My March 9, 2020 blog post was headed, “Don’t Panic, It’s Just Flu.” Within a few days, that looked pretty dumb. Less so five years later.
Early on, there was obviously a huge trade-off between Covid’s potential harm and the certain harms of trying to curb it via draconian measures like lockdowns. China had immediately imposed fierce restrictions on Wuhan, where Covid started — seemingly with much success, extended to many other places. But eventually that approach unraveled, China lifted all controls, and at least a million died. But before that, in 2020, lockdowns were quickly copied by many countries as the only way to go, with no real opportunity for public debate.
America though was very divided, and Covid fed fiendishly into the pre-existing political polarization. One side (me included) embraced masks and lockdowns as being what science dictated. The other side didn’t fancy dictation, making this a freedom issue. Opponents cast that as freedom to endanger your neighbors, with its advocates being anti-science yahoos.
But the waters were muddied by initial confusion within scientific and expert ranks. Yet voices of authority tended to sound arrogant rather than humble — saying “do this” instead of “this is our best guess right now, but we’re still working to figure things out.” Which was true; some early pronouncements proved wrong. (I recall wiping my mail before opening it!) The result was to undermine their authority and aggravate distrust toward all experts and elites. So guess what happened when vaccines arrived.
Sacrifice for the common good is a tough sell. A recent PBS documentary showed Los Angeles citizens riled up by terrible smog in the 1950s. But when, to curb it, they were asked to stop burning trash (a common thing), they rebelled against that. Similarly, few people seem willing to inconvenience themselves to combat planet-wrecking climate change. Covid lockdowns allowed no choice. No surprise that was widely resented. It didn’t help that this also became a free speech issue, with dissident voices squelched. The result was to accentuate an already rampant decline in social trust generally, and with it community feeling, hence amplifying people’s sense of alienation and isolation. Aggravated all the more by their home confinement.
All this was part of the cost of battling Covid. Lives were saved. But how many? Hard to say, actually. Though Sweden offers a clue. An outlier among European nations that rushed to lock down, Sweden never mandated masks or staying at home; most schools stayed open. Yet, a year later, Sweden had one of Europe’s lowest Covid death rates. Maybe because Swedes are very public spirited and behaved sensibly without being forced to. Perhaps other countries would have fared better just urging masking and staying at home, rather than requiring that.
But Americans like me were critical of red states that resisted lockdowns and quickly reopened. Yet their Covid death rates turned out no worse than in goody-two-shoes blue states. Until, that is, vaccines arrived. Then red states looked more like death traps — having far more anti-vaxxers. Lockdowns may have been legitimately debatable, but not vaccines.
Poorer Americans suffered more than the affluent. Being likelier to lose jobs and income, and while white collar folks could often work remotely, blue collar types had to show up — exposing themselves to the virus. While being less equipped to cope with illness. And less able to afford care for children kept out of schools.
Their closure soon seemed ill conceived, with the dangers to children of being in class proving limited and manageable. But teacher unions strove to keep schools shut as long as possible — nice to get paychecks while not working. A bigger factor in blue states with politically stronger unions.
That the harm of school closures outweighed any benefits now does seem clear. Here too, poorer families were especially hurt. All kids suffered educational setbacks, losing ground that they’ll probably never make up, a lifelong negative impact. But worse again for poorer children, less able to benefit from remote learning, due to both cost and less conducive home/neighborhood environments.
So the Covid lockdowns worsened our divide between the poor and the affluent. They also made for an inflation surge, thanks to supply chain disruptions and governments spewing money into the economy. And, further, lockdowns had big psychological effects, many people unable to cope well with the isolation and disruption.
In sum, would we have been better off treating Covid — as my cited 3/9/20 blog post suggested — more like just a bad flu, rather than turning the world upside down?
Covid also, as mentioned, did worsen our political divide. And it psychically discombobulated voters enough to insanely elect as president a convicted felon who’d tried to overthrow the government. Whose handling of Covid itself in 2020 was shambolically idiotic. (Remember bleach?) Now he’s decimated federal health-related funding, including vaccine development, and put an anti-vax crackpot (RFK Jr) in charge of it all; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is in turmoil. Disastrous if another pandemic hits.
In fact, we’re not even really done with Covid.
And America today is a sicker country.
Trump wants schools reopened. Because he cares about kids’ education? (Note, that was a laugh line.) No, of course he cares only about himself, seeing open schools as the ticket to economic rebound, his only hope for re-election.
But the damage to children’s education could actually be lifelong, with the missed classroom time never made up. Zoom lessons are not the same. The impact on poor children, less able to participate remotely, is all the greater. They will fall further behind, widening inequality. And out of school they’re more likely to suffer abuse, malnutrition, and mental problems.
Much unlike Trump (who simply threatens to force schools to reopen, ready or not), Joe Biden has presented a careful comprehensive plan for reopening schools while minimizing the risks. His plan follows CDC guidelines. (Which Mike Pence said schools should feel free to ignore. Yes, our national covid response coordinator actually said that.)
• Good supply of masks and PPE.
Evoking Admiral Farragut — “damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
A rally with thousands of such people crammed closely together, indoors, with no protective masks, is called, in the lingo, a “super-spreader” event. Or let’s just call it insane.
And even this may not be a bridge too far for Trumpsuckers already cocooned in the alternate reality he spins with Fox News’ help. If Fox simply stops talking about covid carnage, it won’t be happening. Except to those actually dying. It’s said doctors bury their mistakes. Trump is trying something similar.
Those actually, Australia’s Reserve Bank says, show the country’s wattle plant, and the writer Mary Gilmore, so identified on the note. Also, it was introduced in 2017!
The speaker, Ricki Lewis, is an Adjunct Professor at the Alden March Biocenter; author of numerous scientific books and papers.
Particularly bats; they’re a quarter of all mammals, can harbor viruses without dying, and spew them all over. This is a natural enough explanation for Covid-19’s source. Lewis noted that no part of its genome matches anything in labs, though she couldn’t rule out its originating in a lab without human intentionality.
“Coronavirus” gets its name from its crownlike exterior of spikes that lock into what are called ACE2 receptors on the outsides of our living cells. That enables the virus to inject its genetic material into a cell, and grab its chemical innards to make copies of itself. Then the cell bursts, spewing out more viruses.
That’s why masks help a lot. Lewis discussed the possibility of getting sick from touching surfaces where Viruses have come to rest. While this can happen, she didn’t think it’s much of a factor.
Meantime “herd immunity” would deprive the virus of enough potential victims to keep itself going; that would happen once about 70% of the population has been infected and are presumably immune; though we don’t yet actually know they are immune from reinfection. And we’re a long way from herd immunity levels. Reopening economies could accelerate that, with a “second wave” of infections. Lewis said she initially expected that in the fall, but now thinks it could come within weeks due to the George Floyd protests likely having spread the virus.
Then tyranny made a comeback. What really happened was its practitioners raising their game, perfecting techniques for neutering democratic accountability and suppressing opposition. With sufficient pushback this could not succeed. But they also perfected techniques to dupe enough people to support them.
Notable is Hungary, where Viktor Orban was already a textbook exemplar for the mentioned autocrat’s playbook, parlaying the support of a minority of voters to irremovably entrench his regime. Now the parliament has handed him power to “rule by decree.” Temporarily of course. Don’t hold your breath.
The protesters saw Beijing as reneging on that deal. Now a bunch of leading figures in the democracy movement have been jailed. Meantime, Article 22 of Hong Kong’s “Basic Law” bars China from interfering with its internal affairs. But now China’s “Liaison Office” in Hong Kong asserts it’s not bound by Article 22. Beijing is betting that a world focused on the pandemic will shrug.
Free flow of information is vital to democracy and inimical to tyranny. Here again the bad guys are taking advantage of coronavirus, to clamp down. Some countries now outlaw “fake news,” with harsh penalties. What’s “fake” is decided by the governments. It really means news they don’t want their people to hear.
And of course the pandemic offers an ideal excuse to fiddle with elections in the name of protecting public health and safety. This has already become a contentious issue in America, with fights over mail voting. Many are properly worried that a Trump facing defeat might pull something egregious.
The virus will in due course subside. Recovery from its economic damage will take longer. And the damage to democracy could last longer still.
Jack Benny’s famous bit: A mugger demands, “Your money or your life!” Benny hesitates. Then says, “I’m thinking it over!”
Creating “herd immunity,” where the virus dies out for lack of enough infectable victims.
But the Trump administration is not biting this bullet; hardly even tonguing it.*
Protesting with their “Trump 2020” banners, guns, and Confederate flags — and no social distancing. These nitwits may be a small minority. But even if most Americans act more sensibly, too many (thanks to Trump’s inconsistent messaging) are irresponsibly complacent about Covid-19. Relaxing restrictions will exacerbate that. Enough foolish people and the virus can spread like wildfire.
(Talk about “American carnage.”)
We’re not hearing much now about limited government. I’m no government-loving “progressive,” but even libertarians recognize a need for government to protect us in situations like this, organizing and mobilizing a societal response. But unfortunately we’re also seeing why the big modern bureaucratic state is distrusted. It’s not size that counts so much as how you use the thing.
So a key lesson is the importance of competent, intelligent, responsible, sane leadership. That’s up to voters. So far I don’t see that lesson sinking in.
This is also changing us as a society. Sociologist Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone pointed up a trend toward atomization. That preceded the smartphone era, which has prompted vast handwringing about growing solipsism. Strangely, on one level, it’s all about human connectedness, with people fixated on their phones mainly for stimuli from others. Yet while our Facebook “friend” rosters grow, real friendships contract. (I’m baffled by people obsessing over online content concerning others they hardly know.)
Now we have “social distancing” — as if that hadn’t already been an apt way to describe what was happening. In-person communication being supplanted by virtual communication. If this were a battle between the two, the former has just suffered a devastating strategic reverse. Now it’s actually wrong for us to socialize in person, it’s bad for public health!
But polls have shown that Americans’ social trust is eroding. It’s not that people are actually becoming less trustworthy. It’s that more of us believe others are less trustworthy. This can become self-fulfilling if we act in ways that exhibit less trust. The decline in social trust may be partly due to reduced face-to-face interaction. And it’s aggravated by having two political tribes each believing the other consists of bad people who threaten everything that’s good and holy.
Garrison Keillor once said, if the purpose of one’s life is to serve others, then what purpose is served by the existence of those others? This actually poses a deep philosophical issue. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. Yet each of us experiences existence only within the confines of our own skulls. Experiencing only one’s own feelings, not those of others.
Hence even if pure selfishness might seem strictly logical, a degree of selflessness is a fundamental part of our human nature (barring sociopaths who failed to get that software installed). And we measure our virtue largely in terms of our interactions with others. Summed up pretty well by the golden rule. Nobody is perfect but most of us try.
Acting rightly does make one feel good about oneself. But that may not be enough. We all have egos, greedy for such feelings, and one way to pump them up is through validation from others. This may seem strange because, again, you don’t have direct access to what others feel. But you’re affected by their behavior, which in turn is affected by their feelings toward you. And our social programming makes our position in society important to us. All this makes us crave the good opinion of others, and suckers for flattery.
Much human behavior seeks to evade that rule. Successful, rich people cannot wear a badge announcing their net worth. But a lot of what they do (and buy) is mainly to advertise to others about their success. Boastfulness by other means.
“I am very smart.” He’s even boasted of being the most modest person ever. And he tells us he’s doing a great job. Thus his coronavirus briefings (whose TV ratings he’s bragged about). Recently the word of the day, repeated like a verbal tic, was “tremendous.” Then he switched to “incredible.” Maybe tomorrow it will be “fantastic.” And not content to trumpet his wonderfulness himself, he trots out sycophantic flatterers to bubble about it.
I have pilloried Governor Cuomo in the past, but his coronavirus briefings are models of what Trump’s are not. No self-praise extravaganzas. No bashing the press and other critics, no demanding obsequious flattery. No lying. Cuomo gives us the unvarnished truth. He takes responsibility. He brings the situation home to us in a very human way we can all relate to. He tells us what needs to be done, what we all must do.
Here is the real point, that all this leads up to. I started out talking about our most fundamental human precepts for living among others. How normal people have that software pre-installed, and how crucial it is in a crisis like we face now. When the leadership we choose is someone who has not had that software installed, we are in very deep trouble as a society.
My first 
Trump’s claim that we’re testing more than any other nation is simply false. Even today, many Americans with symptoms cannot get tested. A Brooklyn ER doctor, in a radio interview Saturday, said her hospital was turning away hundreds daily. While many coming in for unrelated problems are actually testing positive for COVID-19. So it’s likely our count of known cases is just the tip of an iceberg.
The Times report is sickening (no pun here), and makes a mockery of Trump’s daily self-congratulatory briefings. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” We now need megatons of cure because we didn’t test swiftly and widely. Even now, a massive crash testing program — which would cost a tiny fraction of the price tag for our economic shutdown — could pay off hugely in limiting the damage. We should test everybody. (At last we seem to have a test that’s cheap & quick.) Then quarantine those infected, and everybody else could resume normal life, knowing they’ll be safe.
They’re not the ones with jobs suitable for working from home. It’s mainly lower wage workers losing paychecks. The giant bail-out legislation indiscriminately spews cash, but won’t make whole those thrown out of work.
The Trump administration was already trying to skew it for political advantage, by undercounting people in Democrat-leaning areas, to reduce their congressional representation and electoral votes. One way was to simply underfund the census, making it harder to count people on the margins. They tried to particularly target Hispanics by including a citizenship question to scare them off from participating. The Supreme Court slapped down this proposal, literally ruling it was based on lies.
Now, more than ever — now that Trump’s fecklessness has really and truly fucked this nation up — we need that vote.
The end of the world. Everything shut down, cancelled, locked down.
But written by the likes of Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, so it was a misleading mush of misinformation that required swift correction. Thus, intended to reassure, it fueled the panic, financial markets collapsing the next day.
The emphasis should instead be on targeting those likeliest to harbor the virus, by testing them, and quarantining people testing positive. Testing not only ones with symptoms but anyone having had contact with known carriers.* This means a massive crash program to manufacture and distribute test kits and organize a testing infrastructure. Yesterday.
It’s said that when the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked. We always knew there’d be some crisis showing up what Trump is.
The Rational Pessimist 
