Great post. Two things caught my attention, besides your very interesting comparisons among COVID effects in different countries and factors that help explain them. One: I don't get why it would be "heavy lifting" for a lefty to encounter an argument that some COVID restrictions, in retrospect, went too far. That suggests that lefties are generally intransigent, which I hope isn't true. I have a lot of lefty friends (I am an academic), and there's a lot of reflective discussion about the unintended consequences of measures that were too drastic (such as extended school closings), as well as measures that proved completely wrongheaded in retrospect (such as closing beaches, or prohibitions on being outdoors).
The second is the statement about how Republicans want to make it "as difficult to vote as possible". Perhaps there are Republicans who want this, but I don't know any. I also have a lot of friends who vote Republican (they're not academic colleagues, ha), and they are concerned about ballot integrity after an election during which election-integrity rules were suspended in many places because of COVID. They are also concerned about practices such as "ballot harvesting", legal in some states, which includes allowing activist foot-soldiers (paid by partisan organizations, sometimes paid by the ballot) to collect ballots and deliver them (to post offices or drop boxes), which breaks the "chain of custody" for the ballot. It is a system that can be abused, and certainly it is abused to some extent.
When you imply that the US should be like Switzerland in terms of voting practices, I think you must take into account something else that you mentioned about cultural distinctions: the Swiss as rule-followers. I think Switzerland is a very high-trust society (I've been there, traveling from low-trust Italy, and the cultural difference between those two is immediately obvious, as reflected in things like incidence of petty theft, sexual harrassment on crowded buses, or tolerance for littering.) That same rule-following instinct that you believe limited COVID transmission also sustains trust in election integrity.
And I'm curious about Swiss voting practices. I assume the Swiss postal system is run with great professionalism, that there is no ballot-harvesting, and no drop-boxes.
In any case, there are principled arguments being made in the US (weirdly enough, only ever by Republicans!) in support of election integrity. From my perspective, these are common-sense arguments, made by people who are not out to inhibit voting, but who would simply like to feel the same level of trust in election processes that the Swiss enjoy.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment! I probably committed the error of using anecdata in my accusations against both the left and the right. I have read many articles from the left perspective that continue to be strongly against, for example, open schools, or they advocate for continued mask mandates, "just to be extra safe."
And while you may well be right that there is an opportunity for a security breach when partisan volunteers collect ballots, other Republican practices--including closing polling locations in heavily Democratic areas; using "exact-match" voter ID, where even a stray accent mark will disqualify a ballot; counting an NRA membership card as valid ID but a student ID as invalid; and refusing to count ballots that were post-marked before election day but arrive later--all make it more difficult to vote without improving ballot security.
And I agree with you that the cultural difference between Switzerland and Italy is striking! We visited Italy in the fall of 2019, and there was an internet outage throughout the entire region of Tuscany. For three days! And everyone just kind of shrugged and said, "Meh. What can you do?" As we drove through the tunnel between Italy and Switzerland on our way back, suddenly my phone went crazy with notifications--I could tell the exact moment we cross the border into Switzerland, and its totally solid internet!
I live in northern Italy, within an hour of the Swiss border, and I cannot properly express the insanity (the public transit mask requirement was dropped just last week... which included our open-air car ferries -- even if you were IN YOUR CAR). Just thinking about it makes me tense up. The weirdest part for me was the widespread compliance. I could not for the life of me figure out why the average not-overly-rule-following Italian was not simply refusing to go along with the bizarre restrictions. But people just seemed to accept whatever wackadoo new thing the government came up with, which made me feel like I was losing my mind.
One big contributor to the higher Italian death rate that I feel is often overlooked is how terrible our emergency medical care is. Preventative and routine healthcare is pretty good, at least where we are, to some extent because it's propped up by people who can afford to going privately for a lot of things. But God help you if you need an ER, where there is no private option. The average wait time at the closest major hospital to us, in the richest region in the country, for anything below "active heart attack" is regularly something like 12-24 hours. And despite the horrifying travesty in Bergamo, thousands of people dying alone without an advocate, and two years of curfews, closures and hygiene theater, absolutely nothing has changed on that front.
So how much German do my husband and I need to learn to move to Ticino?? ;p
Thank you for such an informative comment! I hadn't thought about the state of emergency care in Italy, and how crucial good ERs and ICUs were at the start of the pandemic.
Sigh. It's true about the mask rules in Italy. We visited Venice back in April, and both ways, no one wore masks in the Swiss part of our trip, and only grudgingly in the Italian part. When you're used to living a totally normal life, it's difficult to go back to masks and other pandemic measures.
As for moving to Ticino, you won't need any German at all! The language requirements go by canton, so here in Bern I need German (French would be ok too because Bern is a bilingual canton), but in Ticino you just need Italian! Come on over!
Thank you for this. I think we often undercount the global consequences of all the harsh restrictions too - things like delayed (non-covid) vaccination schedules, diversion of resources from other medical projects like malaria prevention, the longterm population health impact of an uptick in alcoholism and anxiety, etc.
Early on, I think lefties really, really latched onto the idea that anyone who opposed harsh restrictions was a "Karen" who "would rather kill grandma than miss getting a haircut." I remember it being a fuel for my sense of alienation in 2020, when my peers would post sneering memes about how Americans just wanted the right to die of Covid in an Applebee's while I was dealing with the collateral impact of those restrictions because I worked with unhoused people who had no means of getting resources when the social services all shut down. There was massive cognitive dissonance to get off a phone call with a weeping elderly person who hadn't eaten in two days because the food banks were empty, then to be around my friends on social media posting snide put-downs about how those protesting fools in Florida would rather get Covid than not go to Dave and Busters*.
The impact of collateral consequences are very real, and there's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy among lefties that we've shut down this much, if we admit we were being a little extra then the Republicans win. You can't criticize lockdowns, because if you do, you're siding with the enemy. It's rough to be around that attitude when sometimes, the enemy might have a point or two.
*Yes, these are all class-coded, no, my peers didn't seem to think about that.
Thank you for sharing this perspective from your experience. (And bless you for working with and helping the most vulnerable members of our society.) I agree that the sunk-cost fallacy is part of this. It is difficult to admit that many of the pandemic measures have caused more harm than good. We think of ourselves as good people--and we are!--but that makes it especially difficult to confront the destructive effects of isolation on people's mental and physical health, and of the school closures on all children, but disadvantaged children above all.
Great post. Two things caught my attention, besides your very interesting comparisons among COVID effects in different countries and factors that help explain them. One: I don't get why it would be "heavy lifting" for a lefty to encounter an argument that some COVID restrictions, in retrospect, went too far. That suggests that lefties are generally intransigent, which I hope isn't true. I have a lot of lefty friends (I am an academic), and there's a lot of reflective discussion about the unintended consequences of measures that were too drastic (such as extended school closings), as well as measures that proved completely wrongheaded in retrospect (such as closing beaches, or prohibitions on being outdoors).
The second is the statement about how Republicans want to make it "as difficult to vote as possible". Perhaps there are Republicans who want this, but I don't know any. I also have a lot of friends who vote Republican (they're not academic colleagues, ha), and they are concerned about ballot integrity after an election during which election-integrity rules were suspended in many places because of COVID. They are also concerned about practices such as "ballot harvesting", legal in some states, which includes allowing activist foot-soldiers (paid by partisan organizations, sometimes paid by the ballot) to collect ballots and deliver them (to post offices or drop boxes), which breaks the "chain of custody" for the ballot. It is a system that can be abused, and certainly it is abused to some extent.
When you imply that the US should be like Switzerland in terms of voting practices, I think you must take into account something else that you mentioned about cultural distinctions: the Swiss as rule-followers. I think Switzerland is a very high-trust society (I've been there, traveling from low-trust Italy, and the cultural difference between those two is immediately obvious, as reflected in things like incidence of petty theft, sexual harrassment on crowded buses, or tolerance for littering.) That same rule-following instinct that you believe limited COVID transmission also sustains trust in election integrity.
And I'm curious about Swiss voting practices. I assume the Swiss postal system is run with great professionalism, that there is no ballot-harvesting, and no drop-boxes.
In any case, there are principled arguments being made in the US (weirdly enough, only ever by Republicans!) in support of election integrity. From my perspective, these are common-sense arguments, made by people who are not out to inhibit voting, but who would simply like to feel the same level of trust in election processes that the Swiss enjoy.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment! I probably committed the error of using anecdata in my accusations against both the left and the right. I have read many articles from the left perspective that continue to be strongly against, for example, open schools, or they advocate for continued mask mandates, "just to be extra safe."
And while you may well be right that there is an opportunity for a security breach when partisan volunteers collect ballots, other Republican practices--including closing polling locations in heavily Democratic areas; using "exact-match" voter ID, where even a stray accent mark will disqualify a ballot; counting an NRA membership card as valid ID but a student ID as invalid; and refusing to count ballots that were post-marked before election day but arrive later--all make it more difficult to vote without improving ballot security.
And I agree with you that the cultural difference between Switzerland and Italy is striking! We visited Italy in the fall of 2019, and there was an internet outage throughout the entire region of Tuscany. For three days! And everyone just kind of shrugged and said, "Meh. What can you do?" As we drove through the tunnel between Italy and Switzerland on our way back, suddenly my phone went crazy with notifications--I could tell the exact moment we cross the border into Switzerland, and its totally solid internet!
I loved those cows at the end !
Aren’t they pretty?
I live in northern Italy, within an hour of the Swiss border, and I cannot properly express the insanity (the public transit mask requirement was dropped just last week... which included our open-air car ferries -- even if you were IN YOUR CAR). Just thinking about it makes me tense up. The weirdest part for me was the widespread compliance. I could not for the life of me figure out why the average not-overly-rule-following Italian was not simply refusing to go along with the bizarre restrictions. But people just seemed to accept whatever wackadoo new thing the government came up with, which made me feel like I was losing my mind.
One big contributor to the higher Italian death rate that I feel is often overlooked is how terrible our emergency medical care is. Preventative and routine healthcare is pretty good, at least where we are, to some extent because it's propped up by people who can afford to going privately for a lot of things. But God help you if you need an ER, where there is no private option. The average wait time at the closest major hospital to us, in the richest region in the country, for anything below "active heart attack" is regularly something like 12-24 hours. And despite the horrifying travesty in Bergamo, thousands of people dying alone without an advocate, and two years of curfews, closures and hygiene theater, absolutely nothing has changed on that front.
So how much German do my husband and I need to learn to move to Ticino?? ;p
Thank you for such an informative comment! I hadn't thought about the state of emergency care in Italy, and how crucial good ERs and ICUs were at the start of the pandemic.
Sigh. It's true about the mask rules in Italy. We visited Venice back in April, and both ways, no one wore masks in the Swiss part of our trip, and only grudgingly in the Italian part. When you're used to living a totally normal life, it's difficult to go back to masks and other pandemic measures.
As for moving to Ticino, you won't need any German at all! The language requirements go by canton, so here in Bern I need German (French would be ok too because Bern is a bilingual canton), but in Ticino you just need Italian! Come on over!
Thank you for this. I think we often undercount the global consequences of all the harsh restrictions too - things like delayed (non-covid) vaccination schedules, diversion of resources from other medical projects like malaria prevention, the longterm population health impact of an uptick in alcoholism and anxiety, etc.
Early on, I think lefties really, really latched onto the idea that anyone who opposed harsh restrictions was a "Karen" who "would rather kill grandma than miss getting a haircut." I remember it being a fuel for my sense of alienation in 2020, when my peers would post sneering memes about how Americans just wanted the right to die of Covid in an Applebee's while I was dealing with the collateral impact of those restrictions because I worked with unhoused people who had no means of getting resources when the social services all shut down. There was massive cognitive dissonance to get off a phone call with a weeping elderly person who hadn't eaten in two days because the food banks were empty, then to be around my friends on social media posting snide put-downs about how those protesting fools in Florida would rather get Covid than not go to Dave and Busters*.
The impact of collateral consequences are very real, and there's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy among lefties that we've shut down this much, if we admit we were being a little extra then the Republicans win. You can't criticize lockdowns, because if you do, you're siding with the enemy. It's rough to be around that attitude when sometimes, the enemy might have a point or two.
*Yes, these are all class-coded, no, my peers didn't seem to think about that.
Thank you for sharing this perspective from your experience. (And bless you for working with and helping the most vulnerable members of our society.) I agree that the sunk-cost fallacy is part of this. It is difficult to admit that many of the pandemic measures have caused more harm than good. We think of ourselves as good people--and we are!--but that makes it especially difficult to confront the destructive effects of isolation on people's mental and physical health, and of the school closures on all children, but disadvantaged children above all.