A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

The Desperate Desire for a Post-Illness Treatment

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One of the patterns I’ve noticed in the ongoing COVID-19 debates is a resistance to preventative measures and a desperate desire for post-illness treatments. (I have no professional background, but I think this would be a “therapeutic” — something that treats the disease in a remedial way.) You see this in the folks who don’t want to wear a mask or take a vaccine but would rather glom on to hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or whatever the snake oil of the day comes along. They much prefer a pound of cure to an ounce of prevention. The psychology behind this is interesting to me. I guess it has something to do with humans being generally poor at risk assessment. The masks and social distancing are inconvenient — they impose a cost that you can feel and see. The vaccine has a risk that you are choosing to submit to. Voluntarily submitting to risk, cost, and inconvenience is psychologically uncomfortable. These are probably limbic system reactions. Meanwhile, it’s up to the less visceral, rational part of your brain to understand that there exists in the world a risk of catching COVID and that the impact of having the disease is likely to be greater than the risks of the vaccine or the costs of the other mitigation strategies. That rational understanding of risk is even more attenuated when you’re talking about the idea that you might be a vector of COVID that harms other people.

And so the limbic system conjures up all kinds of reasons not to listen to the neocortex. Masks make you breathe poison. The vaccine isn’t FDA approved. Etc. But when it’s demonstrated that masks don’t cause you to breathe poison and the FDA does give full, final approval for the vaccine, you’ll see these folks shift their reasons. The limbic system doesn’t really care. It’ll come up with new reasons to ignore the neocortex. And these folks will continue to be vectors of COVID and incubators for further mutations.

The Rhetoric of “Personal Choice” in a Pandemic

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Needle

You don’t have to take a bullet for America. Just take a needle for your neighbor.

I’ve long slagged on libertarians for not having a good drainage plan. My attitude toward “personal choice” rhetoric in a pandemic is an offshoot of that. A neighbor’s bad decisions about drainage can hurt my property because water doesn’t respect property lines. Similarly, your bad decisions about spreading plague affect those whose air you breathe. There’s a tension between liberty and community.

Locally, we’ve got people talking about “family choice” and whether their kids should be required to wear masks at school. Presumably we’ll get the same kind of rhetoric about “choice” once the COVID vaccine is approved for kids. In these conversations, one of the disingenuous talking points they like to raise is “have your kid wear a mask.” They deeply want individual decisions about risk to impact only the individual making the decision. But, that’s not how things work in a community. Your mask isn’t to protect you from the community. You should wear a mask so that the community is protected from you (you filthy anti-vaxxed plague vector.) The vaccine does have more direct benefits in protecting you from the rest of the community. However, it also helps protect the community from you — you are less likely to pick up viruses and spread them and, importantly, you are less likely to be an incubator for mutation. Another disingenuous talking point is that none of us who are vaccinated should be concerned about their disease status if we “trust” the vaccine. Of course, the vaccine isn’t 100% effective, there are those too young to be vaccinated, and there are those who are immuno-compromised for whom the vaccine is not as effective and/or not recommended.

I’m not breaking any new ground with these thoughts. These counterarguments have been advanced ad nauseum. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers mostly ignore them or pretend not to understand them. I suppose it’s related to Upton Sinclair’s quip that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For the most part, (a few grifters and political strivers notwithstanding) there is no financial incentive to the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. I think there’s a lot of tribal identity at play. They certainly don’t see themselves as vectors of disease, harming their neighbors. They don’t see themselves as the asshole unvaccinated who will be the reason our community events have to be shut down. Rather they fancy themselves bold defenders of freedom. Independent thinkers who see more clearly than the rest of us sheep. But, at the end of the day, it’s tough to take seriously the big talk about how they’d take a bullet for their country when they won’t take a needle for their neighbors.

My buddy who is a doctor in southern Indiana and has been living with the harsh realities of treating COVID patients has, from time to time, been chastised about his severe language in relation to people who don’t take the pandemic seriously, who refuse to get vaccinated, and who stand in the way of public health measures to mitigate the spread of the disease. He appreciated my observation that William Lloyd Garrison had a relevant quote:

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

7th Circuit Makes Short Work of Anti-Vax Challenge to IU vaccination requirements

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The 7th Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Easterbrook, made short work of a challenge by anti-vaccination students challenging IU’s requirement that students get vaccinated. Specifically, the policy requires students to be vaccinated as a condition of attending the university unless they qualify for a religious or medical exemption. Six of the eight plaintiffs claimed to have some sort of religious reason for not getting vaccinated. The seventh qualified for the religious exemption but wasn’t claiming it. And the eighth wasn’t eligible for any of the exemptions. Those who claim exemptions have to wear masks and get tested twice a week.  The students were asking for injunctive relief (meaning that they wanted the courts to prohibit the university from enforcing the policy.) At the district court level, the judge issued a long (101 page) opinion denying their motion. On appeal, the 7th Circuit was more efficient (4 pages). (Seriously – go read the opinion, it’s one of the better crafted opinions I’ve seen.)

The legal bedrock for these kind of cases is the 1905 Supreme Court opinion in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. In that case, the Supreme Court affirmed the criminal conviction against a man who refused to get a compulsory smallpox vaccination. Citing Jacobson, the 7th Circuit in this case says there can’t be a Constitutional problem with requiring a COVID vaccination. There is no substantive due process right being violated because vaccination requirements, like other public-health measures, have been common in this nation for a long time. In fact, the 7th Circuit says, this case is easier than Jacobson.

First, Jacobson had no exception for adults. IU allows exemptions. Those who claim exemptions have to get tested twice a week and wear masks which, the 7th Circuit observes, are not Constitutionally problematic requirements. Second, where the Jacobson case involved everyone in the community, IU isn’t the only place to get an education. Students can go elsewhere if vaccines and testing are simply intolerable to them. The Court recognized that a University has the right to determine what’s necessary to keep students safe in a congregate setting. Vaccinations protect not just vaccinated persons but also those who come in contact with them. The Court also makes analogy to other rights which are not violated by a University imposing conditions of attendance. A student has a right to property, but it’s not a violation of that right for the University to require the student fork over $11,000 worth of that property as a condition of enrollment. A student has First Amendment rights to expression, but that right is not violated where a University requires students to read something they prefer not to read or write something they prefer not to read “even if the student deems the books heretical.” And, at this point, Judge Easterbrook just seems to be having fun. “A student told to analyze the role of nihilism in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed but who submits an essay about Iago’s motivations in Othello will flunk.”

If conditions of higher education may include surrendering property and following instructions about what to read and write, it is hard to see a greater problem with medical conditions that help all students remain safe when learning. A university will have trouble operating when each student fears that everyone else may be spreading disease.

 

 

On Masks, the General Assembly, and Hypocrisy

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Masks, the General Assembly, and hypocrisy: these things could be made to blend together to make a more cohesive point, but I think I’ll handle them a bit independently. I was put in mind of these things by a Leo Morris opinion piece I saw in “the Republic.” (It’s been awhile since I’ve run across Leo’s stuff. I used to read him all the time when his stuff was running in the News Sentinel.)

His view on hypocrisy (and Holden Caufield) tracks mine reasonably well. Caufield is an insufferable whiner. Hypocrisy is a pretty easy and lazy charge to level against someone. We often times land on hypocrisy as a critique because we have a tough time coming up with an objective measuring stick about what’s good and bad. It’s easier to dodge that work by taking, for the purposes of argument, whatever a person has decided is good or bad for others and applying that standard to the person. They’ll often come up short. Years ago, I wrote a piece about how sometimes hypocrisy was defended as “aspirational morality.” One problem with that is that the morality is rarely cast as aspirational — it’s usually cast as a standard that every decent person should already follow and used as a bludgeon against disfavored people. Still and all, hypocrisy is a charge so common and easily made that — even where very much true, stops being terribly interesting and, therefore, stops being very persuasive on matters of what is right and wrong or who is a good person or bad person.

Leo also talks about masks, the General Assembly, and Gov. Holcomb. I didn’t quite track his argument, if he was making one in particular, but I think that’s because he has mixed feelings. I gather that he doesn’t like the public emergency powers the General Assembly gave the Governor, seems to accept that masks are a necessary public health tool for this pandemic, doesn’t like the Governor’s mask mandate, but thinks the General Assembly should have to abide by it just like the rest of us. The background on that is that the General Assembly has rejected a proposal that it require its members to wear masks during session — they can control their own operations, regardless of the Governor’s mandate, when it comes to the State House and whether their members wear masks.

Now this part isn’t directed at Leo specifically, but for the life of me (potentially literally), I don’t get the mewling and chafing about the mask mandates. It’s as if the full text of Patrick Henry’s firey speech to the Virginia Convention was “Give me liberty, or give me death! Give me the ability to ignore stop lights and the discretion to shit on the floor in restaurants! But, most of all, preserve my unfettered right to exhale deadly viral material on my neighbors in public without putting a piece of cloth over my nose!”  I suppose it’s a fundamental disbelief in the power of the scientific method to tell us anything about how this infection is spread or what measures will reduce that spread coupled with a resentment of the types of people who would purport to be able to use science as a tool to understand these things or who would rely on the advice of scientists to inform public health policy. For my part, I’m not going to rely on the fact that these folks are hypocrites who rely on the benefits of scientific discovery to benefit other parts of their lives. Rather, I’m just going to come out and embrace the Enlightenment as a positive development in human history and appreciate the ability of the scientific method to tell us true things about the world in which we live. I disagree with people who reject those ideas.

The good news for the General Assembly is that their timing looks like it will be impeccable. COVID struck in earnest just after they adjourned in 2020. Since that time, they’ve been able to posture against the Governor’s actions for personal gain and without consequence. (Being powerless has its benefits. I’m reminded of a book quote to the effect that “only the powerless are truly innocent.” That doesn’t quite track with the current situation, but it’s in the neighborhood.) If the good news we’ve been hearing about a vaccine is more or less reliable, it could very well start providing us with a measure of safety before the General Assembly adjourns in 2021. Our health situation might very well improve despite whatever measures they put in place to hamstring the Governor’s ability to deal with public health emergencies. Like Holden Caufield going on about phonies, the members of the General Assembly can thunder about liberty while the adults go about the business of mitigating the loss of life in spite of them.

Executive Order 20-48: Color Coded County Assessments

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Gov. Holcomb has issued Executive Order 20-48 which rescinds the “Stage 5” COVID mitigation order and replaces it with the “Color Coded County Assessment” order. This relies on the State’s color code system where it averages two numbers for each county. The first number is the weekly number of new cases per 100,000 residents in a county. Blue is less than 10 cases per 100,000 residents. Yellow is between 10 and 99. Orange is between 100 and 199. And red is 200 and above. Blue gets you zero, yellow – 1, orange – 2, and red – 3.

The second number is the seven day positivity rate for a county. Positivity rate is number of positive cases divided by number of tests. This is important because a low positivity rate gives you more confidence that you’re identifying most or all of the cases in your community. Blue (0) is less than 5%. Yellow (1) is between 5% and 10%. Orange (2) is between 10% and 15%. And red (3) is above 15%.

You average these two numbers to get your county score/color. Blue for 0 and 0.5, yellow for 1 and 1.5, orange for 2 and 2.5, and red for 3. The executive order requires the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) to monitor these metrics as well as hospitalizations, available critical care beds & ventilators, and testing & contact tracing ability. The order also makes some recommendations to citizens: follow CDC guidelines, self-quarantine when sick or having been in contact with someone symptomatic, and be vigilant if you’re in a higher risk category or in contact with such people. Many of the old stage 5 requirements remain in place: Social distancing and masks are part of the order. Masks are not required in private businesses where maintaining distances of 6 feet is feasible.  Some exemptions are specifically authorized – among other things, where a medical condition that prevents wearing a face mask. (This is the one the anti-maskers are most likely to abuse by lying.) Masks aren’t required when seated at an establishment to eat or drink. Masks are required at schools for students grade 3 and above as well as all staff members. However, if 6 feet of space can be maintained, masks aren’t required. And, if 3 feet of space can be maintained and students are all facing the same direction, masks aren’t required during in-person instruction time.

The color coded approach will limit the size of social gatherings and events based on the county’s color. Larger social gatherings are permitted but the organizer has to submit a safety plan and have it approved by the local health department. In blue counties, social gatherings can have up to 250 people, yellow counties up to 100, orange counties up to 50, and red counties up to 25. In yellow counties, local officials and health officials are expected to meet regularly to talk about potential actions to decrease the spread of COVID. In orange counties, there is the same expectation. In addition, IHSAA sporting events are limited to 25% capacity. In red counties, local officials are also expected to talk and, in addition, to consider limiting hours of operation for bars and restaurants. There’s a lot of encouragement for red counties: the Governor encourages events to be cancelled, encourages businesses to limit employee congregation in public areas, and encourages restaurants and retail businesses to promote curbside pickup. Senior care center activities must be suspended or cancelled.

(I probably mock the “encouragement” more than I should. Yes, there’s a part of me that wants The Law to take forceful action to compel people to act in a way that won’t spread this deadly disease. But the reality is that the rule of law depends heavily on voluntary compliance. If you have to use force in a high percentage of cases to obtain compliance, your government is in trouble. If our leaders were speaking with one voice on the appropriate actions citizens should take, I think we’d be in better shape than if we have mixed messages even if some of those messages come with legal compulsion.)

The order does come with some enforcement provisions for business. Verbal order to business owner followed by written cease and desist order to business followed by the local department of health issuing an order to close the business. There don’t seem to be explicit enforcement provisions for situations not involving businesses but I presume, for example, the courts could issue injunctions in non-business situations. Also, disaster emergency law under which the Governor is issuing these orders has some general penalty provisions which might come into play even though they aren’t specifically articulated in the order.

 

Indiana State Department of Health Agency Report to the General Assembly

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I’ll be candid, I haven’t read this entire document, but it seemed worth sharing: 2020 ISDH Emergency Response Report (pdf). I found the link in the minutes to the October 14, 2020, interim committee on public health. I guess I would have expected that entire meeting to be devoted to COVID and making recommendations to the General Assembly on legislation to address the pandemic which is currently spiraling out of control. (But, the legislature isn’t exactly nimble – the agenda and the notice of the committee meeting were probably prepared a month before based on planning which happened before that. In August, the pandemic felt kind of stable.)

Anyway, what I found probably most interesting in the ISDH document (at p. 18) was a chart of suspended, waived, or modified rules and statutes. For example, a prohibition on automated dialing was suspended for the purpose of allowing the Fairbanks Study to call people to determine the extent of COVID spread. There are several pages of these modified rules, allowing more remote services, modifying timelines,  and relaxing rules to account for the fact that more resources are being thrown at COVID. The document also has a chart (p. 13) listing reduced or suspended health services (e.g. audiology assessment services were reduced or changed to virtual, routine food safety inspections were suspended, some immunization services were suspended, etc.).

As far as future recommendations, the report suggested to the General Assembly:

Related to ongoing response operations and other pre-COVID public health initiatives, IDOH recommends that Indiana consider a long-term solution for expanding some telehealth services on an ongoing basis. The temporary expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be invaluable in supporting healthcare delivery during the public health emergency when our healthcare system was facing challenges keeping patients and providers connected, especially for patients with chronic medical conditions or circumstances where a patient did not feel safe with a traditional face-to-face visit or in-home services. Delivery of services through telehealth expands access to care, streamlines efficiency and increases convenience for both patients and provider and is expected to be an improvement in service delivery going forward.

Which is fine, as far as it goes. What I wonder is whether the committee on public health or some other arm of the General Assembly is studying masking, social distancing, and other tools for limiting the spread and damage caused by the pandemic and — probably the important part — how best to obtain public buy-in and compliance with such requirements or recommendations.

 

General Assembly Declines To Do Bare Minimum To Slow COVID Spread

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I’m open to correct that the Indiana General Assembly is acting more responsibly than this brief AP story suggests, but it looks like they’re unwilling to do the bare minimum to slow the spread of COVID. Specifically, they’re unwilling to commit to a rule requiring that members of the General Assembly wear masks at the State House when they reconvene for organization day on Tuesday.  Just as a reminder: this is what our new COVID cases are doing.

This is probably an indicator that we won’t be getting a lot of scientifically sound public health legislation this session.

Edited to add: I occasionally browse the bioRxiv COVID pre-print server for biology. Just after I wrote this post, I came across this study entitled “Association of social distancing and masking with risk of COVID-19.” From the abstract:

We examined the association of community-level social distancing measures and individual masking with risk of predicted COVID-19 in a large prospective U.S. cohort study of 198,077 participants. Individuals living in communities with the greatest social distancing had a 31% lower risk of predicted COVID-19 compared with those living in communities with poor social distancing. Self-reported masking was associated with a 63% reduced risk of predicted COVID-19 even among individuals living in a community with poor social distancing.

This politically-motivated, performative anti-masking is hurting people.

Holcomb Revising State COVID Plan

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As COVID spirals out of control in Indiana and with re-election secured, Governor Holcomb is apparently revamping the COVID restriction system for Indiana. Instead of the five stage re-opening plan announced earlier this year, there will be a county-by-county set of restrictions based on whether the counties have a red, orange, yellow, or blue coding on the State’s dashboard. The color coding is based on the county’s number of weekly cases per capita and its positivity rate.  According to news reports, social events in orange counties will be 50 or fewer (unless there is a health department approved plan) and extracurricular school events will be limited to 25%.  Red counties will be limited to social events with 25 or fewer (unless there is a health department approved plan), senior care activities are suspended, and school events are limited to participants and parents. I haven’t seen the actual order from the Governor yet, so this is me paraphrasing the newspaper summary — omitting the “ought to” provisions and descriptions of things that are already permitted. (For example, “Local officials can consider limiting hours at bars, nightclubs and restaurants” — they can already do that.)

The mask mandate will remain in place. I don’t see it in the material I’ve linked above, but I thought I read something about the State making money available to communities that enforce the mask mandate. I’ll be interested to see what that’s about.

The number of new cases per day were holding relatively steady until about the beginning of October when things went screaming upward. Our death rates are up, our new cases are up, the hospitals are starting to feel the strain. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Gov. Holcomb would have felt more freedom to act sooner if the election had been earlier. The right wing of his party is howling that having to wear a mask is tyranny and the Democrats weren’t likely to give him much credit regardless of what he did. I would have liked to see more political courage from him. But the hell of it is that it shouldn’t require that much courage.  Rather than fighting him on this, Hoosiers should welcome guidance on how to get past a pandemic that’s cost 4,500 lives in our state alone.  Instead, a shocking number of Hoosiers can’t manage to keep a mask over their nose.

There’s encouraging news about a vaccine, but it’s far from a sure thing and it’s going to take awhile to roll out even if things go perfectly — which they won’t, because our federal government is an incompetent shit show at the moment. So, this winter is going to be tough.

Posting from my subterranean bunker

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Subterranean bunker sounded cooler than “basement storage room” which has become my new office. I don’t know that I have anything profound to offer that won’t be trite in the face of the magnitude of what we’re facing or redundant in the face of the fire hose of online content that comes at us all every day, but I felt like writing, so here you go.

Sorry Folks, Park's Closed

Sorry folks, park’s closed. Moose out front shoulda told you.

We’re in day 14 of the Governor’s “stay-at-home” order. He just extended it for another two weeks through April 20, 2020. I don’t particularly think that it will be lifted at that point. According to the current Institute for Health and Metrics projections for Indiana, our peak medical resource use is projected to be in 10 days, on April 17. They’re estimating that we can expect something like 97 deaths and need something like 4,441 beds and 865 ICU beds that day. (The good news is that they say we have 8,485 beds and 706 beds available.) They also say we’ll need something like 735 ventilators. I have no idea what our capacity is on that score. The latest stats released by the Indiana State Department of Health for April 6 show 5,507 positive; 28,764 tested; 173 deaths (as compared to the day before, that’s +563 positive; +2,573 tested; and +34 deaths).

While legal services are categorized as “essential,” my office is mostly shut down. I’m working from my basement, and my law partner is coming into the office but the doors are locked to the public. Our legal assistants come in to the office about a half day per week at staggered times and do what they can from home. The rest of the time, we’re basically paying them to stay home. Theoretically, paid to stay home sounds nice, but they clearly want to work. We have a good group of people at my office, but I don’t think this is uncommon. Despite the right-wing common wisdom, most people aren’t bums looking for a handout. A stronger social safety net isn’t going to turn us into a nation of mooches. There are presumably some jobs folks won’t do voluntarily unless destitution is the alternative, but the fact is that most people want to work and do something productive with their time. I had been pretty successful in not going anywhere for roughly 10 days. But on Sunday, I had to do some things in the office (when no one else was there) and on Monday, I had to go to a County Commissioners’ meeting. We’re getting better at the technology, but with the need to have several people involved with the meeting and the need to make the meeting accessible to the public in real-time, we haven’t quite figured out how to eliminate the in-person component entirely and there were several items on the agenda where I was the best person to do the talking. It was a big room with 10 people, and we all kept our distance pretty well. Then, I needed to go to our firm’s off-site file storage units to do a deep dive looking for some documents that are 20+ years old (and not available digitally). That’s a pretty large space that no one goes very often, so again I felt reasonably safe, but there’s a keypad to enter the larger facility, so that’s a potential vector.

As far as the family goes, we’re better situated than most for this particular storm. The kids have their own rooms, and we have a basement. My wife is a web designer, so her computer cast offs are pretty good technology for e-learning. Having space and a solid home network are luxuries not everyone had. Still, it’s worth taking a moment — as my wife did a few days ago — to recognize that our kids (privileged as they may be) have been pretty remarkable in terms of how uncomplaining they have been through this process. As Amy put it:

Can I just talk about my kids here for a minute? These kids are 14 & 16 years old. They are in high school. Their school year has been cut short. All the activities they love are canceled. Their band trip to Disney was canceled. Our summer vacation to Europe is canceled. They can’t even see their friends.
And they have not complained one time. They haven’t cried (wish I could say the same). They haven’t whined, asked to break the rules, or even griped about chores I’ve asked them to do. When e-learning started, they just went to work and did what they needed to do.
This sucks for them. I guarantee I would not have been so pleasant to be around had this happened to me at their age. I don’t know what I did to get such great kids but they are handling this with more grace than many adults. I’m lucky to have them. It makes being quarantined easy.
So, big shout out to my kids.
In terms of government response, it’s easy to bellyache about this or that shortcoming. And, on the federal level, a lot of it is definitely deserved. Add the two months of dithering and denial to the trash heap of Trump administration failings. The Guardian had a good article entitled “The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life.” It details how the U.S. and South Korea experienced their first confirmed case of COVID-19 on the same day. South Korea sprang into action. Trump denied that this would be a big deal and did more or less nothing. Consequently more Americans will die than needed to, more of us will stay home longer than had to be the case, and our economy will be scarred more deeply. (A study of the 1918 flu pandemic suggests that earlier, more aggressive public health interventions result in significant economic benefits. “The effects are economically sizable. Reacting 10 days earlier to the arrival of the pandemic in a given city increases manufacturing employment by around 5% in the post period.”)
But what I’d really like at this point is evidence that someone has a plan for the endgame here. It feels like an Underpants Gnome situation:
Phase 1: Social Distancing
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Return to Normal

What I’ve heard is all over the map and mostly from people with no kind of authority to implement whatever strategy we decide to pursue. Get the spread under control, deploy massive testing, and then track & quarantine infected people and their contacts? O.k., how are we ramping up the testing, how is it going to be deployed, what facilities and infrastructure are we going to put in place for the quarantined?

Or maybe it’s “stay in the bunker for 1.5 – 2 years until a vaccine is developed?” In that case, stay-at-home orders for two weeks at a time isn’t going to cut it. Neither is piecemeal employer-subsidized stay-at-home pay. We’ll need huge changes in the social safety net, educational systems, and tax infrastructure among probably lots of other things. If that’s the plan, we should probably be getting to work on the re-design. If we’re going to war with this thing for a couple of years (and, certainly in terms of lives cost, this will take a higher toll than most of our wars), we’re going to have to put ourselves on a war footing.

If there’s no plan for what we do after we “flatten the curve,” then that’s not ideal, but I guess I’d like that information as well.

That’s all I have for now. Hope you all are keeping safe and taking care of yourselves and your loved ones.