Another Covid wave batters the U.S.
What happened
New coronavirus cases in the U.S. shot back above 60,000 a day this week, a 70 percent increase since mid-September, as Americans suffering “pandemic fatigue” stopped practicing social distancing and began seeing family and friends again. Major Covid-19 outbreaks are now rippling across the Midwest and Mountain West, with 12 states—including Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, the Dakotas, and New Mexico—reporting record seven-day new-case averages. Coronavirus hospitalizations are surging in 39 states; Wisconsin is the worst hit, with nearly 10 percent of the state’s hospital beds occupied by Covid-19 patients. “People are dying every night,” said Carolyn Sienko, a nurse at Aspirus Wausau Hospital. “This virus is just beating them.” More than 8.5 million Americans have been infected with Covid-19, and 226,000 have died from the disease—about a fifth of the global total.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, warned that most states are “going in the wrong direction” as the cold winter months approach and that cases could spike higher as people spend more time indoors, where transmission risk is greater. On a call with campaign staff, President Trump said Americans were “tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots” and were ready to move on from the pandemic. Trump has largely sidelined Fauci and other experts on his coronavirus task force in favor of Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist who last week tweeted “Masks work? NO.” Atlas has publicly embraced the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial document from a libertarian think tank that advocates letting the virus spread freely among young people to achieve “herd immunity.”
What the editorials said
We’re all tired of the coronavirus, Mr. President, said The Washington Post. Americans are exhausted by grief and the necessity of following social-distancing rules that slow transmission but come with “enormous costs to education and the economy.” Trump’s antidote to this agony is “wishful thinking.” He continues to block a national testing plan, encourage reckless behavior, and mock prudence. Sticking our heads in the sand will only produce “more unemployment, more illness, more misery.”
There’s not much else our government can do, said The Wall Street Journal. Not so long ago, Democrats were demanding that Trump impose the kind of strict lockdown that European countries tried out this spring. But those draconian restrictions didn’t stick. Economic necessity forced Spain, Germany, France, and other nations to reopen, and Europe is now recording more new infections per capita than the U.S. These struggles prove that, “short of a perfect vaccine, there is no magic solution to Covid.”
What the columnists said
There are good reasons why Atlas and other proponents of herd immunity are in the scientific minority, said John Barry in The New York Times. Yes, most healthy people survive the coronavirus, but studies show many suffer long-term damage to the heart and lungs. Then there’s the question of exactly how we’d shield vulnerable populations while letting the virus run wild. Can you really protect a cancer survivor, a diabetic, or an obese person who needs to go to work every day? Notably, Atlas and company fail to mention how many people would perish on the path to herd immunity, which might require 60 percent of Americans to get infected. Models indicate more than a million would die.
Trump should be running on, not from, his record on the pandemic, said Jim Geraghty in NationalReview.com. Operation Warp Speed, the $11 billion White House initiative to fast-track vaccines and therapeutics, looks like a whopping success. Two vaccines could be available by the end of this year, and experimental antibody cocktails—like the one that helped Trump bounce back from his bout with the virus—will soon be available to ordinary patients. Those are achievements “worth celebrating.”
But Trump can’t bring himself to take the virus seriously, said Paul Waldman in WashingtonPost.com, and that’s why he keeps slipping in the polls. A mere 33 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s response to the Covid crisis, according to a recent Associated Press poll. Yet Trump keeps digging his own grave, saying Joe Biden, if elected, “will listen to the scientists.” The election will be “a referendum on the pandemic”—a vote Trump seems determined to lose.