By David Harsanyi
Monday, March 30, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic is already a catastrophe. How we
fare in comparison to the rest of the world is hardly of paramount importance.
Once the Chinese government hid the outbreak, failed to contain it, and then
misled the world, there remained little
possibility that any nation, much less an enormous and open society like
the United States, was going to be spared its devastation.
Yet, when the political media isn’t preoccupied with a
gotcha du jour, pundits, partisans, and journalists have seemed
downright giddy to let their minions know that the United States now has the
most coronavirus cases in the world. It took a six-siren-emoji tweet from
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to tell us that fact.
Here is how the New York Times’ Paul Krugman
framed the number:
A Nobel Prize–winning economist surely understands that
we don’t have enough data to definitively declare the United States the world
leader in cases. Even if we did, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is the
fault of public policy. There are plenty of unexplained
coronavirus disparities around the world.
The Financial Times chart that that is circulated
by Krugman and his fellow pundits, and sometimes cynically deployed as a means
of attacking the administration’s response, is largely useless as a point of
comparison. For one thing, a graph illustrating per capita cases in all the
nations that the Financial Times chart includes looks different. A
chart that combined all the cases in European nations — the continent has
approximately the same population as the United States — would also look
dramatically different. The known cases in Spain and Italy alone are nearly
twice as many as the United States right now.
Cross-country comparisons at a given point in time fail
to account for many things, including density and time. Iceland is not like
Italy, and New York is not like Alaska. And simply because nations such as
Italy and Spain experienced outbreaks earlier and more deadly than nations such
as Germany and Sweden does not mean the disparities are destined to last.
Moreover, testing in the United States began slowly
before being ratcheted up quickly (and criticism of that delay is a fair one).
Thus, the curve reflects the reality of expanded testing as much as it reflects
reality of the disease. And though I’m not a statistician, I do know that
nations have varied criteria for testing, varied standards of testing, and
varying effectiveness in the testing they do perform. Hundreds of thousands of
Chinese coronavirus tests sent to European nations, for example, have turned
out to faulty. The data are incomplete. Krugman’s claim lacks vital context.
Speaking of China, accepting the veracity of numbers
offered by the ChiCom government without any skepticism might be good enough
for The New York Times and other outlets, but it shouldn’t be enough for
anyone who values facts.
It’s also worth mentioning that the timeline of these
charts are also uncertain. It’s unlikely we know when the tenth or hundredth
case was actually transmitted in China or Iran or even here — and it’s possible
that some people had died and some others had recovered before most people
understood the magnitude of the future pandemic.
All of this is worth keeping in mind when as we see
journalists harping on the overall case number without context. If you want to
continue to utilize this once-in-a-century pandemic as a cudgel against your
political adversaries, have fun. But the most important gauges of success right
now are flattening the curve so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed with new
patients, ramping up our testing capacity to get a better handle on the virus’s
properties, and measuring the number of recoveries from coronavirus. Not owning
Donald Trump.
The United States has already dealt with coronavirus far
better than the Chinese government. The fatality rate in the U.S., so far, is
nowhere near that of Italy. Our dynamism is one of the reasons why an early
high case count is a not a measure of either national success or failure. It’s
not our nature to allow the state to close down borders, travel, or trade, or
to stop interactions with the world — or with each other, for that matter. And
yet, many of same people who incessantly and cynically warned of the coming
Fourth Reich are now blaming the administration for not acting like a
dictatorship. It’s difficult to keep up.
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