Yeah, we’re just killing people

There is a new blog post entitled, “Anarchism, speech, and democracy.”


Pandemic

When I looked this evening, New York City had exceeded 6,300 deaths from COVID-19,[1] well over double the toll from the 9/11 attacks. Nationally, the toll is now the highest of any country in the world. “The actual number of cases is likely higher, experts say, due to lack of widespread testing, false negatives and differences in reporting standards.”[2]

Meanwhile, my skepticism about the effectiveness of “stay at home” orders is increasing. As I’m out driving for Lyft (I haven’t worked for Uber in a while now), I’m seeing more people out, pretty much everywhere I go, among people of every race, in every neighborhood. Traffic, while still far below the usual Pittsburgh unbelievably horrible, is increasing. While some of these trips are surely necessary—I saw a line outside a Trader Joe’s stretched down the block—I think people really just can’t sustain this and we perhaps really ought to be considering how, if we can’t manage to stay in our relatively comfortable homes, we expect prisoners to remain incarcerated without some serious mental health effects for, in some cases, decades.

Eugene Scott, “4 reasons coronavirus is hitting black communities so hard,” Washington Post, April 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/10/4-reasons-coronavirus-is-hitting-black-communities-so-hard/

Jennifer Levitz, Mike Cherney, and Daniel Michaels, “U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Passes Italy, Becoming World’s Highest,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/health-officials-plead-for-public-to-observe-a-locked-down-easter-11586592822


  1. [1]Center for Systems Science and Engineering, “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases,” April 11, 2020, Johns Hopkins Universityhttps://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
  2. [2]Jennifer Levitz, Mike Cherney, and Daniel Michaels, “U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Passes Italy, Becoming World’s Highest,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/health-officials-plead-for-public-to-observe-a-locked-down-easter-11586592822

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