The editors of the Washington Post ponder the number of cases and number of deaths due to COVID-19 in the U. S. and wonder why when we thought we were so prepared our results have been so bad. I presume their answer will surprise no one:
Fighting a pandemic is treacherous and challenging. This particular virus harbored some unexpected tricks that took time to detect, such as the large share of asymptomatic cases. It was always going to be hard. But the worst did not have to happen. It happened because Mr. Trump failed to respect science, meet the virus head-on and be honest with the American people.
The death and misery of 2020 should be taught to future generations as a lesson. What went wrong, making this the deadliest year in U.S. history, must not happen again.
As I’ve said before I think there are many things that President Trump could have done differently or better, particularly in the areas of testing, PPE, and the related supply chains. I also think that what we have been learning over the last eleven months is that the policies that jurisdictions have followed have mattered less than other factors.
I found this observation by the editors interesting:
Meanwhile, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, oversaw a group of young consultants from the private sector who volunteered to work on the supply chain bottlenecks. They were in way over their heads, were not supplied government emails or laptops, and were swamped by tips and requests from celebrities.
If that’s a fair characterization of the process, it would explain a lot. It’s certainly not how I would have approached identifying and resolving supply chain problems.
The editors complain repeatedly about politicization of the process but then express their wish for government to do more. That is a fantasy. Anything in which government is involved will be politicized. There are no dispassionate philosopher-kings. There are only human beings with politics, ideologies, preferences, and prejudices.
When I look at the developed countries that have fared well during the pandemic I see one or both of two things: isolation and/or social cohesion. Neither of those describes the U. S. Under the circumstances we have fared relatively well. As an illustration of our lack of social cohesion just look at the hypocritical behavior of our political leadership. The examples are neither few nor isolated. They’re everywhere.
First, as was repeatedly said by Fauci and other medical experts, the lockdowns and masks were NOT intended to reduce the number of cases nor the number of deaths. They were only intended to spread them out so that the number of people seeking hospitalization at any one time could be minimized. That objective seems to have been achieved. Hospitals were not overwhelmed anywhere, although they got pretty full in some places.
So stop spreading the nonsense that we could have reduced the number of cases or deaths by some sort of magic incantation. We couldn’t and we didn’t.
Of course this also means that the nursing home deaths were unavoidable and had to happen.
Whether we would have been better off in the long run without lockdowns and masks is debatable. The economy certainly would have been better. If the new mutation leads to prolongation of the lockdowns, we will enter the region of permanent recession. Mainly because we can expect new mutations to arise continually. Of hasn’t anyone heard of the annual flu?
The main damage seems to be the unreasoning mass hysteria that the MSM continuously promotes. I have a niece who is going to quit her teaching job out of abject fear. She won’t let her kids go to school, even though her district is fully open. My daughter won’t leave her home except for rare trips for supplies. I haven’t seen her since last February. Fortunately she can work from home.
I lived through the 57/58 Asian Flu (as bad as covid in terms of deaths) and the 68/69 Hong Kong Flu (remember Woodstock? Were you there during the pandemic?), but I don’t remember the kind of mass panic we have now.
I attribute the “mass panic” to Gen X3ers and Millennials without the experience of disease. As a kid I had chicken pox, mumps, both kinds of measles with nearly continuous earaches and sore throat. Those were just ordinary childhood diseases. I had classmates who contracted polio, rheumatic fever, and others. That is not the experience of GenXers or Millennials.
It is irksome to see the blatant lies above. We absolutely have saved lives. Death rates, controlling for age and co-morbidities, have been reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 of what they were early in the pandemic. That is well published and well known. If people dont want to know that or want to lie about it that is on them.
As to politicization, with almost everything about Trump it is a matter of degree. Of course any approach to any major issue will be politicized. However, we have never seen it to the same degree. His first publicly denying it would be problem then trying to blame China, while we now know that he knew it was going to be a major problem and that it was spread by humans well ahead of public acknowledgment of that. Then there has been the whole mask, not distancing not ever closing anything or limiting group activities thing. You had a president with no knowledge, experience or expertise in the area making espousing actions, drugs, etc that were not supported by science or those with any expertise. To his credit as a con man he did get a bunch of almost experts, people whom some in the general public might accept like the woman doctor who also thinks women’s pelvic disease is caused by sleeping with demons, to publicly espouse his beliefs. Then we have the pretty well documented instance of his having his son-in-law, again someone with no experience or expertise in the area, take on the issue of PPE supplies. Who other than Trump would ever do that? Tribalism, we found out, dominates everything.
To social cohesion I would add the political leadership working hand in hand with their public health officials. Maybe that falls under social cohesion but it deserves a special place.
I am not aware of an mass panic, ut if you look at the data from the following (wrongly titled) article on deaths in the US, Covid is the third leading cause of death due to a disease process from age 35 and up. It is 3rd for 45 and up for all causes. And once again, that looks only at deaths. There are other longer term problems and it is not as if a couple of weeks in the hospital is desirable. (Chart at link is fun tot read. I am actually surprised that we have higher Covid death rates than chronic respiratory disease in almost every age group. Lots of COPD and asthma out there. We are a lot better at cystic fibrosis so I guess that helps.)
Steve
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2774465
We can look to the Spanish, British or Italian experience with Covid and remind ourselves that Donald Trump was not in charge there.
The Asian countries were the only ones able to achieve almost total lockdown and if in some alternate universe Trump were President of South Korea in the spring it wouldn’t have changed their outcome much.
The poor American response to pandemic says more about us than any particular leader.
We respect individualism, risk taking and death defying attitudes.
But then it may be fair to blame Trump because he is us.