Month: August 2020

Whatever happens on November 3, many Americans will distrust the election results. They’ve been primed for it. Donald Trump sees himself both as a winner and a victim. Either way, he will spin the results both as a victory and an attack as he did in 2016, even if only he believes it.

Trump had plenty of help in 2016 from the Russians, the Republican Party apparatus, third-party activist groups, online fake-news entrepreneurs, and the right wing noise machine. With the bully pulpit and the levers of power at his disposal this year, he is actively working to rig the election in his favor in ways he could not have dreamed of four years ago.

The others will still play their parts.

ProPublica and First Draft, a firm that researches misinformation, posted a report last month on the viral quality of social media posts, particularly on Facebook, aimed at delegitimizing the upcoming election. (Read them yourself. No need to repeat them here.)

“We have a long history in this country of voter suppression that goes all the way back to our founding,” said Jessica Gonzalez, the co-CEO of Free Press, an advocacy group focused on media and technology. “This is a new way to suppress the vote, and I don’t know why Facebook wants any part of it.”

Facebook claims to be creating a Voting Information Center for connecting people to authoritative information and to have removed 100,000 pieces of voter disinformation between March and May.

ProPublica and First Draft tracked Facebook posts using voting-related keywords — including the terms “vote by mail,” “mail-in ballots,” “voter fraud” and “stolen elections” — since early April, when Trump began attacking voting by mail. Mentions of these voting-related terms nearly tripled on Facebook, with interest in the topic spiking after Twitter attached a fact-checking label to Trump’s false tweets and directed users to a fact-check page on May 26. Twitter’s intervention prompted Trump to claim that Twitter is “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling FREE SPEECH.” Facebook has refused to take down Trump’s false claims about voting by mail.

Facebook’s inaction on Trump’s posts spurred pushback over misinformation on the site. Gonzalez helped organize an advertising boycott of Facebook that now includes more than 1,000 companies and some of the platform’s biggest advertisers. Among other demands, they’re calling on Facebook to remove voting misinformation.

Breitbart, Fox News are still in the disinfo game along with conservative commentators, Trump surrogates, conspiracy sites, and some left-wing pages.

To pad out the 1088 "proven instances" in its VoterFraudCases_5.pdf database, Heritage lumps every form of election malfeasance (much of it not at the polls) under the blanket term "voter fraud" & feels obliged to reach back to 1948 to do it. Impersonation fraud at the Polls: 13

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) August 6, 2020

Most common are overinflated allegations of voter fraud:

Exaggerating the prevalence of voting fraud can backfire. In a study released in June, researchers showed respondents a series of tweets. Some were actual 2018 tweets by Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio that put forth unfounded claims of voter fraud; others were more generic “placebo” tweets. The false claims reduced confidence in elections for everyone, the researchers found, especially Republicans and those who approve of Trump. Those groups “reported significantly lower confidence in elections after exposure to a low dose of voter fraud allegations even when those claims were countered by fact-checks.”

As a result, Trump’s rhetoric may cause fewer Republicans to vote by mail than Democrats, said Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study and a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Still, Nyhan is worried about broader effects of misinformation. “The problem has clearly gotten worse in terms of elite rhetoric,” Nyhan said. “We’ve seen what happens in other countries when there isn’t a shared trust in the rules of the game in democracy and it’s not good.”

Realizing the damage his attacks on voting by mail have done to his own prospects, Trump last week tried reversing himself. He now claims voting by mail in Florida is “Safe and Secure, Tried and True” even as he sues Nevada for automatically sending voters mail ballots.

The pandemic has boards of elections across the country scrambling to retool procedures make voting as safe and secure for voters as possible. This means what you heard last week could be changed next week.

Here in North Carolina, Democrats have been in court challenging Republican voting changes since the GOP gained control of the legislature ahead of the last redistricting. Some of the voting changes the GOP implemented seemed designed not only to suppress the vote but to add to confusion. Others they passed only to have courts overturn them later. Voters here have been whipsawed for a decade.

Just last week, a federal district court in North Carolina ruled that due process demands that those who vote by mail must have the same chance to “cure” mistakes in their ballots that in-person voters receive:

GREENSBORO—Late today, a federal judge ruled in the League of Women Voters of North Carolina’s case that the North Carolina State Board of Elections must provide a notice and cure process for absentee ballots marked for rejection. As the number of voters choosing to cast ballots by mail is expected to surge due to the threat of COVID-19, the decision provides relief for tens of thousands of voters whose ballots would otherwise be rejected without recourse. 

“The establishment of a notice and cure process for absentee ballots is a major victory for North Carolina voters,” said Jo Nicholas, president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina. “Now, even amidst all the uncertainty that the pandemic brings, voters can have assurance that their safely cast ballots will be counted in November.” 

Over 282,000 absentee ballots were rejected in North Carolina’s March primary election, 41% of which could have been cured if voters had been notified and given a chance to do so, according to data reviewed by Southern Coalition for Social Justice. The absence of a cure process in that election left 115,000 voters without a way to fix mistakes and ensure their ballots would be counted. 

Now, the state Board of Elections must scramble once again to figure out how to implement the judge’s ruling before local boards begin evaluating early absentee ballots here at the end of September. The rest of us will have to help educate voters once the procedure is in place. So it goes.

For the rest of you, be sure you are extra careful when filling out your by-mail or absentee-by-mail ballots. Here is some quick video advice. Rejection rates are low, but you don’t want to get caught in that small percentage.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

That’s a Maureen Dowd column today. I’m sure you can see what’s wrong with it. Lol.

It wasn’t just the tweet. Dowd herself got it wrong.

Here’s what Dowd originally wrote. Man, she really just phones it in these days, doesn’t she?

“Feminist fairy tale ….” Oy vey.

Scott lemieux dispatched Dowd with alacrity.

So Trump held another one of his “news conference” rallies today in front of a bunch of wealthy paying customers at the Bedminster golf club and announced that he was signing executive orders to cut unemployment by two hundred a week but extend it to the end of the year while making cash strapped states pick up 25% of the tab. All this is apparently in an effort to take credit for fixing the problem after he and his henchmen sabotaged the congressional negotiations.

He also instituted a payroll tax holiday which he said would have to be paid back at the end of the year unless h wins re-election after which he will get rid of the payroll tax altogether, meaning he will also be getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which are funded through that tax.

No word yet on what the potted plants otherwise known as Republican Senators and Governors have to say about this.

Who knows where this is going? I honestly can’t tell if he can do this or if it’s just more bullshit.

I do think he might have had more of an impact with this if he had announced it from the White House instead of in front of a crowd of drunken revelers in golf attire at his Bedminster resort. And he might have tried to at least pretend that it wasn’t being done for purely political purposes rather than spend most of his rally ragging on Biden and the Democrats to big cheers from the crowd.

Let’s just say it didn’t exactly come off as serious business.

Anyway, some highlights:

wut pic.twitter.com/skUasIID0n

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 8, 2020

Trump is preemptively laying the groundwork to challenge the results of November's election by baselessly accusing the Democrats of promoting electoral fraud pic.twitter.com/qykQ4eXxkq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 8, 2020

the president is out here entertaining his paying customers by ranting and raving pic.twitter.com/WbxGcBLaMj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 8, 2020

I don't understand why reporters are asking questions that assume Trump's moves to completely bypass Congress are lawful pic.twitter.com/VJlgXqnvT4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 8, 2020

Absolutely surreal. https://t.co/HqpVOo9FM0

— Mitch Dyer (@MitchyD) August 8, 2020

Obviously, these numbers don’t reflect world events that affect the economy. And Trump’s term isn’t over yet so who knows where it will end up?

But the truth is that his “job growth” wasn’t that great before the pandemic hit. The following is from January, 2020:

Employment —Total nonfarm employment grew by nearly 6.7 million since the president took office, according to the most recent figures available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That continued an unbroken chain of monthly gains in total employment that started in October 2010. The economy has now added jobs every month for more than nine years, including the first two years and 11 months of the Trump administration.

Yet Trump is far behind the pace needed to fulfill his campaign boast that he will be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” At this rate he will not even come up to the gains made during Obama’s final term. The average monthly gain under Trump so far is 191,000 — compared with an average monthly gain of 217,000 during the four years before he took office.

And let’s not forget that one of the reasons this pandemic is destroying the economy is because Trump’s response has been so tragically incompetent. And now he and his accomplices in the GOP seem determined to make it even worse by refusing to spend the necessary money to keep individuals, businesses and state and local governments afloat until a vaccine is in place and/or the vast number of American dipshits who can’t seem to accept that they’re spreading this disease all over the place start doing the things necessary to bring the virus under control.

So, yes. He is a:

In case you were thinking that the Democratic Party will no longer feature the kind of internal strife we were used to until recently, think again. There may not be many left, but as long as a handfull remain, we’ll have to deal with stuff like this.

Former President Barack Obama has called on the Senate to do away with the filibuster, but that won’t happen if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has anything to say about it.

“I will do everything I can to prevent it from happening,” Manchin, a Democrat, told Yahoo News in an interview on Wednesday. “We will not have the democracy we know today if that [filibuster elimination] happens, I can assure you.”

Debated in Washington for years, the idea of eliminating the filibuster received renewed attention last week after Obama, during his eulogy for civil rights icon John Lewis, described the procedural rule as “another Jim Crow relic” that should be overturned.

Manchin said he sees the filibuster as an essential feature of the Senate and vital to the institution’s role as a deliberative body where members must work toward compromise. He said he didn’t see Obama’s full eulogy, but when asked about the former president’s contention that the filibuster has been used to quash civil rights legislation, Manchin fired back that it has been used to stop many kinds of legislation.- ADVERTISEMENT –

On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden signaled his willingness to do away with the filibuster, but cautioned that it “has also saved a lot of bad things from happening too.”

For Manchin, however, keeping the filibuster in place will ensure stability no matter which party prevails in the November elections.

“My view on the filibuster has been my view from day one,” Manchin said. “We should be able to talk to each other, we should be able to sit down and work through our differences and we should find a compromise. … We’re not going to run this country from the extremes, and if you do away with the filibuster as we know it and basically the 60-vote rule, then you’re going to have the Senate no different from the House — it can go to the fringes to the right or the left.”

When they’re in the majority both parties have to deal with their Susan Collins’. I don’t know who they will be in the Democratic Senate aside from Manchin but there will be a few of course. The difference between the GOP and the Democrats in the past has always been that the Republicans generally make sure they have the votes so they can let their Collins and Murkowskis do their thing but keep thin in ine when they need them. Democrats have tended to be less successful at that. If you want to see how it goes for them just look back at the painful, torturous Obamacare negotiations which took place entirely among Democrats since Republicans just sat in the corner and pouted. You’ll recall that it wasn’t any easier than dealing with Mitch McConnell.

It’s always better to have the majority, even if you have to put up with people like Joe Manchin. You have the power to set the agenda, which is huge. But it doesn’t mean you can completely control these egomaniacs, all of whom look in the mirror and see a president looking back at them.

So get ready people. If the Democrats win back a governing majority it’s still not going to be a cakewalk. The Manchins will always preen and pose and leverage their power to screw everything up.

We're not polarized. One party is a pluralist center-to-left coalition whose ideas are broadly popular, based in scientific consensus; the other is reality-denying, near an authoritarian cult w waning minority support, hanging onto power through cheating and and panic-mongering. https://t.co/BujReaPdrr

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) August 8, 2020

One of his most memorable quotes:

“My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others saying they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia, I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

I know I’ll never forget it. It was a moment which will live in infamy.

Apparently, his good pal Putin is stepping in on his behalf again. Jonathan Chait has the right read on the latest news:

Two weeks ago, William Evanina, director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center, published a somewhat vague warning about various forms of foreign interference in the upcoming election. Today he followed up with a more direct and incriminating one, specifically warning that Russia is working to help reelect Donald Trump. Even more important is what this warning unmistakably implies: that Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are actively cooperating with Russia’s campaign.

Trump obviously tends to respond with rage at the suggestion that Russia wants him to win, let alone that he is accepting the assistance. So Evanina’s summary delicately surrounds the revelations about Trump and Moscow with superficially balancing material. The report highlights three countries that want to influence the election: Russia, China, and Iran. The report notes that the latter two want Trump to lose, while Russia wants him to win.

This seems intended to let Republicans claim that there is foreign interference on both sides. And it’s true, as far as it goes.

But the comparisons end there. What is China doing to defeat Trump? Its government has “grown increasingly critical of the current Administration’s COVID-19 response, closure of China’s Houston Consulate, and actions on other issues.” And Iran’s efforts “probably will focus on on-line influence, such as spreading disinformation on social media and recirculating anti-U.S. content.”

In others words, Iran and China are undermining Trump by criticizing him in public remarks, possibly including some mean tweets.

Russia’s efforts to help Trump include all that. In addition, the statement notes, “pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls — to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”

Derkach and his Russian allies despise Biden, who spearheaded the administration’s efforts to reform Ukraine, reign in its oligarchs, and diminish Russian influence. They have attempted to depict Biden’s reform efforts as a corrupt plot to enrich his son, Hunter.

Derkach has been working openly with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. None of this is a secret. Here are the two of them meeting in Kiev in December:

Giuliani told the Washington Post earlier this summer that Derkach “doesn’t seem pro-Russian to me.” In case that ruse was fooling anybody, U.S. intelligence has now officially described Derkach as an organ of Russian political interference.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee are holding hearings in an attempt to substantiate this charge — or, more realistically, to insinuate it. They have produced no evidence to advance their charge. The Russians have given Republicans stolen tapes of secret conversations Biden held with Ukrainians during his tenure as vice-president, and pro-Trump media outlets have hyped up the material, nothing they have is inconsistent with the narrative that mainstream news organizations found. Biden was working to clean up Ukraine.

Senate Republicans tried to be cagey about their activities. After pro-Russian Ukrainians said they’d passed materials on to Republican officials, a Johnson staffer told NBC News in July that it was “‘false’ the committee has received any ‘oppo,’ or opposition research, without responding directly to whether that covers any materials from foreign sources.”

The Washington Post reported that Homeland Security Committee chairman Ron Johnson received secret documents from Ukrainians. And former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has confessed to putting Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and perhaps Trump’s most energetic defender on all things Russia, in touch with one of the Ukrainians releasing documents in the United States.

There is hardly any secret to what they’re up to. Johnson says he plans to release his report on Biden in September. It hardly matters if the information Russia gives him actually substantiates his allegations, or even whether it is authentic. The obvious plan is to splash some headlines into news screens in the heat of the campaign that seem to connect Biden to some kind of wrongdoing.

In reality, it is not a scandal about Biden at all. It’s a scandal about Republican cooperation with a Russian propaganda campaign.

What makes Evanina’s statement today so significant is that it makes clear that the passing of information, real or otherwise, from various Ukrainian figures to various Trump allies is part of a Russian-directed scheme to help Trump win. Republicans could tell Russia that Russian-controlled media are free to say anything they want, but Republicans aren’t going to launder their propaganda for them. Instead, they are doing everything in their power to exploit it.

This is all fine. Just fine.

I honestly don’t know where we go from here with these Republicans. They are showing themselves to be traitors even beyond anything Trump has done. He’s very stupid after all. Some GOP Senators (Ron *cough* Johnson) are equally stupid as well. But many know exactly what they’re doing. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being shocked by that.

.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/07/postal-service-investigation-dejoy/

In 2016, the Russian Internet Research Agency worked behind the scenes to get elected Vladimir Putin’s chosen U.S. presidential candidate. A federal grand jury later indicted 13 Russians and three Russian entities for “informational warfare.” As special counsel Robert Mueller warned, the Russians would do it again.

“We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment,’ ” reads a statement issued Friday by William Evanina, National Counterintelligence and Security Center director.

The shadowy sabotage is the least of it in 2020. The Trump administration is not only saying the quiet parts out loud, but sabotaging the election out in the open. Since yesterday, there is more detail on how the Trump lackeys are trying to wreck the U.S. Postal Service in advance of millions upon millions of ballots dropping into mailboxes.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer met this week with Trump Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and put in writing his confirmation that he had, contrary to earlier denials, instituted “reductions of overtime availability, restrictions on extra mail transportation trips, testing of new sorting and delivery policies at hundreds of Post Offices, and the reduction of the number and use of processing equipment at mail processing plants.” All of which “now threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters.”

Deliberately slowing down the mail may be illegal, but David Dayen at The American Prospect doesn’t expect Attorney General Bill Barr to come knocking even if Republicans from rural districts complain. Dayen also reports something perhaps more nefarious noted in the (paywalled) Capitol Forum:

The Postal Service has informed states that they’ll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate. That nearly triples the per-ballot cost at a time when tens of millions more will be delivered. The rate change would have to go through the Postal Regulatory Commission and, undoubtedly, litigation. But the time frame for that is incredibly short, as ballots go out very soon.

A side benefit of this money grab is that states and cities may decide they don’t have the money to mail absentee ballots, and will make them harder to get. Which is exactly the worst-case scenario everyone fears.

The Friday night news drop brought word DeJoy is shaking up management at USPS, introducing more uncertainty within a month of the first absentee ballots mailing out in North Carolina (September 4) and consolidating his power:

Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.

“Deliberate sabotage,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee responsible for postal oversight.

DeJoy told a postal board of governors meeting Friday he is committed to fixing “a broken business model” not coping with a decline in first-class and business mail. In the coronavirus pandemic, however, package deliveries to Americans are up more than 50 percent.

If there is anyone who knows how to break a business or a country it is Donald Trump and his merry band of well-heeled incompetents. Half a year is gone, $3 trillion in national wealth, and 160,000-plus Americans while Trump golfs and preens for the cameras among his paunchy, white golf buddies. Testing remains slow, contact tracing cannot keep up, and 30 million are unemployed, Dana Milbank observes. Trump’s “bomb-throwing new chief of staff” blew up the latest round of talks for extending relief to beleaguered families.

Kids slated to return to school under pressure from the Trump administration fear bringing the virus home to their mothers.

But the attacks on the postal system really get under my skin, and not just because of the election. “Broken business model,” my Aunt Sally. The postal service is not a business. Was never intended to be, any more than the military. A college friend who went full-tricorn-hat T-party under Obama argued on Facebook that the government shouldn’t be doing anything not specifically authorized under Article I, Section 8. That is the section authorizing the Post Office, as well as containing the second reference to the government having a duty to provide for the “general Welfare” of the people, something he did not support.

God help us, some free marketeer decides the Pentagon should operate at a profit. Watch military conflicts spike across the globe as capitalist arms merchants with dollar signs in their eyes create even more blood-soaked markets for themselves than they have now.

Trump keeps issuing diktats as though he is CEO of America, Inc., if not king. Well, those who thought America should be run like a business got what they wanted, didn’t they? Those that are still alive, anyway.

UPDATE: Contact your congresscritters and complain loudly about DeJoy’s sabotage of USPS.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

The conservative Evangelicals’ favorite president yesterday:

Here's Trump in Ohio claiming that Joe Biden is "against God."

"No religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God. He's against God," Trump says. 🙃 pic.twitter.com/IwAjgbkEyB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 6, 2020

Here’s God’s protector in 2016:

Trump was asked numerous times during the early part of the campaign by earnest religious questioners if he had ever asked God for forgiveness. He gave this cavalier answer:

I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so.  . . . When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed.

Anderson Cooper followed up on that comment and asked him to clarify. This is what he said:

Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I’m an honorable person.

Jimmy Fallon asked Trump about this again and he said, “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong. . . . I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

Watch this clip while reminding yourself that this guy is now trying to wrap himself in Christianity and portray his opponent as “against God.” Trump is a con man. https://t.co/uGC3Unfgic

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 7, 2020

I came across this piece from the New York Times at the end of May that I thought was interesting. The numbers may have changed as the pandemic progressed (I’m not competent to do that calculation) but I think the point is probably still well taken:

How dangerous is it to live in New York City during this pandemic? How much safer is it in other places? Is the risk of dying from Covid-19 comparable to driving to work every day, skydiving or being a soldier in a war?

We are awash in statistics about Covid-19: number of deaths, fatality rates, contagion rates. But what does this all mean in terms of personal risk?

In 2011, another invisible danger, radiation, sowed fear and confusion in Japan, where I served as the U.S. Ambassador’s science adviser after the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. Then, as now, the news was full of scary numbers. And then, as now, there wasn’t nearly enough context for people to make sense of them, much less act upon them.

Fortunately, there are tools for assessing risk that can help us put the daily torrent of numbers in perspective. I found the best way to communicate the level of risk was to put it in terms that allowed easier comparison to other, more familiar, risks. One could then talk, for instance, about how dangerous living in a contaminated city was compared to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

A useful way to understand risks is by comparing them with what is called a “micromort,” which measures a one-in-a-million chance of dying. Note that we are considering only fatality risks here, not the risk of growing sick from coronavirus, or morbidity. The micromort allows one to easily compare the risk of dying from skydiving, for example (7 micromorts per jump), or going under general anesthesia in the United States (5 micromorts), to that of giving birth in the United States (210 micromorts).

The average American endures about one micromort of risk per day, or one in a million chance of dying, from nonnatural causes, such as being electrocuted, dying in a car wreck or being struck by an asteroid (the list is long).

Let’s apply this concept to Covid-19.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York City experienced approximately 24,000 excess deaths from March 15 to May 9, when the pandemic was peaking. That’s 24,000 more deaths than would have normally occurred during the same time period in previous years, without this pandemic. This statistic is considered a more accurate estimate of the overall mortality risk related to Covid-19 than using the reported number of deaths resulting from confirmed cases, since it captures indirect deaths associated with Covid-19 (because of an overwhelmed health care system, for example) as well as the deaths caused by the virus itself.

Converting this to micromort language, an individual living in New York City has experienced roughly 50 additional micromorts of risk per day because of Covid-19. That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010, a particularly deadly year.

The quality of data varies from state and state, and continues to be updated. But for comparison, using the C.D.C. data, Michigan had approximately 6,200 excess deaths during this same time period. That is roughly the same risk of dying as driving a motorcycle 44 miles every day (11 micromorts per day). Living in Maryland during this time would be roughly as risky as doing one skydiving jump a day for that duration (7 micromorts per jump).

Now, if you’re infected with the virus, your odds of dying jump dramatically. Estimates of the fatality rate vary as doctors continue to learn more about this virus and how to care for people sickened by it, but let’s assume it is 1 percent for sake of this discussion. That translates into 10,000 micromorts. That risk is comparable to your chances of dying on a climb in the Himalayas if you go above 26,000 feet, where the tallest peaks, such as Everest and K2, stand (using climbing data taken between 1990 and 2006).

But that risk estimate is for the entire population, with an average age of 38. If you happen to be older, the fatality rate can be as much as 10 times higher, which is just slightly less than flying four Royal Air Force bombing missions over Germany during World War II.

The acceptability of risk depends, of course, on one’s own attitudes and proclivity to take risks, and whether one has a choice in the matter. Unlike skydiving or hang-gliding, in which the risk is limited to the person making the leap, with Covid-19 the actions of the individual change the risk levels of everyone in the community.

So while there are many thrill seekers who happily jump out of planes, they might think twice about forcing their frail grandmothers, or their neighbors, to jump with them.

I believed I was immortal when I was young and took a ton of unnecessary risks with cigarettes, drugs, etc. I don’t mean to be holier than thou. I get it. But mitigating the risk for yourself and for others in this case isn’t really difficult. It just requires masks and social distancing and giving up large social gatherings for the time being.

Getting COVID is very risky, and especially risky for people over a certain age or who happen to have some health problems. People who get it and end up in the hospital go through the tortures of the damned and nobody knows what the long-term effects are yet. Even if you don’t feel that you are at risk yourself, it’s selfish to spread this thing. Somewhere down the line someone is going to suffer and may die because you didn’t feel you were personally at risk.