PLAGUE JOURNAL August 2020: Why Me? I Did Everything Right! Baffled & Benighted at the New Yorker
Late summer: hopelessly devoted to the story.
Looking in All the Wrong Places
We heard countless examples of people claiming to have done everything “right” yet caught the virus anyway. A New Yorker staff writer named Carolyn Kormann wrote such a story, published August 7th, called “How Did I Catch the Coronavirus?” She believed she was safe although she lived with her boyfriend and four other people in a house in Brooklyn. “We formed a pod. No outside contacts.” There it is again, the othering, the in-group/out-group distinctions that are meaningless to the virus. Using the word “pod” to describe a group of under-employed strangers does not make them safe. We saw this thinking throughout the pandemic: We hung out with our friends all weekend—but it’s okay, we knew they were being safe.
She left the house in “late March” to stay in “the home” of some friends on Long Island who had recently departed for Vermont “with relatives”—another safety pod at risk of spreading infection in-the-home, although at least Vermont was cold enough to make spreading unlikely. She does not say whether this Long Island home was a house or an apartment. She presents herself as highly safe, not even venturing out to a grocery store. On April 14th she “woke up symptomatic,” although she didn't get tested and had friends over two weeks later, saying “They stayed six feet away, in the yard.” In the yard is good. Six feet isn't really the issue.
The two-week gap probably put her well past her infectious period, yet such behavior doesn't sound like the behavior of an extreme safety-ist of the kind that takes her guidance from the New Yorker or the Times. Again and again during our new pandemic, people who take the mainstream view about masks and distance and obedience seem to vastly over-estimate how safe their friends are and how dangerous strangers are. They practice extreme safety when a stranger jogs past but no precaution at all when visiting family and friends, or friends of friends, or people from the same neighborhood or social group or who share the same politics.
Kormann wonders, more than once in the article, if she caught the virus back in March while she was in Brooklyn. It's an odd thing to wonder when 98% of all known cases have an incubation period of two weeks or less, and most develop symptoms around day five or six. When symptoms continued, she finally got tested, and confirmed positive results on April 30th.
She wonders if someone sneezed or coughed on her car-door handle in Brooklyn on March 31st or April 1st. How would that happen? Does someone walking down the street lean over to cough on the door? Even if someone did, how would that transmit the virus to her? She says the WHO acknowledged “airborne” danger in July, citing a widely reported letter from many “experts” who warn of “aerosols,” which “don't fall.” Like so many other noisy threats, the letter posited a theoretical risk from the virus, citing findings from lab studies. As with surfaces, which we learned could hold the virus for hours or days, anything was possible. But people don't live in a lab, and people weren't getting sick from doorknobs or from entering a room three days after someone breathed the virus into it.
We knew from the tracing studies that someone can be infected 20 feet away from the carrier in certain conditions, for example if the carrier sings or shouts for two hours in a small, poorly ventilated area (when it's 35 or so degrees outside, although that part was not in the tracing studies). Kormann misleadingly writes that the virus can “remain viable for as long as three hours.” Maybe in a lab, but not in the real world. So far as we know, there is no spreading event in which people got sick from a carrier who left the room two hours earlier. Even she admits, “It will get less infectious with time,” her only mention of time in the article. In the actual spreader events, the carrier is putting out droplets constantly. And they fall to the ground, even if the very light droplets can travel 20 feet before doing so. They do not remain in the air indefinitely like pollen or dust, and do not have high potency over time. Although they transmit through the air, they are not aerosolized in the medical sense. (For posts about the invented aerosol threat, see links at the bottom.)
She engages in a free-form inventory of bad information she has seen in the news, writing, “The virus can survive on plastic for up to three days. Based on data so far, experts say that fomite transmission—which means picking up the virus from a contaminated surface, such as a door handle—is not responsible for the majority of cases.” Not responsible for the majority of cases? It’s not responsible for any of them. She's trying to reconcile noise. “The scientific consensus is that large-droplet transmission is the most common route. If an infected person sneezed, coughed, or breathed heavily right next to me, I might have inhaled large droplets from them (although I think I would have noticed if that had happened in the haunted early weeks of the pandemic).”
She is correct that droplets are the means of transmission, but not from a single breath or even a single sneeze, especially, as she notes, she would have been on high alert, with plenty of time to move away. She still thinks it zaps you, as the news had us believe for a few days in March. She’s in a fantasy of threat and bad science, concluding with, “Or a sick person’s droplets might have landed on my hands, and then I, inevitably, touched my face.” Does she not understand that her hands, in this example, are fomites? She is writing this in August, months after the basics were clear to anyone who had observed employees in a grocery store, and apparently she had been growing more confused over time, as the headlines have tried to deliver ever-expanding modes of transmission and ever-increasing threats.
Hopelessly Confused
When you have bad information, you draw poor conclusions. Kormann’s belief in aerosols causes her to wonder again whether she caught it weeks earlier from her boyfriend’s roommates, although aerosols would not be necessary to spread the virus in an apartment. Then she invokes math and experts and delivers the New Yorker-approved message that politicians (meaning Trump) were “soft” on the coronavirus, as if it needed a good punch in the face. She's no longer telling her story, instead giving us a re-hash of the headline “science” that we've been getting from the media for months: “So releasing those interventions—the stay-at-home orders and extreme social-distancing measures we had in place—brought R0 above one.” Always stay-at-home, stay indoors; always distance, not duration or air volume or airflow. She did not have good information.
One wonders at the divigation. Her personal story is interesting, but now we are getting boilerplate anti-red-state messaging: “Georgia, for instance, reopened its economy—including businesses such as nail salons, gyms, and tattoo parlors—when daily new cases were averaging around seventy-five per million.” She could have told us that Georgia was fine, with no resurgence of infections after easing restrictions, but the New Yorker doesn’t report that sort of news.
She prefers France, Spain, and Italy, which opened their economies only after new per capita cases were lower than in Florida and other red states. But she doesn't mention that these European countries have far higher death rates than our red states and that their sharp upward curves inevitably meant correspondingly sharp downward curves. Then she criticizes Texas and Florida. Always the same few talking points, never any meaningful data. She tells us that Trump didn't wear a mask until July. Always the experts: “‘What we need,’ Crystal Watson, the contact-tracing expert, told me, ‘is a call to action at a national level and much more federal funding.’” The modern New Yorker has lost any ability to think or to research.
Back to her story: now she imagines she may have caught it on April 1st, from “a tall, burly, bearded man” who handed her takeout food in a bag. What? Although I learned from a relative that men are dangerous because they are extremely dirty and don’t follow rules, Kormann's theory is preposterous, both for its timeline and for its means of transmission. What does his height, build, or facial hair have to do with anything? Has the CDC or Fauci decided that burliness is a risk factor? (She admits in parenthesis that getting takeout food is rated as low-risk by the Texas Medical Association, but perhaps she doesn't trust Texas, with its burly men and its Republican governor.)
After this terrifying experience with the takeout food, she didn't leave the house for two weeks. But on April 10th and 11th, she was moving again. She took trash to the dump on the 10th, where everyone was wearing a mask. (She seems to think masks are foolproof barriers, citing a study about a cruise ship on which passengers tested positive but were largely asymptomatic—perhaps not noticing that the ship issued masks after the outbreak, which means they were not a factor in many or most of the cases.)
On April 11th, she went to a UPS store to mail a box. She used her sleeve to open the door—irrelevant to safety and possibly distracting her from actual risks. The experts and health officials cited by the press want us equally afraid of all things, but humans cannot focus on a long list of things equally. If we focus on the wrong things, we have less attention for real threats. If we sense, even unconsciously, that some precautions are meaningless, we may downgrade all of them.
Two women behind the counter were wearing masks. Kormannn wore a “kerchief.” Really? In one of the most infectious places on earth, during the week that would prove to be the peak of the pandemic, when the point of her article is how safely she behaved? Curious.
She says she “didn't touch anything,” reading her credit card number to the clerk rather than handing the card to her (again, an irrelevant distraction). An elderly man wore a mask, but his nose wasn’t covered. A woman came in without a mask but did not stay long. That was Kormann’s only mention of time—of duration—an important detail that would affect the dosage level if someone in the store was a carrier. How long she was there, we don't know. In a 4,200-word essay, in which she wonders about a two-week-old bag from a tall and hairy man, she doesn’t consider how long she was in the UPS store. I have waited 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe longer in UPS stores, FedEx locations, and post offices.
The next day she went for a run on the beach and petted a dog but didn’t see its owners or get near anyone else. She sums up her story by saying, “So let my story be a parable. Even if you wear a mask, wash your hands frequently, and social-distance, as you must, you might still contract this disease.” She doesn't even consider that these vague bumper-sticker prescriptions may be effectively useless for someone unable to observe her world and to think clearly. Proximity to headlines and the news has made her confused and helpless.
The temperature on Long Island on the days she went out, April 10th and 11th, ranged from either 38 to 56 or 37 to 54 depending on her zip code. The range is exactly what we would expect for runaway transmission rates, with or without masks, with or without “social distancing” (so vague as to be meaningless). Not only are the temperatures perfectly straddling 40, but the skies were flat and gray from the 8th to the 13th. The lows of the preceding seven days were between 44 and 42, never below 40. My guess is she went out on the wrong days and most likely caught the virus on the 11th at the UPS store, or perhaps had other interactions she doesn’t recall. The virus is nimble in these conditions.
Although the seven days preceding the 11th were above 40, the three days before that--March 31st through April 2nd--ranged between 36 and 57, with every day straddling 40. Whoever passed the virus to her would have contracted it on one of those days (or slightly after, as the capsid around the virus remains robust for a day or so after temperatures rise). Her final sentence is, “Be humble in the face of nature.” Yet her focus on government policy and good or bad behavior according to the arbitrary rules of our media experts made it very difficult for her to understand anything about the nature of this thing.
More on aerosols: