As regular readers of my posts know, I oppose lockdowns, favor vaccines, oppose government hyping the threat of Covid to children, and oppose government mask mandates.
So when life starts to look kind of normal, especially for children, I cheer.
I had much to cheer about last night, Halloween. Normally, we have 50 to 100 children come by and collect candy. Last year, we had 3. This year we had just over 60.
Many of them wore masks, of course, because those were part of the costumes. But they were typically masks with holes for nose and mouth. In other words, they weren’t the kind you use to prevent the spread of Covid.
Also, I didn’t see kids or their parents fretting about the fact that I wasn’t wearing rubber gloves while handing out candy.
All in all, a normal evening.
A couple of fun highlights: My pleasure is in asking the kids what they’re dressed up as because if it isn’t ghosts, witches, clowns, or Captain America, I don’t know. One young girl, who was probably about 10 or 11, said she was a character from Harry Potter and then with total pride told me she had read every Potter book and seen every Potter movie. Towards about 8:30, when the teenagers were coming by, one had a fun snarky comment. His friends had each been saying “Trick or treat.” He said, “I’ve been saying ‘Trick or treat’ all night. I’m due for a trick.”
One interesting thing I noticed. We live in a fairly pricy neighborhood where there are not a lot of Latinos. But in a typical year, about 35% of the kids are Latino. This year I would put it at about 15 to 20%.
READER COMMENTS
Art K
Nov 1 2021 at 7:20pm
Great to hear you had a good Halloween. This year felt more normal. Last year’s trick or treating started out quite spooky (due to the lack of kids). It ended up in the favor of the kids that did go out as they got an extra large haul!
Jon Murphy
Nov 1 2021 at 7:29pm
This Halloween just felt more normal. I spent the weekend with friends in an AirBnB (we were playing Dungeons and Dragons all weekend, so the trip was called “AirDnD”. It felt good to be surrounded by people and just laugh again.
Charley Hooper
Nov 2 2021 at 2:26pm
How fun!
MikeP
Nov 1 2021 at 10:04pm
I live in Santa Clara County, not Monterey County. We had a below average number of trick-or-treaters, but we got some and we rarely get a lot.
It was sad that everyone who came to the door was wearing a mask, though I could not be certain about the teenagers with costume masks over their faces. No one seemed to mind that we were not wearing masks while handing out candy, and one neighbor who came to talk for several minutes took her mask off while talking. So I hope it was more of a case of their being afraid to offend door openers rather than actually thinking that masks would do any good while trick-or-treating.
On the other hand, Friday night and Saturday night I was required to wear a mask at the high school football stadium. This insanity from the school district is entirely virtue signalling to their clientele, so my hope may be misplaced.
I was in San Diego three weeks ago. What a relief to not have to think about masks! I must live in the stupidest place on earth.
Rob Rawlings
Nov 1 2021 at 11:41pm
I’m glad things were livelier elsewhere but I have to report that in my area of Arcadia, California Halloween was very quiet. We had 2 callers (30+ in normal times) and when I went on my regular evening dog walk I did not encounter a single trick-or-treater. Very few houses seemed to be decorated compared to two years ago also.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 2 2021 at 6:29am
What, if any, was the optimal restriction on social interaction instead of lockdowns?
Should governments have intervened in the development and marketing of vaccines? Should they be free to the vaccinated person? Should there be any public policy dis/incentive for no/vaccination? How did actual policy depart from the optimal
What is the difference between “hype” and providing information about estimates of spread conditioned on no behavioral or policy change. What information should have been made available how and by whom?
Is there a difference between an unenforced mask mandate and a recommendation? What was the optimal masking policy?
Does anyone wear masks outdoors or wear rubber gloves while handling objects out there? Or is this just a comparison with your place a year ago?
MikeP
Nov 2 2021 at 11:44am
Excellent questions. There’s a lot to answer there. But let’s do the easy one first.
What was the optimal masking policy?
Masks in health care settings. Masks on and among the symptomatic. Masks recommended against at all other times.
This is exactly what the optimal masking policy was in 2019, for very good reasons. Nothing new has been learned since then except that we should be more certain than ever that at least cloth and surgical masks are useless at preventing aerosol transmission of viruses.
With even the Bangladesh study showing zero benefit from mask-wearing among the working age population, there are no RCTs that demonstrate that mask-wearing has any beneficial effect on influenza, influenza-likeillness, or SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 5 2021 at 6:47am
Why? If masks do some good among the symptomatic (which way or both do they restrict infection) why are they recommended against in other settings? What is the cost benefit analysis? [Let’s leave aside the circular argument that masks are virtue signaling, to reassure others that the wearer does not wish to infect them.]
Ryan M
Nov 2 2021 at 12:21pm
Re: masks/rubber-gloves, etc…
My wife and I took a trip through Yellowstone a few weeks ago. That took us from central WA over to Idaho, Montana, into Wyoming, and back up and through Montana again. It is funny to see the way people behave. At Old Faithful, we went into 2 gift-shops and a grill, and saw only a handful of masks. But when we went by the visitor’s center (a little museum by Old Faithful), it was being enforced, and there was nearly 100% compliance (we didn’t go in). Virtually nobody else in the park wore masks.
Montana is almost completely maskless. We didn’t go into any place that required them – BUT – when we went into the heavily liberal city of Bozeman, we started to see a lot of people wearing masks both in and out of stores. Idaho was also almost completely maskless. In fact, if you visit Idaho right now, there isn’t really anything there to remind you that there ever was any such thing as a “pandemic.” It’s almost even a little surreal (as in video-games or dystopian movies where you see signs from past civilizations) to see little reminders, all being ignored.
But when we came back into WA, it was another story. First gas station I stopped at, I was asked to put on a mask (so I left without buying anything). If you go to Seattle (or anywhere near there) right now, or other heavily liberal places in WA, you’ll see universal masking, rubber gloves, people staying away from one another… Seattle has implemented Vaccine passports (you also see them, again, in liberal places like – unfortunately! – the theater where our symphony plays).
But if you look at the numbers in those places, there is no meaningful difference. In the free and open Idaho/Montana, covid exists in its little waves almost identically to the way it does in WA. It has once again receded virtually everywhere, but if you tried to guess where it was worst and where it was receding and when, based on masking or other covid “safety” protocols, it would be impossible to do so.
That we have largely ignored this is absolutely astonishing. That a person can drive through Idaho, into Washington, and not wonder why it is that the state with people acting normally is no different from the state where the government has suspended all individual liberty and forced its population to behave like hypochondriacs, is mind-boggling.
And that anyone still believes that these coercions are either necessary or justified is absolutely criminal.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 5 2021 at 7:02am
The observations are interesting, but clearly not totally a mater of government policy, since a) the is practically not enforcement and not even a recommendation to wear gloves or masks outside. [I have not observed glove-wearing since the very early days when it was though that tactile transmission was a thing.]
I suspect the differences you see are differences in people’s implicit models and/or weights in their utility functions. Some people think that wearing a mask (and gloves???) reduces their chances of infecting other people with a disease and they are willing to accepts some inconvenience not to do so and to be the seen as the kind of person who would not wish to do so. Others do not think masks are effective enough to be worth the trouble or that masks signal that they are high fearful of becoming infected when they are not.
Mark Brophy
Nov 2 2021 at 1:57pm
Optimally, nobody wears masks even in health care settings except surgeons who are trying to avoid being sprayed by body fluids from their patients. Masks can stop body fluids from going in your mouth but cannot stop you from breathing everything in the air. As a clue, consider that the government wants you to wear two masks because a single mask is useless. Similarly, the government wants you to take a third shot because the first two didn’t work; doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is illogical.
steve
Nov 2 2021 at 6:48pm
Optimal would be for everyone to wear them inside when the endemic rate is high. There is a lot of literature showing that they are effective, starting with very good lab studies. What should be remembered is the this is kind fo nuanced so no one on the internet will care to understand. What it means is that masks are very good at stopping spread by droplets which does account for some of the spread. They have some effect against aerosols but it is not as good. So the longer you are around other people or are around a larger number of people and if ventilation os poor the less protection you get from the mask. Also, there is very little transmission outdoors. Wearing a mask there doesnt help much.
Also, since people here dont seem to know we have been wearing masks around pts hospitalized for flu in hospitals for quite a while.
Steve
MikeP
Nov 2 2021 at 4:22pm
Should governments have intervened in the development and marketing of vaccines? Should they be free to the vaccinated person? Should there be any public policy dis/incentive for no/vaccination? How did actual policy depart from the optimal
On vaccinations, yes, the government should have pre-bought vaccines like they did, if not much more than they did. And vaccines should have been approved for emergency use once they were demonstrated as safe — likely around April 2020. That would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives as production ramped up and results were gathered. But the government should not have distributed the vaccines they bought. Rather they should have auctioned them back into the market where people who know how distribute medicines could do so.
Should this vaccine be free? Certainly. It is a genuine public good. The value to society of vaccinating a random person is well above the private value to that person, enough that the state should be outright paying the reluctant to get vaccinated.
On the other hand, government mandates and pressure to get vaccinated are very divisive and extremely idiotic, serving to do nothing but score points with the politicians’ own supporters as they laugh at the rubes. They are effectively killing grandma because her son doesn’t want to be bossed around. This mentality of the state bullying the resistant while being cheered by the masses defies description.
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 2 2021 at 8:20am
We had three groups of kids come to our door. I don’t think any of them were wearing masks. They were all excited to be out trick or treating.
My daughter and I were on a getaway a week ago up in Deep Creek Lake which is right near the West Virginia border on the MD panhandle. We were in a ‘Tiny House‘ cabin (we are both fans of tiny house shows). This is a very conservative area of the state and the three westernmost counties would like to secede from MD and be incorporated into West Virginia. One of the restaurants we visited had a mask mandate but the other four did not.
Gene Laberg
Nov 2 2021 at 9:58am
Alan,
I enjoyed your comment about the 3 Western counties in MD embracing secession. I grew up in Cumberland. In the 1970s, J. Glen Beall, a Republican, was one of MD’s senators. I suspect you will spot a unicorn around Deep Creek Lake before you see another senator from that part of the state.
Grand Rapids Mike
Nov 2 2021 at 10:13am
In Mt Prospect, Ill, my daughter and son in law reported 395 Trick and Treaters. Almost ran out of candy and they needed to do a candy store run. At my house in Arlingto Heights, Ill only about 26 kids showed up, mostly younger, less than expected. Usual have a bigger run of kids in early teens, but not this year. Also the costumes were fairly creative. Now have an excess supply of candy. Will need to redo my candy forecasting model.
David Henderson
Nov 2 2021 at 11:28am
Thanks for all the feedback above. Now I feel even luckier than I did.
Alan, re Deep Creek Lake. In August 1982, a month after my wife-to-be and I started living together and a week before I started my new job at the Council of Economic Advisers, we rented a basic cabin on Deep Creek Lake. Your story brought back those memories. We got there and found that it didn’t even pass my standards for cleanliness, let alone those of my wife. So we went to a supermarket and got all kinds of cleaning supplies. 3 hours later, it was in very nice shape and we had a glorious week.
Jason S.
Nov 2 2021 at 11:47am
In New Hampshire, 2020 Halloween was like a normal Halloween, except that our town canceled the big extravaganza down in the village, so all the kids trick or treated in the neighborhood, and there were hordes of them. This year, the village extravaganza was on again, so neighborhood trick or treaters were down, but still reasonably numerous.
Ryan M
Nov 2 2021 at 12:08pm
Interesting thing about that – things have been returning to normal virtually everywhere, except in places where it is forced. Even though I see some people still going nuts with the masks (even in cars or on streets), most interactions are normal, and there are maskless people in literally every store I go into. I don’t get hassled by employees (generally), and certainly not by other people walking around.
That being said – it is the forced covid-hysteria stuff that still really bothers me. My wife and I have been to several autumn-type gatherings that would otherwise make us think that life has returned to normal (our kids go to a private school that does not do masks or any other covid “safety” protocols, and the kids/teachers are healthy as can be; our church last week was packed and I didn’t see even one mask); but at one of those gatherings, someone told us that Jay Inslee (our governor in WA) is planning to announce a new universal vaccine mandate – that will mean vaccine passports to enter restaurants and so forth (already in effect in Seattle), mandatory vaccines for kids to go to school (mine won’t, but this will apply to the whole rest of the population)…
This is coming at a time when covid is all but gone in our state – it has clearly become endemic, we’ve never had hospital capacity problems, and the “worst-of-the-worst” delta “wave” came and went unnoticed by most people. But our government is doubling down on these “emergency” powers, which, as far as I can tell, being based on very little to begin with, have no end-date (and certainly no benchmark for when the emergency is no longer justified), which means that we really do have an emperor instead of a governor, and the state is hell-bent on making all of this a permanent state of affairs.
So we have 2 very interesting realities – on the one hand, life is all but back to normal; people aren’t really scared in any large numbers, they interact as they’ve always interacted (but for a handful of covid-hystericals) – but on the other hand, our government continues to exercise its tyrannical “this is for your own good” nanny-statism. Kids are still masked-up in school (though they run around the playground interacting as they always have), my courtroom is still holding all of its hearings (even trials!) over zoom … and we’re about to be hit with ever more oppressive measures.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 5 2021 at 7:19am
“nanny-stat-ism” “for your own good”
Maybe the reason is that the unvaccinated spread the disease more than the unvaccinated and it “for the other guy’s own good.” This does not mean that the implicit Pigou tax on un-vaccination in WA may be un optimally high.
I agree that there ought to be periodic random testing to see when different spread-prevention measures become unnecessary
Scott Sumner
Nov 2 2021 at 2:47pm
We had our busiest Halloween ever. (Almost ran out of candy.) I live in Orange County.
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