Behind The Provincetown Virus Explosion

[Lonnie]

Andrew Sullivan's new column at substack explains how it happened through his perspective.  He lives there.

Let It Rip

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Live With The Virus

Andrew Sullivan 20 hr ago

40

 

Brent Thomas, dressed as the historic figure Anne Hutchinson, leads a tour through Provincetown on July 24, 2021. Thomas said they limit their tour to 10 people and ask people to practice pandemic protocol. This group confirmed they had all been vaccinated. (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

 

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It started with a text.

Hey Sully — I started feeling cold symptoms a couple of days ago and didn’t think that much of it but then found out a house of SF guys we were out dancing Fri-Sat-Sun tested Covid-positive despite vaccination. Started with sore throat, cough, etc which is what I have. Most of another house too I know have similar symptoms (and perhaps half of town from last week at this point).

Anyway I went to the clinic this morning and I’m positive. Still have some smell and taste, feel just kinda cruddy But I don’t think a fever.

He asked me to be on call if he needed something. A day later, he wrote, “Felt cruddy last night — chills, a little sweats, but slept 10 - 11 hours and slightly better so far today.” Symptoms lasted about a week, and we texted until I bumped into him as we were both walking our dogs on the beach. He seemed fine.

Then I spotted an old friend near some distant tidal pools, began to walk toward him to say hi, and he waved me away for the same reason: he was sick. The next day, I spotted my next-door neighbor, wearing a neck gaiter alone on the beach, and I was about to tease him but saw the look in his eyes. Another one. Then three texts from health agencies in DC and Ptown telling me I may have been exposed. I’ve had no symptoms, so I haven’t gotten tested. But I’m a little bit happier I decided to get a Pfizer shot after my J&J. 

Is Provincetown our future? Count me skeptical. In Fourth of July week, the town was completely swamped this year, followed swiftly by Bear Week; lines for the bars lasted for blocks; the bars themselves were packed; the weather was dreadful, forcing most of the crowd to pack tightly inside. A tiny town built for a few thousand residents has to absorb up to 40,000 in peak season. One bar in particular — the home for a dance party with the inspired name of “Fag Bash” — resembles a kind of dank dungeon where sweat drips from the ceiling and mold reaches up the walls. It might have been designed for viral transmission. A big swathe of the crowd had also just come from a week of Pride partying in New York City and were likely not, shall we say, at their immunological best. It was a muggy, viral heaven in a classic post-plague burst of bacchanalia. I’m way too old for that kind of thing these days, and don’t like crowds, and so stayed away, finishing the audio version of my forthcoming essay collection. Good call, it turns out.

But would I have gone if I’d had the energy? You bet I would have. Maybe not into the crammed basements, but I had a blast at the open-air tea-dance the same week and since. And why not? I’m double-vaccinated. The chances of becoming sick enough to be hospitalized are extremely small; the chance of death, none at all. My friend who first texted me is super-fit (as are most of the young torsos who show up that week), but he’s also my age (weirdly enough, he’s the same friend I went to stay with when I first tested HIV-positive in 1993). He endured a nasty week of a fluish bug: the kind of thing that happens without any plague at all. Just part of the inherent risks of being human on a planet that does not belong exclusively to us.

And this seems to me to be the key question here: do we really want to get back to living? I do. So take the rational precautions — a solid vaccine — and go about your business as you always did. Yes, I’ll wear a mask indoors if I’m legally required or politely asked. But I don’t really see why anyone should. In a free society, once everyone has access to a vaccine that overwhelmingly prevents serious sickness and death, there is no reason to enforce lockdowns again, or mask mandates, or social distancing any longer. In fact, there’s every reason not to. 

We are at a stage in this pandemic when we are trying to persuade the hold-outs — disproportionately white Republicans/evangelicals and urban African-Americans — to get vaccinated. How do we best do this? Endless, condescending nagging won’t help. Coercion is not an option in a free country. Since the vaccinated appear to be able to transmit the virus as well, vaccine passports lose their power to remove all risk. Forcing all the responsible people to go back to constraining their everyday lives for the sake of the vaccine-averse is both unfair and actually weakens the incentive to get a vaccine, because it lowers the general risk of getting it in the broader society.

So the obviously correct public policy is to let mounting sickness and rising deaths concentrate the minds of the recalcitrant. Let reality persuade the delusional and deranged. It has a pretty solid record of doing just that.

The government cannot be held responsible for sickness and death it has already provided the means to avoid. People are responsible for their own lives. The government can do some things — like making vaccination mandatory for federal workers and contractors, and especially in the military as George Washington did in the Revolutionary War for smallpox. It could offer money — or entry into a lottery, as many states are doing. All good. But the most potent incentive for vaccination is, to be brutally frank, a sharp rise in mortality rates. The more people who know someone who has suffered and died the likelier they will see the logic of taking measures to avoid the same fate. In other words: if people recklessly refuse to face reality, call their bluff.

Sullivan's column continues here:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/let-it-rip-f9c