Letter: The Grim Mathematics of Organizing Amid COVID

A recent tweet by @timerube of New York City DSA (Democratic Socialists of America, a big-tent socialist organization in the United States, the largest of its kind) has prompted outrage and division among the so-called left along lines of COVID mitigation.

over *320 people* at tonight’s nyc dsa 101 pic.twitter.com/5HJXVu0bF6

— Dirk Fuckner 🚯 (@timerube) November 12, 2024

This letter is not about litigating who is and isn’t a proper socialist based on their use of personal protective equipment. I don’t care what you call yourself or other people. This is a letter about how you need to account for reality in your organizing or you won’t be effective in reality. If you want to normalize COVID, you need to account for the effects of that decision and mitigate the risks it poses. 

Let’s describe the landscape of risks that is likely to be familiar to many readers. Imagine that you work at a grocery store and want to secure anti-fatigue mats at workstations. Eventually, you will likely need to meet with your coworkers to decide the steps you’ll take to pressure management to meet your demands. Most of these co-workers will need transportation to make it to the meeting. Transportation involves risk. If you held 10,000 of these meetings over time in the United States, there’s a good chance that there would be a fatality due to a car accident on the way to one or two of those meetings (based on average US traffic fatality rates of 13.8 per 100 000 people). As anyone who has had to work long hours on hard, cold floors can attest, you’re much more likely to face consequences from the working conditions in this example than you are from traffic accidents. So, is it worth the risk? We can make the choice even clearer by encouraging remote meeting and transportation by even safer means like bus or train. 10,000 meetings is about 10 years of weekly meetings. At the end of this simple calculation, it makes sense to meet since meeting is likely the only path to victory and won’t expose participants to very much risk. This is not an endorsement of the rates of traffic accidents. The fact that we need to bear this risk in order to organize is itself a loss, but we did fight for decades to mitigate this risk so it doesn’t immediately threaten our movements on its own.

Of course, the biggest risk of meeting with your coworkers (in person with no mitigations) during the ongoing COVID–19 pandemic is not dying in a traffic accident, not by a long shot. COVID will impact your organizing ability if you don’t mitigate the risk. Using the same example, let’s imagine that you get 300 of your grocery store coworkers (you work in a chain of grocery stores) together for a meeting in person with no COVID mitigations. This meeting takes place in an NYC church on November 11, 2024. According to our best modeling, 1 in 113 people in NYC were likely infectious on November 11th. So you almost certainly have at least two contagious co-workers in the meeting. They will likely infect 10–25 people at your meeting (Omicron has an R₀ of 10-25, so each person infects 10 to 25 other people over the course of their infection. This information is discussed in the post-script). At Dynamic Zero, we’re using an average Long COVID per infection rate of 20% and the reasoning is discussed at length in the Summer 2024 Seasonal Update. Imagining that the chain of infection ends there, with a 20% rate of Long COVID resulting from these infections, your meeting will permanently harm 2–5 of your activists. The disability resulting from that harm may not be total (for example, losing one’s sense of smell can be devastating but it’s unlikely to prevent labor action), but the effect is cumulative. This will happen every meeting. This is beyond the impact of the acute phase of the disease itself, which lasts 10-14 days on average. The equivalent to the disability risk in our original example would mean a rate of being disabled by a vehicle accident of 8,333 per 100,000, which is 603 times higher than what our society bears as “acceptable risk” for traffic fatalities.

This will not be your only meeting, of course, and the risk doesn’t stop after the first meeting. The fight for any improvement in working conditions usually takes months or years, as any experienced activist will tell you. 5 out of 300 is 1.6%. How many meetings can you host like this before your entire body of 300 coworkers has been maimed by COVID infections? Approximately 62 meetings. As an activist for climate justice prior to 2020, I personally attended 4–6 meetings a week. Each meeting also means that 8.3% of your labor pool for actions will be sick for up to two weeks. At best, they will make mistakes and need more rest. It’s likely that they will need material support and community care, which is a wonderful product of our activism but it takes more effort away from actions that work toward our demands. If we don’t want to mitigate the effects of this risk, we need to account for it and describe a plan to win even with such high rates of attrition. I personally don’t believe it’s possible to attrite a significant portion of your organizers each meeting and win, that seems like a dead end.

This is all beyond considering the frankly ghoulish opposite side of the equation. We grudgingly risk traffic accidents so we can organize for a better world. What do we get for risking COVID infections? We refuse to wear masks so we can feel normal? We refuse to clean the air so we don’t have to think about how the authorities are lying to us? Or about how each of us is vulnerable to Long COVID? Is it the snacks? I can’t really imagine what’s on the other side of the equation for the COVID denialists that makes it worth it to refuse to mitigate the risk so fervently.

Several people discussing the original tweet have called people asking for mitigations of this risk (which means filtering the air, getting vaccinated regularly, and wearing respirators indoors) “COVID Dead-enders”. This is a very obvious projection. The (extremely optimistic, since it assumes no other community spread and only one meeting per week) alternative to mitigation is to maim a group of 300 activists every year or two just with meetings. How many groups of 300 activists have you got?

we gotta just block the COVID dead-enders who are essentially anti-vaccine whackos. https://t.co/MPH4JB9szB

— cummunism 🇵🇸 + 🇱🇧 (@comradesanchez) November 12, 2024

My argument is that our bourgeois civil leadership has decided that it’s normal to make every public space invisibly hazardous by systematically promoting COVID reinfection and removing the tools people need to inform and protect themselves from the threat. This is a form of social control since it makes resistance without COVID mitigation hazardous. Your meeting itself is a source of harm and attrition if you don’t mask and clean the air. Who’s working for the feds here?

D.W. McLachlan

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Post-script: On R₀, R_t, Variants, Immunity, and Bullshit

Regarding the ability to model and predict how many people will be infected in a given meeting, it’s important to note that the quality of this data is not very good and the situation is certainly worse than it appears because of the Biden administration’s widespread suppression of testing and data collection. However, if we accept official figures, the 2–3 people with COVID at your 300-person meeting certainly have a subvariant of Omicron. Data on Long COVID rates are impacted by the same suppression as testing and reporting, but the math is easy to adapt. 

R₀ and R_t are statistical figures that represent how contagious a particular disease is. R₀ is also called the "basic reproduction number." R_t is the "effective reproduction number," which accounts for immunity in the population from vaccination and prior infection. An R₀ of 2 means that each person first infected with a disease will spread it to two others.

I use the R₀ of Omicron in the article for several reasons: 

1. First, it’s unclear how the situation has changed due to the suppression of testing and reporting noted above. Wastewater data is notoriously inappropriate for comparing between different waves of COVID infection because of the nature of “normalization target, qPCR chemistry, and watershed scale”. We don’t have a collection method and context that can produce a reliable updated R0 or Rt number for a given variant that accurately determines an individual’s risk and how that has changed since Omicron. 
2. Second, just because public health officials have abandoned the precautionary principle doesn’t mean we should too. Our leaders all over the imperial core have abandoned many aspects of prosocial thinking and policy to protect profits. I am not motivated to discipline myself by the malice of my enemies. The traffic accident analogy is still apt. I don’t know how likely it is to save someone when I prioritize distributing bus tickets at a meeting. I just know that if I didn’t, and someone was hurt, I would forever question whether I could have prevented their suffering with a simple bus ticket. The respirator is analogous to the bus ticket for handling the risk of infecting your comrades with COVID.
3. Third, it doesn’t actually matter. I don’t need to know the exact number against which I weigh your life before I act to protect you. We need each other and I don’t want you to get hurt.