Tag Archives: pandemic

The Super Spreader Event That Too Few Are Discussing

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For good reason, there was a lot of national discussion about the 6,200 Trump supporters who gathered at an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Americans were understandably concerned that Trump’s selfish rally would be a “super spreader event” that would needlessly cause a spike in COVID 19 infections and role model reckless behavior. 

While all of that national discussion was taking place, South Dakota’s ultra-conservative Governor Kristi Noem looked at that Tulsa scene and effectively said “hold my beer, Mr. President.”

In the midwest, you don’t have to be reminded when the ten-day Sturgis Bike Rally begins.  Even in my community, which is 600 miles from the Black Hills of South Dakota, and even in the two weeks before and after the ten-day August Rally, motorcycles and trailers towing motorcycles are everywhere on our roads and highways.

The Sturgis Rally is massive. Last year, 490,000 people traveled from around the nation to the Black Hills.  That’s equivalent to about 80 Tulsa Trump Rallies. Oh and by the way, unlike the Tulsa event, the Sturgis Rally lasts for weeks, not hours. 

That’s a lot of cash for a remote, sparsely populated state like South Dakota. It’s also a lot COVID-19 exposure. Make a list of major COVID-19 exposure risks, and you’ve described the Sturgis Bike Rally: Inability to distance in small indoor spaces? Check. Unwillingness to distance due to libertarian “live free or die” attitudes? Check. Too few masks? Check. Obesity and related comorbidities? Check. Advanced age and related comorbidities? Check. Binge drinking and the associated increase in risk-taking? Check. No small amount of casual sex? Check. Lengthy exposures over multiple days? Check. A merger of exposure pools from around the nation, and lengthy cross-country travel in all directions. Check and check.

Granted, bikers at the Rally are outside a fair amount, riding and camping.  But indoor bars, restaurants, hotels, stores, and tourist attractions within a several hundred mile radius of Sturgis also are traditionally packed with strangers in close proximity with each other. When it’s loud in those indoor spaces, visitors are forced to shout at, and expectorate on, each other.   

If a super villain were to design a super-spreader event to try to harm their worst enemies, they perhaps couldn’t do much better than the Sturgis Rally.

Without a doubt, Governor Noem out-Trumped Trump by refusing to cancel the Sturgis Bike Rally this August 7-16.  From the beginning of the pandemic, Noem has supported basically no public health protections for her citizens.  She wants to show corporations that South Dakota is pro-business, tax visitors so she doesn’t have to tax her conservative base, and show her conservative fan base that she is “protecting freedom.” She apparently isn’t interested in protecting the citizens of her state, a state that is disproportionately elderly and therefore particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 deaths.

So, if you’re thinking about summer travel this year, my advice would be to take a lot of masks and sanitizer, and to take an extremely wide berth around Kristi Noem’s COVID-19 mushroom cloud in South Dakota.

Walz Must Bar Bars

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I like bars as much as the next guy.  Okay, maybe more so, depending on who the next guy is. But the most significant error Governor Tim Walz has made in his mostly wise mid-pandemic “reopening” plans was announcing that bars could return to serving customers indoors if they agreed to operate at 50% capacity to allow for adequate spacing.

Under pressure from Republican legislators and bar owners, Walz seemed to be making the decision in haste. He announced on June 6th that indoor bar reopening would begin on June 10. The announcement was made at a time when COVID-19 cases in Minnesota had only plateaued, not decreased.

While Walz has stressed allegiance to experts, national public health officials disagree with his bar opening timing. In April, the Trump Administration recommended that states only begin a gradual reopening process after they experience a “downward trajectory” of reported cases, or a falling share of positive tests.  At the time bars opened their indoor spaces, Minnesota had not met that criteria.

In fact, according to covidexitstrategy.com, Minnesota is still not meeting federal guidelines today, because the number of cases has been increasing for the past two weeks and ICU capacity is rated as “low.”

Contrary to popular belief, bars are not essential services, so this is not something we “just have to live with.”

Moreover, bars obviously pose a difficult social distancing challenge.  Many, particularly young adults, go to bars specifically to connect with friends and strangers, the precise thing we need to prevent during a pandemic.  Even those who arrive at the bar cautious and responsible get more open to a variety of different types of unsafe encounters as alcohol flows and inhibitions subsequently decrease. 

Bars are uniquely challenging. They work very hard to become social “hot spots,” which makes them especially susceptible to being pandemic hot spots.

So it’s no surprise that COVID19 spread at bars is swiftly emerging as a major public health problem in Minnesota, as the Star Tribune recently reported:

Outbreaks centered on four bars in Minneapolis and Mankato have contributed to a surge in COVID-19 cases in young adults, which state health officials warned could undermine months of planning and recent progress in managing the pandemic.

Roughly 100 people suffered COVID-19 infections related to crowding over the June 12-14 weekend at Rounders Sports Bar & Grill and the 507 in Mankato, while more than 30 cases have been identified among people who went to Cowboy Jack’s near Target Field and the Kollege Klub in Dinkytown between June 14 and June 21.

While growth of COVID-19 is inevitable until a vaccine is found for the novel corona­virus that causes it, preventable clusters could cause an escalation that could exhaust the state’s medical resources and leave vulnerable people at risk, said Kris Ehresmann, state infectious disease director.

“When you have 56 cases associated with one location from one weekend, that is not managing the rate of growth,” said Ehresmann, imploring businesses and individuals to take precautions “so that even as we open up, we are not putting ourselves in a position to overwhelm the system we worked so hard to strengthen.”

A young person familiar with the situation at Cowboy Jacks told me that the 50% capacity rules seemed to be followed, but customers eventually left their tables and bunched together tightly in one relatively small part of the bar. 

Well of course they did.  That scene is almost certainly playing out to varying extents in most of Minnesota’s bars.

I have a lot of sympathy for the bar owners. Most want to do whatever it takes to follow the rules so they can stay open. But forcing drunk people to stay 6 feet apart is not merely “difficult.”  Unless you use unacceptably heavy-handed enforcement tactics, it’s pretty much impossible.   Even for the most responsible owners with the best plans, getting patrons to stay at their tables after the booze has been flowing for hours is just not feasible.

That’s why the Governor needs to shut down bars until Minnesota truly is meeting federal guidelines on a sustainable basis. 

From a public health standpoint, these bars are creating a serious public health threat.  While young people are at relatively low-risk of dying, they’re at high risk of spreading COVID19, and most are in contact with networks of at-risk people. 

I wish there was another way, but I can’t think of one.  I understand this would be really hard on bars, so elected officials should find a way to keep them afloat during the pandemic.  

But legal mandates are the only way when individual choices significantly endanger innocent victims.  That’s why we have enacted legal mandates banning drunk driving, child abuse, driving at unsafe speeds, dumping toxins into water supplies, running red lights, smoking indoors, and many other things that individuals choose to do that inadvertently victimize innocent people.

This may be the least enthusiastic post I have ever written, but the public health logic of it is pretty undeniable.  There’s no getting around this fact:  In the midst of the worst pandemic in a century,  Minnesotans partying inside even half empty bars are significantly endangering innocent people, and there isn’t a way to manage around it. 

This won’t be fun for anyone. Taking hooch from people who’ve been quarantined for months will be like taking candy from babies–big, boisterous, beer-bellied babies. But if Governor Walz is truly prioritizing public health over public popularity, and following the public health science, he’ll admit his error and go back to limiting bars to outdoors only. 

Why Aren’t More Men Social Distancing?

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This isn’t intended to be gratuitous dude-bashing.  My Y chromosome is a pre-existing condition that fundamentally shapes me, and I’m pretty darn fond of myself.  While I sometimes half-heartedly try to avoid some forms of my innate Neanderthal-ness, it seems pretty baked into my DNA.  I scratch inappropriately. I groom only sporadically. I mansplain with the worst of them.

But this business about men not social distancing in the Covid-19 Era is embarrassingly stupid and/or arrogant, even for us.  An Altarum survey tells the tale: Nearly one-quarter (24%) of men say they are going to public spaces “a lot” or “far more than usual,” compared to only 10% of women.

Why? Confronted about going to a public place with Covid-19 cases increasing rapidly, I can predict the reaction of many of my male friends.  A smirk. A shrug of the shoulders. A devil may care twinkle of the eye.  “You can’t live your life afraid of everything,” they’ll say. “If it’s my time, it’s my time.” 

For those of you who don’t speak Dude-ish, allow me to translate what these guys are trying to convey to the world: “I’m a bad ass. I’m courageous.”

Obviously, in this context, this is complete and utter bullshit.  Yes, courage sometimes means going into dangerous situations, and public gatherings in the middle of a pandemic are dangerous.  But let’s be real, fellas. You’re going to the dangerous situations to get yourself a beer, laugh, a corporate brownie point, or a thrill, not to rescue someone. 

Going into these dangerous situations for those reasons isn’t rushing into the smoke. It’s more like what suicide bombers do to themselves and innocents.  

As has been widely reported, Covid-19 is often carried by people who are asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic, so none of us knows who has the lethal germ-bomb duct-taped to our chest.  Walking into public gatherings armed with that knowledge isn’t remotely courageous.  It’s either ignorant or deplorably self-centered.

So fellow dudes, you won’t catch me scolding you for your utterly defensible scratching decisions.  But could we get just this life-and-death decision right?

Walz’s Pandemic Leadership Showcases A Politically Courageous Side

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I’ve come to realize that I’ve been partially wrong about Governor Tim Walz.  Based on what I had seen pre-pandemic, I had him pegged as a politically cautious guy who inevitably gravitated towards a relatively modest “split-the-difference” caretaker agenda.  From a progressive’s standpoint, he seemed like a competent Governor, but far from a bold one.

Often Cautious

After all, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Walz had exhibited an abundance of caution that wasn’t comforting to progressives. For instance, Walz came into office proposing an exciting MinnesotaCare Buy-In Option for Minnesotans who can’t get health coverage from employers or the government. Progressives cheered.  But Walz didn’t seem to fight particularly visibly or hard for it. 

Likewise, Walz has expressed support for legalization of marijuana for adults. Again, progressives cheered. But Walz rarely uses anything close to the full measure of his powerful “bully pulpit” and political influence to move public opinion on that key social justice issue. 

In the 2019 session, Walz wanted to raise much more revenue to deliver improved services.  Instead, he ended up with lower overall revenue. He caved relatively quickly to Republican demands and walked away without one penny of the gas tax increase he sought, while giving Republicans an income tax cut and a 10% cut in the provider tax, which is needed to fund health care programs.

At a time when DFLers controlled the House and the Governor’s office, the GOP-controlled Senate somehow was given a”no new taxes” outcome that would make Tim Pawlenty proud, and Governor Walz declared victory.

Why has Walz been so cautious? My theory is that he is so infatuated with his “One Minnesota” sloganeering from his 2018 campaign that he has been afraid to challenge conservatives and moderates in rural areas of the state.

Bold On Pandemic Response

However, lately Walz has been under heavy fire from those rural Minnesotans about his wise decision to close bars and restaurants statewide.  Since most Minnesota counties still have few or no coronavirus cases, the bar and restaurant closures strike short-sighted rural Minnesotans as overkill, and Republican politicians are always all too happy to encourage rural victimhood and resentment. 

“While we understand the necessity of Governor Walz to lead in this time of crisis, that leadership should not be unilateral and unchecked,” (Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul) Gazelka said in a statement.

Gazelka’s statement came amid growing signs of GOP discontent with Walz’s previous ex­ec­u­tive ord­ers temporarily closing bars, res­tau­rants and oth­er busi­nes­ses. It also comes as the administration mulls new safety measures, including requiring Minnesotans to shelter in place.

Several lawmakers, all Republicans, have expressed concerns about the impact of Walz’s orders on small businesses in their towns in Greater Minnesota.

“The gov­er­nor’s ord­er puts these small busi­nes­ses in an im­pos­si­ble po­si­tion,” state Sen. Scott New­man, R-Hutch­in­son, said in a state­ment addressing the closings in the hospitality industry. “These small busi­nes­ses, and their many hour­ly wage earn­ers, will un­doubt­ed­ly suf­fer be­cause of this ord­er. I urge the gov­er­nor to re­con­sid­er the fi­nan­cial im­pact of his ord­er on small busi­ness own­ers that con­cur­rent­ly has the po­ten­tial to make them crimi­nals for sim­ply try­ing to earn a liv­ing.”­

To his credit, on pandemic response issues Walz has consistently put public health above politics.  He understood that ordering closures on a partial county-by-county basis would be unfair and ineffective.  After all, irresponsible citizens in counties were restaurants and bars were closed would simply travel across county borders to eat and drink out, which would create new pandemic hot-spots in previously uncontaminated Minnesota counties.

Thanks to Walz’s leadership, on March 24 Minnesota ranked in the top ten of states with the most aggressive policies for limiting the rapid spread of coronavirus.  A lot has changed since these rankings came out, but Walz seems very likely to issue a shelter-in-place order sometime this week, which should keep Minnesota relatively high in the rankings.

It would be tempting for Walz to view restaurant and bar closing through a short-term political lens, as the Governors in red states such as Wyoming, Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Missouri seem to be doing.   It would be easier to keep some or all of Minnesota’s bars and restaurants open, and let other states leaders do the heavy lifting when it comes to pandemic management. 

But Walz isn’t taking that politically expedient approach, and the economic and political fallout from all of this could potentially cost him his political career.

I certainly hope that doesn’t happen, but if it does, it’s a relatively small price to pay to prevent Minnesota hospital patients from suffering the kind of horrific meltdowns being seen in Italy, where physicians are reportedly forced to deny care to suffocating people over 60 because of lack of medical capacity. 

Trying to avoid scenes like that are well worth whatever political price Walz pays. Here’s hoping that the newly self-quarantined Governor stays healthy, and that a plurality of Minnesotans will eventually appreciate his impressive display of political courage at this crucial moment in Minnesota history.