As if anyone needed another example of the disconnect between reality and the fantasy of Critical Race Theory, the People’s Republic of California has made reopening contingent on a basic logical fallacy: correlation does not imply causation.
It has been clearly documented that certain communities – low-income, Black, Latino, Pacific Islander, and essential workers – have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in terms of higher rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths. These disparities create a public health imperative to address exposure in all communities, including especially those disproportionately impacted, as a measure to protect all communities.
The Blueprint for a Safer Economy relies on two measures – case rate[i] and test positivity[ii] – to determine when a county can move to a less restrictive tier with more sector openings and resultant increased interaction among residents. In order to avoid a surge of infections, the level of baseline infection in a community should be progressively lower as there is more movement and mixing.
The reason essential workers have suffered higher rates isn’t a mystery. They’re far more exposed to COVID than people hunkering down in their basement. The reason it disproportionately impacts low-income workers is that they’re the people doing the work that’s essential, if unskilled and low-income, of keeping the store shelves stocked. In other words, there are reasons.
And to the extent that black and Hispanic people work in low-income because of historic discrimination, that too provides a reason, albeit one that’s not as easily cured as handing out PPE and sanitizer.
But what about the generic fact that black and Hispanic people die disproportionately from COVID-19?
Most counties have significant differences in test positivity among more and less advantaged neighborhoods, with these differences often also overlapping with race and likelihood of employment as essential workers. Especially as counties move into less restrictive tiers with more movement, the importance of this differential prevalence of infection grows because mixing and opportunities for transmission increase. Therefore, it is imperative to reduce disease transmission in all communities to ensure California reopens its economy safely.
In order to advance to the next less restrictive tier, depending on its size, a county will need to meet an equity metric and/or demonstrate targeted investments to eliminate disparities in levels of transmission.
There are explanations offered for why COVID is more deadly to black people. Genetic predisposition. Comorbidity. What does California expect its “equity metric” to do about these problems? A virus doesn’t have the capacity to be racist, any more that it can engage in age discrimination, since the elderly are similarly susceptible to worse outcomes (not that California included age in its equity metric).
Is this another instance of the old joke?
World To End Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit
Disparate impact has morphed from presumptive evidence of racism into conclusive proof. There is no question that COVID has been deadlier to black Americans than white, but that doesn’t explain why or what, if anything, can be done about it. Will California simply refuse to allow business to open as long as this mystery goes unsolved, even though the state offers no answers and merely demands outcomes that may not be achievable no matter what?
If there were an answer, a solution that would save the lives of black people from COVID, then failure to employ it would be an outrage and, without a doubt, racist. And there are aspects of this disease that reflect racism, such as doctors and hospitals taking the complaints of black people less seriously than white, sending them home to die as if their lives were expendable.
But what about the jobs? Should employers refuse to hire black people to do the work of “essential workers” in favor of white people so that black people are less exposed? On the one hand, that would violate Title VII. On the other, that would deprive black people who need those jobs of the opportunity to feed their families. Is that the solution California hopes to achieve?
That COVID has disproportionately impacted black and Hispanic people is terrible, but it helps no one to mandate that California stay closed until marginalized people ride unicorns or starve.
Modern politics: Demand a result. If that doesn’t work, demand it louder. Keep building the volume and hysteria, but never, ever consider that the result may be unachievable. If that happens to be reality, then reality is unacceptable.
There was a time when at least some would point out that desired outcomes don’t happen because you stamp your feet and scream about it at the top of your lungs. Good times.
It opens with identitarian language, but the policy as written has nothing to do with race, and is a reasonable approach to take. What the policy does is mandate that a county can only move to the next-least-restrictive tier when the positivity rate of its least-healthy quartile (defined by a pre-covid metric) reaches some threshold. A naive approach would be to start with the average of the whole county, not the 1st quartile, but it is reasonable to choose the 1st quartile because it decreases the likelihood of small-geographic-region hotspots.
Reasonable people could spend lots of time arguing about the details (like why use a pre-covid health metric rather than simply using the current covid distribution), but all of the threshold are arbitrary anyway (i.e., it could be the 1st quintile rather than the 1st quartile if they wanted to reduce the hotspot likelihood even more), so while the numbers would shift some, the basic approach wouldn’t.
Proxies are called proxies for a reason. But here, they don’t hide the reason. They say it loud and clear.
Given the general incompetence of government on technical issues, I’ll take an all’s-well-that-ends-well stance here. The formula reduces the likelihood of local hotspots compared to the most obvious potential alternative formulas. Local hotspots are worse than a more uniform distribution with the same average because disease spread is exponential in the number or infections. I also try not to attribute worse motives than necessary to understand a result. This is just as plausibly explained by some competent people coming up with a reasonable approach, and then slapping some language on it that the politicians like.
One need not attribute motives when they spell them out for you. The flip side is you can’t manufacture your preferred delusional excuse when they told you exactly what thy their doing what they’re doing.
It’s going to be a veritable trail of next-least-restrictive tiers.
The world would be a better place if everyone understood functions well enough that we could make these formulas continuous rather than piecewise, but they don’t.
I wouldn’t worry too much California’s synapses are firing off all around the great hive mind as we speak.
The CA state motto is Eureka for a reason you know!
Sooner or latter someone in Sacramento is bound to stumble across your archive.
Speaking of which what is going on with that tree fort clothesline/soup can direct phone line between Newsom’s and Cumo’s office?
I can’t wait until California’s finest legal minds wrestle with eliminating the intersectional disparities in sickle cell, Tay-Sachs, and AIDS.
Less to this than meets the eye:
1) Counties don’t need to meet the “equity metric”, they can meet the “targeted investments” condition instead.
2) In introducing the “equity metric”, the Department makes it look like a condition on relative performance of poorer neighbourhoods, but when they get down to details, it turns out to be a condition on absolute performance.
3) More specifically, it’s a condition on test positivity rates. Counties can get test positivity rates down by doing more testing.
So no, it’s not an attempt to stop COVID from being racist — though maybe it’s meant to look like that; it’s a way of pushing counties to direct more testing-tracing-isolation effort to poor areas.
Why, when they tell you what it is, do people work so very hard to deny exactly what they say?
Why read the fine print? Why look past the large friendly letters? Strange question.
The fine print doesn’t make the large friendly letters disappear. The large friendly letters are there for a reason or they wouldn’t be there.
The CARES act means the government cares about me, and the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act means I can beat my wife again.
Do you believe your own large friendly letters? Do you believe that California will be closed until COVID stops being racist? Or, should people read your post to understand your point?
So you’re forcing us lawyers to figure out whether you’re an insufferable nutjob who sucks at analogies or someone with the impulse control somewhere along the spectrum of Trump and a 3-year-old? Was that really what you were trying to accomplish here?
I can only explain it to him. I can’t understand it for him.
That is not what C Streak and I are doing. There are many government policies that actually significantly favor some groups over others. We are pointing out that this is not one of them. The government is a lot of people, and I’m sure some of them really want policies that significantly favor some groups, and others don’t. The sausage-making process here resulted in some identitarian language attached to a policy that is a reasonable approach to covid management.
You’ve already said that. Do you think repeating yourself makes you more persuasive?