“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Finally, at long last, normalcy is returning. For weeks now, Bucks County establishments have seen more faces and less masks each day. Vaccinations are readily available for any adult who wants them, meaning that there is nobody left in the community who is involuntarily unprotected. When you go out in the community, you can feel the difference. People are simply moving on with life.
Just last week, normalcy had three huge days in a row. Central Bucks voted to make masks optional for students on Wednesday, followed by Council Rock forcefully doing the same for students and staff on Thursday, followed by Pennridge folding to student-led pressure on Friday. As of tomorrow morning, almost half of Bucks County public school students have the option to attend school without a mask.
Yet against that backdrop, there remains a very bizarre element of adults who somehow find a way to disagree with this normalization process. From what I can tell, they appear to be distraught at the idea of COVID mitigation efforts coming to an end. They look and act like people who are losing their identity.
The primary argument they make for continued mitigation efforts is that “it isn’t safe yet“. Well, yesterday Buck County (with a population of over 600,000) had 13 new cases. If a daily case rate of 0.002% is not safe enough, what is?
In particular, the belief that unmasking students is somehow a big risk is so out of touch that it requires a frame of reference for just how bizarre it really is. Let me try to provide you with such a frame of reference.
What Is the Actual Risk to Kids?
According to Statista, 300 children between the ages of 0-17 have died with COVID-19 in the United States [source]. There are 73 million 0-17 year olds in the United States, which means the COVID-19 death rate in this population is 0.41 per 100,000. Let’s see how that stacks up against other causes of death.
So the COVID-19 pediatric death rate of 0.41 per 100,000 is lower than drowning, burning, poisoning, suffocating, and transportation. In fact, pediatric death due to transportation (motor-vehicle related accidents) is 24 times more likely than COVID-19. Are there any adults in Bucks County who have stopped driving their kids places? Maybe make them walk? Even in that case, the pediatric risk of pedestrian death is still over twice that of COVID [same source, page 20].
At the end of the day, risk assessment is highly individualized. An individual’s background and experiences greatly influence their perception of risk. I think it’s hard to blame adults in the community for over-estimating the current risk of COVID, given that COVID hysteria has been their way of life for over a year now. But I’d still like to know how they level with the fact that the pediatric death rate from COVID is lower than all of these other things.
Does My Risk Assessment Make Sense?
The current opposition to normalization revolves around the fact that three school districts — Central Bucks, Council Rock, and Pennridge — have made masks optional for the remainder of the school year. This particular issue highlights how irrational the fear of normalization is. Let me show you why.
According to this chart from the CDC, the risk of death with COVID is highly age-dependent. In the bottom row, you can see that the rate ratio of death increases dramatically with increasing age. Using 5-17 year olds as a reference group, 85+ year olds are 8,700 times more likely to die with COVID.
Yet, because of current CDC recommendations, vaccinated 85+ year olds are free to move about the cabin. They can go out and about without a mask. They are welcome into areas where unvaccinated people aren’t. They have the rubber stamp of “safety”, as opposed to the unvaccinated pediatric population, who still must mask up and stay safe.
But here’s the crazy thing: an unvaccinated child is still wildly less at risk than a vaccinated adult. Even if the vaccine is 95% efficacious, that still leaves the 85+ age group at a 435 times greater risk of death (8,700 * 0.05). Consider a young parent in their 30’s (like me). If I got the vaccine, I would still have more than twice the risk of death that my unvaccinated children have. But I would be free to go wherever I want without a mask; they would not.
In what world does that make any sense? We are sending kids to school in masks because “we can’t yet vaccinate them” and “it’s not yet safe“, while vaccinated Grandma, who is still orders of magnitude more at risk, is free to show her pretty face anywhere she wants to. It’s madness.
My opinion is that this bizarre opposition to normalization isn’t really about the current epidemiological situation or about “safety”; it’s about loss of personal control & autonomy. These poor people have been made to believe that COVID is some type of existential threat, and they’ve had that belief reinforced by non-stop mainstream messaging. It takes a free-thinker to look at a situation for what it is and be able to disagree with the hive mind. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me that there are wayyyyy less free-thinkers than I thought there were, and much more hive mind. So I’ll dispense with demonizing these people, and instead just wait for them to get over their irrational fear of normalization. I guess it’s no skin off my back.
Before I sign off, I have a burning question for those who fear normalization. Since a lot of the opposition to normalization manifests as disagreement with Bucks County Health Department Director Dr. David Damsker, I have to know: what exactly do you think Dr. Damsker has done wrong? Bucks County’s COVID metrics are indistinguishable from neighboring counties, yet our businesses and schools have been open far more than Montgomery and Philadelphia. What, exactly, are you mad about? I would love to hear one metric or measurable where you think Dr. Damsker has failed.
If you feel like you have a decent answer to that, please let me know at info@reopenbucks.com
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.“
Charles Mackay
