Stop the coronavirus scapegoating and be honest
If only there were someone or something to blame for this virus, we would all feel so much better.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing to blame but biology — the slow and somewhat inevitable evolution of a common virus. Now that this new coronavirus has jumped from animals to humans and spread like wildfire through our populous cities, all we can do is our very best to contain it, treat its often horrendous symptoms and then perhaps, one day if we’re lucky, cure or eradicate it.
The reality of SARS-COV-2 has not stopped others from trying to find a scapegoat for this mis(and scary) situation.
It’s your governor’s fault you don’t have a job.
It’s your mayor’s fault you can’t go to a concert.
It’s China’s fault for not containing this virus at the source.
It’s the media’s fault for causing panic.
It’s the president’s fault for not having a large enough stockpile of ventilators to make sure thousands don’t die gasping for air on a cot in a tent hospital.
It’s the CDC’S fault for not being equipped to do the testing that was necessary months ago to contain the spread and avoid a shutdown of much of our economy.
Blaming others will not solve our very large — or actually microscopic — problem. What will our problem is knowledge, information, rapid response and an entire nation working together.
I am not an expert on infectious diseases, but I trust (and you should too) that this nation’s scientists and doctors are not politically motivated with their recommendations. They want to save lives. Nor is the global scientific community sounding the alarm as part of some conspiracy to derail the world economy.
And here’s what many of those experts are telling us: Take drastic action now to stop the rapid spread of this virus or watch more than half-a-million people in the U.S. die in a matter of months. Close bars, restaurants and offices in the U.K. or preerable pare for catastrophic loss of life. Thankfully many of our leaders are listening and have taken appropriate action.
But some are expressing skepticism at those experts’ dire predictions. U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, blamed the media for sensationalizing the virus. He wrote in an op-ed for the Colorado Springs Gazette “it’s important to remember that coronavirus is not nearly as fatal as Ebola, SARS, or H1N1, which didn’t produce a similar overreaction that we’re seeing now.”
If Buck wants to push back against the coronavirus response, he must do so within the confines of reality. His column was premised entirely on a factually inaccurate (do better edisolve tors, please) assertion. While COVID-19 doesn’t kill anywhere close to the rate of some other SARS viruses or Ebola, even Buck’s assumed death rate of 1% is far worse than H1N1 (the swine flu outbreak in 2009-2010) which an international team of scientists in 2013 estimated killed .02% of those infected. The difference is 1 in 100 people dying versus 1 in 5,000. Use the number of Facebook friends you have to process those numbers.
Despite Buck’s assurance that
it will be much less than 1% — glad he’s solved the mystery vexing so many by looking at a single event on a cruise ship where 1% of those infected died — no one actually knows the death rate.
It’s possible that the death rate will be smaller than 1%. For that to be the case, it would mean that tens of thousands more people have the virus than have been recorded in any country. Scientists are exploring the theory right now that a million people have actually already been infected so the death rate is really quite low. But at this point, that is just a theory. The testing for this virus in the U.S. and other countries has been anemic so no one is quite certain what’s happening — except for Buck of course.
It’s also possible that the death rate is much higher than 1%. Evidence for that is coming out of Italy, where, of the known cases of COVID-19, about 9% of the patients have died. Let that sink in for a moment, and pray that is not going to be the case in Colorado. Other countries have shown that somewhere between 5% and 20% of their known cases need hospitalization. Again that is a huge range, but one that should make us all a little queasy, especially if our path forward is simply allowing this virus to rampage through our communities.
Germany is reporting a 0.5% death rate (that is still many times greater than the H1N1 flu) and France’s is around 5%. It’s a mystery and no one is sure why some otherwise healthy 40-year-olds are dying from pneumonia and septic shock while others exhibit no symptoms of the virus at all.
That is why elected officials are acting now with the worst-case scenario in mind and hoping that science proves them wrong in 6 months and everyone is angry at the overreaction.
The odds, however, that this turns out to be no big deal are slim. Because even if the death rate is lower than the flu (as Buck promises those he wants to send back to work), that low death rate is only possible if this new coronavirus is also so much more contagious than the flu that a billion people or more would catch the virus this year. That scenario still has our hospitals bursting at the seams. When hospitals start turning otherwise healthy 60-yearolds away from oxygen, life support, and even basic care, the death rate will climb.
Buck is not the only skeptic of America’s current handling of this crisis — read the thoughtful take on the cover of this section from The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman — but if Colorado’s leader of the Republican Party is going to argue for a different course of action, he needs to stop the scapegoating (this is not the media’s fault) and be honest about what the body count will be under his plan to send healthy people back to work.