COVID-19 unmasks partisan divide

Somehow, wearing a medical mask around town has become a political signifier, the sartorial antithesis of the red MAGA cap.

A mask suggests the wearer respects public health experts who’ve warned that it’s too soon to think the COVID-19 crisis has subsided. To the masked among us, covering one’s face in public is both a means of self-protection and a demonstration of social etiquette, even a civic duty.

Those from the other side of our weird social chasm regard mask wearers as cowering milksops. They take their cue from a barefaced president, whose contempt for scientific niceties extends to warnings issued by his administration’s own public health authorities

Just this week, Donald Trump rejected warnings from the Veterans Administration that the hydroxychloroquine malaria antidote he has been promoting for weeks — and apparently ingesting himself — offers no proven protection from coronavirus infections, and might pose a significant health risk. The president dismissed the report from the VA — his VA — as a “Trump enemy statement.”

Trump’s mystique has been built around such mocking disdain for experts. His followers are convinced that the president, because he says so, knows than better than economists, pollsters, judges, CIA analysts, inspector generals, blue state governors, climate scientists, medical researchers and — especially — epidemiologists, whose continued wariness has put a drag on his push to reboot the economy.

Trump’s contempt for his own administration’s coronavirus guidelines was evident again Thursday in Michigan, where he met, maskless, with a group of black supporters. Then, after a tour of a Ford plant converted to manufacture ventilators, he stood barefaced before reporters.

Trump said that he had donned a facecovering in the manufacturing area away from the TV cameras, but then removed it.

Somehow, in the Age of Trump, utterly impartial threats to humanity, like global warming and COVID-19, have become triggers for partisan contempt. Wearing something as innocuous as a protective medical face mask has become a political declaration.

Our regard for a killer disease is so skewed by politics that, according to an Associated Press poll released two weeks, 17 percent more Democrats than Republicans said they wore masks when they left the safety of their homes.

Vice President Mike Pence surely knew, on his trip to Orlando Wednesday, that reporters would notice that he had emerged from Air Force II without a mask, then addressed a group of maskless first responders on the tarmac.

Later, Pence and Gov. Ron DeSantis briefly wore masks outside an Orlando nursing home, but discarded them for the day’s big photo op: the maskless pair at Beth’s Burger Bar, along with their maskless entourage, amid maskless restaurant workers. None of them demonstrating much regard for social distancing.

When it comes to the Trump administration’s official policies, who you gonna believe: those federal guidelines or your lying eyes?

Math fares no better than epidemiology in our hyper-partisan atmosphere. Last week, the DeSantis administration fired the manager of the state’s coronavirus dashboard after she balked at removing certain data on coronavirus infections from the on-line portal. She claimed that she had refused to “manually change data to drum up support” for the state’s reopening plans. (A charge refuted by the governor’s office.)

The firing might have caused less of a fuss if the DeSantis administration had not refused, for weeks, to release details about deaths and infections in the state’s nursing homes and prisons.

The data manager’s firing added to the perception that the governor has been less than forthcoming with statistics that might complicate the narrative that the pandemic has ebbed in Florida.

Numerical discrepancies were dogging DeSantis again this week when the Tampa Bay Times examined state and local mortality reports, and discovered an unexpected surge in deaths from natural causes in Florida between March 22 and April 25. The coronavirus accounted for most of the increase, but there seemed to be at least another 200, perhaps as many as 600 deaths more than usual.

Uncounted COVID-19 losses provided the most likely explanation for those excess fatalities. Except that would mean that the state’s official tally, used to support the governor’s decision to reopen the economy, should have reflected a grimmer reality.

Of course, that unhappy supposition was supplied by an expert numbers cruncher from the University of South Florida, and you know which faction of our divided society thinks experts tell the truth.

Not the side wearing masks.