Public Comment

Are Berkeley Public Health’s policy decisions rooted in magical thinking?

In theatrical productions of Peter Pan, the character Tinker Bell (typically represented on stage as a prop or spot-light effect, with off-stage voicing) takes poison and begins to die. 

Breaking the fourth wall, the young audience is told that if they all believe Tinker Bell is real, she will in fact live. Children are told to clap to signal their belief. When the performers judge that the children have clapped enough, Tinker Bell returns to life on stage. 

Tinker Bell Theory is a theory that life threatening peril ends because enough people believe that it has ended. 

On stage, Tinker Bell Theory works because, after all, both Tinker Bell and the poison are, in the end, imaginary. In real life, belief alone won’t rescue someone suffering from poisoning. 

Is Berkeley’s Public Health Officer relying on Tinker Bell Theory when lifting indoor mask mandates? It certainly seems possible: Berkeley’s rates of proved transmission and hospitalization are quite high. In earlier times, rates this high justified strong masking requirements. Today, they justify (per our official) ending almost all masking requirements. 

All of this is against a background of recent clinical studies that raise grave concerns that infections, even among vaccinated and boosted people, and children, may be setting up the whole population for an explosion of grave long-term outcomes such as early onset dementia and (other) autoimmune diseases, and premature death. 

In other words, the short term fall in the mortality of infections is not a reliable measure of the seriousness or consequences of even infections that initially appear mild or asymptomatic. 

There are reasons to hope that being vaccinated and boosted may make such grave longer-term outcomes less likely, but nothing close to scientific certainty of that. The only evidence is empirical but speculatively interpreted – it is at the stage of a hypothesis, not a well tested theory. 

Berkeley and all Bay Area counties except Santa Clara County will lift nearly all indoor mask requirements, encouraging people to gather in indoor environments where transmission is extremely common and occurs easily. You might think Santa Clara County is a more dangerous environment for COVID than Berkeley but you would be wrong. 

Let’s contrast the decision of the Santa Clara Public Health Officer with that of Berkeley, using the three statistical measures of danger on the basis of which the Santa Clara officer based her choice: the rate of vaccination in the population, the current proportion of the population in the hospital, and the rate of infection in the population: 

Vaccination Rate

Santa Clara County: 88% Berkeley: 92% 

Current portion of population in the hospital 

Santa Clara County: 0.02% Berkeley: 0.14% 

Rate of infection

Santa Clara County: 88 per 100,000 people per day Berkeley: 92 per 100,000 people per day 

On this basis, Berkeley currently appears to be a a significantly more dangerous place than Santa Clara County, yet the Santa Clara County officer is alarmed enough by the situation there to hold mask mandates in place, while in Berkeley they are being all but eliminated. 

Nationwide advocacy to remove masks as reported in the press seem to rest on economic concerns, and alleged but far from scientific assessments of the public mental health consequences of masking. 

Pressure to unmask in Berkeley seems to also come from concerns about the City of Berkeley’s revenue, and the net income of commercial landlords and businesses. 

I asked the City Public Health officer and the Mayor for comment on why this decision is being made. Neither offered comment. I am surprised that Dr. Hernandez demurred when offered a chance to explain her medical judgement. 

Conclusion

We live in a society in which multiple system on which we rely have failed, and have failed so badly as to threaten the near term future of our society. We are in a collapsing state by all evidence. 

While the press scarcely informs people about “long COVID”, prominent scientists are now finding evidence that we face a pandemic of long COVID systems including quite a few that are permanently debilitating or cause premature death. COVID appears to lead in many to permanent heart damage and heart attacks, to brain changes that suggest early onset dementia will result, to a wide range of systems caused by autoimmune disease, including acute organ damage and joint damage. Long COVID symptoms are observed to effect people who have even asymptomatic breakthrough cases. How frequently? It is simply too soon to have any sense but clinical reports of early COVID patients reporting very long term symptoms are not encouraging. 

The city kicked off the pandemic by asking people to go out to dinner and join Mayor Arreguin and Councilmember Hahn at a posh restaurant. The city’s efforts at spreading public health information are little more than a cheesy, information-free souvenir poster and sporadic, poorly attended webinars that spend an inordinate amount of time with the city officials praising one another for the hard work. 

The City has done useful work organizing testing and vaccination sites but fallen so short in other ways. 

But, back to systems failure: 

The City demonstrably lacks the competence to do (and contract out) road planning and restoration well. Nationwide, capacity to fix infrastructure no matter how much money is budgeted Just Isn’t There. 

Neither our City or country are taking the climate emergency seriously nor do either even acknowledge what extremely well established science is telling us. Young people today are in for a world of hurt much worse than the current one if things don’t change. A super-majority of the City Council can’t talk knowledgeably for 5 minutes about the climate emergency, never mind take sane action. Do they therefore try to learn about what science is telling us? Apparently not. 

What are the people to do when all those institutions and systems become, as they have, seemingly beyond repair, while the world burns around us? 

I’m pretty sure clapping for Tinker Bell won’t cut it.