By Jim Geraghty
Monday, March 01, 2021
Ross
Douthat’s whole Sunday column is good, but I feel like there’s still a
little meat left on the bone in the final paragraphs:
. . . the
press was not wrong to desire heroic
leaders or institutions that Got the Pandemic Right. The attempt to wish those
leaders and institutions into being is a media failure, but the fact that the
media looked for them is not.
Our
society’s sickness may be particularly acute in Trump
worship, but the affliction is more general. The stink of failure hangs
over the liberal and cosmopolitan as well the populist and provincial, the
“Cuomosexual” parts of the media as well the conservative. And as we hopefully
approach the end of this particular emergency, it’s not only Trump’s enablers
but a much wider range of leaders and authorities who should feel shame at the
stark and shocking number of the dead.
Why did the media feel such an intense
need to find and celebrate “heroic leaders or institutions that Got the
Pandemic Right”?
Was it just because they hated Trump and
needed a contrast for Goofus-and-Gallant stories of good and wise Democratic
leaders and bad and reckless Republican leaders? Was it that from the
beginning, they envisioned a tale of Trump bumbling his way through the
pandemic, followed by a Democratic president who swooped in and fixed it?
Or did the glowing coverage of Cuomo (and
Gretchen Whitmer, and Phil Murphy, and Gavin Newsom) demonstrate that a lot of
people need to believe that the right
leaders in government can fix giant and unexpected problems such as a novel
virus that triggered a global pandemic? That they’re so unnerved by the unknown
that they gravitate to a voice that sounds certain and confident, even if that
voice is as flawed and befuddled as the rest of us?
The moment people realized they were
dealing with something new and frightening in the pandemic in early 2020, they
hungered for leadership. Some
people turned to Anthony Fauci with a reverence sometimes bordering on
religious. Those who were convinced that it couldn’t be that bad, and that
everyone was overhyping the threat, turned
to the likes of Alex Berenson. Everybody wanted to find their expert who
really understood everything that was going on and knew what to do and had all
the answers.
Over the past year, I’ve been pretty darn
critical of elected leaders at a bunch of levels — former President Trump, Bill
de Blasio, Cuomo, Whitmer, and all the idiot governors and mayors who broke
their own quarantine rules. I’ve pointed out that the media don’t just
overpraise Democratic governors; they overpraise the wrong ones. There is a lot
to criticize in the federal-, state-, and local-government responses to the
pandemic.
But a lot of evidence also suggests that a
nation’s or state’s success in preventing coronavirus deaths had a lot to do
with geography, population density, poverty, mass-transit usage, preexisting
health problems, and other factors that government really can’t control. Policy
choices probably have some effect, but most likely less effect than impassioned
supporters and critics think. If sweeping lockdowns worked as well as their
supporters believed, shouldn’t California be doing much better at preventing
cases and deaths? By one measure, the
state with the fewest COVID-19 restrictions was Oklahoma. The state ranks
eighth in the country in cases per million residents and 36th in the country in
deaths per million residents. That same study ranked California the most
heavily restricted state in the country; the Golden State is ranked 26th in the
country in cases per million residents and 30th in deaths per million
residents.
A few weeks ago, The
Economist pointed out that despite dramatically
different policies, California and Texas are generating similar
results:
Despite
their contrasting approaches, the results have not been as different as
expected. Texas has a higher death rate per person — only Arizona and South
Carolina have fared worse, according to the CDC. But the gap is not as great as
you might expect: Texas has had 127 deaths per 100,000 compared with 104 per
100,000 in California. “People in California are frustrated because they feel
like they are experiencing the worst of both worlds,” says Ken Miller of
Claremont McKenna college and author of the book “Texas vs California”. They
have endured never-ending lockdowns, and yet deaths are currently higher than
ever. Meanwhile, in Texas, the economic benefits of a more libertarian approach
are hard to discern. The unemployment rate in both states is higher than the
national average.
(The
Economist is being a little cute with the numbers there. The most recent national
unemployment rate is 6.3 percent, the most recent Texas
unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, and the
most recent California unemployment rate is 9 percent — and it increased
nine-tenths of one percentage point in December. Texas’s unemployment rate is
closer to the national average than California’s rate is to Texas’s rate.)
If you really want to terrify a political
junkie or health-policy wonk, tell them that all of the policy decisions they’ve
been arguing about for the past year didn’t matter that much, and
government-imposed quarantine restrictions only had a modest effect on the
pandemic’s outcomes.
By the time most policymakers got their
heads around what the country was facing, the virus had already spread pretty
far and wide. I went back and checked; one
year ago Saturday, Japan announced it was closing schools for a month, Hong
Kong closed schools for two months, and Saudi Arabia halted travel to Mecca. No
government makes decisions like that unless it’s convinced it is facing an epic
crisis with few precedents.
Looking back, the denial and naïveté in
the U.S. in January and February 2020 were tragically laughable — exacerbated
by a president who kept insisting “We
have it totally under control” and by a national media eager to argue that
the flu was more dangerous, and who also worried that the “Wuhan flu” was
xenophobia. The biggest public-health threat in a century was bearing down on
us, and
plenty of big names on both sides of the aisle were eager to play the role of
the mayor of Amity Island.
By January 16, 2020, COVID-19 cases had
been confirmed in Thailand and Japan, the virus was spreading from any number
of the numerous flights out of Wuhan, and the limited window to stop a
worldwide pandemic had closed. Direct
flights from Wuhan to the United States did not stop until January 23. From
December until the ban on incoming flights from Wuhan, 27
of those direct flights went to San Francisco and 23 to New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport.
If you look at the
countries with the fewest deaths per million citizens — or at least those
among them whose publicly disclosed figures are reasonably trustworthy — it
becomes clear that the best way to protect against the virus is to be an island
and to greatly restrict who can enter your country. Taiwan has four-tenths of
one for every million people. Fiji has two. New Zealand has five. (China would
have us believe they have just three deaths for every million people.)
As of this writing, the U.S. ranks tenth
worst in the world with 1,579 deaths per million people, behind Belgium, the
Czech Republic, Italy, the United Kingdom, and a few others. (It is worth
noting that places that had a bad outbreak and have a tiny population, such as
Gibraltar and San Marino, can end up topping the list by this measurement.)
The quarantine methods that worked for
small island nations just wouldn’t work for the United States, which has two
relatively open borders, many port cities with huge amounts of international
trade and shipping, and lots of international air travel — to say nothing of a
population that is used to moving freely and enormous amounts of goods that
need to be shipped around the country.
Once the pandemic hit, the way to keep
your population safest was to keep them at home, and not coming within six feet
of any other people, indefinitely. If we were all programmable and obedient
robots, that plan would have worked. But we’re human beings who need to connect
with others — socially, emotionally, economically. The best answer for human
beings was probably to figure out how to interact and connect in ways that
minimized the risk of transmission — wear masks, be outdoors, make sure there’s
lots of air circulation. But that’s a messy, imprecise, imperfect answer, and
our culture can’t handle nuance anymore.
When people are facing something that
frightens them, they want a leader, and they may not-so-secretly want a savior
figure. Think of all of those prayer candles featuring political figures. A lot
of politicians sell themselves to the public as savior figures anyway. (“I
alone can fix it.”)
Life throws a lot of problems at us that
we have no real control over — earthquakes, hurricanes, heat waves, viruses —
and those are the natural disasters; we’re not even getting into manmade
disasters such as terrorist attacks, wars, waves of refugees, hackers, the violence of
transnational criminal organizations, human trafficking, etc. We establish
government to protect our rights and to give us some tools for collective action
against problems too big for any one person to fix. You might be a genius or
fabulously wealthy or immensely talented, but when a hurricane levels your
community, you’re going to need some help from FEMA and the National Guard and
the Red Cross.
But there are significant limits to the
effectiveness of government, at all levels. And while government can often
mitigate the damage of those terrible events in some ways, it can rarely
prevent them. We still live in a fallen world, and every once in a while,
something terrible is going to come our way — and all of our expertise, all of
our riches, all of our tools and technology will not be able to insulate us
from hardship and pain.
Particularly for people who think about
(and write about) politics a lot, there is an intense belief that every
disaster that befalls us must be, on some level, a policy failure. We can
improve our construction codes, but an intense enough earthquake or hurricane
or flood is still going to do a lot of damage. We can try to avoid war, but
sometimes somebody’s going to fly airplanes into our skyscrapers and start one
with us. We
can be the country best prepared for a pandemic — but if a new virus is
contagious enough and gets into our population undetected, we’re going to be
playing catch-up until a sufficient number of people are vaccinated.
A lot of people act as if they believe,
“If we just elect the right people, then bad things won’t happen in our lives.”
And if bad things are happening in our lives, it must be because we elected the
wrong people. The other party doesn’t just disagree with us on the right ideas;
it prevents the utopia that our guys could easily enact if its guys would just
get out of the way.
The Biden administration had a vision of a
smooth rollout of rapidly expanding vaccinations, and then a really bad gust of
winter weather over most of the country loused that up. (The
good news is the last three days have been terrific, with more than 2
million people vaccinated each day.) The old saying, “no plan survives contact
with the enemy” applies to all government plans, as well.
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