Viral Denial

What’s most remarkable about the state of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States today is how predictable it was. From the very onset it was clear that the President of the United States was not going to take this seriously, which was the canary in our viral coal mine. We know how viruses function, and we know what outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics are. We can cut ourselves a little slack for it being a newly discovered virus, but not much. Once it was in the United States, the exact wrong thing to do was to assure the citizens that it was “just one guy from China,” and that the US has “15 cases and it will be soon down to zero,” and as the Trump Administration’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow embarrassingly  told the world, “We have contained this. I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.” This denial at the highest levels of the government sealed our fate.

The fact that New York City would be an early epicenter was also obvious. There’s 8 million folks packed into a small island that is a hub of international activity. Yet fears of temporary economic disruption caused elected officials like Mayor Bill de Blasio to downplay the virus and encourage people to go out and breathe and cough on each other. In one of his most dangerous statements, he told the people of New York City that casual contact, as you would get on the subway, was not how the virus was transmitted. There’s a reason people don’t want to sit next to someone, or shake hands with someone who has a cold. Because they have a virus, and you don’t want it. And yes, you wouldn’t sit next to them on the subway. Mr. de Blasio helped spread the pandemic.

Once it became unavoidable that panic was setting in among the populace, leadership was moved into various stages of lock down measures designed to slow the spread of the pandemic so we could allow our fractured and decentralized health care system to manage the workload, as hospitals in New York were overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. The lack of a national health care system, predictably, showed how poorly the United States was prepared for anything on a nationwide scale. Yet at this stage, the pandemic wasn’t nationwide, and there was time to get it right. But we didn’t. The entire point of the lock down was to slow the rate of infection and disease so health care systems could keep up, and use the time to establish a system of testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine. But we didn’t do that on a national level, nor did any states effectively do it either.

In my current home state of South Carolina, we did a partial shut down with some weak stay at home orders and closing some businesses like restaurants and the ever essential saloons. But the reality was that any day of the week, one could venture out and go to Walmart, Home Depot or Lowe’s and share the viral exhalations of our neighbors.

What should be obvious to anyone with a functional cerebral cortex is that if there were some way to stop inhaling someone else’s viruses, or exhaling our own onto someone else, that might be helpful. We’ve know about the effectiveness of face masks for eons, and not only in times of pandemics. Surgeons and everyone in the operating room wear them all the time. Construction workers wear them, as do landscapers. The military trains to operate in full gas masks because of the possibility of having to fight a war among airborne contagions. Yet with a global pandemic caused by a contagious virus, we couldn’t even get that right. Not only was the guidance from organizations like the W.H.O and C.D.C mixed and muddled, the guidance from leadership at every level was as well. Most notoriously was Mr. Trump who at first told the country that wearing a face mask was just optional, and then quickly proceeded to say he wouldn’t wear them because it just didn’t feel appropriate because you know, he greets kings and dictators and sits behind a nice desk. Of course we were in a global pandemic which means no one was coming to visit. His obstinance about masks only grew from there as he is a stubborn man who refuses to ever be wrong, and at one point actually said people were wearing masks to make him look bad. Again, knowing Mr. Trump, this was highly predictable behavior. What was also predictable is that those who follow Mr. Trump’s cult of personality would also refuse to wear face masks, and that refusal continues unabated to this day.

It wasn’t long before the Federal Government had to intervene financially, and as anyone could have predicted, businesses across the nation put their hands out and threatened the demise of their existence without taxpayer funds to prop them up. And as one might expect, companies with billions of dollars in cash and cash equivalents on hand, still received billions more from the government as individual citizens, furloughed from their jobs due to no fault of their own, waited patiently for $1200, which Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said should hold them over for 10 weeks or so, and that hopefully we’ll have “killed” the virus by then. Predictably, no one bothered to tell the Secretary how long $1200 might last the average unemployed person, nor ask him how the Administration planned to “kill” a virus spreading across the country in 10 weeks. The denial of reality was allowed to persist.

As one might expect, the sudden government expenditure of trillions of dollars blew a massive hole in the budget deficit ($864 billion) and lawmakers began to wring their hands about giving Americans any more money as the pandemic expanded around the nation infecting and killing more Americans every day. Republicans in particular were concerned that people could make more money from the expanded unemployment benefits some people were receiving than they could from their jobs, so we can’t keep that up. At no point did any member of Congress or the Administration admit that the massive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest Americans, that have not only allowed the rich to get richer during the pandemic and resulting economic slowdown, but has actually created the most billionaires we’ve ever had,  might have been a bad idea and should be reversed.

At the state level, Republican Governors under pressure from the Republican President, expedited removing the weak partial lock down measures they had in place, without bothering to set up the systemic testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine protocols the lock down was designed to do. Most astonishing was that the Trump Administration actually put out guidelines on how to “reopen,” and states opened right up without meeting one single suggestion in those Federal Guidelines. For example, the very first criteria was to demonstrate 14 consecutive days of decreasing cases. Literally Step One. To again pick on my own home state, we have never, since this pandemic began, had 14 consecutive days of declining cases. When I mentioned this on Twitter to the local paper and the Governor’s office’s Twitter account, as anyone could have predicted, I received responses from other citizens with the obvious insults and suggestions that if I was scared, I could just stay home. At this stage, these people demonstrated they still didn’t understand what a viral pandemic was.

Let’s fast forward a bit to the present day, with over 3 million infected Americans, 134,000 dead and counting and massive outbreaks across the nation. Would it surprise anyone that the states that removed their partial lock down measures earliest are having the largest outbreaks? Would it surprise anyone that once again, hospitals are nearing capacity with COVID-19 patients? I will admit that even I am slightly surprised we are once again running short on the Personal Protective Equipment needed to keep our health care workers and patients safe. You’d have thought we could at least get that right. Florida, the state where Governor Desantis mocked the press for suggesting Florida would have a massive increase in cases for his refusal to take any action to prevent it, is now facing record breaking increases in cases, exactly as predicted.

In Texas, Lt Gov Dan Patrick–among the earliest leaders to suggest we needed to sacrifice the elderly to keep the economy going–remains in his pro human sacrifice stance, even as Governor Abbot starts to react to the predictable crisis of their own making.

Would anyone suggest that President Trump would come to his senses and face the reality we are living in and take some other course of action? Of course not, and predictably, he has not. He remains steadfast in his alternate reality where the pandemic will just disappear, the economy will explode with renewed vigor and it was a real shame this had to happen to him.  His latest push after shouting at states to LIBERATE themselves from their partial lock downs is to shout that schools must be open in the fall. Is there any plan to safely accomplish this? No. But there are predictable threats of withholding Federal funds from any school district who isn’t willing to sacrifice the health of the children, teachers, staff and communities to make Mr. Trump look good. The C.D.C. has created guidelines on how local school districts might open up safely, but Mr. Trump furiously pushed back on those saying they were too tough. Predictably, Education Secretary Devos is now the talking head on TV answering every question with the same response: schools need to be open.

We find ourselves exactly where one would expect us to be. In an ongoing, expanding viral pandemic sickening us all at an ever increasing pace, with little guidance from anyone in a leadership position on how to put an end to it. It isn’t that we don’t know how, for there are many nations around the globe who have dealt with this very same pandemic incredibly effectively, most notably New Zealand who has eliminated the COVID-19 disease completely. South Korea has done an admirable job as has Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Iceland, just to name a few. Predictably, the United States is not looking at any of these nations for guidance, or examples of how to stop our citizens from getting ill. Instead, leaders remain in denial of the reality we live in and at best provide mealy mouthed suggestions that people wear a mask in public if they can’t maintain physical distance from each other. To be fair, some states have taken more aggressive steps like threatening that they will “slow” their reopening and start closing things down again if cases don’t decrease. In a bold move, South Carolina’s Governor McMaster, facing an outbreak that would make the state the third worst country in the world if it were a country, has ordered bars and restaurants to stop serving alcohol after 11:00 PM. The mind boggles.

Since everything we are seeing now has been easily predictable, what does the immediate future hold? Full hospitals, long lines for testing with delays of 7-10 days for results, essentially making those tests useless. PPE shortages, record breaking numbers of new cases, a protracted fight over how to send our kids back to school, state leaders most likely to follow Mr. Trump blindly into the forest of flames continuing their march into the fire, partial lock down measures in other states, mixed messages from our national leadership, and an acceptance of daily death counts as part of our new normal. A vaccine won’t save us as we have no idea at this stage if it’s even possible to create immunity from a coronavirus, or if we can, how long that immunity would last. We can predict there will be a segment of the population who refuses to vaccinate even if there is an effective one, which will limit the overall effectiveness. It’s possible we will develop some effective treatments to prevent the worst outcomes from COVID-19, but it seems to be a particularly potent illness affecting much more than just the respiratory system we initially thought was its primary target.

The likely best outcome will be a change in leadership from November’s elections, with a possible willingness then to look to other nations as an example and take the steps we know will be effective in containing the pandemic. I’m not holding my breath, but I am keeping my breath to myself by wearing a mask when I’m in public, and limiting how often I go out in public in the first place. As a very wise person just told me, we need to take a year off and create a new normal for ourselves and keep ourselves safe. Don’t try to force ourselves into what passed for normal in the pre-COVID world, for that world no longer exists. As a sage philosopher once sang, the future is uncertain and the end is always near. Hopefully, the end of the pandemic is what is near, but for now, the future remains grimly uncertain.