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‘Locked Down’: Representing the Pandemic on Screen

photograph of empty London street at night

I have consumed a lot of media over the past year, not all of it great. Spending so much more time at home has resulted in burning through all the shows and movies I wanted to watch pretty quickly, leaving me rapidly approaching the bottom of the proverbial media barrel. Given that the pandemic has been on everyone’s minds pretty much every day for the past 365, it’s been nice to be able to turn my brain off for a minute by watching Parks and Recreation for the dozenth time, or by finally getting around to checking out The Witcher on Netflix (official review: meh). However, we have now been doing this so long that new movies and shows have been made during the pandemic itself, some of which incorporate pandemic-life into the plot.

While it’s certainly true that media in the form of the news has an obligation to present accurate representations of the reality of the pandemic, what about TV and movies? Should these, too, present as realistic a picture as possible, or does a creative license allow them to distort the situation somewhat?

Given that I am a paragon of researcher integrity (combined with my need to find something new to watch), I decided to consume a couple of these pandemic-centric shows and movies. One was a critically unsuccessful and potentially morally problematic movie called Locked Down.

HBO Max’s 2021 Locked Down is described as follows:

“Just when Linda and Paxton have chosen to get separated, they get to hang on to each other due to forced lockdown. It’s hard to live together, but poetry and lots of wine bring them closer together in surprising ways.”

It’s a romantic comedy of a sort, which also involves a heist so that something will actually happen during its 2-hour runtime. The opening minutes of the film show something very familiar: a Zoom call between family members discussing their respective woes. While Paxton is living in “total lockdown” in London and has just been furloughed, his brother is mostly upset that the NBA season has been cancelled (or, at least cut short). Paxton laments that he will spend the next two weeks in total isolation with his now ex-girlfriend in an impossibly well-appointed and no doubt outrageously expensive townhouse in London. The isolation is getting to both Paxton and Linda: for the former, it exacerbates his anxieties; for the latter, she just wants to be able to get away from her ex.

So far, so uninspired. I am certain that I speak for many when I say that the last thing I want to watch after a day of awkward, choppy Zoom calls is a movie about two rich, beautiful people complaining about how awful it is to have to have days full of awkward, choppy Zoom calls. But the potentially morally problematic aspects of the movie are not merely limited to low-hanging comedic fruit and a bad case of failing to read the room: as some outlets have commented, the way the characters interpret the lockdown restrictions risks sending the wrong kind of message to viewers. Specifically, the characters seem to treat the lockdown as nothing more than a burden, rather than something that is a necessity to stop the spread of a deadly virus. Here, for example, are some of the more questionable moments:

  • Paxton reads a poem in the middle of the street, loudly, waking up his neighbors. When Linda asks what he’s doing, he says that he’s “entertaining our fellow inmates.”
  • On a Zoom call, Linda’s Swedish coworker brags that “you can go to bars here!” while Linda asks if anyone is actually obeying all the lockdown rules.
  • Paxton, having previously spent some time in jail, remarks: “People like me who have spent time in actual prison are thriving in this new reality.”
  • Paxton needs to go to the store, but doesn’t have a mask. Linda finds his old bandana in her drawer. While he’s initially surprised and excited to see it, she says: “It’s no longer a symbol of rebellion, it’s now government advice.”
  • When someone starts banging pots in the street shouting for everyone to “make noise for the NHS,” a tipsy Linda hurries outside with pots and pans of her own, not in a way that shows genuine appreciation, but seemingly the result of conditioned obligation, in a manner that is almost sarcastic.
  • At one point, a character describes the situation as an “insane fucking lockdown.”

The worry, then, is that portraying lockdown procedures in these ways reinforces a narrative that conceives of such procedures as overblown and unnecessary, and might encourage those who are watching to feel the same way.

Of course, one can also sympathize with these characters. Spending a significant amount of time cooped up inside can make anyone feel a little stir crazy, perhaps even like they are a prisoner of their own home. At the same time, it’s important to interpret these feelings against the backdrop of the bigger picture, namely why people are locking down at all. In this way, Locked Down might just be “too soon”: it may be that, one sweet day in the future when the coronavirus is no longer a significant problem, that we can look back and commiserate about the comparatively minor inconveniences. Until then, though, it does not seem like the best idea to glamorize rebellion against lockdown orders.

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Pandemic Life and Duties of Self-Improvement

image of woman meditating surrounded by distractions

I haven’t really done that much since last March. I mean, I’ve done the minimum number of activities required to keep myself alive, tried to stay connected to friends and family as much as possible, have tried to stay productive at work, and have stretched my legs outside every once in a while. But it feels like I could have done more. I have, for instance, been spending a lot of time doomscrolling, catching up on those shows in my Netflix queue, and losing all sense of time, but I could have been doing things that would have resulted in some degree of self-improvement. I’ve always wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I need to improve my Danish (min dansk er forfærdelig!), and there are just a whole bunch of other hobbies and skills that I’ve wanted to pick up or improve that I never seemed to have the time for in the past. But now I’ve had the time, and I haven’t done any of these things.

Does this make me a bad person? I’ve had the opportunity for self-improvement and didn’t really do much with it. Do I have a duty to use my time to try to be better?

These questions only arise in my case because the pandemic has, in fact, presented me with means and opportunity for self-improvement in the form of extra time. A lot of people have not had the luxury of facing this particular problem. Instead of having a lot more free time, many people have found what little free time they had prior to the pandemic disappear: perhaps you have obligations to take care of family members that you didn’t before, or you’ve gotten sick or had to help out with someone else who’s been sick, or work has become much more strenuous, or you’re out of work and have had more pressing matters. If you’ve been in this position, picking up the guitar is probably pretty low down on your list of priorities.

So it’s not as though I think I’m deserving of sympathy. But, if you’re like me and have found yourself with a lot of extra hours that you can’t keep track of, you might find yourself feeling guilty that that last nearly full year could have been spent better. Is this guilt deserved?

There has, as one might suspect, been philosophical debate over whether one has any particular moral obligation towards self-improvement. Kant, for instance, argued that we do possess a certain kind of duty of this sort: it is not that we always, in every circumstance, must work towards improving ourselves, but we should definitely strive to when given the chance. Certainly, then, Kant would consider wasting a lot of time absentmindedly on the internet as something worthy of moral condemnation.

On the other hand, you might wonder if we really have any duties towards self-improvement at all: while I certainly have duties to help other people, we might think that when it comes to ourselves we are pretty much free to do what we want. So if I want to learn a lot of new skills and become a better version of myself, that’s great; but if I want to sit on the couch and do nothing all day, I should be free to do so without facing any kind of negative judgment. Telling me to do otherwise can feel overly moralizing, a kind of self-righteous judgment in which you seem to be saying that you know how I should live my life better than I do.

Something seems wrong about both of these positions. For instance, it’s hard to determine how we’re supposed to adhere to a duty of self-improvement: does this mean that whenever I have free time that I have an obligation to, for instance, practice vocabulary in a language I want to learn? If so, this feels too demanding: I don’t seem to be doing anything wrong if I spend an evening now and then just doing nothing in particular. At the same time, if I spend all my free time doing nothing in particular, that feels like a waste. We sometimes make these kinds of judgments of other people: that it’s a shame they’re wasting their time, or their potential to develop their talents. And while this can sometimes feel moralizing, sometimes it also just feels apt: sometimes people really do waste too much time, and sometimes peoples’ efforts really could be put towards self-improvement.

Being in the midst of a global pandemic also muddies the water a bit. While one might have, on the one hand, a lot more time freed up by not having to commute to work, socialize, or really do anything else outside, one also has to deal with new challenges in the form of a dizzying amount of news, anxiety about the current and future state of the world, and a whole host of extra mental burdens that can quickly drain one’s energy and motivation to be a better version of yourself. If these matters become too distressing then they can quickly become a burden that needs to be dealt with.

It’s not clear how to evaluate the best way to make use of the extra opportunities one is afforded in the form of free time that is the result of a world that feels like it’s falling apart. Maybe, then, when it comes to duties to oneself these days, focusing on self-maintenance is more important than self-improvement: while it’s never a bad thing to work towards improvement, it feels like if you’re managing to check off the mandatory items of your to-do list in month 10 of a pandemic then you’re doing pretty well. Meaningful self-improvement can wait for another day.

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For-Profit Coronavirus Vaccines

photograph of ampoules in automatic inspection machine conveyor

Drug giants Pfizer and Moderna announced that they have developed COVID-19 vaccines which have effectiveness rates over 90%. But these are just two of the many drug companies contracted by the U.S. government to develop and distribute a vaccine to combat the pandemic through Operation Warp Speed. Unlike the other companies, however, Pfizer and Modern plan to profit off of their vaccine. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla justified this move by explaining that he wanted to “liberate [Pfizer] scientists from bureaucracy…When you get money from someone that always comes with strings…they want reports.” Moderna meanwhile has yet to offer a justification for its decision to set vaccine sales at a profit price.

Should drug companies making COVID-19 vaccines sell these vaccines at cost? Is profiting off of a public health crisis wrong? And who bears the burden of ensuring public health crises are addressed effectively: government or private industry?

Major U.S. drug companies have taken a range of financial positions when it comes to coronavirus vaccines. Companies such as Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have pledged that they will be producing and distributing vaccines at cost. In other words, they will be charging enough to cover the costs of material and labor, rather than charging more in order to increase their corporation’s net wealth. Pfizer is in a unique position, because while they have decided to their vaccine for profit, they have also refused government money for research and development. Perhaps the most extreme stance has been taken by Moderna, who received government funding for research and development and have announced they will not sell the vaccine at cost.

Is it reasonable to expect drug companies not to make a profit off of a potentially life-saving treatment? Those who see no problem with the profiteering of vaccines might argue that these companies deserve to profit from the hard work and innovation they have put into developing these vaccines at a record speed. Pharmaceutical companies’ right to private patents of the coronavirus vaccine argue that “IP (intellectual property) is a fundamental part of our industry and if you don’t protect IP, then essentially there is no incentive for anybody to innovate.” While this logic is often deployed in the interest of free market economies, the difference in the current situation is that companies withholding patents have been heavily funded by governments across the world, and are not necessarily selling a competitive product to consumers. However, Pfizer and Moderna are both drug companies, and some might point out that their entire business model is reliant on profiting off of death and disease.

Other defenders of Pfizer and Moderna might argue that it is the government, not private industry, which is tasked with addressing public health. Perhaps the larger problem is that we do not have a public healthcare system which can adequately develop medical technology to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, when the outbreak first started in the U.S., it was very apparent that the Center for Disease Control was far less equipped to handle a public health crisis than private industry. It is also important to remember, however, that the necessity for private intervention came after the U.S.’s decision not to use the World Health Organization’s distributed tests.

Those who are against the profiteering of COVID-19 vaccines by drug companies might point to the fact that these vaccines are not simply a novel innovation but are a necessity to ensure the public good and its health. Charging more than necessary for the vaccines could limit access and prolong the pandemic, leading to more lives lost. Oxfam has taken a strong stance on the necessity of affordable vaccines, recently stating that a life-saving vaccine would be “zero per cent effective to the people who can’t access or afford it.” Critics of vaccine profiteering might also argue that it is especially wrong for companies like Moderna to sell vaccines at a profit since they received government funding for research and development.

Another criticism of vaccine profiteering might be based on the morality of profiting off of crisis in general. In a previous article, I examined the moral distinctions between other kinds of crisis capitalizers. Drug companies such as Pfizer and Moderna hold the power to develop and distribute potentially life-saving vaccines. Perhaps this situation makes the desire for profit even more insidious. While nobody has necessarily called for these companies to operate below cost, it does not seem outlandish to expect a lack of self-interest given the scope of such a serious and pressing disaster. Some might also believe that some degree of altruism should be expected in this situation as these companies have the capacity to ensure these vaccines are as accessible as possible to every member of society. The billionaires running  vaccine research made billions of dollars in the days following their announcement of a potential coronavirus vaccine. Though some have claimed that COVID-19 is a “great equalizer” it is clear this is not the case. Income inequality has gradually become one of the major political issues in America and suggesting that the wealthiest members of society donate to help the rest of us is not as radical of a moral suggestion as it has sometimes been regarded.

Even scientists who develop vaccines find what these drug companies are doing unethical. In an interview, Margaret Liu, the chairperson of the International Society for Vaccines, called Moderna “greedy” and suggested that “the taxpayers who have funded all of this should have expected better negotiation from the US government.” Others have expressed opposition to private licenses and disdain for public institutions which allowed private drug companies to sign contracts without this guarantee. Philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have also been criticized for their support of pharmaceutical patents on a life-saving COVID-19 vaccine.

While it’s clear that certain pharmaceutical companies see the pandemic as an opportunity, economists have predicted that their profit will likely be short-lived. At this point, Operation Warp Speed has already contracted out funds with no strings attached. In the future, it is up to us to decide whether or not we are comfortable with public funds funneling directly into corporate profits.

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Should I Stay, or Should I Go: Holidays in the Age of Coronavirus

photograph of "Stay Safe" message among pumpkins and thanksgiving background

Some of the busiest holidays in America — Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years — bring floods of people into airports, who are all looking to travel across the country to see family that they might not have seen all year. Normally, the last few months of the year bring plenty of opportunity for those families to meet each other over pounds of food and gift exchanges. The year of 2020, however, is anything but normal. The coronavirus has put a halt to any and all ideas of what was once considered typical. This virus has been ravaging the world for almost a year now, and the country has managed to still celebrate some holidays, such as the Fourth of July, as summer weather allowed for outdoor gatherings where it was easy to social distance, and harder for the virus to spread. Now that winter is coming on, however, these get-togethers will have to be inside the homes of Americans, with far more risk of transmission. As cases climb and hospitals fill, one has to ask what the appropriate course of action is for Americans who want (understandably) to visit family during the holidays, while this pandemic is surging forward with little end in sight.

As scientists have been concerned about since the beginning of this pandemic, the world appears to be entering a second wave of coronavirus cases. After opening up during the summer months, Europe is introducing new restrictions limiting which businesses can open, as well as night curfews for citizens, as they see cases beginning to surge across the continent. Due to far less restrictions than Europe, and the lack of a cohesive federal response to COVID, America never really cleared the first wave of the virus. While the summer months saw a decline in cases, recently the country set a new record of 90,000 cases in a single day, bringing the total cases to nearly 9 million just in the U.S. As cases rise, hospitals are quickly beginning to fill up, which when this virus first hit led to people dying in hallways of hospitals, mass burials, and hospital workers not having proper equipment to protect themselves from the virus. While in the summer it appeared as if the country was past those horrible conditions, the colder months have brought a reminder of the fact that the world is still very much in the midst of this pandemic.

As the temperature grows colder people are coming in contact more often in enclosed spaces, which increases the spread of the virus. But there is also the issue of pandemic fatigue. This virus has taken over every aspect of life, putting extra stress on everyone’s lives. People have had to create new routines and question behaviors that they once thought completely normal, like hugging grandma. People are growing weary of the fact that life is not what it once was, and that there is an ever-present threat that continues to loom over the entire globe. This exhaustion can lead to an increase in cases as people begin to exercise more risky behavior, like dining inside or going to large events, as if we’ve beaten the virus. As we head into the holidays it makes sense that people want to spend time with their loved ones, especially ones that they haven’t seen for months. The winter months already see a combination of seasonal depression with regular depression among people, and COVID certainly led to a decline of mental health among Americans. The rates of both suicides and opioid overdoses have become very concerning for public health experts who warn of an underlying mental health crisis as a result of the stress and anxiety surrounding the coronavirus. People have been isolated from their families and friends for months because of travel restrictions, and now is the time when people most often travel to see their loved ones. It makes perfect sense that people would want to gather for comfort and strength in these very uncertain and stressful times. Many families have lost loved ones — there are over 230,00 deaths in the U.S. currently — and this is the first time that they will have to experience these holidays without those people present. Grief is a powerful emotion, and mixed with pandemic fatigue, this may lead to people willing to take more risks in order to seek comfort in their families.

The winter holidays are most definitely some of the busiest days of the years for travel, either by car, plane, or other transport. This creates a big risk for people who want to visit their families, but need to visit airports to make it home. Just last year over 45 million people traveled on American airlines throughout the globe over this time period. Considering the fact that many countries have restrictions on who can come in, and America is often on the list of those nationalities who are not allowed in, that number will most definitely be lower. Masks are required throughout the airports and during the flight, which would make it seem as if these flights were quite safe. A new study even came out recently which concluded air travel was safer than eating at a restaurant, albeit this study was sponsored by the air industry, which is desperate for flyers due to the loss of revenue from air travel being restricted throughout the entire globe. A recent long distance flight to Ireland, however, questions the validity of this study as 13 passengers tested positive for the coronavirus on the flight, and then passed it on to people in Ireland, for a total of 59 cases all linked to this flight. Throughout the pandemic, the coronavirus has shown how little we actually know about the virus, as even mask wearing was once deemed not important by health officials. But now calls for a national mask mandate have been amplifying, as they have proven to be extremely effective in stopping transmission of the virus. So the question of risk regarding air travel remains up in the air.

This last year has probably been one of the most stressful, if not the most stressful, period of most people’s lives around the world. This virus is something that none of us can ignore because it affects everyone. If it takes the whole world to spread the virus, it seems it is going to take the whole world working together in order to stop it. This end appears to still be quite a ways off, however, and people are still left with a feeling of inevitableness of this eternal feeling of waiting. Understandably, the first instinct for a lot of people might be to reach out to those closest to them. Some might want to continue decades-long traditions that their families have carried on in an attempt to find a sense of normalcy in these strange times. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has information on their website to help people make responsible decisions if they decide to have some sort of celebration for the holidays. But, one must remember that these are strange times, and any contact with people outside those you live with carries some level of risks. As with most things during this pandemic, people will have to consider the risks of celebrating the holidays this year with those they hold most dear.

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Moral Panics about “COVID Parties”

photograph of teenagers at corwded concert on the beach

In recent weeks, a new feature has appeared in the discourse focused on the global pandemic and its related quarantine procedures: reportedly, people have been hosting and attending parties designed to spread the coronavirus. From Alabama to Florida to Texas, the details of these so-called “COVID Parties” differ, but one element is common: attendees do not take the threat of the disease seriously. Some gatherings seem to be patterned after “chickenpox parties” intended to encourage herd immunity, others are allegedly motivated by sport or financial gain (one widely-circulated report claimed that a party in Tuscaloosa offered a cash prize to the first guest to contract COVID-19).

However, to date, the evidence for the phenomenon of “COVID parties” is surprisingly scarce: that is to say, it is not clear that any such parties have actually taken place. Consider the story of the “Texas millennial” who supposedly confessed to attending a COVID party shortly before he died in a San Antonio hospital in mid-July.

The hospital’s health director admits that she heard of the disclosure secondhand and journalists have been unable to locate the nurse who purportedly received the confession in the first place. Similarly, most of the claims about college students in Alabama holding contests to intentionally catch COVID-19 are traceable to a single member of the Tuscaloosa City Council commenting on (and seemingly embellishing) a rumor shared by the city’s fire chief about sick teenagers leaving their homes: at this point, no hard evidence (such as alleged eyewitnesses or posts on social media) have surfaced of these parties and the University of Alabama has been unsuccessful at locating any potential attendees. Nevertheless, both of these small-scale stories have been reported by national news outlets.

This suggests that the trending discussions about “COVID parties” evidence what’s called a “moral panic” concerned with discouraging lackadaisical responses to the coronavirus. Such panics result when false beliefs about a purported threat to a social group spread throughout that group, thereby leading group members to be increasingly hostile towards anyone or anything they suspect of embodying the rumored threat. Consider the overreaction of the Christian Right to the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s, longstanding urban legends about the risks of poisoned Halloween candy, and the relatively recent “Momo Challenge” where a YouTube video supposedly tried to convince viewers to harm themselves: each of these were rooted in false beliefs about over-exaggerated threats to children. More serious examples of moral panics can be found in the abuses suffered by patients with HIV/AIDS or members of LGBTQ communities as ignorance and fear-mongering among more dominant social groups fueled (and still fuels) official policies of abandonment and exclusion. Importantly, Oxford Reference points out that “moral panics are generally fueled by media coverage of social issues” — a feature only exacerbated by the contemporary explosion of social media.

Given the many risks posed by the coronavirus, the perceived threat of a COVID party might be understandable: if such a party were to happen, it could significantly contribute to more people contracting the disease — including, crucially, more people than just those who actually chose to attend the party. But there are at least two broad kinds of problems with moral panics, and the rumors of COVID parties seem to exhibit both.

Firstly, moral panics unavoidably pose epistemic problems insofar as they are, by definition, fueled by false beliefs and, often, mishandled evidence (or evidential requirements). For example, to date, the reports of COVID parties have ranged from hearsay to misattribution to, potentially, straightforward fabrication. Consider the tragic case of Carsyn Leigh Davis, an immunocompromised seventeen-year-old in Florida who died after contracting COVID-19 in mid-June. Shortly before she fell ill, Davis attended a party at her church where neither face masks nor social distancing practices were required; initial reports (now corrected) labeled this church gathering a “COVID party,” despite there being no clear evidence that the event was actually intended to spread the coronavirus (the church has explicitly denied these allegations). By jumping to conclusions about the nature of the church party, at least some reporters (and self-styled reporters who share information on social media sites) seem to have fallen prey to the problem of confirmation bias. In a similar way (and for a variety of additional reasons), failures to thoroughly vet second-(or third or fourth)-hand reports of COVID parties have led to what amounts to conspiracy theories being shared openly and uncritically.

Which leads me to the second — and, arguably, more problematic — issue about moral panics: what they tell us about the social groups doing the panicking. Naturally, in order for biases to be confirmable, they must first exist in the minds of biased observers: someone cannot, for example, reflexively equate homosexuals with pedophiles if they do not already falsely believe that those two groups of people are somehow logically associated. Certainly, it is no secret that plenty of skeptics doubt the severity (and even reality) of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the panic about COVID parties suggests more complicated stereotypes are at work.

Consider the commonalities amongst the COVID party reports I’ve already mentioned: each of them focus on patients (or imagined patients) who were also members of subcultures frequently treated as fair game for jokes by the culture-at-large: millennials, college students, and religious fundamentalists. Perhaps most importantly, all three stories hailed from the Deep South. For these sorts of stories to seem salient to readers in the first place, those readers must already be at least somewhat suspicious of (or, at the very least, pretentious towards) those subgroups in a manner that will be suspiciously unvirtuous.

Let’s imagine that Barry is a person who takes the threat posed by the coronavirus seriously, but has never before heard of a COVID party. When Barry reads allegations that people in Alabama have been intentionally competing to contract COVID-19 and win a pot of money, they will likely be skeptical (because it will strike Barry as a wildly unlikely thing for people to do). If, however, Barry then reads that it was a group of college students throwing this alleged COVID party and Barry thereby takes the premise of the story to be more likely, then we can reasonably infer certain unflattering things that Barry likely believes about college students. Replace “college students” with “millennials, “religious fundamentalists,” or “Southerners” and the story reads no differently.

This kind of condescending attitude is akin to what Aristotle decried as an act of “insult” (sometimes also translated as both “insolence” and “hubris”). In his Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that insult consists in shaming someone simply for the mean-spirited pleasure of doing so; as he says, people prone to such acts “think that, in committing them, they are showing their superiority.” Such behavior, Aristotle continues, is often evidence of a dishonorable character and this seems equally true of biased attitudes that do not provoke overt action (beyond tapping the “share” link). Insofar as rumors about COVID parties activate biased presuppositions about various subgroups that Barry assumes to be inferior, we can thereby reasonably suspect that Barry harbors certain immoral prejudices.

So, in addition to their other features, moral panics can function as a barometer for subgroups that prideful members of the dominant social group reflexively patronize. If real evidence of COVID parties becomes available, then critical reactions to such threats would be warranted, but in the absence of such evidence, moral panics are epistemically unjustified. Moreover, insofar as moral panics are motivated by regionalism or other kinds of snobbish stereotypes, they run the risk of actually being prideful moral hazards.

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The Moral Pitfalls of Color-Coded Coronavirus Warning Systems

Color-coded chart showing the risk of covid-19 in UK

As states around the country ease lockdown restrictions, some are putting into place systems advising people about threat levels. In some states, these are color-coded systems that strongly resemble the Homeland Security Advisory system, put into place by George W. Bush to inform people about the risk of threats from terrorism after the September 11th terrorist attacks. 

Utah, for example, has a four-tiered system: a red designation indicates high risk, an orange designation indicates moderate risk, a yellow designation indicates low risk, and a green designation indicates “new normal.” The color-coded systems of other states and some other countries largely follow this same model.

It’s important to remember that there were lots of serious problems with the Homeland Security Advisory System, and it was eventually abandoned and replaced. Many of the problems had to do with the fact that color-coded systems are vague by their very nature. People have a sense that red means “stop” and green means “go.” Very few people will investigate the situation further. As a result, these systems are easily manipulated for political purposes. Color-coded systems don’t encourage careful, responsible thinking about risk. They encourage behavior motivated by sentiment rather than reason, and sentiment is easily coerced. Politicians tend to be excellent at cultivating certain kinds of common sentiments that drive political behavior and the Homeland Security Advisory System roused both fear and xenophobia. These are powerful forces and invoking them caused people to make voting decisions that they might not otherwise have made, to support wars they might otherwise have found unjustified, and to accept unprecedented privacy violations on the understanding that they were being protected from imminent harm.

Color-coded responses to coronavirus operate according to similar principles. If people want to know the current level of danger posed by coronavirus, they should be paying attention to the relevant data. How many new cases is a state discovering each day? What are the hospitalization rates? How many people are dying? These color-coded systems are not responsive to these important considerations. For example, there was recently a major outbreak of coronavirus at the JBS meatpacking plant in Hyrum, a city in Northern Utah. The outbreak was the biggest hotspot yet discovered in the state. At this point, 287 workers at the plant have tested positive for COVID-19. This meat packing plant refuses to shut down or to give employees meaningful time off to heal. 

Hyrum is in Cache County, and despite the unknown extent of the spread, Cache County remains in the yellow “low risk” zone. In fact, even in light of the outbreak, the Cache County Council voted to request that the county be moved to the green designation. As one councilperson put it, “I’m in the age group that’s most likely to die, but I’ve had a good life and I say let’s get on with it. That may sound like I’m being pretty casual about it, but that’s the way I feel.” If an area like Cache County requests a green designation on the basis of these kinds of considerations, the system is not responsive enough to actual data.

The Cache County example also illustrates the point that these vague, color-coded systems track not a set of facts, but a set of values. Many states have decided that thriving economies are more important than the lives of the vulnerable, but they haven’t exactly made this value judgment explicit so that people can evaluate it and respond accordingly. Instead, the values are obscured by color designations that look for all the world like they are based on public health considerations.

Instead of motivating people with fear, coronavirus color-coding systems encourage a different form of cognitive bias—wishful thinking. People across the country are sick of lockdown. They are exhibiting quarantine fatigue. They are sick of travel restrictions and of being prevented from engaging in their favorite consumer activities, especially during the summer. The fact that coronavirus cases have reduced dramatically in places like New York is causing the national curve to flatten. This doesn’t tell us anything encouraging about what is happening across the rest of the country. People have self-interested reasons to interpret the numbers favorably, even though there is no evidence-based justification for doing so. These warning systems also undercut good critical thinking practices in another way—they encourage people to disregard the advice of experts on infectious disease. The best available evidence we have now suggests that people should wash their hands regularly, maintain social distance from others, and wear a mask in areas where social distancing is difficult. It’s hard to get people to engage in these practices regularly anyway, and it is even more difficult to convince them that they should be doing so when their county is in a yellow or even a green risk designation.

At least in Utah, these systems do track some data, but not the data people might be inclined to believe. They are not tracking information relevant to whether people are actually safe to participate in social and consumer activities again. Instead, decisions are being made on the basis of how many hospital beds are available in a given area. The concern is not about whether people will contract the disease, but about whether health care systems will be overwhelmed if and when they do. This isn’t a metric we would stand for in other cases. Consider the following analogy. City officials are aware that the water at the local beach is infested with dangerous man-eating sharks. They are tasked with making recommendations about the safety of getting in the water. Tourism to the beach generates a lot of revenue every year, so it is in the state’s interest for the water not to be infested with man-eating sharks. Officials determine that the health care system is well equipped enough to treat people for shark bites, so they advise people that it is safe to swim in the water. Presumably, residents would think that this was an unconscionable decision and there would rightly be a degrading of trust in the public officials that were so callous with people’s lives.

The Homeland Security Advisory System was eventually replaced with the National Terror Advisory System, which was designed to “more effectively communicate information about terrorist threats by providing timely, detailed information to the American public.” Both terrorism and public health are high information issues about which it is difficult for the public to be fully informed.  Nevertheless, we should encourage people to be engaging with actual data rather than with colors that lull them into a false sense of security. 

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Hydroxychloroquine and the Ethical Pitfalls of Private Science

A box of hydroxychloroquine sulphate tablets held by a hand with coronavirus written in background

Last week, news broke that a significant study into the effects of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 relied on data that has now been called into question. The effects of this study, and other studies that relied on data from the same source, were profound, leading to changes in planned studies and in treatments for COVID-19 being prescribed to patients. The fact that this data comes from an unaudited source highlights the ethical concerns that stem from having an increased corporate role in science.

In late May, a study published in the elite medical journal The Lancet suggested that COVID-19 patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die. The study included over 96,000 patients, relying on electronic health data from the company Surgisphere run by Dr. Sepan Desai, who was also included as a co-author of the article. It found that at 671 hospitals where COVID-19 patients had been prescribed hydroxychloroquine, the risk of death was over twice as great as patients who were not prescribed the drug. An additional study using data from Surgisphere investigated the uses of blood pressure medication and was published in a paper for The New England Journal of Medicine. A third paper using Surgisphere data was available as a preprint which suggested that ivermectin significantly reduced mortality in COVID-19 patients. All three papers have been retracted.

The retractions occurred after discrepancies were noticed in the data. The reported doses of hydroxychloroquine for American patients was higher than FDA guidelines and the number of Australian deaths were higher than official statistics. There was also a discrepancy between the small number of hospitals included and the vast number of patient records. Following this, independent auditors were asked to review the data provided by Surgisphere; however, the company refused to provide the data, citing confidentiality requirements with the hospitals. Yet investigations found that no hospitals located in the US admitted to participating with Surgisphere. 

Surgisphere itself is also a suspect source. The company was founded in 2007 but has little online presence. Their website does not list partner hospitals or identify its scientific advisory board. It claims that the company has 11 employees. Their enormous database doesn’t seem to have been used by peer reviewed studies until May. Desai himself also has a colorful history, including a record of three outstanding medical malpractice suits against him. 

The studies had significant impact world-wide. Following the report that hydroxychloroquine increased mortality rates in patients, the WHO announced a “temporary” pause into their studies of hydroxychloroquine (they have since resumed their efforts). The studies also played a role in the national conversation about the drug in the United States following President Trump’s announcement that he had been taking it to combat the virus. The preprint on ivermectin was never officially published, but it did lead to changes in treatment protocols in South America. In Bolivia, a local government planned to hand out 350,000 doses of the drug after receiving authorization from the Bolivian Ministry of Health. The drug was also cited as a potential treatment in Chile and Peru. 

This episode highlights several general moral issues. Retraction scandals at a time when the public is looking to, and relying on, medical science are dangerous. The situation is intensified by the fact that these controversies are tied to the political debate over hydroxychloroquine, as it may undermine science along partisan lines. Polls show that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to have a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public — yet such scandals further undermine public trust and make science seem more partisan. 

The matter also raises ethical issues within the sciences. According to Ivan Oransky from Retraction Watch, the case represents larger systematic issues within the sciences, noting that even leading journalists rely too heavily on an honor system. For example, the pandemic has led to warning signs about the use of preprints in journals, which have moved away from getting feedback while studies are being finalized to sharing “breaking data” as fast as possible, despite the lack of peer review.  

The Surgisphere episode highlights the ethical pitfalls of science relying on private sector companies for research. Since the twentieth century, the private sector has been an increasing source of scientific funding. In the United States, private funding accounts for 65% of research and development spending in 2013. There are good reasons for private sector investments and corporate-university level partnerships. The public sector has shown less willingness to supply the needed funding. As Ashtosh Jogalekar points out in an article for Scientific American, investments by private interests have allowed for many projects to be funded which might not be funded otherwise. He notes, “For these billionaires a few millions of dollars is not too much, but for a single scientific project hinging on the vicissitudes of government funding it can be a true lifeline.” It has also been noted that private funding can ensure cost-effective replication studies are possible, especially important since efforts to produce reproducibility were only successful in 40% of experiments published in peer-reviewed journals. 

On the other hand, according to Sheldon Krimsky, the author of Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research?, numerous problems can occur when scientists partner with private corporations. Krimsky finds that publication practices have been influenced by commercial interests: the commercialization of science has led to a decline in the notion that scientists should work in the public interest, and sharing data becomes more problematic given the use of paywalls and intellectual property protection. This makes it more difficult to verify the data.

There are many ways corporations can complicate data-sharing. By choosing not to release unflattering findings or claiming data as exclusive intellectual property, companies can make it difficult for others to use research (consider Diamond v Chakrabarty which began the precedent for allowing genetically modified organisms to be patentable). And, of course, the Surgisphere episode is an example of university-level researchers working in collaboration with a private company where the company retains sole control of the data. Such cases allow for fraud and suffer from a lack of oversight. 

One proposed solutions is to move towards “open science,” making publications, data, and other information open and accessible to everyone. Such a move would allow for both increased transparency and accountability as well as more rigorous peer-review. Under such a system, falsified data would be more difficult to provide and more easy to detect. 

While many of these issues have been brewing for years, it is not every day that a single published study can have the kind of global impact that came with investigations into the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, even while other independent studies have also demonstrated its ineffectiveness. The ethical fallout from this scandal is thus far more obvious given public interest in the disease. Indeed, there have already been calls to stop private speculation into COVID-19 research; part of this call includes the position that all intellectual property should be made available for free to the international scientific community for fighting the pandemic. The question now is what specific reforms should be implemented to prevent scandals like this from happening again?

 

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Slow and Steady Wins the Race; or, How Not To Confuse Efficiency with Expediting

photograph of blurred pedestrians crossing intersection

Efficiency is the credo of a capitalist society. To the average person, “efficient” has a connotation of speed: if something is not getting done imminently, they reason time must be getting wasted. As the capitalist credo, efficiency often seems elevated to the status of a moral value. That is, a thing done efficiently (again, reading as “quickly”) is a positive moral accomplishment.

This confusion—and it is a confusion—is on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic. The race to find successful treatments, and hopefully a vaccine, for COVID-19 have institutions rushing the usual procedures for research and development. Animal tests would usually precede human testing. However pharmaceutical research companies like Moderna have taken the step of running such trials simultaneously. While people living under the pall of this novel coronavirus want a vaccine quickly, many medical experts—including newly-minted celebrity Dr. Anthony Fauci—urge researchers and policymakers to take the cautious route. These pleas, however, have largely fallen on deaf ears with the advent of initiatives like US President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed.

Nor is the desire for efficiency limited to the development of a vaccine. There is a general desire for the legal and political handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to be efficient. Those who are more cautious and who believe the general public health consensus about COVID-19 want efficiency in the articulation and administration of laws and executive orders. NY Governor Andrew Cuomo enjoys impressive job approval ratings, as do most other states’ governors. Some of the governors with the lowest approval ratings are in states who have moved to reopen more of their states’ non-essential business and to do so more quickly (e.g., Georgia’s Brian Kemp). This is likely because, on the whole, Americans are in favor of many lockdown and social distancing measures, worrying that ending these measures prematurely will negatively impact public health. While apparently more newsworthy, the vocal segment Americans who want the lockdown to end (and believe it never should have started in the first place) is a minority.

Enthusiasm for “efficient” executive authority is not universal and has met substantial legal challenges. The legislature of Wisconsin recently successfully sued to overturn that state’s Department of Health Services stay-at-home orders. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled that the orders were unconstitutional and unenforceable. The court’s decision, which relied largely on a close distinction between a rule and an order as defined by the Wisconsin Constitution, was panned by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers as creating a state of “total chaos.” Reactions of other Democratic officials throughout the state echoed Evers’ concerns that an efficient response to the COVID-19 emergency would be hamstrung by the courts’ decision.

This illustrates the crux of the matter. Supporters of broad executive authority in the face of COVID-19 take an efficient response to be one which is centralized and univocal. The executive, along with their advisors and adjutants, should be able to do what is necessary to stem the spread of COVID-19. The Wisconsin Supreme Court objected that, even in the face of a crisis, statutory limits on executive power must be observed. This objection is of a kind with those made by Dr. Fauci, among others, concerning expedited vaccine development. Just as the statutory limits of executive power cannot be ignored, neither can the ethical safeguards on clinical research.

What this shows is that what counts as efficient is relative to the goal in question. If all that we want is the development of a vaccine that confers immunity to this novel coronavirus, then some of the standard procedures are inefficient. That is, they require the consumption of resources not necessary to produce the desired effect. However, if what we want is a vaccine that confers immunity and also has a low occurrence of significantly harmful side effects, then it is inefficient to rush the job. Likewise if we simply want to stop the spread of coronavirus, we could empower a single person to create laws by proclamation and enforce those laws by force. That is in effect what declarations of emergency by a governor or president allow, within narrowly-defined limits.

Efficiency then cannot be morally good no matter where it shows up. In the terminology of Immanuel Kant, efficiency is not “good without qualification.” In order for something to be good without qualification, Kant argues, that thing must be good in all conditions and circumstances. He says, for example, that pleasure doesn’t pass this test. After all, a sadist takes pleasure from torturing unwilling victims. Using a similar example, it is easy to see that efficiency fails Kant’s test. A sadist who invents a rack across which he can break multiple victims at once, with the crank of a single handle, is surely being quite efficient. He is also doing something quite repugnant. Just as the ends don’t justify the means, the means do not automatically confer any positive moral value to the ends. In fact, efficiency seems to act simply like a multiplier: if an accomplishment is already good on its own merits, doing it efficiently is even better; but if an accomplishment is bad on its own merits, doing it efficiently is even worse.

We want society to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic as healthy and whole as possible. However the best ways to do that are likely not fast. Our medical, scientific, and political responses to this crisis cannot be swallowed up by their own sense of urgency. An efficient process is only as good as what it achieves. By casting away failsafes, we set ourselves up to aim unknowingly in the wrong direction.

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The Small but Unsettling Voice of the Expert Skeptic

photograph of someone casting off face mask

Experts and politicians worldwide have come to grips with the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even Donald Trump, once skeptical that COVID-19 would affect the US in a significant way, now admits that the virus will likely take many more thousands of lives.

Despite this agreement, some are still not convinced. Skeptics claim that deaths that are reported as being caused by COVID-19 are really deaths that would have happened anyway, thereby artificially inflating the death toll. They claim that the CDC is complicit, telling doctors to document a death as “COVID-related” even when they aren’t sure. They highlight failures of world leaders like the Director-General of the World Health Organization and political corruption in China. They claim that talk of hospitals being “war zones” is media hype, and they share videos of “peaceful” local hospitals from places that aren’t hot spots, like Louisville or Tallahassee. They point to elaborate conspiracies about the nefarious origins of the novel coronavirus.

What’s the aim of this strikingly implausible, multi-national conspiracy, according to these “COVID-truthers”? Billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies and votes for tyrannical politicians who want to look like benevolent saviors.

Expert skeptics like COVID-truthers are concerning because they are more likely to put themselves, their families, and their communities at risk by not physical distancing or wearing masks. They are more likely to violate stay-at-home orders and press politicians to re-open commerce before it is safe. And they pass this faulty reasoning on to their children.

While expert skepticism is not new, it is unsettling because expert skepticism often has a kernel of truth. Experts regularly disagree, especially in high-impact domains like medicine. Some experts give advice outside their fields (what Nathan Ballantyne calls “epistemic trespassing”). Some experts have conflicts of interest that lead to research fraud. And some people—seemingly miraculously—defy expert prediction, for example, by surviving a life-threatening illness.

If all this is right, shouldn’t everyone be skeptical of experts?

In reality, most non-experts do okay deciding who is trustworthy and when. This is because we understand—at least in broad strokes—how expertise works. Experts disagree over some issues, but, in time, their judgments tend to converge. Some people do defy expert expectations, but these usually fall within the scope of uncertainty. For example, about 1 in 100,000 cancers go into spontaneous remission. Further, we can often tell who is in a good position to help us. In the case of lawyers, contractors, and accountants, we can find out their credentials, how long they’ve been practicing, and their specialties. We can even learn about their work from online reviews or friends who have used them.

Of course, in these cases, the stakes are usually low. If it turns out that we trusted the wrong person, we might be able to sue for damages or accept the consequences and try harder next time. But as our need for experts gets more complicated, figuring out who is trustworthy is harder. For instance, questions about COVID-19 are:

  • New (Experts struggle to get good information.)
  • Time-sensitive (We need answers more quickly than we have time to evaluate experts.)
  • Value-charged (Our interests in the information biases who we trust.)
  • Politicized (Information is emotionally charged or distorted, and there are more epistemic trespassers.)

Where does this leave those of us who aren’t infectious disease experts? Should we shrug our shoulders with the COVID-truthers and start looking for ulterior motives?

Not obviously. Here are four strategies to help distill reality from fantasy.

  1. Keep in mind what experts should (and should not) be able to do.

Experts spend years studying a topic, but they cannot see the future. They should be able explain a problem and suggest ways of solving it. But models that predict the future are educated guesses. In the case of infectious diseases, those guesses depend on assumptions about how people act. If people act differently, the guesses will be inaccurate. But that’s how models work.

  1. Look for consensus, but be realistic.

When experts agree on something, that’s usually a sign they’re all thinking about the evidence the same way. But when they face a new problem, their evidence will change continually, and experts will have little time to make sense of it. In the case of COVID-19, there’s wide consensus about the virus that causes it and how it spreads. There is little consensus on why it hurts some people more than others and whether a vaccine is the right solution. But just because there isn’t consensus doesn’t mean there are ulterior motives.

  1. Look for “meta-expert consensus.”

When experts agree, it is sometimes because they need to look like they agree, whether due to worries about public opinion or because they want to convince politicians to act. These are not good reasons to trust experts. But on any complex issue, there’s more than one kind of expert. And not all experts have conflicts of interest. In the case of COVID-19, independent epidemiologists, infectious disease doctors, and public health experts agree that SARS-CoV-2 is a new, dangerous, contagious threat and that social distancing the main weapon against that threat. That kind of “meta-expert consensus” is a good check on expertise and good news for novices when deciding what to believe.

  1. Don’t double-down.

When experts get new evidence, they update their beliefs, even if they were wrong. They don’t force that evidence to fit old beliefs. When prediction models for COVID-related deaths did not bear out, experts updated their predictions. They recognized that predictions can be confounded by many variables, and they used the new evidence to update their models. This is good advice for novices, too.

These strategies are not fool proof. The world is messy, experts are fallible, and we won’t always trust the right people. But while expert skepticism is grounded in real limitations of expertise, we don’t have to join the ranks the COVID-truthers. With hard work and a little caution, we can make responsible choices about who we trust.

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Pandemic Sacrifices: It Matters Who Dies and Why

photograph of small liferaft at sea

Political leaders, faux medical experts, and pundits are advocating for a stop to isolation policies despite the real loss of life that would result from doing so.

They are weighing the impact that isolation is having on the economy. The longer we isolate, the more businesses will suffer, and the more corporations will not be able to benefit from the labor that previously was performed. Further, we are facing a catastrophic rise in unemployment—22 million due to the pandemic. Instead of looking towards social benefits and supporting those most affected from losing their jobs and health, these leaders are suggesting ending isolation and further exposing the workforce in the name of an economy that, experts warn, will just need to be shut down again—next time with further dead, made up of those apparently expendable and worth sacrificing for the economy.

These calculations stand in for rhetorical frameworks for moral analysis. We do have approaches for dealing with massive losses when they are the result of, say, natural disasters. These can be blunt instruments that weigh the impact of saving each individual human life against the resources that could otherwise be spent on the good of “society.”

Imagine you were on a lifeboat in a stormy sea. There is no way for everyone to survive, and the experts estimate that a certain percentage must be sacrificed for the survival of the majority. What is the ethical method for making this decision?

The stipulations here force us into “consequentialist” thinking—we would like to maximize the number of people alive at the end of the hellish scenario. However, most would find the “pure” consequentialist reasoning abhorrent. In other words, maximizing the number of people alive at the end is not where our ethical duties end. When stuck on a lifeboat and in a position where 20% of those on board will die, there is a moral difference in this 20% being determined randomly or at the will of a corrupt captain. (Or as a result of the previous decisions of the corrupt captain.)

Our current situation is, and isn’t, parallel to the lifeboat analogy. There isn’t an inevitable number of people that must be sacrificed. There isn’t a storm forcing us to weigh human life against a “greater good”—in this case, the economy. We could, in fact, stay on our boat and take the measures that experts are suggesting at avoiding the sacrifice the leaders are saying are “necessary.”

However, when there is inevitable harm, the procedure for allocating that harm matters morally. Say we do face a scenario where there is a percentage of human lives that will be lost given the pandemic, and a need to end isolation for the greater good of the economy. COVID-19 is the great equalizer we must endure, and while we will lose some, our country/lifeboat will endure.

It’s important to note that even with that stipulation, the metaphor breaks down. That isn’t even the position we are in, either. The actions of the leadership of our lifeboat continue to ensure that the amount of harm increases, and becomes more unavoidable, more inevitable. By defunding the WHO and pandemic response teams, but counteracting state efforts and absolving the federal government from its responsibility for action, the situation continues to be made worse.

Further, they’re able to do this by invoking the notion that it is just like the inevitability of a natural disaster while asking people to unequally bear the burdens of the harm. They’re banking on the support from those they don’t think will accrue the harm. As in the lifeboat analogy, the ones who survive will likely be grateful. But the decision-making for who will be sacrificed is not morally neutral.

Treating these losses as distant and abstract statistics is a strategy. There is force in calling the impact of the coronavirus the great equalizer, as celebrities and politicians alike have claimed. It evokes the frameworks of natural disasters or warfare where there is a limit to what we can do to intervene—lives will “just be lost.” Trump’s message has shifted from denial and buck-passing to attempts to frame casualties under 100,000 as a victory.

This is not an equalizer and is structurally and reliably affecting some groups of people more than others. Black Americans are dying at a much higher rate than non-Black Americans—33%, while only making up 14% of the areas analyzed. Thirty percent of COVID-19 patients are black despite representing only 13% of the population (the different data is the result of varying availability of data). These stark differences become more dire in some cities: In Wisconsin, for example, African Americans represent 6 percent of the population, but nearly 40 percent of COVID-19 fatalities.

Other over-represented vulnerable populations include those living in care facilities, such as disabled people and the elderly, and the incarcerated. Meanwhile, the rich are much safer than others.

This makes a moral difference. Just like on a lifeboat, the captain is not absolved of making every attempt to avoid circumstances where sacrifices must be made, and is responsible for ensuring that just burden-sharing is in place. Sacrifices cannot be justified for false reasons—saving the economy isn’t even a true reason in the sense that sacrificing people may not actually achieve the intended aim.

Anyone suggesting sacrificing 2-3% of the population needs to name family members and loved ones they are willing to sacrifice. They then need to indicate a further segment of their loved ones to live with the effects of a serious illness and extended ICU stay. Because if this is an inevitable sacrifice we all must make, treat it as the great equalizer they claim it is. This will affect us all.

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Freedom of Religion Is Not Absolute

photograph of empty church pews

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

On April 7, 2020, prior to the Easter Holiday on Sunday April 12, 2020, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly issued an executive order which, among other things, had the effect of limiting the size of religious gatherings to fewer than ten people. Gov. Kelly’s order differed from similar stay-at-home orders issued by the governors of other states during the COVID-19 pandemic, like Florida’s Gov. Rick DeSantis, in that it did not include an exception for religious services. Subsequently the Legislative Coordinating Council of the Kansas State Legislature voted to revoke nearly all of Gov. Kelly’s emergency powers asserted in her executive order. Gov. Kelly then sued the Legislative Coordinating Council (LCC) for attempting to impede her constitutional powers as the executive of Kansas. Subsequently the Kansas Supreme Court upheld Gov. Kelly’s order, thus overturning the vote of the LCC.

The reporting on this case frames it as a decision between public health and religious liberty. This was, in fact, one of the stated concerns of the Kansas State Legislature’s LCC. However, the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision did not directly touch on issues of religious liberty. Instead the court reached its decision on procedural grounds, arguing that the Kansas State Legislature in general could not be a party to this lawsuit and that further the LCC did not have the authority in this instance to revoke Gov. Kelly’s executive order. That is, the LCC’s vote was null and void, as if it had never occurred.

Let us suppose, however, that the court had deigned to examine the constitutionality of Gov. Kelly’s order with respect to freedom of religion. Would they inevitably have found that the freedom of religion of the citizens of Kansas has been impaired? After all, the First Amendment in the US Bill of Rights says that Congress shall make no law restricting the free exercise of religion. Further the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights says something similar in its seventh section, stating that its citizens will never have their right to worship God according to their conscience infringed. Despite this uncompromising rhetoric, it is not a forgone conclusion that the court would have found in favor of the LCC.

No person’s rights exist in a vacuum. Each right that one person bears creates corresponding obligations on the part of other people, groups, or institutions. Your right to the free exercise of religion creates an obligation on the part of various levels of government, at the very least, to refrain from interfering in how you choose to worship. However, that doesn’t allow you to do anything you please to me under the auspices of your religion. My own right to religious freedom, among the others I bear, must also be safeguarded by the government. Should your freedom of religion come into conflict with some right of mine, some form of adjudication would be needed. In other words, which have been attributed to numerous writers, “Your rights end where my nose begins.”

Here we can make sense of an important concept in arguments about constitutional law—the idea of a strict scrutiny. A case in which it is alleged that a fundamental right has been infringed, or in which a law is alleged to be enacted or enforced selectively against a “suspect classification” (e.g., religion or nationality) compels the court to review that case under standards of strict scrutiny. Among other things the government must demonstrate that its actions, where they infringe upon a fundamental right or disproportionately affect a protected group, do so for a compelling interest. What might such an interest be? For example, protecting another group’s fundamental rights. Hence the government may restrict your freedom of religion, to the minimum extent possible, if doing so is an effective and direct way to protect other citizens’ right to life. (That is, in judicial jargon, the government’s actions are “narrowly tailored” to achieve its compelling interest.)

Do orders like Gov. Kelly’s satisfy a strict scrutiny test? They clearly do. The state has a compelling interest to protect the lives of its citizens. Moreover, the restrictions laid out by stay-at-home orders are narrowly tailored; they prohibit physical gatherings of more than ten people, except for essential activities. This is narrow tailoring because it limits the breadth of the restrictions as much as possible. The restrictions would fail to be narrow if they, for example, forbade any people from coming within ten feet of each other for any purpose whatsoever. Nor are virtual gatherings forbidden. (Many worshipers are taking advantage of various teleconferencing technologies to observe their religious holidays responsibly.) Further, any gatherings that do occur should involve significant physical distance between each participant. These requirements are in line with epidemiological guidelines for minimizing the likelihood of viral spread by bodily contact and aerial exchange. Hence the restrictions are also directly linked to the achievement of the compelling interest to protect the lives of citizens.

Is all of the grand rhetoric about inviolable and inalienable rights just so much hot air, then? What can it mean that Congress shall make no law limiting the free expression of religion if it is acceptable that people should sometime be limited in the expression of their religion? It means simply that the government—or at least parts of it, occasionally—realizes that rights are things held in common by all citizens at once. The adjudication of conflicting rights claims ought not be interpreted as a decision that some kind of right, or some particular person’s right, has mysteriously evaporated for a time. Rather it ought to be interpreted as courts figuring out exactly how all citizens can bear all fundamental rights at all times. Only a narrow and selfish view of your rights can lead you to insist that you can indulge yourself at the cost of other citizens’ life and liberty.

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A Stoic’s Guide to Crisis

photograph of mountain stream falling through jagged rocks

Since my news article about the context of coronavirus numbers was published, the number of reported cases has increased seven-fold. Schools have closed down as education becomes virtual. The vast majority of workers have been told to stay home. Social distancing has become the new norm. As I sit here in social isolation–hopefully like many of you–I think about how I ought to react to this pandemic.

As one individual, there is little about this pandemic that is within my control. I am avoiding physical social contact, I am washing my hands, I am heeding the advice of my government, and I am keeping myself informed. I am doing my best to neither contract nor spread the virus, especially because I am intimately familiar with the concern for those with weak immune systems. But I cannot control the course of the pandemic nor how my government or fellow civilians respond.

My life has been disrupted through no fault of my own. My academic year has ended prematurely. My days are now confined to my bedroom. Trips, job searches, post-grad plans, living arrangements, and much more have been cancelled or put on hold. Everything is uncertain. For many, life is on pause but time continues to move. It is a strange feeling. Shouldn’t I be upset? Shouldn’t I be disappointed? Shouldn’t I be anxious, worried, panicked?

Or should I be stoic? Or better yet, Stoic? Stoicism is a philosophy that prioritizes rational thought over emotion and argues that contentment is found when one’s natural role is realized and acted out.

What would the famously non-emotional Stoics of Antiquity say if I were to ask them, “How should I respond to the disruption this pandemic has caused me?”  One might find the answer to this question in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

The Roman emperor writes, “A bitter cucumber? Throw it away. Brambles in the path? Go round them. That is all you need, without going on to ask, ‘So why are these things in the world anyway?’” (Med., 8). This pandemic has caused many bitter cucumbers and brambles in the path. But, the Stoics would argue, there is no reason to question their occurrences. By doing so, you make the cucumber more bitter and the bramble more obstructive.

Aurelius continues: “Remember, that as it is a shame for any man to wonder that a fig tree should bear figs, so also to wonder that the world should bear anything, whatsoever it is which in the ordinary course of nature it may bear” (Med., 8.13). These seemingly random and disruptive events are a natural facet of life. If and once you understand that, there is no reason to toil over the events’ occurrence just as you would not toil over a fig tree bearing figs.

But the ethics of Stoicism is not without magnificently substantial flaws. Aurelius argues, “Whatsoever doth happen in the world, doth happen justly” (Med., 4.8). I pity the person who is charged with making the case that the spread of COVID-19 is somehow just. He continues:

“Nothing can happen unto thee, which is not incidental unto thee […] As nothing can happen either to an ox, a vine, or to a stone, which is not incidental unto them; unto every one is his own king. If therefore nothing can happen unto anything, which is not both usual and natural, why art thou displeased?” (Med., 8.45).

The philosophy holds that everything is predetermined, which is absurd. The lack of an emotional response to crises is justified by the notion that every event is essential. You should not fret about crises because a crisis would not happen to you if you were not equipped to handle it. That which occurs to you is within your nature to occur to you; therefore, why be upset that it is occurring to you? Hmm. I am not satisfied. Nor should you be. One possible implication of endorsing this position is to have no coordinated response to the pandemic whatsoever.

But there is something useful to be disentangled from this wonky, possibly illogical view of nature: Understand what is within your control and adjust your mindset accordingly.

“Let thy chief fort and place of defence be, a mind free from passions. A strong place and better fortified than this, hath no man,” writes Aurelius. “Keep thyself to the first bare and naked apprehension of things, as they present themselves unto thee, and add not unto them.” (Med., 8.46-47).

In other words, keep your mind free from the subjective values you assign to an event. Do not allow your mind to be consumed by emotions felt with regard to the event lest the event cause you even more disruption or pain as a result.

To illustrate this advice, the Roman emperor asks you to suppose someone is speaking ill of you. The fact that someone is speaking ill of you is indisputable. But the degree of the offense or hurt that the speech causes depends on your reaction to it.

The fact that the pandemic has caused school closures, employment displacement, uncertainty about the future is indisputable. But the degree to which those realities affect your emotional and mental well-being depends on your reaction to it. How you react is within your control. Best not to add additional suffering.

In one passage particularly pertinent to our current situation, Aurelius observes: “Hath not yet experience taught thee to fly from the plague? For a far greater plague is the corruption of the mind, than any certain change and distemper of the common air can be” (Med., 9.2).

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Re-Thinking Mass Incarceration: COVID-19 in Jails and Prisons

photogaph of barbed wire around prison building

More people per capita are incarcerated in the United States than in any other country in the world—698 out of every 100,000 people are currently incarcerated. Many jails and prisons in the United States are overcrowded. This means that the number of people they have detained exceeds their safe carrying capacity both in terms of space and resources. As the COVID-19 threat intensifies, people across the planet are being strongly encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to stay at home and to practice social distancing. This advice is impossible to follow in a jail or a prison, especially one that is overcrowded. At the time of this writing, hundreds of inmates and prison staff have tested positive for COVID-19.

Conditions in jail and prison are far from ideal for preventing and responding to infectious disease. To fight the spread, people are being asked to wash their hands regularly. Detention facilities are often set up in such a way that regular hand washing is not easy. In many institutions, hand sanitizer is considered contraband because of its high alcohol content. Inmates found in possession of it face disciplinary action. The same bathrooms are used by many people, and toilet paper and tissue are limited. To complicate matters, healthcare services in detention facilities are often shorthanded and of poor quality. These elements of detention environments create extremely unsafe conditions not only for incarcerated people, but also for staff at those institutions.

In response to these concerns, authorities at both state and federal levels have ordered the release of incarcerated individuals. On March 27th, Attorney General William Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to release some of their prisoners that are sick or elderly, depending on the nature of their crimes and their record of behavior while incarcerated. He asked federal prisons to consider whether confinement at home might be the best option for these prisoners.

State systems are also taking steps to reduce the number of prisoners at their facilities. For example, in Utah, prison officials are expected to release at least 80 inmates by Thursday, April 2nd. They are focusing their attention on people whose parole or release dates were set to take place in the next few months.

The COVID-19 crisis in United States detention facilities highlights a troubling fact about the criminal justice system in the United States. Across the country, 555,000 people are detained in prison who have been arrested but not convicted of any crime. What’s more, 25% of people in jails are being held for low-level offenses like jaywalking or sitting on the sidewalk. The average cost of bail in the United States is $10,000, and those who remain in jail until their trials are people who cannot afford to pay that bail. In the current context, the result is that poor people who are arrested but who have not yet had their day in court are forced to remain in an environment in which social distancing is impossible. Many of these people may well be innocent of the crime for which they are accused.

Some states are taking preventative action to reduce the number of people being held in jail during the COVID-19 emergency. For example, in the case of misdemeanors, officers across the country are being asked to give citations rather than make physical arrests.

Critics of the decision to release inmates argue that, at the very least, victims of accused or convicted persons should be made aware of the release before it happens. After all, in at least some cases, the released individuals might pose a threat to the person they victimized. Some argue that victims have a right to secure conditions in which they feel safe before inmates are released. One ready response to those that have these concerns is that most of the people who are being selected for early release are non-violent offenders, or offenders who for reasons such as age or infirmity are unlikely to perpetrate a violent crime upon release.

Many applaud the decision to release incarcerated individuals but are concerned that the process isn’t moving anywhere near quickly enough to prevent the spread. The delay that notification of victims would cause could make the situation much worse.

Others are concerned that release of convicted criminals and those arrested under suspicion of committing a crime is a miscarriage of justice and may constitute a significant threat to public safety. A pandemic doesn’t nullify the crimes that were committed, and criminals shouldn’t get off easy because we’re going through an international emergency.

In response, some argue that this line of thought expresses a purely retributivist attitude toward criminal punishment. This attitude is tremendously common in the United States, but there are good reasons to think that it is misguided. In an ideal world, our response to criminal behavior shouldn’t simply be to put offenders in prison and throw away the key; instead it should be guided by more holistic and evidence-based considerations about what would be best both for the offender and for society at large. People who commit crimes are still human beings deserving of moral consideration and concern.

People who commit crimes do so with full awareness that there might be legal consequences. That said, the decision to commit a crime does not translate into a decision to be locked up in close quarters with people who carry a deadly infectious disease. No person deserves that; it’s inhumane. If all goes well, we’ll deal with the spread of COVID-19 in jails and prisons as best we can. Going forward, we are morally obligated to take preventative and proactive measures for dealing with this kind of thing in the future, knowing full well that prison populations are hotbeds for the spread of infectious disease.

Finally, our response to COVID-19 highlights something significant about criminal justice policy in this country—mass incarceration is not a practical necessity. There are steps that we can take to incarcerate fewer individuals. We know this because we are currently taking those very steps. This pandemic has the potential to teach us many lessons. With any luck, it will cause our culture to be more reflective about our incarceration practices.

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The Ethics of Triage

photograph of empty cots in a medical tent

As the global crisis of the Coronavirus pandemic deepens we are facing a barrage of ethical problems related to the provision of health care.

Equitable access to medical treatment is an issue that will manifest on different levels. It will manifest globally: in areas where health systems are deficient or sections of the population have limited access, the effects stand to be much worse if large-scale infection takes hold.

Populations in countries with underlying issues of poverty or other large public health issues already putting stress on health systems will suffer higher mortality rates and may find it more difficult than wealthier nations to source supplies such as protective gear and medicines.

The statistics stand something like this: Of persons infected, about 20 out of 100 will need hospital care. Of those, about 5, or 5 percent of people overall, (roughly a quarter of those who are hospitalized) will need intensive care including the use of a respirator for assisted breathing.  Mortality rates from COVID-19 are differing between places, but on average it is as high as 3-6 per cent.

If the pandemic gets away from us and infections spiral, even developed countries with good health care, services will be stretched, likely way beyond capacity. As intensive care beds are filled, some people will miss out on medical resources. The question of who is going to miss out, or who is going to be prioritized, will leave doctors and medical staff facing very tough decisions about how best to distribute scarce resources.

When hospitalizations increase to the point where demand for intensive care outstrips capacity, the process of triage is used to make decisions about which patients to prioritize. I’ll come back to this concept of triage in a moment, but first, it could not be more urgent for people in places facing down imminent rises in infection rates and community infections to understand that the more preventative measures are heeded the more we reduce the need for doctors to make tough decisions in terms of access to care. Social distancing measures are vital because even those not as vulnerable to the worst outcomes of infection have a role to play in helping to curb its spread. Though around 80 percent of cases are mild, the danger lies in the threat of overwhelmed healthcare systems if really high percentages become infected –and this is why experts are telling us that we need stringent measures to contain the spread.

Triage is the treatment policy adopted in wartime where the numbers of casualties far outstripped medical resources in terms of access to doctors, medicines, and care facilities.

Wounded patients were divided into three categories: the first, those likely to survive without medical assistance; the second, those who may survive with assistance and probably not without; and the third, those who would probably not survive even with medical assistance. Of these categories, only those falling into the second would receive medical treatment.

How does such a principle look in the time of global Coronavirus pandemic? Hospitals may be forced to adopt such a policy with the use of intensive care staff and equipment, and as health systems reach breaking point, choices about who will get access to life-saving treatment will be a real ethical and practical issue.

How will those decisions be made? If someone needs intensive care their chances of survival without assistance are greatly reduced already. Patients deemed to have a higher chance of survival based on other factors, such as general health or age, are likely to be prioritized over those with existing health problems or the elderly.

It is possible that the elderly or terminally ill, for example, might be placed in the equivalent third category, so that the resources spent in trying to save them might be deemed better spent on someone whose chances of survival are good with care but poor without.

A raft of other factors could be in the mix. It is likely age would be a factor, and if numbers of infections rose sharply, there is the possibility of age cut-offs getting lower, so that first under 70 might be prioritized, next under 60, next under 50 and so on. Would profession be a consideration – should healthcare workers, for example, be prioritized? How about parents or people with young children, or other dependents?

These kinds of choices are not unfamiliar in bioethics (they have to be made, for instance, by doctors considering allocation of the fewer organs available for transplant than patients in need of them), but the salient difference here is the sheer numbers of cases where such decisions are faced.

By virtue of doctors and medical staff having to confront these tough triage decisions on a large scale, a kind of consequentialist ethics is forced upon them. Triage is inherently utilitarian, because it allocates resources according not to need but best outcome. A patient in poorer health has fundamentally higher care needs, which translates to demand on medicine, equipment, and staff; but if those resources can be split between two less critical patients with a reasonable chance of saving both, that is the best (probable) outcome. This decision is not based on individual patients’ needs, but on a better outcome overall, according to consequences.

Whatever factors come to play a role in individual decisions made by doctors and healthcare professionals, once the healthcare system has reached this stage there will necessarily have to be a process of ethical weighing-up of costs and benefits, which thrusts a utilitarian framework onto decision-making.

One may, in theory, reject utilitarian reasoning and argue that we have a duty to everyone, and that everyone has a right to equal treatment, access to care, or other necessities such as protective equipment. But rights are powerless when the capacity to uphold or honor them does not exist. In a scenario where infections spiral out of control and health systems collapse, the notion of a universal right to life-saving treatment will be meaningless.

This is an ethical issue in terms of how it affects individual outcomes throughout the pandemic, and it is also an ethical issue by virtue of the awful position it puts doctors, nurses, and medical staff in. Imagine having to choose between two young patients, one with a chronic condition so somewhat less likely to recover. Imagine having to choose between a healthcare worker and a layperson, or between the mother of an infant or an older child. The point is that it can become a situation where doctors are forced to make ‘ethically impossible’ choices.

Peter Singer, a utilitarian philosopher, claims ethics is not an ‘ideal’ system–that it is not something which works only in theory–but, he says, “the whole point of ethical judgements is to guide practice.” In other words, ethics is not about ideals, but practical outcomes.

He is right, in the context of triage in the age of COVID-19, only insofar as these particular practical ethical issues arise as a result of better ethical options, like preparedness and mitigation, having been foregone. In other words, if ethics is not an ideal but a practical reality, utilitarian ethics is a reality here not because it was, as it turns out, right all along, but because other ethical failures have put us in the position of being left with no other choice.

I said at the beginning that the more preventative measures are heeded, the more we reduce the need to make tough decisions in terms of access to care. Triage is not therefore an ethical position, but rather the unhappy position of having to use a kind of moral calculus, which it is better to have avoided in the first place. We therefore need to mobilize our capacity, at the individual level and as a society, using the measures epidemiologists are urging, to mitigate the need for triage. We can think of it as our duty to our families, to our communities, to our nations, and to humanity. Failure at this level would be an ethical failure.

We should, however, take the opportunity to consider what other ethical failures threaten to lead us to disaster in this crisis. Given the general shortage of specialist care facilities, and even of basic protective gear for front-line staff in many parts of the world, the issue of preparedness is also burning.

Why are there not enough critical care facilities in so many countries when a deadly global pandemic has been warned of for many decades? Many nations spend large percentages of their GDP on defense against threats of invasion or international conflict, yet are completely, tragically unprepared for this, predictable, event.

The situation of front-line medical staff having to make heart-rending decisions about who will receive life saving medical treatment and who will miss out is a morally onerous burden that could, had governments better protected their citizens by being ready for such an event, have been largely prevented.

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The Politicization of Disease

photograph of seesaw with 1 paper cutout man balanced against 20

Obviously, keeping coronavirus and politics separate is impossible. There is no doubt that the disease will have (and already has had) a profound impact on this year’s political election. But even outside of this very practical sense, COVID-19 presents a political problem: How can we most usefully marshal our resources to combat a pandemic and best manage the expected (and unexpected) fallout?

The virus’s rapid spread has emptied everything from sports arenas packed with fans looking to see the King to the studio audiences of Late Night royalty. It’s laid waste to grocery stores and made princes of price gougers. It’s changed the shape of education, and altered the nature of employment. That our discussion of coronavirus get political is inevitable. Every day policy decisions are made regarding everything from curfews to quarantines. Even the WHO’s decision regarding if and when to call this recent outbreak a “pandemic” was a matter of political calculation.

But the current crisis has also provided ample opportunity for partisan exaggeration, posturing, and grandstanding. As we speak, Republicans and Democrats are locked in combat over the details of a $2 trillion relief bill with both sides accusing the other of prioritizing politics over public well-being. That criticism–prioritizing politics over the public good–is perhaps the best explanation of our disdain for politicization: when the possibility of political victory eclipses the pursuit of all other values. And the current crisis has already been seized on as an opportunity to gain significant ground in the war of ideology.

Earlier this month, in his Oval Office address, the president labelled our adversary a “foreign virus” which needed to be “defeated.” The intentional and repeated institutional use of phrases like “Chinese Virus” since has been explained as a strategy made of two parts immigration policy, one part trade war leverage, one part world relations retaliation, and perhaps one part misdirection. But regardless of the rationalization, these actions are gravely irresponsible and morally reprehensible, especially in a time when gun sales are skyrocketing and Asian Americans are purchasing firearms in response to increasing threats of violence made against them. Whatever political points there are to win here can’t be weighed against the very real and very present threat to human life.

Likewise, while Trump has laid claim to the “wartime president” mantle, he’s been loath to invoke the Defense Production Act relying instead on his famed deal-making skills. In the midst of critical shortages in medical supplies, Trump is betting on market forces to correct course. When challenged Sunday on why he was waiting for corporations to identify and satisfy current needs, the president was adamant that “we’re a country not based on nationalizing our business.” The president’s economic adviser, Peter Navarro, echoed this sentiment stating that, “We’re getting what we need without putting the heavy hand of government down.” When pressed further, Trump dared the press corps to “Call a person over in Venezuela; ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out. Not too well. The concept of nationalizing our business is not a good concept.”

Nevermind the false comparison between the Defense Production Act and nationalization, the president’s refusal to direct manufacturers is privileging economic rhetoric at the expense of public health. The current emergency situation calls for pooling national supplies, adjusting for mass production of basic goods like gloves, masks, gowns, respirators, and prioritizing distribution according to gravest needs. Without a coordinated approach by the federal government to make deliberate decisions about supplies and allocations, individual states have been left to fend for themselves. As Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker described it, “It’s a wild, wild West out there.”

Given these developments, the president’s announcement Monday that he was already rethinking the social and economic lockdown was not particularly shocking. As Adam Gaffney wrote on The Guardian last week, “Trump has made it clear he sees this pandemic chiefly as a threat to the market and wealthy people’s personal interests (and relatedly, his own political future) – not to the people whose lives it will threaten or claim.” The economic collapse we have yet to fully experience represents a very real threat to Trump’s private business interests and political fortunes. Concern for public health is, at best, a distant third. Dan Diamond of Politico has even claimed that Trump

“did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, […] partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear: the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.”

Unfortunately, the prioritization of private goods over public health has not stopped there. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick made an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday arguing that we should all get back to work in the midst of this pandemic in order to mitigate the coming financial crisis. Senior citizens, Patrick argued, bear an obligation to their grandchildren to risk death in order to preserve Gen Z’s financial solvency. “Let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country.”

Thankfully, the Lieutenant Governor’s suggestion of trading one’s life for another’s financial gain has been met with much scorn and derision. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo maintained that “You cannot put a value on human life,” and Bill Gates weighed in stating that we can’t just carry on and simply “ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner.” Apart from arguments regarding the pricelessness of human life, it’s also important to note that framing the issue as one of personal choice fails to acknowledge the way in which those willing to take these risks undermines others’ ability to choose. One person’s behavior can put others at risk who have taken steps to insulate themselves; the value of personal choice cuts both ways.

While the reception of Patrick’s remarks have largely been heartening, his rallying cry isn’t without its supporters. Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University, for example, opened the university’s doors yesterday to welcome back students, and is expecting faculty to report to campus. Last week, The Atlantic offered a new take on an old saying: “Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, in a national emergency, there’s no truly laissez-faire government.” But the US seems forever poised to test the truth of that inference.

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“Chinese Virus”? On the Ethics of Coronavirus Nicknames

image of World Health Organization emblem

The recent Coronavirus outbreak has undoubtedly affected the physical and economic well-being of many Americans and people across the world. With total Coronavirus cases over 300,000 and counting, economies have plunged and hospitals are overloaded with patients. However, amid this crisis, a new controversy has emerged concerning the various Coronavirus nicknames.

Recently, President Trump referred to the Coronavirus as the “Chinese Virus.” Other nicknames for the virus have emerged such as “Wuhan Virus” and “Kung Flu.” These nicknames have drawn criticism from the left, mainstream media, and Asian Americans while the right has called these nicknames appropriate and has criticized the political correctness of the left. To determine the morality of Coronavirus nicknames, it is first necessary to see the current context of Asian discrimination.

Without a doubt, Coronavirus has furthered racist discrimination toward Asians and Asian Americans. In schools, Asian students face xenophobic comments like “stop eating bats” and the infamous “go back to your country.” Additionally, Asian businesses, particularly restaurants, had seen significant drops in sales even before the quarantine happened. There have also been countless cases where Asians are harassed due to Coronavirus. In the media, Fox News commentator, Jesse Walters, went as far as to say, “I’ll tell you why it started in China. They have these markets where they eat raw bats and snakes. They are a very hungry people.” Not only are these blatantly racist generalizations of Chinese people, it is a myth that diseases come only from so called exotic animals. Diseases come from all animals such as pigs (swine flu), cows (mad cow disease), and chickens (bird flu), and two of those diseases had their first cases in the Western world. But these facts have held little sway as Asian discrimination has been widespread on social media with many comments seizing on Walters’ (and even Senator John Cornyn’s) words that all Asians eat bat soup and snakes.

In this context of widespread Asian racism, many people have started to call nicknames such as “Chinese Virus” and “Wuhan Virus” racist. However, critics say there is an established record of naming diseases based on their original location. Just to name a few, there is Ebola fever (Ebola River), Lyme disease (Lyme, Connecticut), West Nile virus, Lassa fever (Lassa, Uganda), and St. Louis encephalitis. Diseases have also been tied to nationality such as German measles, Japanese encephalitis, and the Spanish flu (though the Spanish flu started in Kansas). Therefore, many conservatives have argued that President Trump’s comments only follow an established pattern of naming diseases.

Even though we’ve had a trend of naming diseases based on their origin, it is important to recognize that popularity does not equate to morality; just because we have named diseases by origin in the past, doesn’t mean that we should continue doing so. In fact, the naming of diseases by origin is actually now frowned upon by the medical community. The World Health Organization has set guidelines in which they state, “Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations.” This guideline was made in 2015 before the Coronavirus pandemic. Unlike critics’ claims as a common scientific practice, geographic locations are now not used by medical organizations. The morality of the nickname “Chinese Virus” can’t be based on the popularity of past disease naming customs, but must instead be considered according to the negative impact it has for society at large. Calling Coronavirus “Chinese Virus” for the sake of accuracy of original location can’t outweigh the potential further perpetuation of Asian discrimination. Given the fact that Chinese and Asian people are unfairly associated with Coronavirus and other negative stereotypes, associating “Chinese” with the Coronavirus would be a dangerous path to take.

To see this it might be helpful to consider the shift in attitude if a virus were to be named “America Virus” in the midst of a global pandemic where Americans were discriminated against while dying by the thousands. It wouldn’t be well-received by the many Americans who are doing everything they can to save fellow American lives. This is what is happening in China: selfless doctors tirelessly work overtime and overwhelmed nurses rush from bed to bed; all of them giving their heart and soul to save human lives. The doctors and nurses sacrifice their time to save their fellow countrymen, all just for the US to slap their Chinese nationality on the virus they are fighting to save their fellow Chinese people. Using the term “Chinese Virus” not only risks further Asian discrimination, it is disrespectful to the Chinese nurses and doctors risking their lives to save their fellow countrymen.

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The Moral Case for University Closure

photograph of gate to school with "SCHOOL CLOSED" sign

When it became clear that DePauw University was considering cancelling in-class sessions and having students move out of their living units, I began thinking through a number of reasons why this was something that places of higher education should seriously consider. Collectively these reasons make a strong case for thinking that colleges and universities have a moral duty to take measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, and furthermore, that places of higher education might have added responsibilities.

The first set of reasons is more of a response to objections that students and parents might have for thinking that cancelling in-person classes is a bad idea. I’ll address those first. Then I will offer four reasons for thinking that colleges have more responsibility for mitigating the spread of coronavirus than other individuals or institutions.

Things Students and Parents Might Be Thinking:

  1. This won’t be bad for young students
    A common attitude that a student or parent might have is that college students either won’t get coronavirus or if they do it won’t be that bad for them. The first attitude is patently false. College students around the country have tested positive for COVID19 and many more will. The second attitude has a ring of truth to it. Most college students will probably not have severe conditions, but some will. Many young Americans have compromised immune systems due to heart conditions, diabetes, respiratory conditions, and cancers. And the death rates are much higher for coronavirus than seasonal flu.  Top US health officials say that this virus is 10 times more lethal than seasonal flu. The confirmed case death rate for the flu is about 0.1% while the confirmed case death rate for the coronavirus is about 3.4%.
  2. We’re all going to get it anyway, so why the drastic measures?
    I’ve heard some people say that it’s inevitable that everyone (or almost everyone)  is going to get the virus, and so it doesn’t make sense to take drastic measures to stop the spread of the virus. However, whether it’s inevitable or not, there is still significant value in slowing the progression of this disease. Imagine if you owned a restaurant and you were guaranteed to have 1,000,000 customers place an order, but you didn’t know when they were coming. You don’t want them to come all at once or within a few days of each other. You wouldn’t have enough servers or tables to handle them all at once. You would likely run out of food and supplies. It would be better to have those customers spread out over 12 months. COVID19 is like that.Some healthcare professionals refer to this as “Flattening the Curve.” As this article explains, we are much better off having people get this at different times. It makes it more likely that there will be beds and healthcare workers for those who need it most. It gives the healthcare service industry time to scale up production of vital resources to mitigate the effects of the disease and save more lives. Optimism is high there will be a vaccine, but it could be at least a year before we have a viable vaccine. Slowing the disease buys us time so that it may in fact not be inevitable that everyone gets this.

Why Universities and Colleges Have Extra Moral Reasons to Slow Progression of COVID19
There are good reasons for everyone to take steps to help slow progression of COVID19, but colleges might have an even stronger moral duty to do this work.

  1. Higher Education Structure Spreads Disease
    Here is a plausible moral principle: If you are causally responsible for a harm (or potential harm) you have an extra moral reason to take steps to prevent that harm. Universities and colleges are in this position with respect to the coronavirus. As this article explains, the things that make colleges wonderful also make them an exceptionally good breeding ground for pathogens. Universities and colleges are very social institutions. We encourage students to live on campus in close quarters. They attend several different classes a week. When you count the number of classes, co-curriculars, athletics, and social groups (such as fraternity and sorority friends), the average college student is in close contact with hundreds of people every day. Add to this that colleges are global institutions that send faculty and students abroad, and it’s clear that every college or university is a potential hotspot for an outbreak in ways that a lot of other organizations and businesses are not. That puts a greater moral burden on higher education institutions to act.
  2. Vulnerable Groups at Universities and Colleges
    The situation could be even worse at a college or university because the average retirement age for professors tends to be higher and universities often have a vibrant and active community of retired emeritus professors in their midst. This means that there is more at stake locally for your typical college or university. On the plausible assumption that employers have a responsibility to care for the well-being of those they employ, colleges have extra reasons to be concerned about slowing the spread of the virus.
  3. Fundamental Mission to Sustain Democracy
    It is sometimes forgotten that one of the fundamental aims of colleges and universities is to strengthen and sustain a legitimate and flourishing democracy. The Jeffersonian idea is that we need all of these colleges and universities to provide citizens with the knowledge, skills, and capacities to be good, democratic citizens. Our fundamental mission is not to educate students; educating students is simply how colleges and universities think they can best fulfill the fundamental mission of preserving our democracy. To that end, anything that is a potential threat to democracy should be of grave concern to any college or university and sometimes colleges and universities should be called upon to temporarily suspend the usual ways in which we preserve our democracy, especially if business as usual poses a different sort of potential threat.  And, yes, pandemics are a significant threat to democracy.
  4. Colleges in Small Communities
    This last moral reason applies to colleges and universities in small, rural communities. Colleges and universities have responsibilities to the communities that they operate within. The degree of responsibility is proportional to how much damage the college is uniquely capable of inflicting on the community. When a college is part of a small community with few other large organizations, they bear a greater share of the moral responsibility to limit the ways in which it might cause harm via disease spread. A place like DePauw is the biggest risk factor for Greencastle having an outbreak, and so places like DePauw have extra reasons to consider closing down.

The decision to close a college is disruptive for so many people, and I get the sense that many students think that these are arbitrary and capricious decisions that couldn’t possibly be motivated by sound moral reasoning. Whatever you decide about the wisdom of closing colleges, I hope you do so with the understanding that there are several significant morally relevant considerations that give college administrators and boards legitimate moral reasons to join the fight to slow the progression of this virus.

UPDATE: (3-15-2020)

The Likelihood of College Students Spreading the Virus Without Symptoms
Since this piece was published, it has come to light that people who have the virus but do not have symptoms are playing an even bigger role in the spread of the virus than we previously thought. It’s also coming to light that people who spread the disease without symptoms tend to be 20 years old and younger. That gives colleges and universities even more reason to consider closing, since college age students are likely to contribute to the spread in ways that make mitigation extremely difficult.

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Are We Overreacting? Coronavirus in Context

Perhaps the fear about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) stems from uncertainty about the future. Or perhaps it stems from confusion about the virus itself. In late January, the number of coronavirus cases was just shy of 600; seven weeks later that number had ballooned to 110,000. Figures such as those can cause panic. But numbers without context or explanation can be meaningless. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman observes, “Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers.”

Relative to the world’s population, the number of cases is small. Proportionally, if every seat in Gillette Stadium was occupied for a Patriots game, only one of the spectators would have coronavirus. And that spectator would have a 3.4% chance of dying as a result.

But even that percentage, provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), requires context. Depending on the location, the mortality rate varies substantially. Jamie Ducharme and Elijah Wolfson of Time observe that countries with a greater number of tests administered have lower mortality rates. For example, the U.S. has a mortality rate of 5% but has only administered seven tests per million residents, while South Korea has administered 1,100 tests per million residents and registers a mortality rate of 0.6%. Additionally, compared to other once-novel coronaviruses, COVID-19 is more akin to flu.

“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) killed about 10% of the people who got it, while Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was even deadlier,” Ducharme and Wolfson write. “At least so far, COVID-19 does seem to be more lethal than the seasonal flu, but it’s closer to that end of the spectrum.”

Often excluded from the live updates of the number of coronavirus cases is the number of those who have recovered. During an address on March 9, the WHO Director-General noted that of the 80,000 individuals in China who have tested positive for COVID-19, 70 percent have made a full recovery. The 110,000 number does not reflect the number of those currently infected with the virus but rather the total known number of those who have been infected.

Our perception of the risk informs our reaction. Incomprehension about numbers paves the way for overreaction. But does that matter? Is it better to be safe than sorry? Or should we balance preventing the spread of the disease with finding normalcy amidst the prevention?

In reaction to fears about the virus, shoppers in the UK are emptying out grocery stores despite government ministers saying there is “no need for anybody to stockpile.” Grocery chains have begun to limit the purchases of certain goods such as anti-bacterial gels, dry pasta, and canned vegetables. In the U.S. and Canada, shoppers are stockpiling toilet paper. In New York, people are stealing medical masks and other equipment from hospitals. Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist who studies how people respond to pandemics, called the reaction “excessive.” “When people are told something dangerous is coming, but all you need to do is wash your hands, the action doesn’t seem proportionate to the threat,” he told CNN.

Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund echoes Taylor’s observation in his piece about the panic. “[Wash your hands is] too simple for some people to take seriously,” he writes. “The idea that complex problems can benefit from simple solutions isn’t intuitive.”

Abdu Sharkawy, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Toronto, says that he is not scared of COVID-19. “What I am scared about is the loss of reason and wave of fear that has induced the masses of society into a spellbinding spiral of panic, stockpiling obscene quantities of anything that could fill a bomb shelter adequately in a post-apocalyptic world,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

The risk of contracting COVID-19 remains low. The risk of suffering the most grave consequence is even lower. But you may not know that when hit with a steady stream of numbers on the news and an increasing sense of panic amongst your neighbors. Perhaps the best thing to do is keep calm, heed the most up-to-date advice of your government, and wash your hands. If you have questions about the coronavirus, visit the WHO’s Q&A page.

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Infodemics and Good Epistemic Hygiene

3d rendering of bacteria under a microscope

There has been a tremendous amount of news lately about the outbreak and spread of COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus. And while having access to up-to-date information about a global health crisis can certainly be a good thing, there have been worries that the amount of information out there has become something of a problem itself. So much so that the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that they are concerned that the epidemic has led to an “infodemic”: the worry is that with so much information it will be difficult both for people to process all of it, and to determine what they should trust and which they should ignore.

With so much information swirling about there is already a Wikipedia page dedicated to all the various rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding the virus. For instance, some of the more popular conspiracy theories state that the virus is a human-made biological weapon (it isn’t), and that there are vaccines already available but are just being kept from the public (there aren’t). It shouldn’t be surprising that social media is the most fertile breeding ground for misinformation, with large Facebook groups spreading not only falsehoods but supposed miracle cures, some of which are extremely dangerous.

In response to these problems, sites like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been urged to take steps to try to help cull the infodemic by employing fact-checking services, providing free advertising for the WHO, and by trying to make sure that when looking for information about coronavirus online that reputable sources are those that dominate the results.

While all of this is of course a good thing, what should the individual person do when faced with such an infodemic? It is, of course, always a good idea to be vigilant when acquiring information online, especially when that information is coming from social media. But perhaps just as we should engage in more conscientious physical hygiene, we should also engage in a more substantial epistemic hygiene, as well. After all, the spreading of rumors and misinformation can itself lead to harms, so it seems that we should make extra sure that we aren’t forming and spreading beliefs in a way that can potentially be damaging to others.

What might good epistemic hygiene look like in the face of an infodemic? Perhaps we can draw some parallels from the suggested practices for good physical hygiene from the WHO. Some of the main suggestions from the WHO include:

  • Washing hands frequently
  • Maintaining social distance
  • Practicing good respiratory hygiene (like covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze)
  • Staying informed

These are all good ways to minimize chances of contracting or spreading diseases. What parallels could we draw from this when it comes to the infodemic? While the physical act of hand-washing is unlikely to stop the spread of misinformation, perhaps a parallel when it comes to forming beliefs would be to make extra careful which sources we’re getting our information from, and to critically reflect upon our beliefs if we do get information from a less than trustworthy source. Just as taking a little extra time to make sure your hands are clean can help control the spread of disease, so could taking some extra time to critically reflect help control the spread of misinformation.

Maintaining a kind of social distance might be a good idea, as well: as we saw above, the majority of misinformation about the epidemic comes from social media. If we are prone to looking up the latest gossip and rumors, it might be best to just stay out of those Facebook groups altogether. Similarly, just as it’s a good idea to try to protect others by coughing or sneezing into your arm, so too is it a good idea to keep misinformed ideas to yourself. If you feel like you want to spread gossip or information you’ve acquired from some other less-than-reputable source, instead of spreading it around further by posting or commenting on social media, the best thing would be to try to stop the spread as much as possible.

Finally, the WHO does suggest that it is a good idea to stay informed. Again, we have seen that there are better and worse ways of doing this. Staying informed does not mean acquiring information from just anywhere, nor does it mean getting as much information as is humanly possible. In the light of an infodemic one needs to be that much more vigilant and responsible when it comes to the potential spread of misinformation.