The left’s panic pandemic

The more data arrive, the greater the sense grows that the coronavirus is not nearly as deadly as originally thought.

A steady stream of studies coming out of Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties, New York City, the Boston area and various European countries indicate a vastly higher infection rate among populations than previously estimated and thus a many times smaller fatality rate.

The number of official virus-related fatalities continues to climb, but some are also digging beneath those raw numbers to put them into better perspective. Writing in Forbes, Rich Karlgaard statistically analyzes the virus death toll in terms of what he calls “living days stolen”—the cumulative number of likely days of life that have been lost given what we generally know about the age and health of the victims—and concludes that automobile fatalities cause seven times more lost living days every year in America than the virus has thus far.

If science is indeed guiding our decision-making, such knowledge should lead to a recalibration of policy in favor of gradually lifting the lockdowns and the use of a different approach that does less economic damage and focuses more on protecting those most vulnerable.

As Bret Stephens noted in a recent New York Times column, basing policy in Nashville on what is happening in New York is nonsensical, as is continuing to shut down everyone and everything if the numbers tell us that only a small percentage of the population—the elderly and those with severe underlying conditions (overlapping categories)—was ever seriously at risk.

This should all be obvious to anyone capable of understanding rudimentary cost-benefit analysis or the logic of actuarial tables, but such approaches appear callous and even unpatriotic to those among us who have acquired a masochistic commitment to the idea of a shutdown nation, to the point of demanding that things stay that way for months or even years to come, regardless of the cost.

The original, reasonable goal of “flattening the curve” so as to not overwhelm the health-care system now appears to have shifted to the irrational, impossible-to-achieve goal of eliminating all risk. If opening up might lead to more loss of life than staying shut down, even only slightly more, then we must all stay shut down; thus establishing a decision-making principle which by its intrinsic logic contains no basis for ever opening up.

This “If it saves just one life it’s worth it” position, overwhelmingly concentrated on the political left, most likely flows from certain geographical and ideological tendencies.

On the geographical level, as those “red” and “blue” maps tell us on election nights, the left is disproportionately concentrated in the kinds of large “cheek to jowl” urban areas that have been harder hit by the virus. “Red” America has been much less affected than “blue” America, and this undoubtedly colors perceptions of the degree of threat, especially when also considering that the area that has been hit hardest of all, New York City, is home base for the same left-leaning national media whose coverage has driven so much of the panic and over-reaction.

Occupation probably comes into it as well, since the working class and small-business owners that make up so much of Donald Trump’s base have been hurt much more by the shutdowns than the “chattering classes” (those in the media, academe, publishing, and the arts) who can more easily do their jobs from home and overwhelmingly support Democrats.

Ironically, the left’s abandonment of the working class (the proletariat, once its raison d’être) has now been completed by the virus.

In political/ideological terms, the “resistance” to Trump has also now clearly fused with the resistance to opening up the country. Because Trump wants to end the shutdowns, and the resistance and the media want to end Trump, the resistance and the media want to prolong the shutdowns as long as possible.

The hunch along these lines is that Democrats and their media auxiliaries will suddenly adopt a vastly different view of the virus and the need for shutdowns, regardless of fatality levels, if Joe Biden gets to 270 electoral votes on Nov. 3.

The transformative nature of leftist ideology comes into play in all this as well—the left is arguing that a “return to normal” won’t be possible because it didn’t much like normal pre-virus America anyway and doesn’t want to go back to it; it wants a different America to come out this crisis and feels that prolonging it will make that more likely.

In short, a large political investment has been made by various parties in virus hysteria and the shutdowns that flow from it.

Because their political interests now coincide with prolonging the shutdowns, and maintaining the level of fear necessary to justify them, the Democrats and the media have become, in Alex Berenson’s words, “Team Apocalypse.”

The more we learn about the virus, the stronger the argument for returning to work becomes, but the more Democrats want us hunkered down at home, unemployed and cowering in fear.

The left claims that science is guiding its approach to the pandemic. It isn’t. Politics is.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.