Prior to the recent protests, the US seemed to be making some progress on controlling coronavirus, with an r0 of probably around 0.9, a slowly declining number of cases, and many states starting to ease lockdown. In particular, restrictions on large gatherings helped significantly slow the spread, because they reduce both the number of infected people who can spread it and the number of new people who can become infected. One (BERI funded!) study suggested that banning large gatherings reduced r0 by around 28%.
Unfortunately, protests seem in many ways ideal for spreading the disease. They involve a large number of people in a relatively small area for an extended period of time. Even protests which were advertised as being socially distanced often do not end up that way. While many people wear masks, photos of protests make clear that many do not, and those that are are often using cloth masks that are significantly less effective than surgical or n95s in the face of repeated exposure. Additionally, protests often involve people shouting or chanting, which cause infectious droplets to be released from people's mouths. Exposure to tear gas can apparently also increase susceptibility, as well as cramped indoor conditions for those arrested.
It's hard to estimate how many new cases will be caused by the protests, because there doesn’t seem to be good statistics on the number of people at protests, so we can't model the physical dynamics easily. A simple method would be to assume we have lost the benefits of the ban on large gatherings over the last week or so. On the one hand, this may be an over-estimate, because fortunately most people continue to socially distance, and protests take place mainly outside. On the other hand, protesters are actively seeking out (encouraging others to seek out) boisterous large gatherings in a way they were not pre-March, which could make things even worse. On net I suspect it may under-estimate the incremental spread, but given the paucity of other statistics we will use it as our central scenario.
If the r0 was around 0.9 before, this suggests the protests might have temporarily increased it to around 1.25, and hopefully it will quickly return to 0.9 after the protests end. Even if we assume no chain infections during the protest - so no-one who has been infected at a protest goes on to infect another protester - this means the next step in disease prevalence would be a 25% increase instead of a 10% decrease. Unfortunately the exponential nature of infection means this will have a large impact. If you assume around 1% of the US was infected previously, had we stayed on the previous r0=0.9 we would end up with around 9% more of the population infected from here on before the disease was fully suppressed. In contrast, with this one-time step-up in r0, we will see around 12.5% of the population infected from here - an additional 3.5% of the population.
Assuming an IFR of around 0.66%, that's a change from around 190,000 deaths to more like 265,000. Protesters skew younger than average, suggesting that this IFR may be an over-estimate, but on the other hand, they are also disproportionately African American, who seem to be more susceptible to the disease, and the people they go on to infect will include older people.
So it seems quite plausible to me that the protests might cause around 75,000 thousand additional Americans to die of covid, including probably over 10,000 African Americans. Additionally, despite the massive reduction in international travel, there will probably be some spread to other countries, especially if they have copy-cat protests.
There is clearly a lot of uncertainty about this number - my guess is that the actual r0 impact may be higher and longer lasting, but the IFR may be lower. If r0 is sufficiently low the disease will be suppressed more quickly afterwards, potentially making these numbers significantly too high (if the r0 were as low as 0.7, the protests would only cause an incremental 20,000 deaths). If r0 is a little higher then these numbers will be a substantial under-estimate. On the other hand, if the r0 was sufficiently high then containment will inevitably fail, and almost everyone in the US will catch it regardless of protests!
However, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the incremental number of deaths is quite likely many thousands. (In contrast, the Washington Post estimated that US police killed 41 unarmed people in 2019, of which 10 were black.)
My guess is that the indirect and statistical nature of these deaths makes people less sensitive to them. Probably if they were more emotionally salient, many protesters would not be willing to so endanger their lives.
As a result it seems to me that, even ignoring injuries and fatalities directly incurred during the protests, and the damage caused by associated looting, that the protests are quite bad, and it would be good if instead people stayed home to save lives and protect their local health systems.
I think a crux for some protesters will be how much total damage they think bad policing is doing in the USA.
While police killings or murders draw the most attention, much more damage is probably done in other ways, such as through over-incarceration, petty harassment, framing innocent people, bankrupting folks through unnecessary fines, enforcing bad laws such a drug prohibition, assaults, and so on. And that total damage accumulates year after year.
On top of this we could add the burden of crime itself that results from poor policing practices, including a lack of community trust in police due to their oppressive behaviour and lack of accountability.
Regardless of where a consequentialist analysis would come down, it is a tragedy that people feel they need to choose between missing an opportunity to fix a horrible system of state violence, and not spreading a dangerous pandemic.
I think this is the wrong question.
The point of lockdown is that for many people it is individually rational to break the lockdown - you can see your family, go to work, or have a small wedding ceremony with little risk and large benefits - but this imposes external costs on other people. As more and more people break lockdown, these costs get higher and higher, so we need a way to persuade people to stay inside - to make them consider not only the risks to themselves, but also the risks they are imposing on other people. We solve this with a combination of social stigma and legal sanctions.
The issue is exactly the same with ideologies. To environmentalists, preventing climate change is more important than covid. To pro-life people, preventing over half a million innocent deaths every year is more important than covid. To animal rights activists, ending factory farming is more important than covid. To anti-lockdown activists, preventing mass business failure and a depression is more important than covid. But collectively we are all better off if everyone stops holding protests for now.
The correct question is "is it good if I, and everyone else who thinks their reason is as good as I think this one is, breaks the lockdown?" Failure to consider this, as it appears most people have, is to grossly privilege this one cause over others and defect in this iterated prisoners dilemma - and the tragic consequence will be many deaths.
I think this argument conflates the fact that p, and people's belief that p. Consider these two principles
1. If people correctly believe that going on the protests produces more good than harm, then they should go on the protests.
2. If people believe that going on the protests produces more good than harm, then they should go on the protests.
Principle 1 seems to me clearly correct from a utilitarian point of view. Principle 2 is absurd - people can have mad and false beliefs. If someone believes that going on a neo-nazi rally is going to produce greater marginal benefits than staying at home, that doesn't mean that they should in fact break the lockdown. The proposition "The BLM protests will produce more good than harm" doesn't entail principle 2.
(I'm not saying that the protests do in fact produce more good than harm, I'm just criticising Larks' counter-argument in the above comment)
Who is the 'we' here and by whose yardstick the benefit measured?
Animal rights activists are not turning out in large numbers to get tear gassed and beaten for the cause. This is pretty good evidence that they are not in the set of 'everyone else who thinks their reason is as good as I think this one is'.
As usual, there are better alternatives being neglected here. Those who want more lockdown have, in this situation, two options to get it: more violence or more concessions.
Negotiation is certainly possible. So, a consequentialist might lay additional covid deaths at the step of a government which failed to negotiate.
Add to this the obvious virtue of the demand to end police brutality and recognize that black lives matter. That being an option now, it seems particularly bizarre, and wrong, to delay granting the wish.
Investigations into police brutality that follow viral footage have historically been quite harmful for all involved. The upside is a small reduction in police brutality. The downside is a massive increase in non-police brutality, as found in this recent paper:
Indeed the harm done by one day of reduced policing in Chicago may have already rendered the protests a net negative, even ignoring spreading Coronavirus:
I also think you misunderstand your fellow EAs:
Many animal rights activists believe that the status quo is far far worse than the holocaust. There are billions of animals being farmed for meat today, generally treated very cruelly. Whatever you think of the state of US race relations, it is clear that, if animals matter, they are much worse off - both much more numerous and treated much much worse!
I think what you are missing is that there are factors other than believed importance of cause that determine one's actions. For example, animal rights activists might care about suppressing the pandemic! Or they might think getting tear gassed was counter-productive!
You suggest that concessions will help reduce the scale of the protests, but my impression is that the literature suggests that actually repression is effective. For example, this study on the 2011 London Riots, where first-time looters were punished relatively harshly, found it was successful in reducing crime:
Similarly, this study on Israeli counter-terrorism police:
Finally my guess is that this is sort of irrelevant anyway because OP is probably not a senior government official; she may be able to persuade some friends not to go protest, but probably can't change US policy.
Presented with options to get largely non-violent protestors-for-justice to go home quickly:
a) Justice
b) Repression
Your response is that b) is a tried and tested intervention. Seriously?
That is not the path to human flourishing.
I don't think this is an accurate portrayal of what Dale was trying to say.
I don't see them actively recommending a particular policy in the post -- just noting that some studies of repressive behavior find that it may lead to a certain outcome. It can be true that repression sometimes quells riots while also being true that it has many other negative outcomes and should clearly be avoided. (Though I didn't see Dale say that, either, and I don't want to put words in their mouth.)
Of course, the vague term "repression" and the differing social context of the examples Dale cited mean that blanket statements like "literature suggests that repression is effective" aren't very useful, and I wish they'd acknowledged that more clearly in their post, especially given the awful consequences of policies like "harsher prison sentences for a lot of people."
*****
As for the claim that "justice" will clear up protests quickly; leaving aside the question of which specific demands will have a positive impact on their own merit (likely many), have we seen enough demands granted so far to have a sense of what usually happens after vis-a-vis public protest? Especially in cases where actually following through on promises of change will take a long time?
The clearest example of responsiveness to protest I can recall (haven't been following the topic too closely) was action taken by the Minneapolis City Council to ban certain restraint practices and explore "dismantling" the police department. Did either action lead directly to a reduction in public protest?
Even if it isn't difficult to cast blame at one's government, this doesn't mean much for the people who have died. It also seems unlikely that governments are going to feel much additional pressure from deaths for which they bear only indirect responsibility.
I don't have any developed opinion on the original post, but I did want to take mild issue with the idea of thinking about deaths as a bargaining tool. (I'm sure you meant for this to be a neutral/factual point about negotiating, but it's hard for me to shake off the devastating impact of additional deaths.)
I suspect that a lot of protesters would be very angry we're even raising these kinds of issues, but...
If we're being consequentialist about this, then the impact of the protests is not the difference between fixing these injustices, and the status quo continuing forever. It's the difference between a chance of fixing these injustices now, and a chance of fixing them next time a protest-worthy incident comes around.
Sadly, opportunities for these kinds of protests seem to come around fairly regularly in the US. So I expect these protests are probably only reducing future injustices by a few years in expectation. Add to that the decent chance that the protests don't achieve very much[1], and it might be even less.
Normally, of course, it would be well worth it. But if it's true that mass protests during a pandemic will cause many thousands of deaths, then the above reasoning becomes pretty important.
This is certainly true.
In particular, it's important to ask how a pandemic affects the chances of success. If it decreases them (say, because people are unusually unsympathetic to people seen as irresponsibly crowding together) then the expected value of these protests (relative to waiting) falls. If it increases them (say, because politicians and public authorities are unusually keen to resolve the crisis and get people off the streets) then that would be a counterargument to my claims here. ↩︎
A couple more weak arguments pointing towards protesting now:
if protest success depends on number of people, the fact that many people are currently out of work may make current protests more likely to succeed.
if protests are about demonstrating strength of feeling, then saying (with one's actions) 'I care enough about this to risk a deadly disease' arguably does that pretty effectively.
There's also the question of whether protesting meaningfully affects the election, if so the effect size of that could dwarf everything else, but I don't have any idea which way it cuts and can see good arguments in both directions.
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of response I'd like to see.
I agree that the first point points in a pro-protesting direction. The second might also but I am uneasy about it (for a young person, most of the impact of their getting sick is infecting others, so the actual message is "I care enough about this to risk giving others a deadly disease", which is somewhat less attractive). I agree that the third could go either way.
(Notably, the third point makes rioting an even more terrible idea than I already thought it was.)
I didn't mean to imply that the protests would fix the whole problem, obviously they won't.
As you say you'd need to multiply through by a distribution for 'likelihood of success' and 'how much of the problems solved'.
Sure, I didn't think you were saying that the protests would be a panacea. My main point was less about probability/degree of success and more about counterfactual impact.
These points don't apply to the UK and elsewhere to anywhere near the same extent, so the post does at least seem like a good argument against the protests in the UK and elsewhere.
There are other factors (relating to points made in the post) to suggest the protests in UK and EU may carry less risk comparatively. Police tactics at protests in different countries may be a relevant consideration - e.g. the heavy use of tear gas in the US (bad for spreading covid, as larks notes) isn't happening in the UK. R0 also a relevant consideration - likely much lower in many european countries now than in many parts of the US.
Is the R0 lower in Europe? The 3 day average deaths per million is similar in the US, UK, Sweden, and (eg) Italy. Fatal shootings by police officers of citizens per capita are about 170x lower in the UK than the US. Imprisonment as % of the population is about 20x higher in US than US. Prison conditions seem far worse in the US than UK
I would expect deaths to be on a lag (it takes a few weeks on average for people to get sick enough to die). At a quick glance, France, Spain, Italy and Germany are reporting an average of well under 1k new cases a day for the last 7 days, compared to 19-25K/day for the US (obviously necessary to correct for the USA having a 5-6x larger population than these countries).
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Edit: this site estimates R0 as being 1.02 in the US overall, and <1 in all western and northern European countries (although >1 in several eastern european countries)
https://covid19-projections.com/#europe-summary
Contra: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/07/britain-is-not-america-but-we-too-are-disfigured-by-deep-and-pervasive-racism
Interesting stats on police violence in the UK:
https://www.inquest.org.uk/bame-deaths-in-police-custody
Might suggest that the benefits of protesting in the UK and elsewhere outweigh the costs of virus spread especially given the differential state of the pandemic.
I don't think this is a counterpoint to my claim which was that the problem of state mistreatment of black people is considerably lower in the UK vs the US. I didn't claim that there wasn't unfair mistreatment of black people in the UK.
These articles do not appear to contradict what Halstead said at all.
The first link appears to be an opinion piece rather than a serious piece of analysis - for example it does not include any comparison of the rates of Police killing between the UK and the US. It complains that UK police haven't been found guilty of murdering black men for a long time, but does not compare this to the number of unarmed black men shot by cops in the UK - a number which is approximately zero most years! It mentions that black men are imprisoned at higher rates than white men in the UK, but does not compare this to the rate at which they commit crimes, which is also significantly higher. Indeed, the only time it actually makes a direct comparison between the US and UK it actually (begrudgingly) agrees with Halstead:
Overall I would not consider that article to be a particularly serious analysis of the issue.
Your second link (which I see you found by following a link in the Guardian article) is significantly more data-orientated, but again the only time it directly touches on the issue at hand it seems to agree with Halstead:
Finally, neither article contains any comparisons to the pandemic.