Gov Baker Has Done Real Harm to the State of MA

I've read several people arguing that Baker is doing the best he can and that he's doing everything that he thinks will be permitted.  I would argue that he is not.  

I would argue that public messaging is important and that the fact that he has been saying that the entirety of the issue is house parties is a problem.  By downplaying the situation, he has contributed to the confusion among many who struggle to understand that we're still in the midst of a global mess where relaxing will cause many more cases, many more adverse health situations, and many more deaths than if we all kept up our guard.  Furthermore, if he truly did wish that he could do more, his downplaying of the situation and pushing the house-party narrative is causing the issues he's facing.  By promoting this idea, business owners who feel that everything should be fine now for them to re-open see their feelings confirmed by his statements and push all the stronger.  By promoting this idea, people on the rightwing of MA politics see their beliefs that all business should be as usual and people should just take their health as their own responsibility, because it's just because the stupid people are doing stupid things.  By promoting this idea, people who might be more restricted in their small gatherings feel like these are ok now and have been having get togethers when, in fact, the danger had only lessened and hadn't really gone away at all.  By promoting this idea, he's making the job of promoting the truth of the spread that much more difficult.  By promoting this idea, he has made the potential political backlash for any action against something that clearly, from his own narrative, isn't a big deal and we have properly managed.  

Promoting the idea that the increased cases since the start of summer was due to house parties is not the only way in which Baker has downplayed the situation either.  The COVID-19 reports his administration puts out, while full of useful information, is also full of information that is less useful and his administration promotes that less useful information as if it is more important than the useful stuff.  The reports have changed periodically and every single time the daily report is updated, it is updated in a way to make the situation look slightly better than it would look if you were viewing the older version.  Often it has further downplayed the information that looks bad by moving it to later in the report or by putting less bad-looking (and potentially less relevant) information at the same level of importance.  This obfuscation and misdirection is an intentional effort to downplay the situation.  This, above all else, leads me to believe he does not want to deal with the situation, because this would be one of the easiest ways in which to change the narrative and promote people behaving in better ways.

Furthermore, Baker waited until after the huge-public-bar-and-party-behavior holiday near the start of our spread.  This delay of a couple days very likely caused the spread to be hugely exasperated.  This delay was to avoid financially impacting bars, where this is essentially their version of retailer's Christmas and the bars had already gone into a huge amount of debt in order to stock up on supplies which they would not be able to sell.... so, instead of bailing out bars across the state and protecting citizens, Baker decided our health was less important than the principle of the state not providing economic assistance.

Furthermore, Baker pushed for us to re-open far quicker than was reasonable given how long it takes to determine the outcome of a particular level of re-opening.  Logic would suggest that you wait to see the impact of a particular re-opening phase before DECIDING whether to move forward with the next.  This is, in fact, what Baker said they were going to do.  But with COVID-19, as with everything, understanding what you're dealing with is everything.  In order to make an informed decision, you need to:

• Account for delay in people's behavior.  For example, if you're reopening restaurants for dine-in, most people eat out on Thursday through Sunday, so if you're re-opening restaurants on a Monday, part of the delay in figuring out when you can expect the full results of re-opening to come into play is to wait until the weekend after the re-opening.  So, that adds a 6-day delay right there.
• At the time that we were re-opening for phases 1-3 we were seeing a delay of stabilization of the known cases for a given day of roughly 2 weeks.  That is to say, the cases for June 1 didn't stop increasing regularly (and by double digits) until about June 15.... so we can't say we truly appreciate what cases came in until that time.  This adds a 14-day delay in being able to analyze the re-opening.
• People typically see their symptoms 7-14 days after they were exposed.  This means you have to add another 14 days to window to analyze the re-opening.
• And for any analysis to occur, you really should have several days of numbers, I would promote a 7-day average as the cases that come in on a weekend have always been lower than those that come in on weekdays.  This adds another 7 days to the window.

So, we should have had the decision to move to the next phase at the end of the sum of the above days, or about 6 weeks.  Instead, we were re-opening to the next phase every 2 weeks and even doing half-phase steps so we were seeing a change to the level of re-opening just about every week in some cases.  This directly contradicts the idea of re-opening in a safe manner because it is quite literally impossible to identify when you've reached the maximum point you should be re-opening based on avoiding increasing the spread.  Once you get past a point of re-opening, it is extremely hard to push back to close down that phase because there was a push to re-open to that point and there are added expenses for a business to get things started again and so it is even more problematic for them to close down again.  Also, people assume that if you re-opened to a particular phase, you've done your analysis and found that it was safe to do so and you're now suggesting you were wrong... which Baker of course wouldn't want to do.  

In addition to allowing more risky behavior, and indeed promoting it, re-opening like this also contributed the message Baker promoted that we were doing better than we actually were at fighting COVID-19.

If Baker really had our safety in mind, he made the task of pushing to put our safety first so much more difficult on his own and so, regardless of his intent, I blame him for his behavior throughout this year and will continue to do so.  I'll give him credit when he does something that he should be given credit for.  

Putting in place what is essentially a curfew may seem like it's doing something, and it will likely slow the increase we're seeing somewhat, but it won't drive the numbers down like we need to.  It won't stop the spread we see from businesses that are open during the day nor the in-person dining nor the school districts that have in-person learning going on nor the gyms that have re-opened... It may cause some people to pay attention and recognize they shouldn't have get-togethers, which is really the only reason I believe this may slow the increase of spread.  

Baker does not have your health at the forefront of his mind and, regardless of how he may personally feel, his actions are harming the health of our state.