Young people get COVID and spread it. Old people get it and are hospitalized.
It's the Holiday travel season and people are traveling.
Biden, Democrats, CNN, and Dr. Anthony Fauci fight the spread of COVID. Hold back the tide by freezes and social distancing. Rage against the disease. Sacrifice now for a better tomorrow.
Trump, Republicans, Fox, and Dr. Scott Atlas say COVID-spread is the way of the world. Go with the flow. The cure is worse than the disease. Live your life and "don't let it dominate you."
Real people get sick from COVID and a few people really die, about 1.5% of the people who we know had contracted COVID. We are experiencing "excess deaths" above the trend line that would be expected in our country of 328 million people--a little over 1,000 extra deaths per day, and trending up again as virus cases increase. There is a tiny reduction of deaths among people in their twenties below the trend line and a slight increase among people in their thirties and forties. The big bulge of "extra deaths" happens among people aged seventy and beyond. Many elderly people who die test positive for COVID and have classic symptoms. People can argue about whether they died because of COVID or simply with it, but put simply, COVID accelerates the mortality date for older people who catch the disease.
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| Young people catch it |
Behavior is reality, as Democrats learned to their chagrin from the election. Trump's live-your-life view was more popular than Democrats and pollsters thought. Young people are out and about, doing what young people do: work at jobs, socialize, presume they are immortal. Thad Guyer, currently in South Florida, sent these photos of Miami Beach life. Mask-less people eating and talking face-to-face. Mixed aged family groups. Democrats wonder that Florida--chock full of vulnerable and presumably afraid seniors--would vote for Trump. Seniors also want to be out, to see their friends, their children and grandchildren.
Our country is of two minds about COVID. Each side has its metaphors and lessons. Life experience, shared history, religion, and classic literature warn and advise about what to do when facing trouble. COVID is trouble.
Two days ago this blog used a convenient metaphor of Inuits putting seniors out on ice. Americans, I wrote, are tacitly agreeing to let seniors die, averting their eyes from the reality faced head-on by the Inuits. An anthropologist with knowledge of Arctic people protested in a comment that this was likely an untrue and unfair legend circulated by White missionaries to "other-ize" the Inuits and justify missionary work. OK. The story persists as myth because it is so useful. They are shown acting with intention, publicly. Americans cite the behavior to look at it with horror and to shame it. If it is to be done--and it is--deny it.
Humans are troubled by the issue of one generation's duty to another because in actual practice in a family or polity burdens are shared, but never evenly. They cannot be. Circumstances are different. In childrearing, some children need more or different things than others. Same with inheritances. Generationally, the old give to the young, then sometimes, in pensions and health care, get back. Some die before they can reap their pay-back. Individual and generational equity is impossible, and therefore the subject of religion and literature.
In the late 1960s the boomers were famously the "Me Generation." We still are, no longer inheriting postwar prosperity from our parents and complaining about it; now requesting COVID sacrifice from the young, and not getting enough of it, many of us think.
Western civilization is replete with stories and cautions about the sacrifice of one generation for the benefit of the other. Did Abraham fail the test of the Old Testament God when he agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar because no God would request human sacrifice, or did he in fact pass the test, because God wanted total buy-in? The New Testament's God is said to have so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son--and thereby saved mankind. Oedipus killed his father, assumed the kingship, and brought a plague.
Trump and Biden are fighting over who is metaphorical Winston Churchill. Trump claims Churchill--citing the legendary act of Churchill going into the subways during the London Blitz to talk and reassure people to carry on. Trump-the-Churchill led by example by getting COVID, then carried on. Biden is the Democratic version of Churchill, urging Americans to do the hard thing now--blood, sweat, toil, tears--for the benefit of all of us later. Don't appease. Don't be soft.
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| One mask |
Thanksgiving offers another battle of metaphors. Is the healthy family group the one that gets together around the big table, the generations mixing, old fashioned and good, or the one that meets on Zoom, thoroughly modern and smart, and good for not spreading a disease. Trump is on-brand, the traditional values advocate, notwithstanding the realities of his personal life. Biden is doing brand extension, the old fashioned big-family guy showing solidarity with his younger urban constituency, the people who use technology rather than complain about it. Hip Biden.
Amid the jockeying for position on the moral high ground Americans are facing a dilemma of what to do about the reality of contagion. The Trump view of the world of COVID--live your life if you are young, shelter if you are worried--won, partly because Trump allowed it and partly because enough Americans see it Trump's way that the virus escaped. It is Gresham's Law of COVID. Spreaders win. It can only be contained if nearly everyone complies, and Americans simply did not want to do so.
The vaccine. Americans who listened to the Lone Ranger on the radio, or who learned the American version of the lesson of World War Two, or who watched movies in the last decades, learned that the solution is a Silver Bullet, some Deus ex Machina in the form of a big technological weapon. Americans think the atom bomb ended WWII. Americans believe in firepower, which caused us to misunderstand for years why things were going badly in Vietnam.
Trump understands that this is a country that celebrates youth, the economy, and reliance. Not everyone, of course, but enough people to win office. He understood that people--even seniors--identify with the people who survive, not the ones who drift off on the ice.
But he lost. Doesn't that negate this argument? I think not. Trump almost won, despite multiple and consistent acts of self-destruction. A candidate less conspicuously vile and divisive would have won. Trump was just one notch too nasty.
4 comments:
Is it the weather or the windmill that makes the wind to blow? Was it the Covid19 spread or mask wearing that caused Trump to lose? Or is it Jonestown where we drink the Covid-Koolaid dreaming of Heaven and the righteousness of our belief trumping epidemiology; and, that our belief is more powerful than the virus? Or did 80 plus million voters in the US electorate reach an inflection point and chose to put out the lout? The simple truth is Donald J. Trump would be the winner in this election IF he had consistently lead using the guidance and advice from the COVID task force of medical and economic advisors. He lost when he injected the nation with falsehood and misdirection causing chaos and confusion. Trump lost when he treated the virus like he treated all his enemies and perceived slights by marginalizing and litigating them. So he metaphorically drug the virus and us into the courtroom of public opinion and FoxNews allowing the virus to spread. In the end Trump lost, bigly, because he didn't believe the science and act on it with his merchandizing and branding skill. Too late at his rallies you saw in the rally crowds assembled people wearing MAGA labeled face masks. What if he'd used his and Ivanka's merchandizing skill day one of the epidemic? We would be entering Trump's second presidential term.
The "old/young" thing is just a coincidence. If the virus was less discriminating there would be nothing to discuss.
As it is I reiterate:
it's not bad enough
As it is it doesn't adversely affect, i.e. kill, enough people fast enough to engender the kind of response that public health officials, except Fauci and the other collaborators, have been clamoring for since the beginning. Scientists have sufficient imagination to envision an epidemic far worse. Just a smidgen difference in DNA and this could be far more lethal.
As it is it's just bad enough that it can be politicized and true to form Regressives have done just that.
This virus actually isn’t discriminating.
It almost exactly doubles the risk of death evenly across the age spectrum.
Which is also precisely why you see many more deaths as ages rise.
I am not convinced that it was the Covid that caused people to vote against trump. I think it could have been just the accumulated crap about this man that finally drove more young people, more Blacks, etc to vote him out.
The other republicans down the ballot who were voted in might just be due to the undervote of such new voters.
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