Personal responsibility
Aug. 15th, 2022 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livTL;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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-16 12:09 pm (UTC)It turns out it is relevant.