Politics and policy

Stop Blaming the Beach! — Rational Masking During the COVID-19 Pandemic

August 21, 2020 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

It seems just about every time a media outlet runs a story about people being irresponsible during the COVID-19 pandemic, some editor slaps in a photo or video clip of people gathered on beaches.

But beaches are getting an unfair rap, and such displays only sow confusion among the public because they fly in the face of sensible intuition — and science.

Despite photos in the media suggesting that gathering on a beach is dangerous during the COVID-19 pandemic, in fact, beaches and other open spaces are exceedingly safe. Clay Bonnyman Evans photo.

It’s critical to understand how the novel coronavirus — aka SARS-CoV-2 — actually causes infection. Erin S. Bromage, Ph.D., associate professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, puts it succinctly: “Successful infection=exposure to virus+time.”

In any enclosed space, or amid a tightly packed crowd, both time and exposure (i.e. more viral particles) are likely to increase, including if air is being recirculated. It’s critically important to reduce the chance that you are expelling virus in such environments by wearing an effective mask — more on that below.

But outside, it’s a totally different ball game.

“If you are sitting in a well-ventilated space, with few people, the risk is low,” Bromage says. “(R)emember, it is ‘dose and time needed for infection.”

“Outside, things like sunlight, wind, rain, ambient temperature and humidity can affect virus infectivity and transmissibility, so while we can’t say there’s zero risk, it’s likely low unless you are engaging in activities as part of a large crowd (such as a protest),” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, told Vox.

Carmen knows she doesn’t need to wear a mask on Hilton Head beaches. Clay Bonnyman Evans photo.

The risk is so low, in fact, that it’s not far from zero. When The New York Times went in search of a documented outdoor transmission, it rummaged up a single case out of 7,300 studied in China — that’s less than 0.0000014 percent. And that patient had been closely speaking with an infected person, not riding a bike, walking a beach or jogging.

If you walk past someone outdoors, Bromage explains, you would “have to be in their airstream for 5+ minutes for a chance of infection. While joggers may be releasing more virus due to deep breathing, remember the exposure time is also less due to their speed. Please do maintain physical distance, but the risk of infection in these scenarios (is) low.”

“Viral load” is the number of particles being expelled into the air via breathing, coughing, sneezing, even singing or shouting. Generally, the more violent the expulsion, the more particles are expelled. Research has found that the novel coronavirus can travel more than 25 feet and remain viable in air for up to three hours, but only in tightly confined laboratory conditions. With any ventilation at all, i.e. almost any outdoor environment, expelled virus is scattered almost immediately, reducing concentrations to below transmission levels.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is highly contagious, but outdoor transmission is virtually unheard of.

Public confusion, even skepticism, regarding masks is not entirely the fault of the public. After first insisting that masks were not necessary, U.S. health officials did a sudden about-face, urging the wearing of virtually any kind of mask when in public (without bothering to note that masks are unnecessary outside).

On Aug. 7, a group of researchers at Duke University published a clever study that used lasers to count droplets emerging from the mouths of people wearing 14 different types of mask and no mask at all, demonstrating that al masks are not equal.

According to the study, N95 masks used by hospital workers provide the best protection for both the wearer and those around them (excepting those with an exhalation valve), followed by surgical masks and fabric masks of at least three layers. Meanwhile, droplets expelled through a single-layer cloth mask (think neck gaiters, bandanas and knitted masks) were reduced in size, making them more likely to remain airborne for longer, rather than falling to the ground.

Bummer — it turns out that a Buff won’t do much good in an indoor environment, and could even promote transmission. Clay Bonnyman Evans photo.

“There’s a lot of controversy and people say, ‘Well, masks don’t do anything.’ Well, the answer is some don’t, but most do,” one of the study’s co-authors, Warren S. Warren, professor of physics, chemistry, radiology and biomedical engineering at Duke, told the Washington Post. “If you can see through it when you put it up to a light and you can blow through it easily, it probably is not protecting anybody.”

Cynics might take this as evidence that scientists are just messing with us, but it’s precisely the opposite. Called upon for advice early in the pandemic, scientists offered their best judgment in the absence of clear data, but science didn’t stop there. Following the scientific method, the Duke researchers devised an experiment, resulting in data that now puts us all on firmer ground.

In conclusion:

In enclosed spaces or a crowd, always wear an N95, surgical or mask of at least three cloth layers. Thinner, more convenient masks may make things worse.
There is no need to wear a mask well-ventilated, outdoor spaces. It’s advisable to maintain physical distance from others and definitely don’t join a crowd.
Go to the beach! A beach — or park, trail or forest — is as safe a place as you can be.

Book review: A Land Made of Water by Robert R. Crifasi

January 25, 2016 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

A Land Made of Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado’s Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions by Robert R. Crifasi. University Press of Colorado, 424 pp. with b/w photos and illustrations. $50 (print); $40 Kindle.

Let’s face it. Most people would no more pick up a book about such enticing subjects as “ditches” and “water appropriation” than they’d spend an afternoon at the beach reading an auto manual in Esperanto.

But with his first book, “A Land Made of Water,” former water resources administrator for the city of Boulder’s open space program Robert R. Crifasi has written a deeply researched, deftly written guide that is both informative and entertaining, even for lay readers.

Widely regarded as one of the area’s bona fide water experts, Crifasi sat on the boards of 11 private Boulder ditch companies and managed all of the city’s ditches. He’s also shoveled countless tons of wet leaves, silt and the occasional dead skunk as a ditch rider.

He begins with a concise history of water development in the West, noting that the Anasazi people who inhabited Mesa Verde were building ditches and reservoirs for irrigation as early as 900 BCE. The Spanish took some of those ideas and blended them with a cultural and political system of “acequias,” a word adapted from the Arabic “al saqiya,” meaning “water conduit.”

The Boulder and St. Vrain valleys were dry indeed before pioneers dug the first ditch in 1859, using shovels and horse-drawn “Fresno scraper” plows. Based on historical documents and photos, he concludes, “I think we can safely state that east of the foothills from approximately Coal Creek on the south to St. Vrain on the north there were virtually no lakes present prior to active settlement.”

Few area residents may know that a famous 1882 Boulder County case, Coffin v. Left Hand Ditch Company, led to a Colorado Supreme Court decision that established the most basic (and still standing) principle of Western water law: first in time, first in right. Essentially, the ruling meant that simply owning land did not automatically give one rights to water passing through.

That may sound a little, well, dry. But Crifasi injects the history of this mini-water war with real-life drama, personalities and the occasional pointed observation.

“Today, Colorado’s Prior Appropriation system has become a symbol for the preference of private property over common property, the privatization of public resources, and the rule of markets to distribute natural resources,” he writes. But, he notes, the Left Hand Ditch Company resulted from the kind of cooperative that many would revile as “socialist” today, and prior appropriation was widely understood at the time as a victory against control of water by wealthy capitalists who could afford to buy land.

Crifasi relates the history of how modern Front Range residents came to enjoy a wealth of water through such public projects as the Moffat Tunnel and the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. He’s also refreshingly frank about conflicts between some environmentalists and the reality of water in the dry West.

While wearing his ditch rider’s hat, Crifasi ran into a young biologist who found found leopard frogs, a federal species of concern, in one of his ditches and thought it should not be disturbed.

“I wholeheartedly shared his desire to protect the species. But the problem was that these frogs migrated into and now occupy habitat that was created by people,” Crifasi writes. … Never mind that if someone like me didn’t get the laterals cleaned, there would be no point for the rancher to turn water into the laterals so he might irrigate his hay meadow. The laterals would simply dry out and cease providing tadpole habitat or a source of water for the hay meadow. … It felt like to me that he wanted … some kind of frog Valhalla. Our conversation made me feel like a callous frog killer for even suggesting it might be necessary to occasionally disturb the habitat … so that we might perpetuate it.”

He dispels, though history, the common romantic notion that “Indians roamed the plains as if it were an ecological utopia” and that settlement was “a fall from Eden that happened with the discovery of gold.”

“Human-induced changes to our streams and the outright construction of lakes make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between natural systems and those that are more or less derivative of human action,” he writes. And, he concludes, “Since Boulder citizens began actively acquiring open space in the name of preserving nature, I think it is especially important to consider how the landscapes … came into existence in the first place.”

Despite such candor, Crifasi isn’t likely to spend a weekend taking potshots at feds alongside the likes of Cliven Bundy; indeed, he has no truck with ranchers who refuse to see the value of preservation, as well. Rather, he is a deeply informed realist: “I do not wish to wax nostalgic for a paradise lost. Nor do I advocate dismantling our ditches and reservoirs or drying our fields to recreate something that is long gone.”

Millennial ‘chickenhawks’ mirror society’s abdication on war

January 8, 2016 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

America’s millennials want ground troops to fight the Islamic State in the Middle East, but when it comes to themselves, most fall back on the old classic line, “That’s not my job.”

According to a December poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, found that 60 percent of America’s 18-29-year-olds support “sending ground troops to participate in a military campaign against the Islamic State” — even as 85 percent say they definitely (62 percent) or probably would not (23 percent) join the military to fight ISIS. Just 2 percent of those surveyed had served in the military; 4 percent “definitely will join if needed” and 9 percent would “strongly consider joining.”

The internet was instantly aflame with cries of hypocrisy and “chickenhawk” in the “not me generation,” and the poll certainly seems to paint an unflattering portrait. What surprises me is that anyone is surprised.

First, young people resisting the idea of interrupting their lives to go into a war zone isn’t an anomaly; historically, it’s the rule. But more important, government and society have trained this generation to see war as something other people do.

Tens of millions of Americans born since the late 1980s have grown up in a country almost perpetually at war — with the exceptions of 1997 and 2000, some kind of military action has been under way every year of their lives.

They have experienced war as dirty work other people have to do: Less than half a percent of Americans now serve in the military. Perhaps worst of all, they have been trained by politicians to look the other way, go shopping, pay no attention to the flag-draped coffins hidden behind a curtain of cynical censorship drawn by those same politicians who don’t want anyone to know about war’s consequences.

These “chickenhawk” millennials are really no different than the people now leading the country. Republican elected officials and presidential candidates are full of hollow bravado about how to handle the Islamic State, willing to hint at using nuclear weapons — “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we are about to find out,” said Ted Cruz — or sending in ground troops (almost all of them).

Nobody in the GOP or Democratic presidential field served in the military. In all of U.S. history, just 11 presidents have not served in the military, some serving in state militias rather than federal forces. The longest drought ran from 1913 (Wilson) to 1944 (Roosevelt). Today, just over 20 percent of members of Congress have served, compared to a peak of 77 percent in 1977-78. And just 7 percent of the population are veterans, compared to 13.7 percent in 1977, a drop by almost half.

Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis took note of the hypocrisy in a tweet he sent while watching a Dec. 16 GOP presidential debate: “My blood pressure rose when they used ‘I’ or ‘we’ to talk kicking ass since they all said no to their feet in mil boots.”

Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein’s infamous “Starship Troopers,” a 1959 novel-slash-political lecture, seriously suggests that suffrage be extended only to discharged

Heinlein's novel imagines a future in which only those who have served in the military may vote. — Heinlein’s novel imagines a future in which only those who have served in the military may vote.

veterans, instead of “anyone who is 18 years old and has a body temperature near 37 degrees (Celsius).” But under the Constitution, there is no requirement that one must serve in the military to be elected to office.

And certainly, a history of military service doesn’t inoculate a president from making dubious (and worse) decisions about war — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and George W. Bush all come to mind. One who didn’t, Franklin D. Roosevelt (he did try to resign as Secretary of the Navy to enlist during World War I, but President Wilson refused) arguably remains the nation’s greatest war president.

Still, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was surely right when he fretted privately(according to one of his daughters) that non-veteran presidents would be too easily manipulated and steamrolled into bad decisions by military advisors and that the increasing entanglement of business and war, the “military-industrial complex,” would likely result in ill-conceived wars.

And while the specter of the Islamic State is obscene and dangerous, today’s flocks of chickenhawks, from millennials to presidential contenders, are too ready to throw someone else at a situation that isn’t quite as simple as, “send in the Marines.”

Here’s how Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security and former advisor to John McCain (Fontaine is no dove) told The New York Times in September:

“In Iraq, we toppled the government and did an occupation and everything went to hell. In Libya, we toppled the government and didn’t do an occupation and everything went to hell. In Syria, we didn’t topple the government and didn’t do an occupation and everything went to hell. So, broadly, this is the Middle East. Things go to hell. And we’ve got to make our way through that fact to protect our national interests, on the back of a war-weary public that doesn’t want to invest our treasure in this.”

It’s probably true that a massive-scale mobilization of American troops — consisting mostly of other people and other people’s kids, of course — could, like Tito in Yugoslavia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, rout the Islamic State and hold the area in some semblance of order through sheer power. But such an occupation would have to be all but indefinite, because as soon as those troops leave, the old Sunni-Shia and other historic, even ancient, antagonisms will fill the vacuum. Mission creep would be hard to avoid.

“The United States could decide to go all-in with ground troops and provide the military muscle for Sunni moderates for the foreseeable future. That would start in Syria, but Obama’s advisers fear the commitment would expand to other collapsed Sunni states, such as Libya and Yemen,” David Ignatius wrote recently. “The United States, in effect, would become the governor of Sunnistan.”

And the truth is, even the best minds of the U.S. military and state department can’t be trusted to understand complex situations on the ground in such places. (For a sobering, wholly balanced — neither anti-American nor anti-Taliban — examination of the fiasco in another place of mystery, read “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes” by Anand Gopal.)

In other words, the fondest wishes of chickenhawk millennials and politicians would have terrible costs, counted both in blood (of “other people’s kids”) and treasure: Some military experts think 100 troops killed, 500 wounded and $10 billion a month would be all but guaranteed, and it might be even worse.

As Tolstoy asked, what then must we do?

Although generals and politicians hate the idea, and 74 percent of Americans say they oppose it, the nation should move away from an all-volunteer force, perhaps via a national-service requirement that includes a military lottery and no loopholes, except for the truly disabled, as in Israel and Switzerland. (There would have to be non-military options, for moral reasons and because the U.S. military doesn’t need that many bodies).

How would this help? Here’s a rather long essay on the subject, but in short, the all-volunteer force is dangerous. It has led to a growing separation between the troops and civilians, with many in the military believing that they are superior citizens and non-military Americans the dupes of cynical propaganda campaigns leading them to proclaim all who serve are “heroes” — virtually all active-duty military and veterans openly mock this idiocy, and they should know — and thinking that clapping for soldiers in airports or slapping a yellow ribbon on the SUV somehow constitutes “support.” An all-volunteer military leads to more war, and whatever the shortcomings of mandated service, it will give a broader swath of the public pause when we are called upon to blindly support the next war.

In addition, we need politicians with spines stiffer than wet spaghetti. The current scheme, under which Congress ignores its obligation to declare war under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and presidents of both parties relish their all-but-unfettered freedom to wage war, is dishonest. Members of Congress are too chicken to take an actual vote, fearing future repercussions, thereby ceding enormous power to the executive.

From there, I propose a law mandating across-the-board tax increases on all individuals, businesses and corporations — again, no loopholes or deferments, and no more putting wars on national credit cards — once troops have been in a theater of war for 90 days, to pay for all costs stemming from the conflict, including top-notch medical and psychological care for returning soldiers. It’s past time to rip Americans who have not served in the military from the appalling, comforting, false belief that they need make no sacrifices for the wars they have been trained to cheer.

It’s easy to point a finger at Millennials, but the undeniable truth is that most Americans do the exact same thing.

‘Spotlight’: An epitaph to the noble pursuit of journalism

November 27, 2015 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

I spent much of the two-hour run time for the new movie “Spotlight” with tears in my eyes, and sometimes, anger in my heart.

Spotlight is what I used to call a “journalist hero” movie, the true story (with Hollywood gussing-up, of course) of the Boston Globe journalists who doggedly pursued the monstrous truth that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (and ultimately, the church around the world), callously sought to cover up the fact that it knew about, and ran interference for, scores of priests who molested boys and girls in their parishes.

First, the anger. I couldn’t help but flash back to the men who, for whatever reason, looked me in the eye and told me I was exaggerating, perhaps even lying, when I reported that my scoutmaster was molesting kids in our troop. They told my parents they’d “keep an eye” on the scoutmaster, but dismissed my concerns and did nothing. The last time I saw the scoutmaster he was sitting outside of one of those men’s office and he said, very matter-of-factly, “I’m going to kill you for this.”

I learned many years later that I wasn’t the first who had come to the troop leaders with such information. I consider them culpable in the continued molestation of scouts over the next year, until the man was arrested, tried, and convicted (he was paroled after five years, but reoffended and will remain incarcerated in Colorado until 2035).

But it was sadness, not anger, that I mostly felt while watching this story of old-school journalists fighting the good fight, even as newspapers were beginning to crumble in the internet era.

There is a brief, pivotal — and deliberate — scene in the movie, when a reporter parks in an almost empty employee lot at the Globe beneath a looming billboard pitching AOL. Video killed the radio star, and the internet age has all but destroyed the Fourth Estate.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." — Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men.”

I was drawn to journalism at Boulder High School in 1978, in the wake of Watergate. Journalists might be scruffy and crude, poorly paid and hated by the powerful, but they could do heroic work. I watched movies like “The Killing Fields,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Year of Living Dangerously,” eager to do my part to set some of the world’s wrongs right.

In my quarter-century career, I got that chance from time to time (though never on the scale of “Spotlight”), when I poured every ounce of effort in my being into investigating stories where someone was being hurt.

But those days are, for the most part, long gone. “Spotlight” subtly hints at the coming disaster, when a new editor arrives and everyone at the Globe is resigned to a new round of cuts.

Journalism was never perfect. But today, everyone has their own set of “facts” and politicians no longer have to worry that their misdeeds and lies will be exposed. They knowingly spout falsehoods, confident that few reporters will bother to check them out (and if they do, an ever-shrinking number of people will ever read the truth). Instead, readers — I use the word in only the loosest sense — ping from tasty social-media memes to echo-chamber websites, happily accepting and propagating total bullshit simply because it suits their pre-determined beliefs and their chosen “team.”

I loved that powerful politicians thought I was a slob and a no-account. But I was reporting on some of former U.S. Rep. Gary Condit’s — the California Democrat who got mixed up in the ugly murder of his illicit young lover — foibles during his first election … as an intern. (The night he won, he came up to me and asked if I were an intern. I said I was, and he was incredibly insulted that my paper would assign a lowly worm to his race.)

You’ll often hear people, on both the left and the right, claim that journalists have an “agenda.” Mostly, in my career, the only agenda was pursuing a good story and getting as close to the truth as possible, using facts. I know it’s more fun to think of conspiracies, but as one colleague once said, “For Christ’s sake, we couldn’t conspire to push a Volkswagen with a dead battery to the side of the highway!”

I’ve always said Americans will miss the journalists they love to hate when they’re gone. I now think that’s wrong. We’re all too distracted and invested in our respective beliefs; these days, most readers would find the “Spotlight” team’s 600 Pulitzer Prize-winning stories tl;dr.

I highly recommend “Spotlight.” I don’t expect we’ll ever return to an era where Americans actually wanted to know the truth — the actual, documented truth — but this story is a great reminder of the power of journalism.

When they killed death with dignity

June 5, 2015 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

Twenty years ago, a freshman legislator from Boulder County named Peggy Lamm thought independent-minded Colorado was ready to join Oregon, which in 1994 had passed its Death with Dignity Act, a law allowing terminally-ill patients to voluntarily obtain prescriptions to end their lives.

“The idea had very substantial majority support among typical people,” says Lamm, now CEO of the Colorado Mesa University Foundation in Grand Junction. “It was working in Oregon. It seemed so logical that I thought it would be the law of the land in a decade.”

Her bill was promptly killed in committee — “I guess I was fooling myself.”

Some two decades later, on Feb. 6, the House Committee on Public Health Care and Human Services killed Rep. Lois Court’s Colorado Death with Dignity Act, despite a January Talmey-Drake poll that found 68 percent of voters supported it, with just 28 percent opposed. Two Democrats, including the committee chair, joined Republicans to kill the bill.

“It’s shocking,” Lamm says, “how unrepresentative government can be.”

Court’s office told me that the bill died not because of “philosophy,” but concerns about a lack of safeguards regarding life insurance. She decided to bring the bill back next year instead of amending it.

But the bill had all the safeguards it needed. As in Oregon, applicants would have to be at least 18; capable of making and communicating health-care decisions; have a terminal illness confirmed by two physicians, including the patient’s primary-care physician; and express their wish to die.

The bill required that patients make two oral requests, at least 15 days apart, and one written request for a prescription. Physicians would have to inform patients of the right to rescind their request after the second oral request, and the prescription could not be written until 48 hours after the written request was received. Ultimately, the patient would have to self-administer the medication with no assistance.

Oregon’s bill has worked extremely well for nearly two decades, providing peace of mind to patients who feared loss of autonomy (91.4 percent, according to one study), inability to enjoy life (88.9 percent) and loss of dignity (80.9 percent). Many patients said simply knowing they had the prescription was enough and through 2013, 752 of the 1,173 people who had received prescriptions (64 percent) chose to use them to end their lives. (See a summary of polls here.)

More than 100 witnesses spoke during the 11-hour committee hearing, about evenly divided between pro and con. Dozens of citizens told heart-rending stores of suffering and brutally prolonged death. Opponents, including disability rights activists flown in from out of state, insisted disabled people would be pressured to cut costs to insurers and families by killing themselves.

Yet that’s never happened in Oregon. And in 2007 the Journal of Medical Ethics reported that there was “no evidence of heightened risk for the elderly, women, the uninsured, people with low educational status, the poor, the physically disabled or chronically ill, minors, people with psychiatric illnesses including depression, or racial or ethnic minorities, compared with background populations” in Oregon or The Netherlands, where the practice is also legal.

As Dr. Charles Hamlin of Compassion and Choices told the committee, there”is not one case in this country (of a disabled person being coerced into suicide) nor will there be because of the nine hurdles in this law.”

Opponents also wrote numerous fevered letters to the editor. Two physicians wrote the Denver Post, “Any legislation that promotes physician assistance in a patient’s death undermines the integrity of the medical profession and devalues the person to a burden.”

That argument, as the English say, is bollocks — the law would not require any physician or patient to participate in such a decision. Don’t want a prescription? Don’t request one. Don’t want to write one? Then don’t.What opponents really want is to force their personal and religious beliefs down your throat with the government acting as their cop.

It may come a quarter-century later than Lamm first hoped, but thankfully, this wave is cresting in favor of individual liberty. Washington state and Vermont have joined Oregon in legalizing the practice. Courts have made it legal in Montana and Bernallillo County, New Mexico, while California and Connecticut courts are reviewing laws. Measures are pending in more than half the states.

“This is about individual liberty. Is this a decision for a person with a terminal illness to decide? Or should the government be able to say ‘You haven’t suffered long enough’?” Lamm says. “This is not a partisan issue.”

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