The politics of pandemics

Some Democrats have expressed concern that the interruption of our presidential campaign will work to Donald Trump’s benefit in November, that even someone as un-presidential as Trump gets to leverage the advantages of the presidency and incumbency during a crisis.

Of special concern is a scenario in which the shutdowns end sooner rather than later, the economy comes back to life quickly (with an especially strong stock market recovery), and the fatality rates turn out to be far lower than initially predicted, and Trump being Trump attempts to then claim credit for it all.

Although such fears leave Democrats in the rather tricky position of politically benefiting from and being seen to hope for bad news, within them one also senses a post-pandemic political strategy beginning to form.

At the heart of that strategy will be a recognition that any decision on Trump’s part to encourage an opening up of the country is going to be fraught with great political risk. Most rational people know that we can’t stay in shutdown mode much longer, but opening things up will leave Trump in a vulnerable position, which Democrats will seek to exploit.

Indeed, there will be almost no way for Trump to avoid the charge of having ended the shutdowns too early even if the best possible post-shutdown scenario plays out, since the virus will still linger to some degree, more deaths will still occur, and we will never have a firm way of knowing how many lives would have been saved by staying locked down longer or what the additional economic damage to an already damaged economy would have been under such circumstances.

The Democratic approach will thus likely consist of two steps: Play up the bad news (even if it isn’t really that bad), and blame it all on Trump, to the point of holding him responsible for the death of anyone who dies with the virus after the shutdowns end.

Even those of us who never have or will vote for him recognize that Trump thus faces the ultimate nowin proposition — continue the shutdowns, watch the economy collapse and thereby become the 21st century’s version of Herbert Hoover, or open things up to avoid that dismal outcome and be blamed for the inevitable loss of life that follows. Bad things are going to happen either way — heads you win, tails I lose.

A viscerally anti-Trump media which has whipped the country into a pandemic panic and pushed terrified politicians into draconian over-reactions will also be sure to play its part in any such strategy, in most cases by delivering any bad news (or anything that could be made to look that way) in blaring headlines and stories shorn of context or any sense of perspective.

A rather predictable example of this, and of what is sure to come from the media post-shutdown, occurred recently when headlines across the country reported that the U.S. now had the highest number of national virus fatalities, with scant acknowledgment of differences in population among countries and more relevant per-capita statistics.

Those headlines could have reported that the U.S. was doing, in terms of deaths per million or official fatality rates, much better than most other developed nations, but then that wouldn’t have the same scare effect or provided the same fodder with which to criticize Trump’s handling of the pandemic.

The data that we need most as we grapple with the question of when and how to open things up — breakdowns that indicate which demographic groups and localities are most threatened by the virus, the probability of healthy, sub-70-year-olds succumbing to it, and the percentage of heavy smokers and/or those with various cardiovascular diseases as a percentage of fatalities — have been mostly absent or buried in media coverage, perhaps because such reporting might alleviate rather than encourage the hysteria and damage the ratings of CNN and MSNBC (as well as the dethrone-Trump project).

Although we have been inundated with all kinds of methodologically dubious models and projections seeking to predict likely fatalities from the virus, we’ve seen virtually none attempting to predict the loss of life that a severe global depression would cause, in terms of starvation, suicides, drug overdoses, increased alcoholism and stress-related illnesses. Unlike the virus, those deaths will be distributed among the young and old alike, with probably hundreds of millions of other lives blighted for years to come through impoverishment flowing from lost jobs and businesses.

When considering that the bottom third of the world’s nearly eight billion people try to survive on less than $1,000 per year ($3 per day), and are thus already perilously close to the starvation line, it is easy to see how a severe global downturn could kill many times more people than would have been lost in the most extreme, uncontrolled pandemic projections.

It isn’t money versus lives here so much as it is a lesser loss of life by opening things up or a likely greater loss of life (and much else) by staying shut down too long.

The sense grows that Sweden was right and just about everyone else wrong on this; that we’ve made a terrible mistake and now don’t know how to undo it.