Did We Learn a Single Fucking Thing From Covid?

My sense is "nope"

Everyone loves a good World War II narrative. The specifics change, but the theme is always the same: A group of people come together to make the best of a bad situation. Sometimes it’s a platoon coming together, sometimes it’s a squadron, sometimes it’s an all-women’s baseball team. Often, an entire nation comes together; Americans like these narratives a lot and Brits love them substantially more than oxygen. We enjoy these stories because they celebrate our big win, even though the main reason that the Allies won World War II is that Hitler tripped over a pile of frozen Russian corpses on his way to Moscow.

For a nanosecond, it looked like Covid might be this type of story. Sure, cheering for health care workers was performative and cheap — where I was, people cheered even though health care workers couldn’t have heard us even if my building had been full of Freddy Mercury clones screaming at the top of their lungs — but it signaled a desire to band together. Maybe this was the moment that the nation would heal. Maybe a serious threat would compel us to drop the nonsense and make clear-eyed decisions. And maybe, just maybe, we would stop playing Who Has The Right To Throw The Biggest Hissy Fit for ten minutes and focus on what we have in common.

The pandemic is now over, and: nope. That did not happen. American politics did not cease to be an orgy of brain-dead points scoring. We do not seem to have developed decision-making skills that will serve us well in the next crisis. When all this started, I thought the presence of a science-based challenge with high stakes might force us to move down some learning curves at an accelerated pace. And it’s hard to assess how “we” did when “we” are 330 million individuals, but here’s my general impression of things we could have and maybe should have learned from Covid that we didn’t.

An old person’s death is not the same as a young person’s death

In May of 2020, the front page of the New York Times ran the names of the 100,000 Americans who had, to that point, died of Covid (under the baffling headline “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss”…is the 100,000 number not something of a calculation?). It was meant to be a somber acknowledgement of Covid’s enormous human toll. And it was that. But, because the Times included ages next to the deceased’s names, it was also a reminder that most people who die of Covid are very, very old.

I am against old people dying — call me a bleeding heart if you want. But I am even more against young people dying. When I worked for EPA, I was taught a measure that captures this distinction: years of potential life lost. YPLL is simple: It captures how many more years someone would have lived if not for the thing that killed them. So, if a person was expected to live to 75, but a carcinogen caused them to die at 74, then YPLL = 1. But if a ten year-old dies of the same cause, YPLL = 65. This is somewhat gauche to discuss — attaching a value of “0” to a person’s death is not a good look — but it captures an important distinction. I don’t know anyone who denies the reality captured by YPLL. Brian’s Song would have been a very different movie if Brian Piccolo was 112 years old.

And yet, this distinction was mostly absent from our dialogue. That continued to be true as age became a confounding variable for other measures; vaccination death rates were distorted because the elderly were more likely to be vaxxed, and Covid morbidity rates were similarly skewed due to mandatory Covid screenings at hospitals. Conversations about closings and safety precautions — most notably in schools — were held with little to no acknowledgement that age was far and away the variable most closely correlated with risk. To my knowledge, YPLL was not embraced by any news outlet. The fact that we frequently had discussions that danced around an obvious reality with which basically everyone agrees did not bode well for our ability to have honest conversations.

Being “pro-science” means you might have to change your opinions

Early in the pandemic, the populist right confirmed their position as the undisputed champs of remaining ignorant of all evidentiary data. First, led by Trump, they waved away the pandemic’s severity. Next, they shunned masks due to their failure to grasp the complex scientific principle: “They help a bit.” Vaccine skepticism was the coup de grâce. When it comes to being so ideologically blinded that you barely qualify as sentient, the GOP’s performance is akin to Yankees slugger Aaron Judge: They’re doing such amazing things that it’s fair to ask where they rank among all-time greats.

But the Twitter left ended up posting some not-too-shabby science-ignorance stats of their own. As the pandemic evolved, many people’s views on mitigation measures did not. Even after vaccines, PAXLOVID, better information about transmissibility, higher society-wide immunity rates, and less-deadly strains of the virus became reality, some people remained as committed to masks and social distancing as they were in March of 2020. I still see people wearing masks in situations where it makes absolutely no sense, and — at the risk of making snap judgements about lesbian couples walking down the street in West Hollywood — I suspect that they’re liberal. I’m now of the opinion that “pro-science” is not a constituency with any substantial numbers. I think that people mostly believe what they believe, and if they can play the holier-than-thou “you’re ignoring science!” card against their opponents, then great. But if not…well if not, that won’t really change a solitary fucking thing.

Everything involves trade-offs

It’s long bothered me that being able to cite any down side to an action is sometimes enough to thwart that action. The “wind turbines kill birds” argument might be the best example of this; we’re facing a global crisis and we’re desperate for solutions, but some people oppose windmills because they kill less than 0.1% as many birds as cats. And “a thousand times less effective than a cat” — an animal that sleeps 23 hours a day — strikes me as another way of saying “not very substantial”.

Above: A cold-blooded murder machine. (picture from Kārlis Dambrāns)

The failure to acknowledge tradeoffs was probably most palpable in the dialogue around school closings. By 2021, shocking data was coming in about the effects of school closings on students, especially poor students. This spurred a massive reassessment of priorities in some quarters, but not in others; some people remained adamantly opposed to policy changes due to “one child’s death is too many” logic. And, obviously, that’s a powerful card to play; I don’t enjoy being on Team Actually, One Child’s Death Is Acceptable. But we accept some deaths all the time, otherwise we would have very different attitudes towards car travel, sports, and non-Covid diseases. The tendency towards grandstanding instead of acknowledging difficult tradeoffs led to bad decisions.

The media has a responsibility to be scientifically literate

This is another longstanding grudge from my EPA days: Reporters who report on science should have a vague sense of what the fuck they’re talking about. I spent so many hours on phone calls with reporters trying to get them to understand the details underlying (and often undermining) their splashy headline. It was like that Simpsons episode where Bart tries to explain Sideshow Bob’s plot to Homer.

Obviously, some reporters did a great job. But there amount of sloppy, lazy, and deceiving journalism — including from credible publications — was stunning.

The Atlantic ran just such an article this week. In a piece called The ‘End’ of Covid Is Still Far Worse Than We Imagined, Sarah Zhang compares Covid mortality rate unfavorably to that of the flu. Her main point is that Covid is substantially more deadly than the flu, and notes that in the week that President Biden declared the pandemic “over”, we were still recording about 400 Covid deaths a day, which is more than triple the typical mortality rate from the flu.

This is the type of true-but-misleading statement that liberals used to rail about when they appeared on Fox News, but frequently embrace today. It is nominally true that 400 Covid deaths a day (and right now we’re actually a bit below that and trending down) is roughly three times the death rate of a bad flu season (though there’s a lot of variance in that number). But there are mitigating factors that make Zhang’s argument essentially untrue.

First, the number of Covid deaths is almost surely overcounted. If you check into the hospital with a knee injury, test positive for Covid (because everyone in a hospital gets tested), and then the TV in your room falls on your head and kills you, you go into the books as a Covid death.

Second, flu deaths are not spread out evenly throughout the year — they’re packed into the winter months (duh). Here’s what that looks like:

Source: Statistical Analysis System

The flu kills almost nobody for eight or nine months a year. But in the winter, the mortality rate is similar to and sometimes in excess of Covid’s. If people considered that death rate intolerable, then they would have argued for masks, social distancing, building closures, and other measures during the winter months prior to the pandemic. To my knowledge, no person on the planet did this. People arguing for those measures now are arguing for a standard of protection that was universally rejected just three years ago.

The third factor that makes Zhang’s argument misleading is the fifth lesson that I think we failed to learn:

People bear some responsibility for their own protection

This is such an inelegant thing to say that I devoted an entire column to carefully parsing the issue, but the fuck-it-I’ll-just-say-it-in-English version is: If you choose not to get vaccinated, and you die, then in my opinion, your death is less tragic than the death of someone who took reasonable precautions. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, and if the horse then dies of dehydration, well…in my opinion, that’s on the horse.

Vaccines’ effectiveness is beyond doubt. Here are hospitalization numbers for vaccinated and unvaccinated people, and I like this particular graph because: 1) The age range is held constant, which is huge, because graphs that just chart “vaxxed” and “unvaxxed” make vaccines look less effective than they are because the vaccinated population skews old, and 2) It tracks different levels of vaccination.

Source: CDC

The later stages of the pandemic saw an unholy coalition between anti-vaxxers and the Panic Forever crowd: The first group provided the mortality figures that made the second group’s crusade possible. Pussy-hat wearing members of the Resistance Left and QAnon loons who sleep with a paperweight looted from Adam Schiff’s office on January 6 under their pillow aren’t often mutually-enabling, but they were in this case. As sometimes happens, the far left and the far right found common ground at the single stupidest point in the universe.

---

What’s the common thread between these failures? I think it’s politeness. We were too polite — too afraid of looking uncouth — to include uncomfortable topics in our conversations. This extreme aversion to untoward statements is probably the result of a political culture that treats torching your opponents for any minor misstep as the highest form of personal expression.

I think this politeness led to a lot of bad outcomes. Omitting uncomfortable facts makes it harder to find the truth. It’s like leaving variables out of a math problem — you’re not going to find the answer that way. If the circumference of a circle is 2πr, but “r” is problematic, so you decide that the circumference is just 2π…well, that won’t fucking work, you idiot. And neither will decisions borne of conversations that dodge distressing elements.

There’s still a chance that we could learn from our Covid-era mistakes. It would be a classic “learn how to do the right thing by trying all the wrong things first” situation, which — speaking for myself — is the only way I ever learn anything. If we got Covid completely wrong so that we can get the World War Z virus right, it might still be worth it. I hope that happens, but if I’m being honest, I see no evidence that it will.

---

***POLL***

A mailbag column — in which Jeff responds to your questions with smartass answers — would be...

1. Fun [VOTE FOR THIS]

2. An even bigger waste of time than usual [VOTE FOR THIS]