Why Covid Curfews Don’t Make Sense
By: Matt Charnock
Tags: Coronavirus, California, Covid 19, San Francisco, Cities

California is on the precipice of another full-out shutdown similar to what we experienced in the early days of March — shuttered storefronts, empty sidewalks, and embracing at-home workouts. And while many Covid-19 restrictions, like banning the vast majority of indoor activities and necessitating mask-wearing, have merit, curfews are far more questionable.

Recently, curfews have been enacted by leaders in some of the country’s most populous states like California and New York. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a curfew last week that barred “nonessential work and gatherings” from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for every county in the state’s “purple” tier Covid-19 risk level; essentially of California’s counties fall into that parameter, including those in the Bay Area.

In New York, Andrew Cuomo ordered a less restrictive curfew, more or less forcing bars, restaurants, and gyms to close by 10 p.m. — but not applying to individuals. Ohio instituted a three-week curfew as well rather than shutting down businesses.

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Generally, curfews don’t apply to those going to or from work, those who have an emergency, or those who need medical care.

The purpose of Covid-19-related curfews is supposedly to thwart the collective mobility of people in highly infectious urban areas. After all, you can’t contract the virus in a room… alone… bingeing Netflix.

While the intention of these tepid curfews is laudable, they represent a zero-sum game when adopted with lackluster enforcement and rules around them.

While the intention of these tepid curfews is laudable, they represent a zero-sum game when adopted with lackluster enforcement and rules around them. For curfews to work in the way they’re intended — to bend the positivity-rate curve and caseload downward — they require strict mandates, enforcement, and no ambiguity.

In reality, getting Covid is no less common after 10 p.m. and before 5 a.m. So why put such a random time stamp on it?

“Curfews like these are really like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health — who previously called curfews a “crude, inelegant instrument” — told the New York Times.

Blanket curfews, given the sparse data that support them, can erode our trust in government and enforce the Orwellian Big Brother energy that continues to generate widespread paranoia. Given that California has already imposed historically tight public restrictions, issuing this arbitrary curfew may, in a roundabout way, discredit the more sensible measure.

These seemingly random, unsubstantiated curfews, too, purport the idea that we’re not given all the information available on Covid-19 to understand why something is happening or being taken away.

“When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” science journalist Roxanne Khamsi wrote in Wired. “Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.”

It was a sentiment also shared and expressed in a recent piece in The Atlantic.

“People aren’t sheep,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the publication’s Amanda Mull. “People act rationally with the facts that they have, but you have to provide an understanding of why these decisions are being made, and what kind of factors are being considered.”

With California’s ICU bed capacity looking to tip in the coming month — in some cases, less than two weeks for some regions — the “red flags are flying,” Newsom said in a Monday afternoon press briefing.

At this point, it seems the only logical point going forward in lieu of a vaccine (which is, reportedly, on its way to California in the form of over 327,000 units) is to stay home for at least a few weeks and ride this surge out — for not only our state’s health care system but for our friends and loved ones who might need those ICU beds for unrelated Covid-19 ailments.

Right now, we need a shutdown — one that is substantiated and presented to the public with clear facts, figures, and goals. Doing so would at least give us a tourniquet to stop our hospitals and health centers from bleeding out entirely.