{"id":20280,"date":"2020-07-27T15:48:40","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T20:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20280"},"modified":"2020-07-27T15:48:40","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T20:48:40","slug":"the-public-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2020\/07\/27\/the-public-health\/","title":{"rendered":"The Public Health"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

A thing I\u2019ve been musing about over the last few months, for some reason, has been the phrase public health<\/i>.\r\n

Here\u2019s the part that sticks for me: there isn\u2019t actually any such thing as the public health.\r\n

In much the same way, in fact, that Margaret Thatcher observed that there was no such thing as society. That is, it\u2019s perfectly true, and yet also utterly false. The public does not get sick or stay healthy; individuals do. But for something that doesn\u2019t exist, the public health sure has a massive effect on all those individuals.\r\n

For the last few months, and for the next few months, we need everybody to protect the public health, a thing which does not exist. It may not be enough for us to pretend<\/i> that there is such a thing as the public health. We may all need to believe<\/i> that there is such a thing as the public health. We need to wear masks to protect the public health. We need to close schools or open them based on public health outcomes. We need to stay out of shopping malls and dance clubs, barbershops and bookstores, because of the effect on the public health.\r\n

We should also take into account individual health, of course. Absolutely! If you are particularly vulnerable to a severe case, you need to protect yourself; if your mother is, you need to protect her. That\u2019s one layer of activity we need to do, one level of risk assessment we need to constantly take. That\u2019s terrifying and exhausting enough. I understand that. But in addition to\u2014maybe even before<\/i>\u2014assessing individual health, we have to protect the public health, which, as I say, doesn\u2019t even exist.\r\n

I am bothering writing this for my Tohu Bohu because of the story about national security advisor Robert O\u2019Brien<\/a> having contracted this disease on a family vacation. And I can\u2019t help thinking that for Mr. O\u2019Brien and his family, thinking of themselves as individuals, choosing to go on some sort of family vacation, involving some risk of contracting this disease, is not altogether unreasonable. After all, if one of them were to get ill (as did happen, of course) they would get the best of medical care. There was no chance that they would be the ones stuck in the hospital hallway. If there were a shortage of any particular treatment, they would still have access to it. The chances of any individual in that family dying are much less than the general population\u2014I have no idea how much less, but it\u2019s not out of reason to call it one in a thousand. Somewhat more likely is a long and serious illness, but if that were to happen, they would still have the best of care, and of course it wouldn\u2019t bankrupt them. Even if (the Divine forbid) their daughter were to have chronic problems for decades, it\u2019s very likely that those would be ameliorated by her access to superb medical care; she would likely still finish her college degree and have a long and fulfilling life and career, despite that terrible, unlikely outcome.\r\n

Did the O\u2019Briens make that sort of cold-blooded calculation? Of course, I have no idea. Maybe they did. Maybe they just relied on an internalized notion that they are generally protected from the consequences of bad decisions. Maybe they\u2019re just dumbfucks. I don\u2019t know.\r\n

What they clearly did not do was ask themselves whether going on a family vacation was fulfilling their responsibility to the public health. And I don\u2019t just mean Mr. O\u2019Brien\u2019s position as a public figure and thus a role model, or the putative danger to our national security should he be unable to carry out his duties. I don\u2019t even mean the exposure of waiters and housekeepers and other vacationers, and in his case his counterparts overseas on his scheduled trip, and eventually the doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists and pharmacists who will need to interact with them. I mean the increased risk\u2014slight, but accumulating\u2014to everybody in the public when a person takes that individual risk.\r\n

When I decide whether to go out for ice cream, or visit my mother-in-law, or replace a broken dishwasher, I need to do risk analysis\u2014I should say that\u2019s not purely a pandemic thing, but most stuff I generally do is sufficiently low-risk that it\u2019s normally pretty easy. I\u2019m not doing a lot of bungee jumping or hang-gliding or walking home alone at night, drunk off my ass. But during a pandemic I have to think about the public<\/i> health, not just my own. Because if we mostly focus on our own individual risks, people will continue to get sick, because all of the individual and individually reasonable risks to individuals will mean overwhelmed hospitals, rationed care, and temporary refrigerated corpse storage.\r\n

I don\u2019t know how to convince people to believe in the public health. I wish I did. I wish I knew how to convince people to believe in the public welfare\u2014in society. I see people trying, and failing, in various ways, and I want there to be some perfect meme to retweet or sign to put in my garden, or even phrase to use in conversation. There isn\u2019t one. But I will keep trying.\r\n

I do think it would help, at least a little, if public figures acted as if they believed in public health, too.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger doesn't mean staring at those graphs all day, even though, yeah, pretty much all day.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20280"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20283,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20280\/revisions\/20283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}