You May Think/Wish You Are Done With The Pandemic... But That Is Not How It Works

Yesterday the NY Times reported that Dr. Fauci "delivered a grim assessment of the devastation wrought around the world by the virus, describing COVID-19 as his 'worst nightmare'-- a new, highly contagious respiratory infection that causes a significant rate of illness and death. 'In a period of four months, it has devastated the whole world. And it isn’t over yet... Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it.'" Trump could care less what Fauci thinks. To him, the pandemic is just an inconvenient possible obstacle to his reelection.

A couple of days ago, The Atlantic published their version of an increasingly popular essay-- this one by Alexis Mafrigal and Robinson Meyer, America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic-- Businesses are reopening. Protests are erupting nationwide. But the virus isn’t done with us. "Americans," they wrote, "may wish the virus to be gone, but it is not. While the outbreak has eased in the Northeast, driving down the overall national numbers, cases have only plateaued in the rest of the country, and they appear to be on the rise in recent days in COVID Tracking Project data. Twenty-two states reported 400 or more new cases Friday, and 14 other states and Puerto Rico reported cases in the triple digits. Several states-- including Arizona, North Carolina, and California-- are now seeing their highest numbers of known cases. These numbers all reflect infections that likely began before this week of protest. An even larger spike now seems likely... But as the pandemic persists, more and more states are pulling back on the measures they’d instituted to slow the virus. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force is winding down its activities. Its testing czar is returning to his day job at the Department of Health and Human Services. As the long, hot summer of 2020 begins, the facts suggest that the U.S. is not going to beat the coronavirus. Collectively, we slowly seem to be giving up. It is a bitter and unmistakably American cruelty that the people who might suffer most are also fighting for justice in a way that almost certainly increases their risk of being infected."

For several weeks at the beginning of the outbreak in the U.S., the need to control the virus took precedence over other concerns. Now, for many people, the pandemic is no longer the most pressing national issue. As protesters and some public-health officials have said they are weighing the harms of police violence against the risk of increased viral spread and choosing to gather in the streets, state governments have made similar risk-reward arguments about balancing public-health and economic concerns. The virus does not care about these trade-offs. Retail reopenings and racial-justice protests may exist on different moral planes, but to the virus they both present new environments for spreading.

Maybe the U.S. will somehow avoid another New York–style outbreak. Maybe the number of new infections will not grow exponentially. Maybe treatments have sufficiently improved that we will see huge outbreaks, but fewer people will die than we’ve come to expect. If so, it won’t be because the United States made concerted, coordinated decisions about how to balance the horrors of the pandemic and the frustration of pausing everyday life. Instead, the United States has moved from attempting to beat the virus to managing the harm of losing.

This is America. The problems with our response to the pandemic reflect the problems of the country itself. Our health-care system is almost uniquely ill-suited to dealing with a national health crisis; preexisting health disparities, entrenched and deepened by decades of racism, cannot be erased overnight; state and local health departments desperately needed federal leadership they did not receive; the Senate has not entertained a longer-lasting economic-rescue package that would allow a more prolonged period of sheltering in place; states are facing a fiscal cliff.

And yet, even though this health crisis reflects our nation’s political, social, and civic infrastructure, this plague has no consideration for morality. People partying in a pool may live while those protesting police brutality may die. People who assiduously followed the rules of social distancing may get sick, while those who flouted them happily toast their friends in a crowded bar. There is no righteous logic here. There is no justice in who can breathe easy and who can’t breathe at all.

Kim Bellware and Jacqueline Dupree, reporting for the Washington Post also noted that over a dozen states have seen their daily caseloads increasing, not going down. As we've been pointing out-- warning-- here, "As rates of coronavirus infections ease in places such as New York and Illinois and onetime hot spots move into new phases of reopening, parts of the country that had previously avoided being hit hard by the outbreak are now tallying record-high new infections. Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, according to data tracked by The Washington Post: : Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

The increase of coronavirus cases in counties with fewer than 60,000 people is part of the trend of new infections surging across the rural United States. Health experts worry those areas, already short of resources before the pandemic, will struggle to track new cases with the infrastructure that remains.

Adding to the disparity in health-care support, residents in states such as Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are living under only minor-to-moderate restrictions-- even as their average daily infection rate is rising.

The past two weeks of protests against police brutality will be yet another variable in how the virus spreads in the country. Protesters flooded the streets of major cities but gathered in small towns across the country, too. Though the widespread protests are a boon for the movement, health officials have warned about the impact so many people closely packed with one another could have on transmission rates.

This week, the U.S. passed the 2 million confirmed cases mark. No other country is close. Brazil, which has been spiking gigantically and occasionally has more new cases per day than the U.S. does, is the second most hard hit country-- with just over 700,000 total cases. Russia is third with not quite 500,000 cases.

On Monday, the most new cases were reported in these states (followed by their Tuesday new case confirmations):

• California +2,279 --> +3,045
• Texas +1,486 --> +1,748
• New York +1,064 --> +768
• Florida +966 --> +1,096
• New Jersey +911 --> +275
• North Carolina +892 --> +710
• Arizona +789 --> +618
• Illinois +658 --> +797
• Georgia +599 --> +752
• Virginia +570 --> +487
• Tennessee +563 --> +631
• South Carolina +514 --> + 428
• Mississippi +498 --> +341

It's easy to blame these spikes on government policies and on crackpot ideologue governors like Greg Abbott (R-TX), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Brian Kemp (R-GA), Bill Lee (R-TN) or Henry McMaster (R-SC) or on politically ambitious hacks and cowards like Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Andrew Cuomo (D-NY). And... it really comes down to the people on the state. Gavin Newsom has declared California "open," pleasing his campaign donors who have funded his career and will fund his eventual run for higher office. But my neighbors aren't going back to work or wandering over to shopping malls or restaurants. My friend just got home from a drive to Arizona where he said half the people he saw weren't wearing masks and seemed oblivious to the threat on steepening the curve.