Pandemic won’t listen to Trump’s promises
President’s ‘comeback’ vow seems increasingly unlikely as crisis worsens
In Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” the narrator explains why officials and townsfolk are so reluctant to respond in time to a deadly epidemic. “Stupidity had a knack of getting its way,” he says.
His townspeople kept “doing business, arranged for journeys and formed views,” because “they fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free as long as there are pestilences.”
The words seem especially apt today in the U.S., where, after business and social reopenings in May and June were cheered by President Donald Trump, the country now faces a coronavirus crisis arguably as severe as it has ever been.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helps lead the U.S. coronavirus task force, warned senators Tuesday the current record-high 40,000 cases being detected per day could increase dramatically. “I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around,” he told them.
And yet, like Camus’s characters, the warnings were resisted. “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best for everyone,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul said in response to Fauci.
Even as other countries celebrate COVID-19 success, the sobering truth is sinking in that, in much of the U.S., the virus is surging and threatens to overwhelm hospitals. Some states are re-closing businesses in response. The European Union is barring U.S. travellers. VicePresident Mike Pence has shifted his tone to encourage mask use and slower-paced reopenings.
“This is really the beginning,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deputy director Anne Schuchat told the Journal of the American Medical Association this week. “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, ‘Hey, it’s summer. Everything’s going to be fine,’ ” she said. “We are not even beginning to be over this.”
A symbol of the Trump administration’s optimism crashing into reality came from Jacksonville, Fla. On June 11, Trump announced he was moving the August Republican presidential convention there from Charlotte, N.C., because he wanted a site where officials wouldn’t insist on masks and social distancing. On Monday, the mayor of Jacksonville implemented a mandatory mask order as Florida cases have surged fivefold in two weeks. Still, some people persist in resisting warnings.
Whether Paul has a point about experts always knowing what’s best or not, many of them predicted a situation like the one occurring now. Some I spoke to in May, as Georgia and Texas allowed businesses to reopen even as virus transmission remained high, said a disease resurgence was likely.
Jon Zelner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, says you could psychoanalyze the behaviour leading to the resurgence as a culture war over freedom and individuality, but that he thinks it comes down to the difficulty of seeing cause and effect when cases and hospitalizations lag behind behaviour.
“If you’re motivated to think that your activity is harmless, it’s easy to find evidence for that by not seeing new cases cropping up all around you in the days or even one to two weeks after you really let your foot off the brake,” he says. He also says age, race and wealth can drive a “sense of invulnerability” in some places.
The surge is likely not just frustrating to those who predicted it, but to the leaders who ignored the predictions, as the major aims of the aggressive push to reopen may soon prove to have been self-defeating. One aim, repeated often by Trump and supporters, was to bring the economy back.
But Houston boutique owner Alex Belt told The New York Times this week that her situation since reopening was “business as usual without the business.” An initial surge of customers has since disappeared as the virus has surged, she said. “People are just scared.”
Analysts at the Bank of America, Moody’s Analytics and the
Federal Reserve of Boston have warned in recent days the resurgence of the virus threatens any economic recovery.
Trump has been promising the “Great American Comeback” on the campaign trail. Which suggests the second presumed aim of the aggressive reopening strategy. The president’s re-election hopes are thought to depend on an economic bounceback. If the economy lags, the strategy could backfire.
More so if people see a rise in illness and death in states Trump needs to win. That the virus resurgence is most pronounced in states that followed Trump’s lead most closely — places he won easily in 2016 — could hurt his political prospects even more. Polls in Texas and Georgia this week showed Democratic candidate Joe Biden competitive with Trump — any election in which those states are close is not one Trump is likely to win.
Which is aside from the human cost of a protracted epidemic in suffering, lost lives, fear and isolation. As in the case of Camus’s townsfolk, it appears leaders fancied themselves free to make decisions despite the virus, but are finding those decisions cannot work as long as the virus runs rampant, at great cost.
Zelner, of the University of Michigan, says it’s an “open question” whether authorities are learning their lesson.
“I think state and local health departments have been almost uniformly great across the board from the beginning, but elected officials and the public have not always been motivated to listen,” he says. “I worry in some places — and at the executive level — the strategy may just devolve into letting this thing ‘burn itself out.’ ”
Perceptions of danger, economics and politics will likely continue to propel a see-saw of reopenings and closings, but Zelner thinks the status quo of regional surges in cases will probably prevail until either a vaccine or herd immunity slow the virus’s spread. “I think this noisy, spatially heterogeneous ‘thing’ we’re in right now is probably going to be what it looks like for awhile, until we get our act together or the biology takes care of it for us,” he says. “I hope it’s the former rather than the latter, but I’m not optimistic at a national level.”
The sobering truth is sinking in that, in much of the U.S., the virus is surging and threatens to overwhelm hospitals