Leung, 2020) and a hospitalization rate of 15% (meaning roughly 15% of people infected need hospitalization) and 5% need critical care (Wu and McGoohan, 2020). In the U.S., the hospitalization rate so far has been about 12% (CDC, 2020).

The flu’s R0 is about 1.5 (but is often higher) (Ferguson et al., 2006) and has a hospitalization rate of about 1% (CDC n.d.)

The seasonal flu kills ~0.1% (CDC, n.d.). Worldwide, COVID 19 has a mortality rate of about 3.7% (WHO, 2020). There is variation. The mortality rate can be lower in places with adequate hospitals and higher in areas with overcrowded hospitals. It also affects older people and people with conditions (but the young can still die). But Mattis would be fine, of course.

An optimistic estimate of the mortality rate in the U.S. (so far) is 1% (CDC, 2020). That may seem small, but 1% is ten times higher than the flu. Plus, that is 1% of all the people who would get it, which is a lot because it spreads so quickly.

So why does COVID 19 spread so fracking fast without social distancing precautions? Precisely because it doesn’t kill a high percentage of people, and symptoms take days to be seen. This means people unknowingly spread it more than Charlies Sheen’s gross genitals.

So what does this mean in real-person speak? A lot of people dead.

Considering how fast COVID 19 spreads without social distancing measures we could expect a doubling rate every six days (note: confirmed cases can be lower because of a lack of test kits, people not identifying the symptoms, etc.) As STAT News points out, let’s use a conservative start of 2,000 cases in early March (again without social distancing measures).

With no social distancing this is the rough timeline…

April 1st: 1 million U.S. cases, 10,000 dead

May 7th: 2 million U.S. cases, 20,000 dead

…and so on…

Social distancing flattens the curve

There is a real risk of burdening our hospital space, medicine, equipment, protective supplies, etc…

Let’s look at the hospital space.

There are about 2.8 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the U.S., and roughly 68% of those beds are occupied at any moment, meaning around 300,000 available beds. (See STAT news link above).

Without social distancing, a hospitalization rate of 5% means we run out of beds on May 16, and a 20% hospitalization rate means we run out of beds by May 4.

By May 7, those 2 million cases would have led to 20,000 deaths (using the conservative estimate of 1%). This doesn’t even take into account the lack of respirators, medicine, and other supplies that hospitals face now. Just beds. As those supplies dwindle, the death rate rises.

Assuming a higher death rate now on May 7 (3%), this means that the next doubling in 6 days:

By May 14th, there would be 2 million more cases (4 million total), and 60,000 more dead (80K total).

By May 20th 8 million total cases, and 120,000 more dead (200,000 total). And growing…

Imagine if hospitals were over-crowded. That would be a terrible time to trouble the overly-stretched Emergency Room staff because you inserted a random object in your overly stretched colon. (I’m not kink-shaming, just saying that would be an inopportune time to need medical attention).

My point: if you need medical attention for something else, you wouldn’t likely get it. Over-stretched hospitals mean more people could die from treatable conditions too.

Social distancing is critical. Just like in a combat patrol, we need to maintain dispersion.

Social distancing buys us the time we need to prepare hospitals, get more supplies (like masks, ventilators, and test kits) and find/test better treatments. We need to flatten the curve. If we don’t, we could live under real tyranny.

Enforcing moderate rules now actually prevent tyranny

Yes, society depends on liberties. I took an oath to preserve those, after all. Society also depends on essential functions too. This isn’t the AVN awards, we want flatter curves and less action.

Edit: It’s hard to imagine society would collectively isolate themselves voluntarily to a degree high enough to flatten the curve. Even with these rules, many people are not complying. Can you imagine if more people had to go to work, or send their kids to school? The math shows COVID 19 spreads too quickly, has too high of a hospitalization rate. Without these measures, this disease can flood our health infrastructure too fast–not mention the hundreds of thousands that would die among the millions sick. Coordinating social distancing requires use of authority. I don’t like it, but it does.

Can you imagine 8 million sick and 200,000 deaths and climbing (in two months) with no end in sight, all because the damn gubb’emment didn’t enforce any preventative measures? It would be chaos. And not the cool Mattis call sign.

No, I mean absolute fucking pandemonium. There would be looting and social collapse. Essential services like stores, gasoline, trash pick up, maybe even electricity would just stop.

That would be the wrong time for the government to finally do something. And that something would be severe martial law. Remember the movie Outbreak? Yeah, fucking that. Complete lockdown, suspension of rights and liberties, centralized authority, et cetera.

And this is to say nothing of the snake-oil salesmen selling bullshit medicines.

Closing Thoughts

Yes, this sucks. My favorite bars are closed. I have to homeschool the kids. Other businesses are closed, we lost income in my household, and I have barely left home.

No, I don’t like government interfering with our lives. But this is obviously the better option. (Edit note: these actions are mostly on the state and local level. However, at the time of writing this, some states still lack sheltering in place orders, such as the Dokatoas and Iowa).

To claim that these moderate, temporary rules are tyranny, thus, the government should stop enforcing them, is paradoxically arguing for a high chance of martial law later. This is like shitting on your cake and eating it too.

Edit: And the founding fathers? Ben the Frankinklin was talking about tyranny from a brutal, neurotic King George. Ben was not talking about pragmatic, temporary measures to preserve a functioning society. Even Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” isn’t congruent with this scenario, because he was talking about the eve of revolution. The founding fathers were knowledgeable of history, which is full of quarantines in Europe, in colonial America, and the early U.S. The founding fathers vociferously disagreed on a lot of stuff, and they generally spoke ill about government atrocities throughout history. But I could not find one iota of evidence to suggest that even a sizable minority preferred complete government inaction to disease ripping apart society. Quarantine measures were sometimes just a part of life.

Yes, this sucks. And yes, you can complain about it. Odin knows I have. But I recommend doing so wisely, and with some honest reflection. Our grandparents were called into service to go to war. We are being asked to watch Netflix. We can do this.

Stay safe. Stay home as much as you can. Wash your hands.

Carpe Datum and Semper Sci

[Sgt Scholar Actual]

References

CDC (2020) Severe Outcomes Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) — United States, February 12–March 16, 2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2020;69:343-346. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6912e2

CDC (n.d.). “Disease burden of influenza.” From CDC website. Page last reviewed:

Ferguson, N. M., Cummings, D. A. T., Fraser, C., Cajka C. J., Cooley, P. C., Burke, D. S. (2006) Strategies for mitigating an influenza pandemic. Nature 442, 448–452. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04795

Franklin, B. (1775). Franklin’s Contributions to the Conference on February 17: Four Drafts, 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-21-02-0269. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774, through March 22, 1775, ed. William B. Willcox. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 495–499.]

Sanche S, Lin YT, Xu C, Romero-Severson E, Hengartner N, Ke R. (2020) High contagiousness and rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 26 (7). (Early release, cited 4/9/2020). https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2607.200282

WHO (2020). Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)situation report – 52.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/20200312-sitrep-52-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=e2bfc9c0_2. Date accessed: 9 April 2020

Wu, Z., McGoogan, J. (2020). Characteristics of and Important Lessons From the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in China. Summary of a Report of 72 314 Cases From the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. JAMA 323(13):1239-42. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.2648

Wu, J. T., Leung, K., Leung, G. M. (2020) Nowcasting and forecasting the potential domestic and international spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in Wuhan, China: a modeling study. The Lancet 395 (10225) 689 – 697.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30260-9