The now infamous coronavirus is sickening people and exposing key weaknesses of the United States. The one positive aspect is that the coronavirus has a relatively low mortality rate (currently estimated to be about 2%) compared to viruses such as Ebola. This makes it deadly enough to be taken seriously but not deadly enough to severely damage civilization. Crudely put, most of us will live to see the mistakes of our leaders and our health care system.
One foundational weakness is that the United States tends to see health care as a private good rather than as something as critical to the United States as its military and economy. This has long been the case but is even more so under Trump. The Trump administration, via budget and policy choices, has weakened the CDC and our national defense against pandemics. While medical professionals and scientists will work heroically to address this virus, they are largely operating in a way analogous to a militia with limited support from the federal government. While the federal effort will (one hopes) expand, the basic attitude needs to change: disease, like climate, must be seen as an integral part of national defense and the well being of the country. This will require good leadership.
Sadly, good leadership is lacking at the highest levels. Trump is not interested in the virus, aside from its potential impact on his re-election. He has provided incorrect and misleading information to the public, such as expressing confidence that the warm weather of April will take care of the virus. While warmer weather does sometimes have an impact on illnesses, they do not go away and tend to return. Trump has appointed Pence to head up the response—while it allows him to scapegoat Pence if things go bad, Pence’s track record with illness is terrible. Trump has created a low-information, low-competence griftocracy which values obedience to the whims of Trump over all other values (like the good of the country). As such, things are likely to go very badly as Trump and his fellows endeavor to lie and blunder their way through the crisis, all the while looking for opportunities to grift.
The for-profit health care system is likely to prove extremely vulnerable to this virus. As anyone who works in health care will attest, the for-profit operations are designed to run at the very edge—having just enough people and resources to address the typical case load while maximizing profits. While health care professionals step up in time of disasters, the system is designed for maximum profit, not for resiliency in the face of a crisis. Keeping resources and personnel available to respond to a crisis is not good for short term profits but is critical to the defense of the United States. In the past, the United States approached its military defense in a similar way: a small force on active duty and desperate call ups and drafts in time of crisis. Now we maintain a standing military that is (one hopes) ready for a crisis. We need to take the same approach t0 health care. This might mean changing the focus from maximizing profits to, well, providing health care.
Another factor is that many Americans cannot afford health care nor can they afford to take time off from work because of illness (or for a quarantine). This means that many infected Americans will not know they are infected, will not get treatment and will spread the virus as they suffer through a workday while ill. Many Americans rely on schools as their primary child care; when the schools close, they will also face the challenge of addressing that problem.
While some might rush to accuse me of advocating some sort of socialist health care plan and a radical change to the economy, what I propose is something that a profit-focused capitalist should agree with, provided they can think in the long term. As China has shown, an illness of this sort can cause havoc on an economy. The stock market has been reeling in response and the pandemic has not even hit its stride. Laying aside concerns about human suffering, love of money should serve as a powerful motivating factor: building a solid defense against pandemics will provide a significant return on investment by providing resilience. Even those who hate the idea of everyone getting health care at affordable prices should accept that it would be worth it to keep the corporations and stock markets humming along and making money.
Mike, there were 12,500 deaths from swine flu in 2009. I don’t remember you writing anything about this. Why would that be?
I wrote about this matter before 2009; the essay is in my 2008 book. I argued, as I just did, that we should treat disease threats in a manner analogous to how we responded to military threats. So, this is not a new position for me. But we are objectively less prepared under Trump then we have been in the recent past.
This is so tiresome, really. This blog just continues to be an outlet for left-wing talking points and the attempt to spin any story, any fact, any situation into some kind of anti-Trump trope. What’s so disappointing is that there really is no basis in fact for any of it – but the proposed “fact” that they want you to believe is that Trump is incompetent at every level, and “This Is Proof of That Fact”.
So have at it.
I came across a statement recently: “Truth is not a value of the Left. It is a value of Liberals and Conservatives, but not the Left.” (Using “Liberals”, I presume, in the non-USAian sense – what you could call Classical Liberals.) I offer no proof of this,but it does strike me as plausible. The more I read around based on checking into the essays here, the more worried I am about the prospects for the next few decades if the US continues on what seems to be a leftist path.
I also came across this story, in which a satirical tweet about the virus is credulously retweeted and commented on by a bunch of Blue-Checkmark American political and media types – not average DailyKos commenters, but people who should know better, including Susan Rice: https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/02/trump-deranged-blue-checkmarks-get-punked-by-obviously-fake-coronavirus-quote/
(And yes, despite the screenshots, I checked at least some of those I could directly on Twitter: the cover-up is in full swing now; the originator has deleted his tweet and so have some of the retweeters, but I could see the comment abouve a deleted tweet box in others.)
Does nobody on the Left over there care about facts, or doing any due diligence on what they repeat?
I admit, this essay wasn’t about any kind of facts. Still, it pointedly ignores one big fact: the US is the best-prepared country in the world to handle health emergencies, as ranked by the Global Health Security Index at ghsindex (dot) org. The sponsors and advisors of that seem as non-partisan and high quality as anyone could ask for. And yet you say that the outbreak is “exposing key weaknesses of the United States.” Compared to what? What weaknesses is it exposing, and compared to what other countries? Did you feel that your expertise was such that you had no need to check credentialed estimates of emergency capability?
You say
One foundational weakness is that the United States tends to see health care as a private good rather than as something as critical to the United States.
Is that a weakness? or a strength? or a weakness in some areas and a strength in others? I say this, by the way, as someone who believes in public health care, and that Americans are getting fleeced by a confusopoly of administrators and regulators. But there is no doubt that the profit motive has already put massive resources towards this outbreak far beyond what would otherwise have been committed.
they are largely operating in a way analogous to a militia with limited support from the federal government.
This goes to the efficiency of markets versus Five Year Plans and directed economies. I’ll put my trust in markets.
I am really angry about the way so many in the US are cynically exploiting a tragedy to get their feelgood hit for another attack on Trump – who, frankly, hasn’t done anything wrong in this, at least yet. You used this as a platform to get in a set of gratuitous insults. The WHO has made it a priority to avoid associating it with China so as not to exacerbate any bad feeling towards innocent Chinese people. It’s a pity they can’t do the same for US politics.
The more I read around based on checking into the essays here, the more worried I am about the prospects for the next few decades if the US continues on what seems to be a leftist path.
This has been my concern for decades now. Though I must say just in the last few months with the light being shined more and more on the left and leftist ideology and even elements of the D party stepping back, just a little bit, from the Sandernista/AOC elements, I am beginning to feel a ray of hope. The more light being shined on it the better. I really think most of this nonsense was able to carry on because people were not aware of what folly it all is. The veneer of respectability of our elites has been sanded away over time. It’s like the 1984 Super Bowl commercial for Apple computers only the tide turned the other way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
This problem has deep roots in our education system. That someone like AOC spouts the economic nonsense that she spouts (see https://humanevents.com/2020/03/02/the-moral-panic-about-capitalism-threatens-american-potential/) yet has a BA in economics from a mainstream university is an absolute disgrace. But on the positive side, I am hearing more and more people, both parents and young people, stepping back from the absolute disgrace our education system has become. In the younger people, some of this is being driven by the insane student debt problem but some of it is an understanding that wasting 4, 5,6 years of one’s adult youth wasting money instead of making money is not a wise choice. The more the desire of young people to get on with their lives, relationships, travel, experience, etc. something that was a natural part of young men from even well-to-do families 100-150 years ago, the less pressure they feel to follow the economically destructive path of socialism.
Hopefully that’s clear…I gotta run so no time to fully proofread so it will have to do…
Dammit…my comment/reply to CT had two links in it so it’s stuck in the spam filter, I suppose?
Meanwhile, what does this say about the liberal academic culture at FAMU?
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/03/01/florida-am-student-donald-trump-deserves-credit-for-progress-at-historically-black-colleges/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
Lost the most coherent post I’ve put together since returning (finally time) when my browser window closed. Anyway, it amounted to saying what DH says: It’s all about finding a way to demonize Trump. 16,000 flu deaths this year in the US in first two months of 2020. 80,000 deaths last year according to the CDC. Anyone want to weigh in, also, on the chance that people who know people in media can manipulate stories in order to change market forces and thus profit? For instance, if my buddy is the CEO of CNN, why not ask him to pound the COVID-19 story into the ground, invest in face mask companies, pull your cash from cruise liners, airliners, and other areas sure to tank, only to buy when they’re cheap and wait for the inevitable rise? South Korea conducted the most comprehensive testing and found a death rate form COVID-19 of .6%. I, in all likelihood have already been exposed due to travels to multiple large airports (London, Dulles) and with people coming form China during this time.
When it comes to media handling of things like this, two vids are important. Both are long, but worth a watch over a beer. I’ll post them separately so they don’t get stuck in a filter.
Also, note I too am concerned about a disease that seriously endangers large groups of humans. But there’s an enormous amount of intellectual dishonesty going on here, and by all the usual suspects.
Next vid:
I have a hypothesis that most people in the United States would become more informed if all mass media died. The level to which the media controls so much of our perception of reality is truly frightening.
Important to look at sources that existed before Fake News got its teeth into COVID-19. Coronaviruses are responsible for 20% of all “colds”.
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_causes
True, but that’s a bit like saying most sharks don’t bite. But the ones that do…
Anyways, here’s a thing, and take it with a grain of salt…I have a co-worker who has a friend out in Seattle who *thinks* she may have COVID-19. She has had very mild flu-like symptoms but the one thing that she is saying differs from past flu experience is a bit of shortness of breath going up stairs and such. She’s not bothering to get tested because she really doesn’t feel all that bad. She’s had it a week now, though.
I like Eric Weinstein’s theory: That many if not most modern institutions are ponzi schemes and that in order to maintain previous business levels, these institutions must provide ever increasing panic or outrage-inducing materials that essentially hack human instincts into clicking, watching or attending seminars. In order to hack human instincts, one of two things must exist: A story that stimulates the human moral instinct (justice) or the instinct to survive. I suppose a third may exist as well which is the desire for revenge.
Russia hacked the election
Trump used dirty words that liberals basically created and are now outraged to hear
Trump was a Russia agent
Trump walked out of the Paris Climate Agreement and we’ll all die
Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist
Trump made death camps for children at the US border
Trump is leaving the Kurds to die
Trump must be impeached because he abused power
Coronavirus will kill us all.
It will never end. When this is over, there will be something else. The media will make it, because it must. It has a business to run, after all.
Can we not see the trend? Crichton was right. Gelman Amnesia is real.
While it is true that the cold virus is a corona virus, it is also true that the helpful bacteria in yogurt and yersinia pestis (the bubonic plague) are both bacteria.
Ok, but the media has never to my memory commonly used the term coronavirus. MERS and SARS are caused by coronaviruses. The implication throughout this is that this some new, scary virus that is fundamentally different from even recent viral respiratory infections. It’s not.
So that was my point. Using scary sounding terms to get more clicks works, but it’s not analysis.
True; it is fair to criticize some of the media for hyping the threat. It is, as you say, a novel virus of an existing family–not some utterly new species. Trump was not entirely wrong when asking about using a flu vaccine–we have studied the virus family extensively and are not starting from zero and we can often use existing vaccine research to address a new problem.