Resignation Review: Covid! Masks! Birdsong!
Your letters and thoughts about my letter and thoughts
Thank you for all the feedback last week about my resignation letter to the Democrats. I hear they had a party last night. Who won the Oscar?
I thought I’d respond to some of the critiques and suggestions you took the trouble to offer.
I was startled to see someone tweet the letter out, calling me a “former Democrat.” I guess I don’t see resigning from the party as no longer being a Democrat. Transgender is something you do, not something you are. Maybe, too, “Democrat” is about who you vote for, not your values, not your essence. There isn’t really a chance for those to overlap neatly (for me) in the current iteration of the party. Right now, in order to summon my voice, in order to finish the book I’ve been slogging through for over a year, I need to declare my independence. I need to feel no fealty to either side; that’s the only way I can do the story justice. That doesn’t mean I’m becoming a Republican or won’t vote for whoever is Not Trump.
Primaries
I had not considered one commenter’s caution that I could no longer vote in primaries in local elections, where, in theory, my vote counts. But the truth is, no one I’ve voted for in primaries in the last few years has made it through. I voted for mayoral and city council candidates based on policy, not identity, but the race or religion or sex of the candidates—the things we’re not supposed to discriminate based on—seem to be what mattered to voters. Some candidates ran almost entirely on identity. If I were to buy the line that only someone who shares my identity can understand or empathize with me, I’d have to elect someone who shares my background. But I don’t believe that. That’s the lie that has perpetuated a lot of—dare I use this overused word?—harm.
Covid
What did I mean when I said “Republicans were right about Covid”? For one thing, I don’t think their stances were rooted in science any more than ours were; I think they were accidentally right that we shouldn’t have closed schools; that there was merit to the lab leak theory; that we should not have mandated vaccines. The director of the CDC went around saying vaccines prevented people from getting and spreading Covid. That was not true! So many of us gave these vaccines to our kids when kids were the lowest risk group. I have seen no acknowledgement of just how bad, how authoritarian, how unscientific the Democrats’ decision-making has been. We cannot call ourselves the party of science anymore. Oh, wait, I’m not a we!
Masking
So many notes about masking. Some people sent studies “showing” that masks work. I looked at the methodology. Some of them were based on mannequins. Some where the control group was the same as the experimental group. Sure, yes, I’m willing to concede that if you have an N-95 mask fitted to your face that you do not remove for eating or chatting, it lowers the spread of disease. But when I walked into the Park Slope Food Co-op earlier this year, unaware that they had mandatory mask days, I saw people with Jesse James-style stick-em-up cotton bandanas over their noses, the bottoms willowing on their chins. Seeing a person with a loose slab of cotton over her mouth at a reading, which she removed, I just thought: Our side has not realized how misinformed we are.
We made toddlers wear masks, okay? Let’s admit we had it wrong.
Birdsong
You’re all completely correct. This is not a ten-dollar word. This is a seventy-five cent word. I just find it pretentious.
You can always send a “letter to the editor” (which would be me) if you want me to publish your response to something I’ve written. I would love to host opposing perspectives here.
Thank you all for your continued support—which includes criticisms!
It was imperative to investigate the theory, and not dismiss it as racist, which is what our side did. Some people are convinced it’s the absolute truth. You’re convinced it has no merit. I like considering the most likely scenario. But it wasn’t a single op-ed that med me to think it was likely—or even worth looking into. It was common sense. I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying we need an environment where we can find out if it’s true.
A couple thoughts from a health care worker about Covid:
1. I agree with you that Republicans were accidentally right about certain things. Like, for example, there is little doubt that school closures affected kids academically and social-emotionally. But, I do think that focusing just on those direct effects on kids misses the bigger picture.
For one, schools cannot exist without adults. Many of whom are, or live with someone who is, in a higher risk group. Even in blue states and areas that had longer closures, including my local district, there were multiple times where schools that had reopened had to return to online when over a third of the staff was out sick. And teachers and staff were retiring early or quitting in large numbers that worsened a teaching shortage that remains a problem today. Many cited health concerns in doing so. That is particularly true of older and more experienced staff who were at higher risk of severe disease; they also happen to be the most experienced and so losing them brought down the average experience levels among teachers overall. (Something similar happened in health care workers.) And then you have to consider the economic impact of long covid and other covid related disability. Many working age adults remain disabled now to the point they are surviving on disability or welfare. Not only do we have workforce shortages that could really use these workers, but obviously higher disability rates affect the economy negatively in other ways.
Then, there's the effects on the health care system of creating more patients. Remember the bed shortages? The morgue and funeral home overcrowding that required refrigerated trucks and tents to hold bodies? Most of the idea of vaccination, masking (I'll get to that next) and social distancing was the flatten the curve, not to completely prevent the disease from spreading. Just slow the spread so that hospitals could handle the sick, workplaces could handle absences, and so on. Things were BAD in hospitals and other health care settings. Staff didn't have enough ppe, manpower, supplies, etc for a couple years. Which was part of the exodus of experienced health care workers that was a major contributor to the ongoing severe staffing shortages in that sector. So, ever teacher or custodian who stayed out of the hospital helped reduce a bunch of domino effects. All of which affected kids and most of which continue to do so today in ways like longer waits for health care or household economic struggles.
And, some of the worst effects of school closures hit kids with special needs. Unfortunately, much of that group is ALSO the group of kids who were most likely to be in danger from covid. And despite the overall low risk to kids, those who were medically fragile did die and/or spend extended time in hospitals and/or suffer lasting health issues related to convid infections in numbers that were too high. So, the ones who really did need to be isolated were unfortunately also the ones who suffered most from it.
2. Now about masks. Yes, unquestionably, n95s are effective for covid and other airborne diseases if properly used. And you're correct that the research on other types of masks is far less conclusive and less impressive. But. At the start, the public was using less effective masks because there was a severe shortage of n95s such that hospitals didn't even have enough for their staff. (That issue likely contributed some to the spread of infections between patients as well, since ppe that was meant for single patient use had to be reused, sometimes for weeks.) That is also how kn95s became a thing.
Even if surgical or cloth masks did nothing to prevent covid (and my impression of the evidence is that they probably did modestly reduce spread), they absolutely prevent transmission of other diseases, such as flu. Which, again, reduces strain on the health care system, as well as reducing workplace absences. Which were worthy objectives in and of themselves at the time. And for your average adult, the risks and difficulties in wearing masks are very low, meaning it was probably worth it for even small benefits.
If you're still not convinced of the benefits of looser masks, I would ask you to consider whether you would want the OR team performing your next surgery to forego surgical masks during the surgery. Or whether, if you or a loved one was immune compromised, you would tell them to skip wearing a surgical mask in public because they don't really work. In both those situations, surgical masks have been the standard for years. Health care workers have worn them around patients who are sick other than those with a few very specific conditions (TB being the most notorious) for many years and continue to do so. Because the benefits outweigh the costs and risks. Surgical staff never wear n95s unless the patient is known to have TB or one of the handful of other illnesses spread in very small droplets. Even though most pathogens can travel around or even through the mask, they are proven to reduce surgical infections, and again, the risk and cost is so low compared to the benefits. So, while n95 for everyone would have been ideal, it wasn't possible until later in the pandemic, and surgical masks absolutely aren't useless in the big picture. And they cause almost no real hardship for the average adult or teen.