I've been deluged with arguments this week from people who blame practically everything that has gone wrong in the U.S. in 2020 on President Trump's crime of not taking COVID seriously enough. It's impossible to engage them in a discussion of any action he took that supposedly stemmed from this improper attitude, or of a result that credibly followed from the action. Instead I hear claims that, if the President had made people understand how seriously they must take the danger, we would somehow have handled better the convulsive rush to universal mail-in voting. If I object that the big problems were not just the difficulty of imposing enough antifraud measure but the concerted opposition to antifraud measures as a cruel and unconstitutional burden on the franchise, I get back an argument that somehow this would have resolved itself reasonably if Orange Man hadn't poisoned the well of public discussion.
Similarly, all the jobs lost? Somehow his fault for not talking the virus seriously. The 200K-plus deaths? Somehow there would have been fewer. Not up for discussion, it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Riots? Arson? Murder? Catch-and-release perpetrators of same? Major problem: his attitude:
(1) Doubt in the public mind.
(2) . . . ?
(3) Bad result.
My own view, of course, is that's it's a lot easier to make the case that, if COVID-restraining measures really aren't working as well as they might in a perfect world, a large part of the explanation is that people are going through the motions on measures they don't believe in, at least in part because reminds them of hearing that eggs are good, then bad, then good for your health. It doesn't help when the most prominent and powerful voices for the most personally costly containment measures treat them with contempt in their own lives whenever they're inconvenient.
At least when President Trump sheds doubt on the effectiveness of a measure, he's acting consistently with his stated beliefs. What I hear him saying is, sure the virus can be dangerous, but some dangers have to be faced. We don't necessarily have a choice of a world in which we can eliminate the danger without bringing on consequences that are even more damaging. We wish we had that option, but acknowledging that we may not is not the same as wanting to kill Grandma. Nor am I entitled to believe that half the country is guilty of attempted murder because they're not as convinced as their not-very-trustworthy betters wish they were.
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COVID is no wolf. Or rather if COVID is a wolf, we are not medieval peasants armed with farm implements. We are 20th Century hunters armed with rifles, sidearms, and plenty of ammunition. They tried to sell us that COVID was a modern Spanish Flu (ironically, Spanish Flu is still with us, no one mentions that it's just the H1N1 strain we still get every so often, without the population killing effects of the 1919 pandemic). At best, it has been a bit more lethal than a bad flu season, especially if you remove the easily preventable early deaths when certain governors intentionally put the most vulnerable at risk by sending infected elderly patients into nursing homes instead of banning the practice.
What made COVID-19 so deadly (other than negligent mismanagement of the elderly population in some states)? The same thing that made H1N1 so lethal in 1919. It was novel. Meaning widespread human populations hadn't been exposed to it previously, and victims had no natural resistance. And I think history will eventually show that like H1N1, we will see periodic outbreaks of COVID-19 in the future (just like we see periodic outbreaks of OTHER Coronaviruses all the time now), but none of them will pack the same lethality. Why? Because we will have resistances to it after it's been with us for a while. It's why H1N1 influenza doesn't kill millions of people each time there's a modern outbreak.
Yes, Covid-19 is a wolf (and like actual wolves, it tends to attack the vulnerable), but it is not the *only* wolf, and treating it like it is the only one is very destructive. To switch the metaphor, it is like Target Fixation, in which a combat pilot is so intent on his enemy that he ignores other factors, such as the danger from *other* enemy aircraft, of flying into terrain.
Covid-19 is a wolf ... but it is not the *only* wolf
Yes. And the media tend to take a position by beginning with the phrase: "Listen to the experts" just before introducing ONE, single, unchallenged, expert. Maybe an expert who just wrote a book. Maybe an expert who formerly held a government job. Maybe an expert who WANTS a government job...
The decision makers have to listen to more than one expert per decision. The medical expert. The education expert. The economic expert. The military expert. Even, I'm must admit, the media-relations expert. And it will be a rare crisis indeed when all these experts speak with a single voice and recommendation. (If such incidents were common, there would be little for presidents to decide...)
J Melcher..."The decision makers have to listen to more than one expert per decision."
Probably everybody who has ever held major management responsibilities has had the experience of conflicting advice from different experts...usually, experts in different fields, but sometimes, even from different experts in the *same* field.
One of the things that really scares me about Biden is his absolute lack of experience in actually runnning anything.
It's not a wolf. If it was a wolf, we would all know people , personally, who had died from it. It is a hysteria, fueled by the media.
IF THE MEDIA DID NOT EXIST, WE WOULD SCARCELY BE AWARE OF THIS VIRUS.
It IS a political weapon. The corollary to Emmanuel's comment on crisis and opportunity, is this- if there is no crisis, invent one.
Heh- did any of you read Bolsonaro's covid recent comments? Hilarious.
We would call a quarter of a million deaths from a new source a wolf in any other circumstance. Despite enormous precautions and significant improvement in rapid order in treating it, it has caused more than twice as many deaths as the worst flu season. It is ten times the average for a year, and still going. How much of this was avoidable, we do not know. I suspect not much, once the planes were allowed to fly internationally out of Wuhan.
Many other countries also have this wolf, so I don't see how Trump is uniquely responsible for it. However, it's going to get worse, he lost the election, and he will increasingly be blamed. What things will look like after this next spike I have no idea, but I have certainty that Democrats will use it as a blame-campaign issue. It will continue to center around the "take-it-seriously" issue, without regard to actual policies and actions. It is a feelings complaint. People were/are worried and they want Trump to be worried too. People made fun of the Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" comment, but it was how he got elected and how he stayed popular. Politically, it works.
I still don’t know anyone who has had the thing, let alone has died of it. Maybe we have so many people that a quarter million deaths is a small splash in a big pond. Or maybe the numbers are just another game. How many flu deaths this year? Pneumonia? If those numbers are low, is this really deaths from a new source, or are existing levels being priced in?
Also, I’m beginning to lean to my wife’s long held sentiment that there may be too many people anyway. It’s her answer to everything, but she might not be entirely wrong.
Also, I’m not ready to concede the election. It still looks like massive fraud to me, and I’ve monitored elections in two countries (Iraq and Egypt).
Just yesterday Fauci comes out and literally says "this is a good time to do what you're told"- I thought this was staggeringly idiotic. He apparently even still has no sense of the negative effects of the heavy hand, and treating the population like children rather than free citizens.
"Do what you're told"...not much of a marketing man, is he, or even a propagandist...but one hell of an authoritarian.
America has been called 'The land where no man has to bow'. There have always been people who didn't like it that way, and right now, they think they are in the ascendency.
I've had neighbors die of it, though so far no one I was particularly close to. I have several close friends who reports deaths of people close to them. Our contractor's father-in-law, two different neighbors' long-time friends, well-known people in the nearby town, one local family that lost four members in two weeks--a friend had to attend all four funerals for that family. It's not an ordinary flu season.
As is completely natural, I know many more people who've caught it and come through fine: my pastor and his office staff, people in the County Engineer's office, quite a few neighbors. It's not diphtheria sweeping over the plains killing whole household at one blow. It's not the 1918 flu. It's contagious, but it's not measles. It's dangerous, but not SARS or Marburg or rabies.
It can be somewhere in the middle: neither a meaningless threat nor an existential one. That's why it's important to look at data instead of hype, and balance costs against benefits when we craft solutions, especially when we impose them on others.
I've known 9 people who have had it. Luckily none have died, but a few had underlying health conditions and I hope it doesn't lead to long-term effects.
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