PLAGUE JOURNAL July 2020: Maintaining a Safe Distance from our News Feeds by Camping
Folk wisdom at eight thousand feet, social connection, distance from the dogma.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Colorado Outdoors
It seems clear, at least in part, why counties that leaned blue in 2016 have higher COVID fatality rates than counties that leaned red. We will never know by actual vote, but the patterns across counties are clear, and the differences are sizable and cannot be explained by population density, which correlates only modestly with COVID fatalities. The Democratic voters (mostly Trump haters) trade precaution for a chaos of safety-ism, outrage, and alarm. They believe the headlines.
For four nights around July 4th, 2020, I camped and rode my mountain bike with a small group of friends above Steamboat, Colorado, a beautiful mountain town. We’d never seen crowds like this, and ended up sharing a large open campsite with a group of young locals who were also there to bike. I chatted with one of them, who stood twenty feet away—not because we thought such distance was necessary but because distance occurs naturally outdoors (one of the many safety features of the outdoors). I asked him what he understood to be the main risks of catching the virus. He said not getting enough vitamin D.
I had surveyed many people and never heard this answer. It was an unthinkable answer for people who believed their Apple news feed or watched CNN. Yet it was clearly a better answer than the mainstream message about staying indoors, maintaining six feet of distance, avoiding doorknobs, and scrubbing oneself constantly with chemicals. On our mountainside, we were free of the safety recipe. No one wore masks at the campsite or on the trail. Maintaining distance while camping was both less important and more likely. We barely washed our hands or anything else for five days, as there was no running water at the campsite.
I asked the camper where he’d heard about vitamin D as protection against the coronavirus and he said, almost sheepishly, that he listens to a lot of podcasts. Given his age (late twenties) and aspect (dude, long hair, mountain sports), I knew he meant Joe Rogan. Rogan himself may be a Democrat or an independent or a libertarian, I don’t know. Certainly he isn’t a Trump supporter. The camper got his information from Rogan’s wide-ranging three-hour discussions with non-doctrinaire thinkers and entertainers from across a wide range of disciplines and political attitudes. I knew that among Rogan’s guests were scientists and epidemiologists and people interested in health from a range of backgrounds. I can be confident that neither Vin Gupta of MSNBC nor Donald G. McNeil, Jr. of the New York Times were among them.
Rogan’s shows last three hours, so his devoted fans have little time left for MSNBC or the Times. The less mainstream news we absorb, the more we can find good information, from podcasts, YouTube, or direct observation and experience (although YouTube, owned by Google, is increasingly censoring honest discussion). Clearly, we were protecting ourselves by spending our time outdoors. Yet many governors and mayors have kept beaches and parks closed throughout, driving people indoors in search of cooling and diversion, into stale air-conditioned sunless environments. Many among my own family and friends believed the news and stayed inside, afraid that nature would do them in.
Blue/Red Disparities & Bad Information
The May [2020] stories about fatalities in Trump counties and Clinton counties showed stark disparities. The New York Times, which had been telling us all along that Republicans kill people, ran a story called, “The Coronavirus Is Deadliest Where Democrats Live.” Blue counties had 39 deaths per 100,000 while red counties had 13. Thirty-six states had higher death rates in blue counties than in red ones. In Kansas, the death rate was seven times higher in the two blue counties than in the rest of the state. Even the exceptions seemed to have explanations: the Washington Post reported that some of the higher death rates in red counties in Delaware, Nebraska, and South Dakota can be explained by deadly outbreaks in meatpacking plants (artificially cooled and dried environments), which skewed results (although whether plant workers generally lean left or right in these states, I don’t know).
Many of the stories, including the one in the Post, implied that people in red counties were less worried about the virus because they saw fewer devastating effects. I believe it went the other way, that people in red counties were less fearful because they had a better sense of how the virus spreads. People who watched the news, where every story was driven by outrage at Trump, had bad information. People who sought out more thoughtful sources or trusted their eyes had a better understanding of the risks and the precautions they should take. People who avoided the news could see more clearly that they were safest and healthiest outdoors and in the sun.
I’ve heard many stories from people who said they were extremely careful, followed every rule, and caught it anyway. Of course, people are inclined to overstate their degree of caution—especially since avoidance had become associated with virtue—yet many seem genuinely baffled. But they were following bad rules, listening to Don Lemon and Donald McNeil, learning about masks, aerosols, asymptomatic spreading, infected pets, hand-washing, sanitizers, and the rest of the fear canon. People who turned off the garbage and went for a walk could see other healthy people out walking, and understood that a disease that spread in stale air and attacked weak immune systems would not hurt them outside exercising in the sun.
Nonsense. Most people now about vitamin D and it’s effect on the immune system. I spent the shutdowns walking and hiking in my very blue state, which was hard hit at first. Once the virus spread, the unprepared red states were devastated while their “leaders” gave them misleading information and a false sense of security.