National Post (National Edition)
COVID-19 didn't seem to worry Americans; that should worry Canadians.
WORST MONTHS OF PANDEMIC AHEAD WITH POSSIBLE LAME-DUCK LEADERSHIP
Did they forgive him, or did they believe him? Nearly 70 million Americans cast their votes for U.S. President Donald Trump, despite Democrats' harsh criticisms of his handling of the pandemic. “A disaster” and “all these idiots” is how he described infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health officials. “Don't be afraid of COVID,” he urged Americans.
Should Joe Biden emerge victorious, his challenge will be convincing millions of Americans that COVID-19 is, in fact, a big deal.
With only four per cent of the world's population, the U.S. has accounted for 20 per cent of global deaths due to the pandemic. The virus rages across the American nation — more than 100,000 new confirmed cases Wednesday; an average of nearly 900 deaths daily over the last week. The U.S. has suffered 235,000 deaths. Modelling is forecasting 100,000 or more as Americans move into the cold months of winter.
“We're not in a good place,” Fauci said on a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) podcast last week.
From the beginning of the pandemic, Trump minimized the threat, federal scientists and mask-wearing, removing his own mask on a White House balcony after COVID-19 put him in hospital.
One fallout? Psychological denial has become a genuine public health crisis in the U.S., physician and novelist Dr. Austin Ratner, and Nisarg Gandhi of Saint Barnabas Medicine Center in Livingston, NJ argue in The Lancet.
“Never before have so many citizens had so much access to information and simultaneously protested public health recommendations with such full-throated denial of the medical facts,” they write in their case for engaging psychoanalysts to help treat “mass denial and mass non-adherence” to medical advice.
Some 66 per cent of Republicans believe the pandemic has been overblown and made into a bigger deal than it really is, compared to 15 per cent of Democrats and 39 per cent of Americans overall, according to a Pew Research Center poll released last month.
Canadians shouldn't be smug. We're not as polarized but we're becoming more so, says University of Alberta professor of health law and policy Timothy Caulfield. Nearly one in four Canadians think the threat of COVID-19 has been exaggerated, including the need for physical distancing, finds an online poll by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies.
We're less enamoured with public health officials than we used to be — “the perception that public health authorities have done a good job is starting to decrease,” Caulfield says. Fewer than half of us say we'll get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one becomes widely available, while a quarter believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon in a Chinese lab, according to a survey by Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication.
“Some of these things may seem absurd and it may be frustrating for those of us who are adhering to the science, but it's clearly having an impact,” Caulfield said. People who are willing to buy into misinformation are less likely to adopt preventive practices such as distancing and wearing a mask, and given that cases are going up, on both sides of the border, “it really demonstrates the incredible science communication challenge in front of us,” Caulfield says.
The election saw the highest voter turnout in the United States in more than a century. The pandemic absolutely made Trump vulnerable, said Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol. “It's not easy to unseat an incumbent, an American president, if the economy is going well, no matter how controversial he is to large sections of the population.”
But red and blue America has experienced the pandemic in different ways. “Let's take the first six months,” Skocpol says. Initially it was experienced as a New York City-area, Northern California and west-coast-type crisis hitting mainly racially diverse, urbanized populations, Skocpol says.
“A lot of the rest of the country could think, `well, that's too bad, but it doesn't have too much to do with me.'”
“And yet because the Trump administration refused to get on top of it early on, it ended up doing the most extreme kind of call for shutdowns, along with many governors, by March and April, and that caused a lot of people out there in the heartlands of America, particularly in the non-metropolitan areas that are the base of the increasingly radicalized American Republican party to think, `well, they're telling me that all the businesses that my neighbours and I work in or go to have to close down and maybe go under, and it's not even something that's happening that much in my community.'”
The pandemic arrived slowly in medium cities and smaller towns, and when it did arrive, it often arrived in a nursing home or prison, or some other context that made it seem as if it the virus could somehow be contained, Skocpol says.
Trump's base is middle-aged workers or middle-income men who may respond differently to the crisis than their wives or mothers, Skocpal adds. In the final month of the campaign, when Trump said “I beat this crazy, horrible, China virus,” that he was in “great shape,” that he was “immune” — when he made a show of whipping off his mask, it was like a “tribal political statement,” says psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances, “a red badge of courage.”
The most interesting paradox? “The reddest and most loyal Trump states are precisely the ones that have the highest rates of new cases, death and suffering,” Frances, a professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry at Duke University said in an email to National Post.
Issues like the economy, COVID and science denial are shaped by partisan predispositions, says Matthew Lebo, chair of Western University's department of political science. For a Republican, “voting against the Republican would be to deny part of their identity,” so they rationalize being OK with everything else.
“To side with Joe Biden is to deny part of their identity. So, they reach for things that help rationalize that, such as believing Donald Trump if he says there's going to be a vaccine next month, or that this really isn't affecting anybody …. Or we can't shut everything down.”
The coming months are scary to think about, Lebo says. Should Trump lose, “he's still going to be in charge for two-and-a-half months. Especially with COVID raging worse than ever, it could be the worst two-and-a-half months of his presidency, and his worst behaviour of his presidency. There's nothing at all reining him in anymore.”
The pandemic's surge in the U.S. will keep the border closed that much longer and will probably be a source of infections for people crossing the border for necessary reasons, Lebo says. “The numbers are horrible.”
A fair number of Trump's supporters probably do know the virus is dangerous, Skocpol says. But Trump is a showman, “a seller of hopes and dreams. And what he was doing was tapping into the yearning of a lot of his core followers to get on with it — to get out of the house. To stop cowering before this virus. To get the economy going again.”
It's not going to take very much to improve upon Trump's handling of the pandemic, she says. Biden has promised widespread and free testing, ramped up contact tracing, emergency paid leave for those exposed to or sick with the virus, support to workers, families and businesses. Skocpal, a self-described liberal, is confident Biden can build cooperation across all levels of American government to deal with the COVID crisis and get vaccines distributed when they become available.
Biden needs to make his health messages bipartisan, Lebo, of Western University, says. “He needs to stand up to Democrats and Republicans and say, `this is what the science says. Put your mask on.' That would be a great start.”