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Most churches shut down the way they were told to. Most are protecting their congregants and their communities. My ire is not directed at those churches or the people who attend them.
I am very angry at the evangelical dominionist asshats who opened their churches today and encouraged their congregations to come to Palm Sunday services in violation of stay-at-home orders. I'm angry at any congregant who went, especially the ones who are active on the internet and have no good reason not to know how serious this is, except that they're too stupid to listen to experts. I give a little more of a pass to elderly people whose news sources are more limited, but not a whole lot of a pass even there. My most significant ire is reserved for the governors and politicians who either haven't issued stay-at-home orders yet, or did it only recently, or exempted churches from those orders.
Church services are pretty much designed to spread viruses. People sit so close together they are touching all the time. They hug, shake hands, sometimes kiss on the cheek. They sing, which involves an expulsion of air from the lungs with a great deal of force, usually into the airspace of the person sitting in front of them. I can't think of a better place to pick up a virus spread by respiratory droplets than a church service.
What this means is that, a few days from now, a couple of people in each congregation that met today will start to fall ill. It will be obvious that they were spreading the virus at church today, but nobody will worry too much. The people who were near those few who fell ill will still be going shopping. Some will be essential workers who will go to their jobs.
Around Good Friday, a bunch more people will be starting to feel ill. Some will stay home from Good Friday services, but some will go back to church that day (if the pastor wasn't arrested for opening the church today, at least.) They'll spread the virus again. On Easter Saturday, more will be falling ill, but a lot of the people infected today will still be feeling fine on Easter Sunday. They'll go back to church. They'll spread the virus that they're about to get sick with.
Easter Monday comes, and now we're eight days out from the initial super-spreader event that happened this morning in these churches. More people are falling ill. More are getting scared. More are staying home. But it's too late, because by the following Sunday, people in each of those congregations are going to be very, very sick. And the week after that, three weeks from now, they'll be a few ragged, gasping breaths from death.
Not all of them, of course. One or two per pew, probably, given pews that hold an average of ten people. Three of those ten will feel fine. They might still be going about their daily business, unaware that they're asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19. A couple more will have only mild symptoms. Three more of that ten will be very sick but not go to hospital. And about two from every pew will be in hospital, and about one from every other pew will need a ventilator or will die before they can get one.
Their community hospitals will go into overdrive mode if they weren't already. They'll be begging for ventilators nobody has, begging for PPE nobody has, desperately trying to save the lives of all those people who went to church on Palm Sunday. At the same time, they'll be falling ill themselves, because they lacked PPE on Palm Sunday or shortly after it, because they've been working around people with overwhelming viral loads for weeks, because they've been working insane hours for a month already and they're exhausted. At the same time, essential workers in other fields, people who didn't have the privilege of self-isolating, will be falling ill. They'll be competing for beds and ventilators and staff with the churchgoers.
Those congregations will spike the curve in each of their communities. Their hospitals will be overwhelmed, their case loads will blast through the top of the chart and force their local newspapers to do some creative printing to report on the cases, their deaths will fill newspapers to the exclusion of all else.
I'm not angry at people taking chances with their own lives. I'm angry at people spiking the curve for everyone. I'm angry that they are so selfish that they can't see how a quarantine is a completely reasonable imposition on personal liberty and that violating it will cost a lot of lives other than their own.
A few years ago, I read a book about the last great smallpox epidemic, which happened in Montreal in 1885. The super-spreader event then was a funeral for a well-loved bishop in the city. A lot of people who were still healing from smallpox went to the funeral, and spread it. The worst death rate was from a few weeks later.
In this pandemic, Mardi Gras has already emerged as a similar super-spreader moment. The Florida beaches over March Break are up there, too, and the night life in New York around St. Patrick's Day. We can add another super-spreader event to these: Palm Sunday church services.
I am very angry at the evangelical dominionist asshats who opened their churches today and encouraged their congregations to come to Palm Sunday services in violation of stay-at-home orders. I'm angry at any congregant who went, especially the ones who are active on the internet and have no good reason not to know how serious this is, except that they're too stupid to listen to experts. I give a little more of a pass to elderly people whose news sources are more limited, but not a whole lot of a pass even there. My most significant ire is reserved for the governors and politicians who either haven't issued stay-at-home orders yet, or did it only recently, or exempted churches from those orders.
Church services are pretty much designed to spread viruses. People sit so close together they are touching all the time. They hug, shake hands, sometimes kiss on the cheek. They sing, which involves an expulsion of air from the lungs with a great deal of force, usually into the airspace of the person sitting in front of them. I can't think of a better place to pick up a virus spread by respiratory droplets than a church service.
What this means is that, a few days from now, a couple of people in each congregation that met today will start to fall ill. It will be obvious that they were spreading the virus at church today, but nobody will worry too much. The people who were near those few who fell ill will still be going shopping. Some will be essential workers who will go to their jobs.
Around Good Friday, a bunch more people will be starting to feel ill. Some will stay home from Good Friday services, but some will go back to church that day (if the pastor wasn't arrested for opening the church today, at least.) They'll spread the virus again. On Easter Saturday, more will be falling ill, but a lot of the people infected today will still be feeling fine on Easter Sunday. They'll go back to church. They'll spread the virus that they're about to get sick with.
Easter Monday comes, and now we're eight days out from the initial super-spreader event that happened this morning in these churches. More people are falling ill. More are getting scared. More are staying home. But it's too late, because by the following Sunday, people in each of those congregations are going to be very, very sick. And the week after that, three weeks from now, they'll be a few ragged, gasping breaths from death.
Not all of them, of course. One or two per pew, probably, given pews that hold an average of ten people. Three of those ten will feel fine. They might still be going about their daily business, unaware that they're asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19. A couple more will have only mild symptoms. Three more of that ten will be very sick but not go to hospital. And about two from every pew will be in hospital, and about one from every other pew will need a ventilator or will die before they can get one.
Their community hospitals will go into overdrive mode if they weren't already. They'll be begging for ventilators nobody has, begging for PPE nobody has, desperately trying to save the lives of all those people who went to church on Palm Sunday. At the same time, they'll be falling ill themselves, because they lacked PPE on Palm Sunday or shortly after it, because they've been working around people with overwhelming viral loads for weeks, because they've been working insane hours for a month already and they're exhausted. At the same time, essential workers in other fields, people who didn't have the privilege of self-isolating, will be falling ill. They'll be competing for beds and ventilators and staff with the churchgoers.
Those congregations will spike the curve in each of their communities. Their hospitals will be overwhelmed, their case loads will blast through the top of the chart and force their local newspapers to do some creative printing to report on the cases, their deaths will fill newspapers to the exclusion of all else.
I'm not angry at people taking chances with their own lives. I'm angry at people spiking the curve for everyone. I'm angry that they are so selfish that they can't see how a quarantine is a completely reasonable imposition on personal liberty and that violating it will cost a lot of lives other than their own.
A few years ago, I read a book about the last great smallpox epidemic, which happened in Montreal in 1885. The super-spreader event then was a funeral for a well-loved bishop in the city. A lot of people who were still healing from smallpox went to the funeral, and spread it. The worst death rate was from a few weeks later.
In this pandemic, Mardi Gras has already emerged as a similar super-spreader moment. The Florida beaches over March Break are up there, too, and the night life in New York around St. Patrick's Day. We can add another super-spreader event to these: Palm Sunday church services.