What is "social" about social distancing?

Roger Kimball writes in Spectator USA,

Not for the first time, I have been to led to wonder why a practice that is so patently antisocial should have been baptized ‘social distancing’. What’s social about it?

‘But a couple of weeks ago you said there would only be hundreds of deaths.’ Yes, I did. I got that wrong, but just how wrong is not clear. Dr. John Lee, writing in The Spectator, made the important point that there is ‘a big difference between COVID-19 causing death, and COVID-19 being found in someone who died of other causes’. Indeed. It is one thing to die from the effects of the coronavirus, quite another to die with the virus. If you are 87 and ailing and are infected, your chances are not good. But who’s to say whether you died from the virus or that congestive heart failure you’d been battling all these years?

...Let me be clear. The CCP virus is a nasty bug. People should exercise caution. They should wash their hands frequently, etc. If they are in one of the few hot spots — New York City above all — they should be especially careful. But remember, 2.8 million people die every year in the US. The seasonal flu hospitalizes hundreds of thousands every year and kills anywhere up to 80,000. Overall deaths this season are actually down because of the coronavirus: people are not out and about as much, so fewer have died. In one sense, then, it has been a lifesaver. The panic surrounding it, on the contrary, has been a lethal assault. It’s too soon to say what the fatality rate of our insane overreaction will be. It will be many months, maybe years, before the tally of lives blighted, as well as lives ended, can be toted up.

Read more here.

"And so we find ourselves, in our seclusion, forced to craft an art of living, to transform confinement into freedom. Our calamity is also an opportunity."

Pascal Bruckner writes in City Journal about the challenge we face.

Locked at home, we face a crisis of mundane absurdity—and a challenge to craft an art of living.

...And the contrast between nature at a time of exploding, blossoming colors and the drawn faces of passersby is stupefying.

...Paris, like Rome or Madrid, has become the set of a horror film, but your monster is your neighbor, and you are his.

...One might say that our time has created the sickness that reflects it. Just yesterday, we feared the stranger; now we dread the renter on our floor. We have gone from agoraphobia—the fear of open, borderless spaces without guard rails—to claustrophobia, the feeling of being incarcerated in one’s own home. Now the world is more present to itself than ever. For the first time, we are contemporaries of our contemporaries in real-time, in Iran or Argentina as in Korea. Globalization by pandemic has replaced globalization by trade.

...Let’s maintain some perspective: this is not the Black Plague, nor the Nazi occupation, and still less the situation of a hostage captured by terrorists. But it is our present challenge, and it is unprecedented. It is not up to us to conquer this illness, but at most just to slow its spread. Our part, instead, is to rise to the occasion, whatever happens. Every day is a discreet battle against doubt and discouragement. It is important in exceptional times not to let oneself go, but to carry on “as if”—to dress as if social life continued, to tidy up the house as if guests were expected, to decorate rooms, prepare delicious dinners—in a word, to carry on.

...We are not equal in the face of boredom. Some defeat it by perpetual distractions; others use it to dive into a fertile reverie—these are the aristocrats of the interior life. This aristocracy is in principle open to all, being independent of riches and of birth. It consists in a mental hygiene that orders us to find within ourselves the resources needed to survive. The perception of time has changed; it is no longer oriented toward a goal but toward our improbable deliverance. There is no longer any Sunday or Monday; each day is a single day that resembles all the others in a perpetual present. What threatens us, as much as illness, is the specter of dissolution, the tempest of languid hours. Each of us deploys a thousand ruses in order to escape monotony: some transform their living room into a gym, their driveway into a running track, and move their bed into the hallway just for a change. Others exchange poems, or songs. We even hear of couples making love on the balcony to defy propriety, while across the street, music lovers improvise arias. Ingenious competitions take place, thanks to the telephone or video-streaming. A thousand jokes circulate online, including some that, we must admit, reveal a touch of nonsensical genius. Historians will tell us later how populations developed a mental immunity against fear, or how they built for themselves an interior fortress in order to repress sadness and allow the entry only of beauty, talent, humor, the unusual, and testimonies of love and friendship. And so we find ourselves, in our seclusion, forced to craft an art of living, to transform confinement into freedom. Our calamity is also an opportunity.

Read more here.

Lockdown theater

Roger Kimball writes in part in the Epoch Times,

An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”

I agree, except for the “there’s some utility to it” bit. In my view, the TSA is 100 percent “airport security theater.” If we really wanted to be secure airline travel, we’d allow passengers to carry concealed weapons. A baddie pops up with a box cutter, pow, Mr. Smith in 11D puts his Beretta M9 to good use. No more baddie and the nice lady next to him gets to keep the box cutter as a souvenir.

How about lockdown theater? What good has it done? The main current of opinion favors the process if not necessarily the theater. In a particularly nauseating piece, even for The New York Times, our former paper of record notes today that the situation on the ground seems to be improving, but asserts that “The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country.”

Playing Epidemiologist
I know that many people think that is the case, but there are some dissenting voices. The biostatistician Knut Wittkowski is one, and I recommend this interview (https://archive.is/0jB0M) as a primer on his thoughts about the subject.

Wittkowski has been the object of much abuse by those acting in, or producing, the Lockdown Theater, but it is worth noting that more and more bits of data are emerging to support his main contentions: 1. that the medical problems caused by the CCP virus, often known as the novel coronavirus, are respiratory illnesses; 2. that like all respiratory epidemics, this one follows a predicable course; 3. that one should respond by protecting the “elderly and fragile”; but 4. that massive self-isolation impedes the development of herd immunity and makes a “second wave” more likely.

Read more here.