Trump’s strategy onmasks destined to result in deaths
Believe it or not — and I know many will refuse to believe it — right now New York City may be among the best places in America to avoid catching the coronavirus.
In New York state as a whole, the number of people dying daily from COVID-19 is only slightly higher than the number killed in traffic accidents. In New York City, only around 1% of tests for the coronavirus are coming up positive, compared with, for example, more than 12% in Florida.
How did New York get here from the nightmarish days of April? It’s no mystery: partial herd immunity might be a small factor, but mainly the state did simple, obvious things to limit virus transmission. Bars are closed; indoor dining is still banned. Above all, there’s a facemask mandate that people generally obey.
New York isn’t the only such success story. At first, Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, did everything wrong; not only did he keep the bars open, but he refused to let the (mostly Democratic) mayors of the state’s biggest cities impose local face-mask mandates. The result was a huge spike in cases: For a few weeks in July almost as many people were dying daily in Arizona, population 7 million, as in the whole European Union, population 446 million.
But then Ducey reversed course, closing bars and gyms. He didn’t impose a statewide mask mandate, but he allowed cities to take action. And both cases and deaths plummeted, although not to New York levels.
We know what works. Which makes it both bizarre and frightening that Donald Trump has apparently decided to spend the final weeks of his re-election campaign deriding and discouraging mask-wearing and other precautions. Trump’s behavior on this and other issues is sometimes described as a rejection of science, which is true as far as it goes.
But I think it’s also important to understand the point I was trying to make with my New York and Arizona examples: The case for masks doesn’t rest merely on detailed scientific research that laypeople may find hard to understand. At this point it’s also confirmed by the lived experience of regions that suffered severe coronavirus outbreaks but brought them under control.
You sometimes see people suggesting that wearing face masks is somehow inconsistent with America’s individualistic culture. And if that were true it would be a condemnation of that culture. After all, there’s something wrong with any definition of freedom that includes the right to gratuitously expose other people to the risk of disease and death — which is what refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic amounts to.
As long as I can remember, many shops and restaurants have had signs on their doors proclaiming “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” How many of these establishments have been stormed by mobs of bare-chested protesters?
In short, anti-mask agitation isn’t about freedom. It’s a declaration of political allegiance, driven by Trump and his allies.
But why make a partisan issue out of what should be straightforward public health policy? The fairly obvious answer is that we’re looking at the efforts of an amoral politician to rescue his flailing campaign. But widespread mask-wearing is a constant reminder that the virus is still out there. Hence Trump’s renewed push against the simplest, most sensible of public health precautions.
As a political strategy, this ploy probably won’t work. But it will lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths.