The Civil War and the American engagement in World War II both lasted about four years. We are about to enter into the fourth year of the pandemic. Yet, it does not seem that Covid’s impact on American life – political, economic, or social – its impact on individual American consciousness, thinking, or perceptions of oneself or of the world, will be anything comparable to the profound and persistent and continuing impact of those wars. For me – remembering food rationing, the shortages of almost everything one needed from clothes to cosmetics, the constraints on traveling and entertainment, the intense attention to the progress of the war, the sharing among schoolmates of news from fathers who were at war, and the communal grief for those schoolmates whose fathers never returned – the seeming irrelevance of the deaths of over a million Americans from Covid, far more than the combined American dead in both wars, is incomprehensible. It seems a different America.
Since the summer, deaths from Covid in the US have hovered between 300 and 400 per day (sometimes lower and sometimes higher). That is way over 100,000 deaths every year. When the pandemic began, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicted that the epidemic would kill from 38,000 to 162,000 people in four months, by which time the mortality rate would have dropped to 10 deaths a day. That prediction was thought extravagant and horrific. When the 100,000 death mark was passed after four months of the pandemic, at the end of May, 2020, the CDC issued the following statement:
“Today the number of people in the United States who have died from COVID-19 surpassed 100,000. Families, friends, coworkers, loved ones and community members are grieving for each person who has been lost to this disease. Reaching the milestone of 100, 000 persons lost in such a short timeframe is a sobering development and a heart-breaking reminder of the horrible toll of this unprecedented pandemic.” https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0528-coronavirus-death-toll.html
Yet, today, with deaths occurring at about half that rate, the nation, generally, acts as if there is no epidemic. Only 11% of over 2,000 polled adults think Covid is a “severe” health risk in their community (https://morningconsult.com/views-on-the-pandemic/), and 76% of adults are not “very concerned” with the epidemic. Neither the government nor the people want to prevent these deaths. They will be the concern only of themselves and their families and friends, a lonely death.
When so many people died at the Veterans Home, the Sierra County Sun could not publish a memorial for them because we could not even find the names of all the victims, barred from that information because of privacy rules. Death seems a private affair now, and of no concern to the public. In contrast, next to the Vets is a version of the Vietnam Memorial, where all those who died in Vietnam (less than 60% of the present annual Covid toll) are listed without privacy issues. The distinction shows a strange, biased concept of human worth.
The privatization of death fractures our sense of what it is to be human; socially it threatens our sense of community, and politically it destroys our sense of a common good. It is ironic and appropriate that we see these sea-changes in our culture in the context of an epidemic since isolation (quarantine) has been the traditional, ancient method for humans to deal with contagion and it continues to be more effective than the technological alternative of vaccination. Equally ironic and somewhat contradictory, is the explanation many people give for why the pandemic should be ignored: that we need socialization. But, in fact, socialization hardly benefits the society if it results in so many deaths. Perhaps, we need to distinguish between a socialization that benefits and a socialization with kills. From the very beginning of the pandemic, promotions of how to prevent transmission focused on self-protection (on the assumption that people will act in self-interest) whereas the real issue epidemiologically is the protection of others. The assumption of self-interest has become our primary attitude towards Covid. It forms the basis of objections to the imperative of isolation as it forms the basis of the demand for social gatherings, and it is one of the many reasons deaths from the SARS CoV-2 virus is only a private concern.
I do not mean that the social order Americans experienced during WWII in their collective attitude towards death was “better” than the isolated and private deaths from Covid. That order was also a classist and racist order of exclusion, but even the excluded participated in the community spirit. Witness the black men and women who fought in the war or the Japanese American units who volunteered out of their isolation camps. Perhaps, the outsider’s view of that bonding is exaggerated and the illusion of that bonded order stronger because of being excluded, but the sense that today we are willfully ignoring our responsibility for the deaths of several hundred people every day still seems incomprehensible and inexplicable to me.
It seems to me more and more likely that this assertion of the priority of the individual over the group played multiple roles in America’s extraordinary failure to prevent over a million deaths from Covid, far more than in other countries. The US leads Brazil, the country with the next greatest number of Covid deaths, by 50%. The difference is huge, and it is even more significant when one considers how wealthy we are, how technologically savvy we are, how we developed the vaccine in record time, how we prevent others from using the vaccine formulas, how strongly we believe and defend to our deaths our superior and world leading way of life, or how proud we are to have a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and yet we failed to protect over a million people from dying as other countries and peoples have.
The only real purpose of government, said Rousseau in The Social Contract, is to protect the people who cede it their democratic power. But what does a democratic government do when the people are, in fact, not much concerned with the death of others?
The expression of freedom and liberty in The Declaration of Independence is our primary definition of these democratic ideals, and there in the second sentence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”) we see the basic principle of community, that is, the equality of all. What are today mistakenly thought of as “individual” rights, are in fact common rights. Without the equality of the community there are no rights, only assertions of individual self-interest; that is, rights exist only within a context of equality. This basic social principle of freedom was even clearer in Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent [sic], that from that equal creation they derive right [sic] inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; ….” Basically, we’ve violated our own rights by violating the rights of over a million people to life, liberty, and happiness. And that is and continues to be our loss.
Covid deaths were and are a big problem. And I don’t mean to understate it.
The Council on Foreign Relations discussed under reporting of Covid cases and deaths in a 2021 paper. It helps explain the counterintuitive assumption that the United States leads such countries as India, Pakistan or Bangladesh in Covid deaths. The US has very sophisticated information collecting ability due to mandated data collection by hospitals, clinics and providers. Compared to this the ability to collect data on outcomes in many, poorer countries is marginal and may help explain the reporting of so few deaths.
Thanks, Dave, for continuing the discussion. I looked at that report you mention, and I don’t see that it says we are more accurate in our counts than other countries. The counts are all very low. We never did do enough testing to give accurate case counts, and now that we have really stopped testing the public, the case counts are pretty useless as an indication of reality (though they are still important in indicating variations). Death counts came from death certificates, and comparisons between death certificate causes of death and autopsy determined causes show almost a 50% rate of error. See G. Cecilia Alfsen and Jan Maehlen, “the Value of Autopsy in Determining the Cause of Death,” a Norwegian study which includes information of similar findings in the US. That is why we go to excess deaths for a more accurate picture. I still use the death certificate counts for comparison purposes. But you are right. There is a good chance our death toll is near 2 million, as suggested in one study cited in the report you mention.
My comment referenced total Covid deaths. The fact that we can even begin to evaluate the errors in the count itself is indication to me of a fairly rigorous accounting system. I have worked in the health care field and I must tell you that, while there are certainly problems, health insurance companies, the VA, Indian Health Service, Medicare and Medicaid and various indigent counts by hospitals are far more rigorous in death counts
– frequently simply to, along with mandated reporting, bill payers accurately – and causes of death than in most (or all) poor countries, where there are desperate people living in shipping crates and scavenging refuse dumps for food. It is simply unfair to assert that the inhumanity of the people in the US and the partisan dialogue has resulted in Covid deaths per 1000 people greater than in any other country. While the US spends more per capita on healthcare (far from inhumane in itself) than any other developed country it is a disgrace that it is nevertheless ranked so low in health care quality. However, Occam’s razor tells me that if a country like Bangladesh or Burundi, with an average income of a few hundred dollars a month at best is asserting a more positive outcome in Covid mortality rates the reason is not because their people are kinder and gentler or their health care system more efficient.
I wanted to add, in reference to the 2012 Norwegian study, that only 5 percent of those deceased in the US are autopsied. I would assume the figures found (there was no analysis of US autopsies) are probably accurate and might well apply here. At least when updated for another decade of research and technological improvements.
I wonder if we aren’t just debating the relative ranking of our country in the imaginary “inhumanity rankings”. Personally I blame all of us (globally). I suppose the politicians are as responsible as anyone but I think the old Pogo comic strip quote is worth reviewing if we want to find the real enemy. Thanks for the article. If noone disagreed with it none of us would learn anything.
I was too lazy to look this up before, but since you are interested in this question of accuracy in Covid death counts, here is a link to an old American study of cause of death inaccuracies in Connecticut:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4058507/.
I agree. I don’t think the cause of our death toll is our inhumanity or lack of personal kindness. Nor do I think that the apparent, general return to essentially careless behavior indicates that. I have heard that we are just tired of the epidemic, but I would like to know a bit more, and more analytically, about why we seem to have changed from a nation that bemoans Covid deaths to one which seems to take it for granted.
I do say, though, that what looks to me like a drift towards a stance of individualism in this country changes (“fractures”) the idea of humanity. This doesn’t mean we are, for example, less charitable. It means that our charity comes more from a sense of ourselves, who we think we ought to be, our sense of ourselves as moral people (and this is a good thing). It comes less from a sense that we are all humans equally. We do not act more inhuman, but our humanity has a changed and changing basis. The relation between humanity and the individual seems to me to be shifting from ourselves as an element of humanity to humanity as simply an abstraction made up of multiple ourselves. In one concept, humanity is primary, and in the other, the individual is.
Nice a(e)ssay, Max.
I don’t know that comparing the attitudes towards death by war and death by microbe is not an apple and orange situation.
I recently read a book discussing the history of smallpox and have been discussing with a friend her readings on the flu pandemic. In both cases the public attitudes towards the diseases exhibited striking similarities to what we’ve seen during the Covid pandemic.
Why humans (not just Americans) differentiate in their responses to the mode of death is curious and tragic.
Thanks, for reading and commenting. Yes, early detection and treatment always help. The problem is getting people to do that. There are lots of things we, individually and collectively, can do that would help in the pandemic, but I think we, individually and collectively, won’t do them. We’ve reached an impasse. I’m just looking at that situation and wondering how we got here, hoping that we can change those factors to get around the impasse if we can identify them. In this first piece, I’m just describing how it is that we can let (actually cause) 100,000 deaths and accept that as normal.
I was unable to read the full WSJ article because I’m not a subscriber, but the shortened audio version tells me it is not about Covid or Dr. Battacharya, but free speech on Twitter. In so far as it is an opinion piece, I would not take this representation of Dr. Battacharya at face value. Dr. Battacharya promoted the idea that we should let the virus spread to get to herd immunity, an idea which now makes little sense since we’ve discovered that the immunity created by catching Covid diminishes over time, just like the effectiveness of the vaccine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya. He is knowledgeable and thoughtful, but his ideas are not infallible. With the artificial immunity gained through vaccination, we are close to “herd immunity” now, but we are dying at the rate of way over 100,000 a year.
Since the discussion on this article seems to have run its course, I am shutting it down. Kyle’s last comment suggesting that we read the report of a study of the relationship between getting Covid and heart problems in Israel, seems to me to have nothing to do with my attempt to describe the Covid situation in the US.
The study is interesting, however, in showing us that the popular and simplistic notion that our natural immune system will deal with the Covid problem if we just give it a chance is a fatal error of judgment. Its entire discussion of the possible mechanisms that link Covid with heart problems is about the ways in which our wonderful immune system’s response to the SARS CoV2 virus is sometimes the cause of serious inflammations.
Interesting as that is, it is not the subject of my article. The discussion is not a place to say whatever one thinks about Covid. The discussion is about the state of the nation. And it is a public discussion, which is not the public airing of a one-on-one. Ultimately, the reader of a comment is not me but the public. And, though I respond to a comment personally, my response is for the public. If we are losing our sense of what the public means, then I would see that as a confirmation of what my article said, that we are losing a sense that death is public and privatizing death.
I will be publishing in the next day or two an essay on thought processes that lead to errors of judgment. Kyle’s recent comment is a compendium of such mistakes.
The Israeli study he linked to (not posted) does NOT concluded that heart muscle problems are not associated with Covid as he wrongly asserts. It concludes that these problems AFTER recovery from Covid are not statistically linked to Covid (even though numerically there were more heart conditions among those who had been infected than in the control group of those who had not been infected). Many studies have shown that Covid has caused many people with heart conditions and especially young people who did not have heart conditions earlier to die of heart failure. The study’s title says it all: “The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients—A Large Population-Based Study.” “Post” means post. Please do not think that Covid has nothing to do with heart problems. It does. And the dramatic rise that Kyle mentions is not the rise in number of people with heart problems but the rise of deaths from heart attacks because of Covid infections.
Almost every sentence in this comment results from a misreading, misunderstanding, or misstatement. Just because people did not want to listen to these mistakes does not mean these mistakes were censored. In fact, many people considered and then rejected these opinions. Ivermectin was studied and rejected as a cure for Covid. If they were censored we would not be reading their erroneous statements on the internet as, in fact, we can.
As for the claims that had we listened to the “censored,” we would be better off, I wonder what kind of evidence can prove that since, as Kyle complains, it didn’t happen. It’s a claim emptied of meaning.
Kyle repeatedly cites wrong evidence for wrong conclusions. Is this a problem?
Unless discussion is shut down? I enjoyed the piece and am looking for a copy of “Stolen Oranges”. I’d be interested in Mr. Yeh’s take on the changes that have taken place in Hillsboro in the last 30 years. I remember it being very different in the nineties!
OK. Since comments keep coming in, I’ll keep posting them, but I don’t think I will respond to them. I will be posting soon another in this sequence of considerations of how we dealt with Covid.