[FRIAM] Wisconsin stay-at-home (safer at home) order overturned

[Steven A Smith]

Friammers -

Mary's daughter, who lives in Wisconsin alerted us to the big
court-decision overturning the governor's stay-at-home order:

    https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-strikes-down-stay-at-home-order/article_fd2be344-666f-5437-8955-f5cd9ae17a50.html

    /In a concurring opinion, Kelly said the court’s decision hinged on
    determining the extent of Palm’s authority, not whether her
    emergency order was a good idea./

    /“The order may be a brilliantly conceived and executed response to
    COVID-19,” Kelly said. “Either way, that is not the question before
    the court.”/

I'm (nicely?) split on issues like this and I think this last quote
really says a lot.   I understand that 2 or more counties immediately
issued their own "safer at home" order matching the one repealed at the
state level.   I'm not clear on whether a similar "overreach of
authority" will ultimately be decided against those.

Anecdotally, in the meantime, many bars have opened and apparently many
patrons have returned (without masks and not observing social distancing
guidelines).  

This seems like a good test bed of some of the assumptions behind Dave's
"prophecy".   Will the (if we believe in the germ theory and network
transmission) uptick in cases resulting from this lead to a continuation
of the pandemic (or "pandemic" if we prefer to believe the only
uncontrolled growth is in hysterical media coverage and hypochondria).  
The best case (and one I mostly hope for) might be if the subset of the
WI population who now disregard the (former) rules is small enough and
insular (only infecting one another) enough and/or the herd immunity has
grown enough (highest estimates in places like NYC I think are still
down as low as 20% out of the believed 70% required to bring R0 below
1.0 w/o masks/social-distance measures?).  

Given that the courts may well be accurate in their interpretation of
the limits to the governor's powers, I would expect a domino of
challenges across republican-majority courts in other states, and a
subsequent surge in the unrestricted opening of businesses and events.  

I find a bit of cognitive/emotional/spiritual dissonance in trying to
hold all three of the following in my head/heart/soul at the same time:

 1. The rule of law is important in our society and if a governor does
    not have the right to shut down as hard as some have, then that
    needs to be acknowledged and reversed.
 2. There is a lot of evidence suggesting that like Kelly above is
    quoted that "the order may be a brilliantly conceived and executed
    response... " and that reversing it in fact as well as in law may
    well yield a significant increase in R0 in those states (and among
    states who have significant mixing *with* those states), possibly
    putting us back close to where we were in late March.
 3. I don't like the idea of telling others what to do (wholesale), nor
    being told what to do (specifically), but I also recognize that we
    do not live isolated, solitary lives, and "what we do matters".  My
    threshold on accepting secondary and tertiary consequences may be
    above "helmet and seatbelt laws" but below "measures to suppress
    epidemic spread of deadly disease".   But how does that jive with my
    threshold for accepting "limits to personal agency and volition"?   

These are indeed, interesting times, and as with the basis of Dave's
prophecy, "only time will tell"...  and with Glen's "put a pin in it", I
just hope we keep track and pay attention to how well our
prophecies/projections/forecasts play out.

- Steve

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