Enforcement And Anomie-- Trump vs Law And Order

"I’m strongly in favor of mandating things. If you do that, I think it’ll be a giant step towards interfering with the spread in the community."
- Dr. Anthony Fauci

How far can society go from protecting itself from existentially dangers posed by idiots within-- and when I say "idiots" I mean this described by Umair Haque in his interpretation of the etymology of the word from the ancient Greek meaning. To the Greeks an idiot was a contemptible, anti-social person, only interested in private gain, with no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. Like the anti-maskers, who are putting the rest of us in grave mortal risk by refusing to cover their noses and mouths.

Still, I don't believe law enforcement agents should be allowed to go up to someone not wearing a mask and shoot him in the head without a trial. Early in the pandemic I was on line outside a grocery store in Los Angeles. Everyone was masked and socially distanced. A little guy making a lot of noise and without a mask pushed himself up against a big guy on the line. A few words were exchanged and the big guy decked him. I don't condone violence but I admit I felt some satisfaction to see the noisy little maskless fellow dragging himself across the parking lot.

But should it be up to customers and shop owners to enforce government mandates? In mid-May Neil MacFarquhar brought it up in a New York Times column, Who’s Enforcing Mask Rules? Often Retail Workers, and They’re Getting Hurt. Trumpists everywhere, including in California, where you don't see many of them, say they are standing up for their rights by not wearing masks. I've been complaining for months that Gavin Newsom's mandates don't come with endorsement, so do not protect us and are bullshit mandates. MacFarquhar wrote that "many retail workers have reluctantly turned into de facto enforcers of public health guidelines, confronting customers who refuse to wear masks or to maintain a wide distance from others. The risk of a violent reaction now hangs over jobs already fraught with health perils. A Target employee in Van Nuys, Calif., ended up with a broken left arm after helping to remove two customers who refused to wear masks... In San Antonio, a man who was told he could not board a public bus without a mask shot a passenger, the police said."

Hardball by Nancy Ohanian

Masks, he wrote "turned into a flash point in the country’s culture wars, with some defending their right to not wear one. The Trumpists whine about their individual rights-- the idiot argument, over which they get all indignant and even revolutionary over.

Public health experts said this argument was misguided.

“I never had a right to do something that could injure the health of my neighbors,” said Wendy E. Parmet, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University.

Mask opponents generally overlook the fact that such regulations are meant to protect other people, not the person wearing the mask, she added.

Americans are navigating a patchwork of conflicting national and local guidance on masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, initially downplayed the efficacy of masks but now recommends them.

And they have become a ready symbol for those dubious about giving government officials wide powers for an extended period.

Retailers find the confrontations over masks a minefield.

“It is a very hot button issue,” said Kenya Friend-Daniel, a spokeswoman for Trader Joe’s. The company declined to allow Jesse, the employee involved in the confrontation, to be interviewed.

“We do not want to put our crew members in the position to have to enforce something like that,” she said, noting that customers “overwhelmingly” wear masks.

In all its 505 stores, Trader Joe’s has put up signs recommending that customers wear masks, not least to protect its employees, Ms. Friend-Daniel said.

Refusing is not grounds alone for being ejected from a store, she said, even where wearing masks in public is the law, but creating a disturbance that bothers other customers is.

Target, in places where masks are the law, has stationed security employees outside its stores to remind customers to wear them, said Jake Anderson, a spokesman.

Stores are not the only businesses involved. Uber announced that starting Monday, drivers and riders must wear masks, and those who refuse can be kicked off the platform.

Smaller retailers feel especially vulnerable to balancing the need for safety and the need to revive their bottom line.

...In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made masks mandatory in late April and allowed stores to bar customers who refused. But she did not criminalize such refusals, so police have only intervened when confrontations turned violent.

In Illinois, Rob Karr, the president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, compiled a list of episodes that took place in the first 48 hours after masks became mandatory on May 1.

One customer threatened to get a gun from his car to shoot the worker insisting that he wear a mask. Several employees were hit, while others were verbally abused. Sometimes customers fought each other. The list has only grown longer.

Some police departments refused to respond when stores asked for help, Mr. Karr said, while various retailers were fined $750 for not enforcing the ban.

In Warwick, R.I., a police union initially announced on its Facebook page that it would not enforce Gov. Gina Raimondo’s mandatory mask order, calling it “overreaching” and bound to destroy the bridge of trust built with the community. The police chief then issued a statement saying the department would act.

Lawrence O. Gostin, the Georgetown University professor who wrote the draft public health law adopted by many states, suggested that in the absence of national guidelines, retailers should develop one policy for all their stores and stick with it, whether it has the backing of state law or not-- that way the rules would be clear for all customers.

Some experts also suggested it was overkill to involve police in the general enforcement of public health measures.

The issue should be treated like wearing seatbelts or not smoking in public, which eventually became habits, Ms. Parmet suggested, but such consensus must develop much more quickly given the danger from Covid-19.

Monday morning one of the kings of idiots, Rush Limbaugh was quoting fake statistics on death rates and ripping the media for failing to talk about the "survivability rate" of coronavirus, arguing it was time to allow the "young and the healthy" to "live their lives and spread herd immunity. You need to not go along with this idea of shutting down the entire economy again, shutting down entire states," Limbaugh said. "What they’re not telling you is the death rate is falling. But you don’t know that, because they’re simply reporting this massive increase in cases and you’re supposed to assume every case equals a death... They’re not reporting the survivability rate. The answer, here: Don’t mandate closures. Don’t mandate social distancing. Don’t even mandate mask-wearing. Encourage people who are old or who have a compromised immune system to stay quarantined. Stay hidden away. Do not go out. But let the young and the healthy go out and live their lives … and spread herd immunity, because that’s ultimately-- until we get therapeutics or vaccine, that’s going to be the answer to this." He's distorting the facts and lying and should be deprived of his broadcast license for endangering the public health.

On Monday, reports of new cases from the states showed Texas taking the one-day lead from Florida-- 9,054 new cases, bringing the state total to 210,006 (7,243 cases per Texan-- worse than any country in Europe. Sweden is closest with 7,234, practicing an unspoken herd-immunity agenda like the one suggested by Limbaugh.) Because of the "Limbaugh option," a growing number of hospitals in Texas, Arizona, South Carolina and Florida are at, near and beyond capacity.

Officials in Texas also reported hospitals are in danger of being overwhelmed. Hospitalizations statewide surged past 8,000 for the first time over the weekend, a more than fourfold increase in the past month. Houston officials said intensive care units there have exceeded capacity.

Along the border with Mexico, two severely ill patients were flown hundreds of miles north to Dallas and San Antonio because hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley were full.

In Arizona, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 topped 3,200, a new high, and hospitals statewide were at 89% capacity. Confirmed cases surpassed 100,000, and more than half of those infected, or over 62,000, are under 44 years old, state health officials said.

As cases surge across the state, Katie Cameron said it appears some of her neighbors in Phoenix are in denial. The mother of two said she’s seen people tearing down caution tape meant to keep them off playground equipment in parks, large groups gathering to socialize and-- most concerning-- very few masks.

“I feel like people don’t care or don’t think its real,” Cameron said. “It’s kind of like ‘out of sight, out of mind’ or they are just lying to themselves because they don’t want to believe it.”

Health officials in South Carolina reported over 1,500 new cases Monday. If the numbers keep rising at their current rates, hospitals will probably have to adopt an emergency plan to add 3,000 more beds in places such as hotels and gyms, authorities said.

...[T]hree of the top U.S. medical organizations issued an open letter urging Americans to wear masks, social distance and wash hands often to help stop “the worst public health crisis in generations.”

The American Medical Association, American Nurses Association and American Hospital Association issued the plea in the absence of a mask-wearing order from Washington and said steps taken early on that helped slow the spread of COVID-19 “were too quickly abandoned.”

The White House again rejected calls for a nationwide order to wear face coverings, with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows saying on Fox News that it is a matter for governors and mayors to decide.

Late Monday night, the Washington Post noted that a growing number of Texas sheriffs are refusing to enforce Gov. Greg Abbott's mask mandate. Anomie and the social breakdown that accompanies it are becoming a real threat across the country-- almost as if it was planned this way.

Sheriffs in at least eight Texas counties-- Denton, Nacogdoches, Smith, Upshur, Kerr, Gillespie, Panola and Montgomery-- are refusing to fine or cite people who defy Gov. Greg Abbott’s order requiring masks in public.

Abbott, a Republican who had previously blocked cities and towns from enacting their own mask ordinances, reversed his stance last week and made masks mandatory statewide as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations exploded in Texas. The order allows authorities to fine repeat offenders up to $250 but states that violators cannot be detained or jailed.

That limitation has frustrated sheriffs in Montgomery, Kerr, Gillespie and Upshur counties, who say they’re unable to stop anyone who isn’t wearing a mask, since that could be construed as detaining them. The Gillespie County Sheriff’s Office has additionally claimed that “the wearing of objects near the face and neck provide an offender possible tools to impose harm to an officer.”

In other parts of the state, including East Texas’s Panola and Nacogdoches counties, local sheriffs have said that they lack the resources to enforce the order or keep track of repeat violators. Smith County, located east of Dallas, says it will “encourage voluntary compliance.”

Denton County, located north of Dallas and Fort Worth, is by far the most-populous county where the rule isn’t being enforced. Sheriff Tracy Murphree has expressed concerns about the prohibition on detaining people and told a local newspaper that he predicts Texans “will rebel and purposefully try to go into establishments without masks,” predicting that it would invite “chaos and protest.”

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