HOW MUCH IS A FACE MASK WORTH? TRY $3000.

 Every face mask worn consistently in public in the US is worth at least $3000 to society, a new study shows. Or, to put that differently, every American who chooses not to wear a mask is costing the rest of us at least that much.

Every face mask saves society $3000-$6000 / Every refusal to wear one costs society $3000-$6000

Photo Credit: Chad Davis

This eye-opening calculation comes to us from a team of medical, public health and economic experts at Yale University. You can find a preprint of their paper here.

The researchers cite several lines of evidence to arrive at their economic estimate:

--As of the date of their study, countries with pre-existing norms for mask-wearing by sick people experienced a 44 percent slower growth rate in Covid-19 cases and a 48 percent slower growth in the number of deaths than countries without such norms. These effects remained significant even when other possible factors were controlled for statistically.

Although the above statistics indicate that universal mask-wearing would reduce the rate of viral transmission by much more than 10 percent, the authors decided to use a 10 percent reduction as an extremely conservative estimate.

When they plugged that relatively minimal reduction into a widely used model for the progress of the pandemic along with commonly used estimates of the costs to society of premature or excess deaths, the result was a conservative estimate of $3000 to $6000 of benefit to society for every person who wears a mask consistently.

They add that this estimate is extra-conservative since it only looks at excess deaths and doesn't include the costs to society of hundreds of thousands or millions of sick people. ". . . our estimates . . . suggest that the effect of masks could be 5-6 times as large," they write.

The authors provide a separate analysis for the benefit of highly effective N95 masks for front-line health care providers, who, as we've learned, are at particularly high risk of contracting the SARS-NCoV-2 virus and passing it on. In addition, they are absolutely necessary to treat the sick and save lives. "Multiplying these factors together," they write, "the social value of each N95 mask for a healthcare worker could easily be more than a million dollars per mask."

The researchers conclude by pointing out that the availability of this simple, cheap and effective intervention is a rarity. "Outside of crises, policies do not exist where a few dollars of expenditure per person can produce thousands of dollars in benefit. We are in a rare moment when such benefits are achievable--this is an urgent crisis and action is necessary."

As we know, there is still no universal mask-wearing mandate from the federal government, nor is there likely to be one as long as Trump remains in office. However, according to a National Geographic assessment, 44 states have mandated mask-wearing under at least some conditions, and 74 percent of Americans polled say they "always" wear a mask when out. Unfortunately, many Republicans continue to receive the opposite message from the President and from conservative media. As a result, while 84 percent of self-identified Democrats say they always wear a mask, just 66 percent of Republicans say they do. 

The largest gap--a 22 percent difference--is between Democratic and Republican women, reporting 89 and 67 percent mask wearing respectively.

Once again, if every missing mask is costing the rest of us $3000 to $6000, not to mention needless illness and, tragically many lives lost, those differences in willingness to wear face masks in public are costly indeed.

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REA

FROM HATEFUL WORDS TO HATE CRIMES--NEW RESEARCH SHOWS A CLEAR LINK

As children most of us learned some version of the phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That old saw may help some of us shake off unkind words in some circumstances, but new research underlines just the opposite--hateful words on social media can lead to actual hate crimes.

Trump at CPAC, 2013

Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Writing in the Journal of the European Economic Association, co-authors Karsten Müller, at Princeton University, and Carlo Schwarz, at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, detail links between anti-immigrant and anti-refugee posts on Facebook and violent crimes against those targets, based on events in Germany between January, 2015 and February, 2017.

You can read the details behind their findings in the open-access paper, "Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime."

As presented in the paper, the authors found a significant, nearly linear correlation between the incidence of hate speech on Facebook and actual hate crimes. This was especially clear for municipalities with above average numbers of Facebook followers of Germany's leading anti-immigrant, anti-refugee political party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD. (For a striking graph, see page 17 of the paper). 

The authors write, ". . . we find that--during periods of high salience of refugees on right-wing social media--anti-refugee hate crimes increase . . . This correlation is especially pronounced for violent incidents such as assault."

Müller and Schwarz did something very clever in order to go beyond mere correlation and get closer to testing for a causal relationship between hate-filled content on social media and hate crimes. They took advantage of hundreds of local or regional internet outages that took place during the years of the study, outages which temporarily blocked a given area's exposure to hate speech on Facebook. 

It turned out that a local internet outage acted much like turning down a dimmer switch or letting up on the gas pedal of your car--the internet outages cut down the number of hate crimes in the affected areas. The cause-and-effect relationship was made even clearer by the fact that even during periods when anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment and hate crimes were surging throughout the country, those crimes did not increase in regions temporarily without internet access. "Quantitatively, a typical internet disruption fully mediates [breaks] the link between social media and hate crime," the researchers write.

They still caution that the "natural experiment" provided by localized internet outages wasn't quite enough to prove causation. Their interpretation is that the flow of hate speech through media such as Facebook encourages and enables hate crimes and makes them more likely, but is just one of many causes. ". . . we do not claim that social media itself causes crimes against refugees out of thin air. Rather, our argument is that social media can act as a propagating mechanism for hateful sentiments that likely have many fundamental sources." 

Similarly, one could say that stomping on the gas pedal doesn't cause your car to speed up, it just adds fuel to an already-running engine.

Interestingly, the researchers found that the enabling link between hate speech and violent assaults was particularly strong for attacks involving groups of perpetrators. We may have seen just such a link between President Trump's support of or refusal to condemn armed, right-wing and often violent groups and the 13 white nationalists now under indictment for plotting to kidnap and try Governor Whitmer of Michigan. It would be incredibly naive to believe that Trump's words don't encourage such violent groups to act, as testified to by their own comments.

So it looks as though hateful words can and do "propagate" or fuel actual attacks with "sticks and stones," or worse, especially when those words are amplified and echoed on social media and heard again and again by aggrieved individuals brought together by the same media.

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REA

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HOW IS THE US DOING VS COVID-19 COMPARED TO THE REST OF THE WORLD?

 Just a quick note as of Sunday, October 11, 2020.

Credit: geralt/pixabay

The US has 4.25% of the world's population.

To date we've suffered 21.17% of the total recorded cases of Covid-19. That's 7,958,612 documented cases in the US.

But we have a great medical system, so our death rate is much lower, right?

Sorry, but our death rate is almost identical, 20.03% of the total deaths. That's 219,343 Americans who have died from the coronavirus in the nine months since the first documented case, January 20, 2020. That represents an average of 828 covid-19 deaths per day, or almost 5800 per week.

For another comparison, so far documented cases for the whole world equal 4,833 cases per million people. In the US we've chalked up 24,005 cases per million. We've had just under 5 times as many cases per million.

The world as a whole has incurred 139 documented covid-19 deaths per million. The US 662. The US has suffered 4.76 times as many deaths per million.

You can draw your own conclusions as to how we're doing and who's responsible.

Here's my nominee:

THE CORONAVIRUS AS A REALITY CHECK

To paraphrase a quote usually attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool a virus.

                                                     The coronavirus--"It is what it is."

                        Credit: NIAID

As historian Yuval Noah Harari brilliantly explains in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, it's our uniquely human capacity to believe in shared fictions such as the value of money or the necessity for daily prayers that sets humans apart, allows millions of strangers to cooperate, but that also divides us into adversarial and sometimes murderous tribes. 

As symbol-using animals, we are able to convince ourselves of all kinds of ideas, from bible stories to trickle-down economics and act by the millions or hundreds of millions as if they were real, sometimes defending them with our lives (or all too frequently the lives of others). 

It's belief in a shared narrative that lets you go to an ATM anywhere in the world and retrieve a handful of paper for which a merchant will hand you actual food or clothing. But that same propensity to accept and believe in pervasive, communal myths also means you may not be able to share a Thanksgiving meal with friends or relatives on the other side of a political or ideological fence. 

We humans swim in a sea of memes, concepts, ideas and narratives, and we're usually as unaware of it as fish are of the ocean. 

In stark contrast, the coronavirus is completely immune to the web of narratives that we clever, cognitive, symbol-using humans weave within and around and ourselves. It has no ears so it doesn't hear that it will surely be defeated next week, month or year.  It has no eyes so it isn't deflected or deterred by what we see on our screens or read on the signs so proudly displayed at political rallies. It can't be seduced, bribed, bullied, browbeaten, bargained with or bought off. 

All the virus has is a genetic code that equips it to infect one person, multiply, turn that victim into a vector, sicken or kill, and spread. To the coronavirus we are not republicans or democrats, billionaires or beggars, sentient, sophisticated, symbol-using beings; we're just meat. That's the truth, and as Ghandi said, " . . . truth overrides all our plans."

As President Trump so succinctly pointed out, the coronavirus is what it is. Precisely because of that it has the potential to serve as a painful and costly yet vital teacher to us. It can be the "whack on the side of the head" that awakens us to reality, to the ground truth behind the crazy-making swarm of buzzwords, memes, slogans and contradictory narratives that befuddles us. 

I doubt that Trump, now personally suffering from the virus, will get the message. More than anyone else I know of, he seems to believe that he can impose his will on reality. He's spent his life mastering an armamentarium of manipulations that have worked to get him what he wants and where he wants to be.  My guess is that he has travelled too far down the ever-narrowing tunnel of narcissism to turn back. If he survives his bout with Covid-19, my guess is that he will brag about his superior genes and tell us how his resilience and toughness let him beat the virus.

However, that doesn't mean that the rest of us can't benefit from the raw reality that the virus makes us face. Beyond taking the by-now-well-known steps to protect ourselves and others from the virus, it can and should prod us to question our assumptions and preconceptions, to search for and be open to facts, to remember that there's an actual reality that we can strive to know and have to respect. 

It's worth noting that we have access to a highly developed methodology for doing that. It's called science. Scientists have spent centuries honing tools to track fact to its lair by stripping away as many as possible of the myths, wishes and cognitive biases we project onto it. They too spin their theories, but they constantly check them against reality. We need to listen to them, not just about the coronavirus, but about the increasingly urgent threats of climate destabilization and ecological collapse.

Rather than groping and wandering in a fog of myths and memes or choking on the smog of outright lies, let's use this implacable virus to spur us to at least start the hard climb to where we can breathe the cold but bracing air of truth.

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REA

UPON WHAT MEAT DOTH THIS OUR CEASAR FEED . . .

 "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed...?

The corrupting effect of power has been recognized for centuries:

Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" metaphorically (and perhaps presciently) posed the question in terms of a tyrant's diet; with Lord Acton's famous aphorism adding the further warning that "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

                                                                   Julius Ceasar

Credit: Vatican Museum

Rarely, if ever, in the American experience have the consequences of unbridled power in the hands of an ego-driven, would-be tyrant, been as readily apparent as in the unhinged actions of Donald Trump in Tuesday night's very un-Presidential debate.

While the President's tendency toward personally denigrating opponents, demeaning rivals, dismissing critics, denying inconvenient facts and demanding 'absolute loyalty' from traditionally independent agencies and individuals has been well known, and even celebrated by his loyal followers, his behavior in the so-called debate reached a new and threatening pitch in Cleveland. It was as though any limits observed by normal individuals do not and should not be applied to President Trump. Bullying both his opponent and the moderator, Chris Wallace, and refusing to respect even the most minimal rules of courtesy or timekeeping, Trump verbally 'invaded' Mr. Biden's space, finding a way to loom over the proceedings much as he physically loomed over Hillary Clinton in their 2016 debate.

                                                     Donald Trump--official portrait

Credit: Gage Skidmore

Nearly four years into his presidency, having again and again been enabled in his assaults on accepted democratic norms by his political protectors in Congress, and following his success in avoiding any consequences from either the Special Counsel's investigation or his impeachment, Mr. Trump has clearly concluded that he really can say or do whatever he wants.

A somewhat shocking rhetorical assertion by a flamboyant candidate about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing political support has by now become a terrifying reality in the position of the most powerful and dangerous individual in the country, and possibly the world. Refusing to repudiate white supremacists while signaling a right-wing militia group to 'stand down and stand by' activates his rhetoric in real life and death terms.

Coupled with his repeated and direct assaults on the integrity of the upcoming election, while refusing to agree in advance to a peaceful transition of power should he lose, he is further raising doubts and stoking fears about the reliability of the most fundamental processes of democratic governance. Protected by enablers like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and increasingly by enforcers such as Bill Barr, the President's sense of invulnerability, omniscience and entitlement has only magnified.

Trump's willingness to use any and every resource, foreign and domestic, to gain power has never been in question from birtherism to the dark arts of social media manipulation at home to the use of American foreign policy to seek-out 'dirt' on his opponents abroad.

As President, with the enormous resources of the federal government at his disposal, he has shown he will fight to remain in office, seemingly without concern about any potential cost to the country.

What was most nakedly displayed on Tuesday's debate stage was, to borrow Shakespeare's terms, Trump's 'diet'. It was as disturbing an exposure as most Americans have ever experienced to the very consequences a ruthless drive for power can bring. It was exactly what our founders, political philosophers (as well as psychiatrists) have warned against over the years.

Power does corrupt, and a stark vision of its workings was delivered to all of us, isolated in our homes, without commercials.

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Les Adler