Reopening statement

Here’s how I see the reopening question:

There are three numbers in play here.

• X = the number of people are going to die regardless of what we do.
• Y = the number of people are going to die because of what we do.
• Z = the number of people are going to die if we don’t do what we are doing.

Z was supposed to be phenomenally high, even if we did what we did. It’s not anywhere near what it was supposed to be. Even in places where it’s incredibly bad, like New York. And if everywhere was affected the way New York is, we would have 250K deaths by now. But in most places like Oregon, it’s actually way, way off. 60K is still a horrible death toll, but it’s not out of line for seasonal respiratory ailments annually, and it’s skewed tremendously by the geographic distribution of deaths and cases. Half of those are coming from 5 or 6 places.

Anybody’s guess about Y is probably way off. How many people die every year because of poverty? How many more suicides are there when the unemployment rate goes up? How many more victims of domestic violence will there be because we locked them up with their abusers? How many people will lose their homes? How many jobs won’t be waiting for them even when things open up again? I’m sorry, there just AREN’T easy answers to these, but they are considerations. It’s not necessarily any comfort to those affected by these to say that we are protecting people from the virus. If I’m dead, it really doesn’t matter whether it was COVID-19 or the impact of my body on the pavement when I jumped off a building, to me or to people who care about me.

Nobody should even pretend to know what X is, but it’s somewhere between zero and what Z actually turned out to be. Despite what you hear, despite what politicians say, we don’t KNOW how effective the measures are. That’s not to say we shouldn’t have done them, or that we shouldn’t continue them, but from a scientific perspective, it’s actually very hard to “know” things with certainty. cf. Richard Feynman for a good discussion on this,.

Finding the perfect sweet spot with all of this in play is impossible, and it’s easy (and typical of politicians) to second-guess, but the extreme measures we took were all based on and justified by the original estimates of Z. It’s fair to say that, now that we’ve seen that Z isn’t anywhere near that high, we probably should re-evaluate those measures. We can’t pretend that the measures have no cost.

Here in Oregon, should we start to re-open the state? I don’t know. If I were in charge, I think I’d be looking at reopening places like Prineville or Baker City well before I did so for Portland or Eugene. Some things I’d never do; I doubt very much that I’ll ever ride the Max again, at least without disposable gloves and a mask.