US virus explosion pays no attention to politics
“I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”
Reportedly these were the words of a 30-year old from Texas who’d attended a so-called “Covid party”, in which guests gathered to see if they would contract a disease that many of them suspected wasn’t real. The report hasn’t been confirmed, but if true it is a heart-wrenching story but hardly unique, even for the past week, when we had already heard about Carsyn Davis, a 17-year old girl from Florida whose mother had taken her to a Covid party organised at her local church. The girl was already immuno-compromised from childhood illness and died after finally being admitted to hospital once the hydroxychloroquine administered by her parents failed to live up to the President’s promises.
As Europe looks ahead to a possible second wave, America is still coming to terms with the first, which hit its coasts in March and has since rolled slowly across the country. As the nation climbs towards three and a half million cases, 41 states currently have a rising number of infections, with other states, such as Arizona and Arkansas, plateauing on some quite dizzying peaks.
This is a story about science rushing to understand a very novel virus, but it’s also about a nation fundamentally divided about how it views the world. The divisions are as crude as they are sometimes helpful, with the old oppositional politics played out between the more secular coasts and the deeply religious heartland. Yet what we’re also witnessing is hubris exposed on a national scale.
After initially flattening the curve in places such as New York and California, parts of the American political establishment thought it was done with the virus. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, boasted back in May: “We’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognise it because it challenges their narrative”. Narrative here meant recognising how a much-ridiculed president and Republican administration had conquered the “invisible enemy”. The problem for DeSantis is that it has increasingly become apparent that his narrative was false.
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) had issued guidelines for re-opening America. The Trump administration had initially refused to publish the guidelines, but they finally appeared on the 16th of the month at a much-feted press conference led by the President. It was memorable because it was such a peculiar affair, with one half of the podium preaching caution, the other half haste.
Minimal requirements would have been met before restrictions were lifted, promised the scientists. Reopening would take place in three stages, driven by data over a range of criteria including testing and hospital capacity. Stage one, for example, would require “downward trajectory (or near-zero incidence) of documented cases over a 14-day period”.
They were sensible guidelines, immediately ignored by the President who could only see a green flag. “We must have a working economy,” he declared. “And we want to get it back. Very, very quickly. And that’s what’s going to happen.”
The federal response was thereafter scaled back, with priority swinging back to the President’s drive to restart the economy ahead of the election. The narrative shifted to the states, where the administration pressurised governors to re-open their economies – in some cases after what had only ever been a fairly notional lockdown.
This shift is important to the story. It represents the devolution of responsibility (and blame) from the President to the governors, but also allowed the governors to project themselves onto the national stage. This is why, for example, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, now finds herself in the running to be Joe Biden’s pick for VP.
Michigan is one of the states that have suppressed the virus over the entirety of the outbreak and Whitmer proved she could get under the President’s skin – he calls her “that woman from Michigan”.
DeSantis, on the other hand, isn’t just speaking to Florida. He is said to have presidential ambitions and has proved the most Trumpian of governors, even going so far as to blame Hispanic farmworkers for the rise in cases. He was also slow to close beaches in March and April, refuses to make masks mandatory, and this week described Florida’s plight as “a blip”. That blip amounted to 10,000 news cases on Saturday alone, the same day that saw Disneyland Florida reopen. A day later, the state would record the highest daily increase in the entire nation, with over 15,000 cases added.
Florida was not alone. Last week, a Texas doctor speaking to Sky News described how the state was “heading to pure hell”. Sure enough, yesterday Texas saw another 10,000 new cases as hospitals began to report that they’re running out of ventilators. Former Democratic candidate, Beto O’Rourke, has now described the infection as “out of control, with no leadership from our governor, no leadership from the President”. Yet thus far the governor, Greg Abbott, has refused to take measures stricter than warning Texans that a lockdown will come unless they start to wear masks.
Meanwhile, in Arizona the state governor, Doug Ducey, has now reversed plans to re-open. He had rushed from total lockdown to complete reopening in the space of just two weeks, despite cases still rising. Yet when photographs emerged this week of an unmasked Ducey at a party, he claimed it was a “smear attack”.
Yet as much as one might be tempted to simplify the problem into blue and red states, the virus is proving indifferent to politics. On the back of his success helping his state flatten the curve through April and May, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, introduced a four-stage plan to reopen the state.
They only reached stage three before they began to see cases rise. What appeared to be a “flattened curve”, with one to two thousand cases a day, now looks like the lower slope of a mountain that developed through June and July to exceed 7,000 daily cases. They have thus far avoided the exponential explosion seen in some states but it’s enough of a worry that Newsom is again closing indoor dining, movie theatres, bars, and gyms.
The three big states, California, Florida, and Texas, account for 30,000 of the new cases reported on Monday and 18% of the global total. Yet in the US that still amounts to less than half of the 61,492 new cases reported. There is a long tail of states racking up hundreds of new cases a day. Idaho, for example, has seen cases rising quite precipitously. The numbers are low compared to other states (last Thursday saw a record rise of 594 cases) but the example serves to demonstrate what happens when the virus takes hold in a community. Unlike Florida (8th), California (11th)and Texas (26th), Idaho (44th) has one of the lowest population densities. If Idaho can spike, so can anywhere.
If America is slowly learning that reopening is fraught with peril so long as numbers climb, the example of New York should give them hope. This week saw the city’s first day without any coronavirus deaths. Yet, unlike Florida where DeSantis claimed victory in May, New York is remaining cautious. “This disease is far from beaten,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday.
That kind of focus appears to be key. New York has proved the case for rigorous testing to identify outbreaks and then tracking to prevent its spread. Most significantly, New York’s strategy is led by the data. Governor Andrew Cuomo has just announced a plan for reopening schools, and the non-emotive language should be familiar: “Schools in a region can reopen […] if its daily infection rate remains below 5 percent or lower using a 14-day average”.
That language is similar to the CDC’s guidelines from May, and makes the point that the failures across the US are not failures of science but of politics. Cuomo himself can sound abrasive but perhaps understandably so when young Americans are dying in the mistaken belief that this virus is political.
As he puts it: “You don’t hold your finger up and feel the wind, you don’t have an inspiration, you don’t have a dream, you don’t have an emotion – look at the data.”
Since publication, the New York Times has modified their report of the incident involving the 30-year old Texan man’s death . See here for more on this development.