Personal responsibility

[liv]

TL;DR: I'm sick, and it might or might not be Covid, and I'm grumpy.

I'm very much susceptible to the notion that the key factor in the morality of society is personal responsibility. I'm white, I'm middle-class, specifically the kind of white middle-class background where my family dropped several notches on the social scale as immigrants, and through a combination of hard work and latent class privilege were able to climb back to comfortably middle class in a generation or two. Growing up, I often heard "you can have anything you want as long as you work for it", and the maxim seemed totally plausible until I met people from very different backgrounds to my own. I've been using 'individ-ewe-al' as an online handle for years. I'm by inclination capitalist and right-wing politically and I really really don't think the state should micromanage ordinary people's day-to-day lives.

But even with all those biases, I just don't see how personal responsibility is a viable strategy for dealing with infectious disease epidemics. Not that people aren't responsible. At least 80% of people are more responsible than Boris Johnson and his pro-disease cronies, and are basically willing to restrict their lives in order to keep other people safe, without needing legal compulsion. Part of the problem is that the remaining quintile are selfish jerks, but actually that's a very minor aspect. Much more serious is the issue that the virus doesn't care if you are an upright person with lots of personal responsibility; you can somewhat reduce your own personal risk by doing things like avoiding crowds, wearing good quality masks and so on, but that alone isn't enough to bring infection levels down and return to normality.

And more serious still is that you just can't exercise personal responsibility unless there's societal infrastructure to support you. On a basic level it's near-impossible to isolate when sick if testing isn't widely available; you are likely to miss asymptomatic cases and likely to over-compensate for minor symptoms like allergies. If there isn't coordinated surveillance, you can't know when cases are high and when extra precautions are needed, and indeed you can't know when it's time to relax. But it's more than that, you can't avoid spreading disease at work unless employers support working from home or taking time off from an in-person job when you might be infectious. If schools are actively prohibited from offering hybrid options and kids are written up for truancy any time they need to isolate, schools will be disease reservoirs no matter how much personal responsibility parents of schoolkids demonstrate. And there's a kind of knock-on effect; if everybody takes personal responsibility for deciding which events are safe, there's a baseline expectation that transport, retail, culture etc will be available for those who decide it is safe enough, which means that all the employees are forced to take additional risks that may be beyond their own thresholds.

Same goes for masking. I have no problem at all with wearing a good quality mask basically all the time I'm away from home, and I don't mind at all looking 'silly' if I'm the only person doing it. But one-way masking is not all that effective; to actually reduce transmission, it needs most people in most gatherings wearing masks (enough to compensate for people who are unable to wear masks.) And I can't take personal responsibility to ensure that all events and venues offer outdoor food options, let alone provide seats, tables and non-enclosed shelter to actually consume the food. I suppose I could take personal responsibility for bringing a portable HEPA filter with me wherever I go, but it would make a lot more sense for businesses to install filtering and air cleaning at an appropriate scale.

So here's my current situation: my friend invited me to a life even that's important to her, several hours travel away. If it were completely up to me I would have stayed home for two weeks before travelling to make sure I wasn't a potential disease vector. But I don't have that option; work insist that I attend in person 1-2 times a week, and this particular week there were multiple medium-sized in person indoor meetings where very few colleagues apart from me wore masks. It's even worse for people whose work makes them show up when they have known exposures or even confirmed infections. So failing that, I took repeated LFTs in the days leading up to the trip and they were all negative. I wore a FFP2 mask for the whole journey, which meant most of 7 hours with almost no opportunities to eat or drink. I had a few connections, but there wasn't time to buy food, leave the station to eat it, and return in time to catch the onward train. Bringing my own food with me might have been more responsible but I really wasn't sure I would get time to eat it and pretty certain I wouldn't be able to sit down to do so, and I didn't want to waste food by packing a lunch that I might not get to eat. Some of the trains had good aircon and I've heard that that can be pretty good protection, but some really didn't (which also made the two hour stretch in 30+ temperatures on a train with about twice as many passengers as seats really unpleasant). If we had a societal level approach to ventilation, I would know whether it was safe to take my mask off on the train in order to eat some sandwiches and take a drink.

The event itself was mostly outdoors, and I wore a mask for the part that was indoors. The celebratory food and drinks afterwards were indoors, but the venue did have a balcony and were willing to bring my food out to me. That meant I ate on my own and not with my friend and the party, but that's ok, that's a level of personal responsibility that's ok for me. The day after the event, I started getting symptoms, mostly a really really painful sore throat, and feeling slightly shivery and achey.

So what's the responsible thing to do? I started looking for places to isolate but there is almost nothing available at short notice in high season. Even if I was prepared to drop most of a month's salary on a short term let, there really weren't a lot of options for somewhere to stay where I could be sure I wasn't exposing other people, such as hotel staff. Would I have a means to get food and clean clothes without risking infecting others? A society-wide response would provide at least financial support for isolation, and ideally designated safe, well-ventilated venues for people who needed to isolate. Just as an individual person, even a relatively rich one who could just about afford four figures to book somewhere to stay in this sort of situation, I was really limited. In the end I decided to take an LFT, and when that was negative, travelled home. This time I really really didn't take my mask off, even briefly, for the full 6 hour trip, even when I was outdoors, and I was really scared I was putting other people at risk.

So I made it home. I had a kind of bad night, and I've taken today off work because I'm not really well enough to work from home. Still testing negative. Theoretically, as a vaccinated person even if I test positive I'm advised to take precautions, but there is no legal obligation on me or my employer to actually isolate properly. Given the timing, I was potentially exposed Wednesday at work, Thursday while travelling long distance and maybe Friday at the event, and symptomatic by Saturday, so I think it's most likely that I caught this (whether Covid or some other upper respiratory thing) at work.

Another aspect of why personal responsibility doesn't work is that we never really had an effective track and trace system, and what little we did have has been abandoned. So if I do test positive, I don't really have a good way of informing the people who might have been exposed to me, fellow passengers on the train, fellow attendees at the celebration (which was in a pub so it was kind of semi-public, not just members of our group whom I will be able to contact). And even then, I'm relying on LFTs, which I'm taking personal responsibility for purchasing, but obviously not personally responsible for making sure LFTs are manufactured and quality checked and distributed. I should possibly pay for a PCR which are in theory more sensitive but again, they're only as good as the quality control systems which are... non-existent, basically, I can take some amount of personal responsibility for researching a provider I believe to be reputable, but that only goes so far.

At the same time, the personal responsibility rhetoric means that I keep running across vulnerable, disabled and shielding people who argue that anyone who does any travel or socializing at all is an evil eugenicist who wants disabled people to die. I really don't know how to deal with that. Possibly it was ableist of me to even contemplate taking a long train journey to a celebratory event when some people can't do that. But the problem with that line of reasoning is that me not taking the train for an event that wasn't strictly necessary for my life just wouldn't go very far in making the world safe for vulnerable and immune-compromised people. What if "what I want" is a world with lots of remote and hybrid options, where in-person events have really high standards of ventilation and everybody knows whether they are currently infectious or not so they can act accordingly? I can agitate for that, but I need organizations and ideally public bodies on my side to achieve anything.

I've been personally called a bad person both for saying that we need to move on from santizing hands and touchpoints to taking actually airborne precautions based on what we now know about the science, and for saying that sometimes people leave the house and mix socially while infections are high for reasons other than just being 'dicks'. And I can see the temptation, I feel myself getting irritated with people who take risks that look unnecessary to me (but I don't know their lives and I don't know what they've compromised on to be able to do that one thing I might not approve of). I confess I do also get irritated with people who say things like, Omicron has an R₀ of over 18 and anyone who ever leaves their house is recklessly spreading microscopic murder machines!!! But really, there's no point getting irritated with people who are exercising personal responsibility in the wrong ways, I should remind myself that the problem is that infectious disease can't be solved by personal responsibility alone.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Sorry you're sick, hope you feel better soon, COVID or not.

I empathize with a lot of this, particularly the last paragraph. And I find I'm particularly struggling when people say things like the "Omicron has an R0 of over 18 and..." because I am very much struggling to keep up with the science and the facts but a lot of the time either their facts about the dangers of COVID are wrong or my facts about the dangers of COVID are wrong and I don't know how to evaluate whether or not I'm recklessly spreading microscopic murder machines because I don't know whose facts are right. I'm finding it very hard to make probabilistic calculations about my personal risk and the risk I pose to others, and especially because I am very aware that whatever facts I do have about the reality are lagging behind the reality by months or years.

My mother got COVID two weeks ago and went to see a doctor who prescribed Paxlovid and she refused to take it, partially because of fearmongering on the news about its side effects but I think in large part because it would have meant admitted that at 66 she is old enough to be considered high risk, and that was scary to her and also I suspect a blow to her vanity. Thankfully she's fine and recovered well, but it was still frustrating to me, not to mention terrifying, that she wasn't following easy and straightforward medical guidelines with a lot of evidence behind them. So I am skeptical of personal responsibility, I know that people are not rational and that no matter how much I try to calculate the odds I am not rational. But I'm also skeptical that large government agencies are rational so I'm not sure I believe in any workable alternative to personal responsibility either.

[liv]

Yeah, part of why personal responsibility is hopeless is that it's so impossible to keep up with the science and facts, let alone feed that data into personal decisions. You're absolutely right about lagged information too, even if an individual is capable of filtering good quality evidence from misinformation, a lot of the studies are based on older variants and contexts with less vaccination and more restrictions, all of which make it hard to extrapolate anything. The R0 of 18 thing is ridiculous on its face, it comes from adding up numbers that are not at all additive and it's absolutely implausible in the real world, but there are plenty of other claimed risks that I'm far less sure of. And there's a layer beyond just probabilistic; there are plenty of risks that would be negligible if one person did them once but cumulatively disastrous if everybody did them every day and I don't really know how to take that into account.

I'm glad to hear that your mother recovered, but oof, that is really hard about the drug decision. You're entirely right that people aren't rational and government agencies aren't rational and organizations in general aren't rational, but I still think we could be doing a lot better than leaving everything up to individuals. Like, for example, it's possible to have some sort of functional occupational health and safety system whereby businesses are liable if they expose employees (and customers) to dangers. It doesn't have to be perfectly rational or even perfectly enforced, but it's not completely unthinkable.

[redbird]

Another piece of the problem is that the "screw you, I've got mine" contingent are doing their best to obscure the differences between, for example, needing to go to work in order to pay your bills; going to an event like the one you traveled for and isolating beforehand to the extent possible; and multiple unmasked visits per week to crowded bars.

One online argument I walked away from, a few months ago, was with someone who said that if she wasn't already prepared [in spring 2022] to go out dancing to live music, unmasked, she might as well never leave her house again.

It's hard enough to figure out what is safe enough -- for me, for my household, given what I know this month and what medical treatment is available to me -- without people being upset by questions like "what are your covid protocols?" As you say, we don't know what other compromises people are making, in terms of total risk: in infectious disease terms, it may matter whether you make that railroad journey once in six months or every week, but it doesn't matter whether you were traveling for social reasons, medical ones, or because you really like train trips.

[liv]

Yes, the (likely intentional) obscuring differences really bothers me too. Both treating all possible risky behaviours as basically the same, and the other side, treating all possible health measures as equivalent to full trapped in your home lockdown. Forgoing unmasked dancing absolutely is hard but it's definitely very different from never leaving the house!

I am mostly, but not completely, trying to stick to events where I can ask the other participants about their covid protocols. But train journeys clearly aren't in that category, and synagogue services are pretty borderline. I haven't had a lot of problems with people being upset about being asked, but having basically helpful acquaintances doesn't go as far as I would like.

Really good point that infection risk doesn't depend on whether you do things for "good" reasons or not! On a personal level, if I evaluate the reasons for taking a calculated risk that averages out at taking risks less often, which does matter. But on a societal level, selfish acts aren't particularly more risky than virtuous ones because the virus isn't a moral agent. That's related, I think, to the inadequacy of personal responsibility. A person who sends their kids to school because they need an education, or visits many vulnerable people to provide care, is behaving very responsibly, but is also a big potential vector of disease.

[ambyr]

My kingdom for it to become standard, as it apparently is in some parts of Asia, for buildings to have clearly displayed air quality monitors in public places. I am willing to take the personal responsibility of deciding what buildings to enter; I don’t want the personal responsibility of sourcing a portable CO2 monitor produced somewhere with reasonable quality control and carrying it everywhere I go.

[seekingferret]

You don't worry that if we had systems like that we'd just end up drowning in information we don't know what to do with? Because I worry about that a lot, and I'm an engineer who spends a lot of time designing systems for telling people when something is unsafe. It's one thing for me to put a Hydrogen Fluoride sensor in a tool and set an alarm to trigger if we're at 25% TLV, we have lots of data and know what will happen if someone faces an exposure at that level. And on the other hand, we designed a system that channels high powered microwave radiation and I set out to design sensors and shielding based on maintaining safe limits of exposure and... I learned that the literature is confusing and uncertain and there is no federal guideline other than "Not enough to do immediate physical tissue damage" and... it was really challenging to know how to approach the design.

CO2 level is a proxy for a proxy for a proxy, a high level doesn't mean that you will get COVID and a low number doesn't mean that you won't, and as you say, what that number does is foist the personal responsibility for deciding what to do with that number onto every individual, no matter how mathematically and scientifically literate they may be. I'm not always sure that more data is better data.

[oracne]

This.

[anais_pf]

I hope you feel better soon, and that this turns out not to be Covid.

[lovingboth]

Yep, the recent peak is down to the current variant not caring much if you have had Covid-19 before or if you have been vaccinated..

.. and the government going "It's all over! Do what like! If anything happens, it's down to you!"

At least this time, fewer people have died.

[liv]

I wouldn't like to guess whether the repeated omicron peaks since November are due to changes in the virus, or changes in behaviour due to the absence of public health measures and pro-disease messaging. Probably combination of both really. I'm definitely glad of the low death rate in a vaccinated population, but there's so much disruption to everybody's lives due to living with Covid.

[oracne]

I hope you feel better soon, and that it's not covid.

[nameandnature]

Can you explain why I should avoid catching and passing on COVID more than I would, say, flu? For flu, I wouldn't go to work if I had it, and I'd avoid vulnerable people, but wouldn't expect others to be masked indoors to avoid me (or anyone else) getting it, or for the government to enforce masking, say, and certainly wouldn't berate people in general for going to pubs or going to weddings in case they passed on the flu.

I say this because COVID is less deadly than flu because of vaccination and the reduced virulence of omicron. I'm someone who largely supported lockdown before the vaccines were available, but I'd say the only justification for such authoritarian restrictions on personal freedoms is that a lot of people might well have died without them.

There are still people who are especially vulnerable, but again, pre-COVID we didn't impose (or feel guilty about not self-imposing) mass restrictions to stop the masses giving them flu. Perhaps we should have?

[wildeabandon]

I think the main reasons is that whilst Covid is less deadly than flu, it's considerably more likely to lead to long term, possibly permanent disability.

As a relatively minor additional factor, I think the much higher infectiousness of Covid also means that there's more chance of it mutating into something considerably more deadly, and reducing transmission reduces that risk.

[(Anonymous)]

Omicron is less dangerous than delta, but delta was more dangerous than the initial Wuhan strain. I hope that the next variant doesn't turn out to be more dangerous than delta, or even as infectious as omicron but more dangerous.

[lnr]

There's an awful lot of space for precautions in between the two extremes of Lockdowns and Nothing - and I think we should be being more cautious than we are. For one thing it's now well over 6 months since many vulnerable people had a booster - unless you're over 75 or immunosuppressed you're mostly not eligible. My son hasn't even had his second dose yet, as he caught covid just before the first dose for under 11s and had to wait 12 weeks. (He gave it to both of us, Mike was more ill than he's even been with flu - I was lucky and only experienced it as a very heavy cold). I have friends on their third round and still struggling with long covid symptoms from the first, and scared this is going to make it worse.

I've already booked my flu jab for September and I still don't know if I'll get another covid one, or when, despite having been one of the people on the CVE list!

Wearing masks in enclosed indoor spaces, testing, and providing people with *proper* sick leave so they can isolate if they have it all seem like sensible precautions to me, but like Liv says, relying on people to choose to do those things from a sense of personal responsibility isn't enough.

Also I would try and avoid catching and passing on flu too!

[liv]

Mm, I don't believe in the abstract that you 'should avoid Covid more than flu'. But if we had over 1% population prevalence of flu for over a year solid, with multiple extended peaks spiking over 1 in 20 people infected simultaneously, that would be a major public health emergency. I would very happily undertake to wear a mask on public transport and in healthcare settings and avoid going to the pub any time we had over a thousand flu deaths in a week; that would impact on my life basically not at all.

I absolutely don't think we should address the Covid emergency with authoritarian restrictions on personal freedoms. I have basically opposed every lockdown since the first, reluctantly accepted the early 2021 lockdown because by the time we'd fucked things up that badly, not having a lockdown would have been even worse than the disaster we already experienced. But if it had been up to me we would have avoided that situation through effective public health measures in autumn 2020. I never ever thought it was a good idea for the government to repeatedly make up new laws criminalizing the minutiae of people's regular daily lives. That was absolutely disproportionately authoritarian and likely didn't help nearly as much as supportive measures would have.

So when I say I want a coordinated public health response, not just personal responsibility, I don't at all mean we should have another lockdown or act as if we were still in a pre-vaccine scenario. Basically, we should support people who currently have Covid so that they're not forced into situations where they infect others. Which means that the people who don't currently have Covid would be able to just get on with their lives, and not need to take lots of precautions in case they might have Covid. Would you feel your personal freedoms were restricted if we had continued to fund extensive monitoring of Covid infections and tracking variants and local surges properly? We could use precious boosters for ring-fencing, which is how epidemics and outbreaks are usually tackled, rather than the blunt instrument of offering boosters to people over 65 but ignoring younger people who are situationally, rather than medically, vulnerable. We could take extra precautions if needed based on local case rates rather than having only high level regional data with a long time lag (eg ONS summaries.)

If we had decent sick pay, let's say at minimum in line with most of Europe, even if we didn't have specific Covid isolation payments, so someone needing to miss work would get a decent proportion of their salary from the first day they lost income. Including gig workers and self-employed people. If employers were liable for making people work in unsafe conditions, that would somewhat restrict businesses but I think it's right to restrict business activity for the goal of public health, restrictions on businesses are much less onerous and authoritarian than restrictions on personal freedom. Right now businesses are struggling anyway because there is so much sickness absence, due to both people catching acute Covid repeatedly and disability due to long Covid. Tackling that situation needs up-front investment and I'm agnostic over whether that should be compelled just like other health and safety measures are, or supported through grants.

If we invested in air replacement, filtering and cleaning for schools and provided at least grants for businesses to improve their ventilation, as well as monitoring to make sure they were in compliance, we wouldn't need masks in most situations. We certainly wouldn't need to feel guilty about going to the pub if we knew that pub was actively removing virus from the air. Those kinds of measures would help with both Covid and flu, so it's a win-win without any need to decide which of the two diseases we care about more.

Basically we should be driving Covid back down to less than 0.1% population prevalence, and given we have vaccines and we have good knowledge of how Covid spreads, this is perfectly achievable without needing any draconian measures like lockdowns. Indeed it's what we normally expect with infectious diseases like flu. But most of currently political activity actively opposes that goal, from punishing schools and hospitals for taking precautions, to strongly pushing people to commute and work in offices needlessly.

Covid isn't special. It isn't some mega scary never before encountered super-virus. Yes, November 2019 to December 2020 was an unprecedented disaster, because it was a novel disease and nobody had any natural immunity. But now we have vaccines, the only reason Covid seems "worse" than anything else is because we've allowed it to circulate at unbelievably high levels. Lots of viruses cause disability in a small proportion of people, but it's not as noticeable because we don't keep reinfecting the entire population with glandular fever or flu or whatever every few months. Lots of vaccines have some degree of breakthrough infections, but that's much less of a problem if we take reasonable public health precautions to avoid major outbreaks.

So yes, treating Covid like flu would be completely fine by me. But we're not doing that, we're actively encouraging the spread of Covid under the guise of 'personal responsibility'.

[finding_helena]

This is really well said. You encapsulated my concerns with a lot of the rhetoric I hear from both camps. It's a Covid world now, and precautions overall are so relaxed now as to be nonexistent. We're trying to live in it and it is not going to change any time soon. Trying to reconcile all that is hard. I don't feel like there is a black and white solution here, not that we as individuals can implement.

[liv]

Thank you for your encouragement. I was so sick and so grumpy when I wrote this post, I'm really glad it still made sense. If we had a national drive to bring Covid levels down then personal responsibility might be enough to keep it low. But living in a Covid world doesn't give individuals any good options, really.

[lilacsigil]

Yes, I think one of the reasons I haven't yet have COVID despite working in healthcare in person throughout is that I live in a very rural area. There's no public transport, most gatherings are outside, there's pretty much no restaurants to eat out in, I'm entirely able to wear a mask everywhere out of my home with no problems. Also, I don't have school-age kids. Precautions are pretty much completely out the window and it's incredibly frustrating.

[liv]

Much sympathy on navigating all that. I'm glad you have been able to stay safe while working in healthcare, and I think your reasoning about what's kept you safe is likely sound. Parents of children and people in crowded cities also need to be safe, undoubtedly.

[sfred]

I find it all very frustrating too. I hope you feel better soon.

[ewt]

I hope you're on the mend soon!

I think if it were normal for most people to wear masks at indoor gatherings, and normal to have excellent ventilation (or filtering/UV-C/whatever air treatment), there would still be some airborne illness. But there would be less of it, and it would likely be less severe (in cases where viral exposure levels at infection influence disease severity). In such a context I would be willing to do things like remove my mask to eat and drink.

This wouldn't only affect catching Covid, of course. It would mean less 'flu, less measles in areas with low vaccine uptake, less chickenpox (insert rant here about chickenpox vaccination not being routinely offered on the NHS), less of that horrible cold that does the rounds most winters. It's not just about Covid, it's about airborne transmission of loads of things after a century of not taking that possibility seriously and blaming poor hand hygiene instead. (Good hand hygiene is still good, of course.)

I am very, very frustrated that we aren't there yet. In this less supportive context, for me 'personal responsibility' combined with my household's risk tolerance means wearing an elastomeric respirator at any indoor gathering or in sufficiently crowded outdoor spaces, which is a lot more uncomfortable and inconvenient than an N95, and really difficult to sing in (an N95 isn't wonderful, but when I was in Canada in May I attended two choral concerts where the entire choir were wearing masks). And yes, we are hugely privileged in that all of us can work from home; "not everyone can do this, so we should, in order to prevent infecting others" is part of our calculations. Whereas 'personal responsibility' for my 92-year-old father-in-law who lives alone is rather different.

[liv]

Yeah, I think the level of precautions needed to achieve no airborne illnesses whatsoever would probably be unsustainable. In some ways I'd quite like to try it, as an experiment, and then gradually cut corners until some sort of balance could be achieved... But realistically we could just have a whole lot less Covid and flu and debilitating colds, without needing people to give up all in person gatherings. And yes, living as if we actually believed in airborne transmission would go a long way.

My personal preference would be to remove the need for masks in most situations by improving air quality (and being transparent about where air quality is good or bad). But that's partly why I want a coordinated public health response rather than personal responsibility, because individuals can't do much about air quality. I'm thinking that having caught something (even if it's not Covid, which I continue to hope) while wearing an N95 consistently, I may well need to switch to elastomeric respirator for travel. For situations where the point is to talk, such as work or synagogue or socializing, that's not useful, and equally, for situations where I need to eat and drink, I need either outdoor options or ventilation, and those depend on organizations, not my personal choice.

Masks should be normal in healthcare (unless you're actually having a procedure done on your mouth and nose), and probably on public transport and in shops. I'm not sure masks should be normal for a group of friends hanging out together in the pub, much less in someone's living room. At the moment I'm mostly erring on the side of not doing those things at all, but would certainly wear a mask if I did, but that's because we have constant high circulating levels of Covid and no air quality initiatives. I'm nervous about masks as normal for religious services, theatre performances and those sort of things where being able to hear the words clearly is important. Maybe it's the right trade-off but I'm still reluctant to accept that living with the virus is the only alternative.

[silveradept]

Hopefully it is a common infection and not COVID, and easily dismissed.

It is difficult to give credence to a personal responsibility narrative when the structural parts assume that you are okay with going unmasked and engaging in the behaviors that you would otherwise have done if there weren't a risk of infection. Anything that might be more protective than that is voluntary and usually couched here in the language of "well, we won't stop you from choosing to wear a mask, but we won't ask anyone to do the same."

And in some states, there is active suppression of what personal responsibility choices are available to someone, depending on their profession and how desperate their elected officials and corporate supervisors are to pretend that nothing is wrong and capitalism can proceed as usual. So, as you've noted, a lot of people are being exposed to a greater risk than they themselves would like, because the people with the decision-making power have decreed it so.

(Events that are looking at the science and the numbers they can find and making decisions to require masking for all attendees are decried for engaging in political shibboleths here by the kind of people who will be more than happy to watch disease kill the people they feel are inferior and proclaim martyrdom on those the disease kills that they believe are worthy.)

And, unfortunately, we have long since gone past the point where this is a tragedy, and now it is only statistics.

[liv]

Yes, I think that a lot of the problem with personal responsibility is that people are being compelled to a greater or lesser extent to behave irresponsibly. If it were really true that 'we won't stop you from choosing to wear a mask' that would be one thing, but actually, people in customer-facing jobs (including education) are in fact being stopped from making that choice. And yeah, private organizations are being prohibited from imposing mask or vaccine or testing requirements.

Most of the risk comes from whether or not you're in a place with infectious people, and most people don't have that free a choice over which places they go. Employment and school are compulsory or nearly so. Hospitals and medical appointments are necessary. Prisons and care homes offer people absolutely no choice at all about whether they're in a place where infection rates are high. So even if masking is possible, personal responsibility in that sense is very strictly limited.

The political stuff really is scary, and I think it isn't even pro-capitalist any more, it's identity politics, because everybody constantly getting sick all the time is in fact bad for economic productivity! It does feel like mass death is desirable for some leaders, and I appreciate your insight about it being either deserved or martyrdom.

[rysmiel]

I do hope you recover quickly from whatever this is, and that it is not COVID or anything else with potential longer-term bad consequences.

I am selfishly glad that Canada, and Quebec within Canada, are doing better than other places on many fronts; at this point everyone here, sfaik, is entitled to a free fourth booster, I had mine a couple of weeks ago. At the same time, I am aghast that we have lifted the mask mandate on public transport - I would say between a quarter and half the people on buses or the Metro are still wearing masks here at this point. And while it's pretty clear to me that with the omicron variants checking vaccine status before letting people into restaurants and the like is no longer as effective as it once was, I still think it's entirely necessary and am very unhappy that that is no longer being done either.

This pandemic has really driven home to me the extent to which I am an outlier in terms of emotional stability and introversion, and that staying home and not seeing many people in person seems a great deal easier for me than for most people I know, so I don't wish at all to be inconsiderate of the mental health stressor it is for many people to be restricted in that way. But as restrictions on personal freedoms go, it seems fundamental to me that rights do not exist without corresponding responsibilities, and as with smoking, the place where I want to see hard lines drawn on that is where people's behaviour is putting other people at meaningfully increased risk. There aren't many things I miss from the early days of the pandemic, but consistently seeing bus drivers refuse service to people who were not masked and if necessary throw them off the bus is one of them.

[liv]

I'm glad to hear that you still have some kind of public health measures in place, that is comforting to know. Public transport seems like the situation where masks are least onerous (because you're just sitting there taking your ride) and most necessary, or at least second after healthcare, so that really seems like it should continue. And yes, the analogy to smoking seems apt here.

I am glad you're coping ok with staying home and not seeing many people. I am too, but from the opposite side. I'm incredibly extrovert, but I get my extrovert energy almost as well from online interactions, whether text-based or video, so I don't feel nearly as lonely as even many introverts. The other thing is that people do have a genuine need for in-person socializing (and more utilitarian interactions as well as social ones), but there's no psychological need for that to happen in crowded, stuffy buildings! People could meet up in well-ventilated places and get almost all the benefits but none of the downsides. Canada certainly has more serious weather to contend with than we do, so shifting things outdoors isn't a complete solution, but at least some things could happen outdoors some of the time, which would help.

[verazea]

I hope you feel better soon and that it turns out to be something less dangerous than covid.

The whole personal responsibility angle is incredibly frustrating. I can try and keep myself and others safe, but with the government wanting us to "live with covid" and expecting life to go on as if the virus isn't there while not supporting anyone trying to protect themselves or others, and having to choose between various imperfect compromises with an imperfect understanding of where the risks are it feels like we're all being set up to fail. If we do end up getting covid and suffering serious consequences as a result that's all on us.

[liv]

I do absolutely share your frustration. We're all kind of fighting uphill to keep each other safe, because of this expectation of pretending the virus isn't there, and because of the lack of good quality information about risks. I fear you may be right that repeating the mantra of "personal responsibility" without giving people the tools or even the freedom to exercise that responsibility is indeed pre-emptively blaming people if they suffer serious consequences of Covid infection. Which really doesn't make things any better :-(

[beckyc]

Hope you make a speedy recovery!

Indeed, taking personal responsibility in a pandemic is not a suitable public health strategy or a strategy for structural/societal issues without suitable infrastructure/support! Taking personal responsibility is one of those phrases that means more than one thing, I suspect? It’s frustrating because in certain senses of the term, it is something that is very important to me and probably to most of us. Yet I’m no longer sure I can say I believe in it because it’s come to mean something else. (See also: herd immunity and endemic.)

Sorry that you’ve had people telling you you’re bad, sounds like you’re doing a lot more than most at this point. And yes absolutely we need to be doing more to get clean air, for all kinds of reasons anyway (it benefits all of us, not just us asthmatics!), but especially since we now know that’s how covid spreads. Yes please to the ”what you want” world. That sounds great.

[liv]

Yeah, I fear you're right that "personal responsibility" is a code-word for "deliberately sabotage any public health measures", just like the other misused phrases. Bleh. Clean air shouldn't feel like a hopeless utopian fantasy, it really shouldn't!

The "bad person" thing I think is the flip side of the personal responsibility narrative. If it's all down to individual choice, it's somebody's fault if a person gets Covid. It's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking, anyone more cautious than me is paranoid and anyone taking more risks than me is reckless, but I know that's not true.

[swaldman]

Personal take: personal responsibility now, when there are no covid-specific society-wide requests, is to use common sense to avoid infecting others with any disease, whether or not it is covid. When I am ill, I don't physically go to work (I'm aware that not everybody has that option, and that is awful). Last time I was ill I did test myself, but honestly I'm not sure why: getting a positive test doesn't trigger anything else any more, and I don't want to pass *any* virus on to my co-workers.

I do take other measures to try to avoid catching Covid myself, but that's less about personal responsibility to society and more about self-preservation.

[liv]

This seems absolutely reasonable to me. For me, the point of testing is that I may have asymptomatic (or any of the other not very obvious combinations like paucisymptomatic, presymptomatic etc) Covid. And equally I'm often mildly "ill" but not infectious; I have a runny nose and sniffles and some sneezing for a big chunk of the year, or I get headaches or vague sore throats. When I do have a cold I often have symptoms for far longer than the likely infectious period; most colds leave me with a cough for weeks, which may be a sign my asthma is flaring.

I don't think it's realistic to miss work every time I have a bit of a cough or sniffle, let alone all my other obligations and things I might do outside the house. Since Covid I've been a lot more scrupulous about cancelling in-person things for "just" a cold, though I don't isolate for ten days if I think it's a cold rather than Covid.

I agree with you that choosing whether or not to go to work, and erring on the side of not infecting others, is the ideal. I'm worried partly for myself and mostly for the people directly affected about those who are forced to go to work while infectious; at least having a legal obligation to isolate made it that bit harder for employers to directly pressure people to come in. But I do realize that there are other pressures apart from coercion, not being able to find viable childcare, not being able to complete time-critical responsibilities from home, not wanting to lose income, etc.