Letter to the Editor / THE COVID DANCE—the Dance with Death

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

The only issue that matters in this election is that 400,000 Americans will be dead of COVID-19 by Inauguration Day, as projected by CDC. This is egregious, unacceptable and immoral. Some of us will lose loved ones and friends. Has any American president caused such pain and suffering to this degree? When history is written, this episode will be treated with the harshness and bone chilling truth it deserves. No president has met a crisis with such ineptness and had such destructive effects as this President. But, he is not alone. The COVID Dance happens when a craven politician and an ignorant public mix with a pandemic. The outcome of this mixture is chaotic, out of sync and deadly. Take away either one of the first two ingredients and it could be a ballet. Think the United States and South Korea: 466 dead vs. 230,000 dead.

The enormity of pain and suffering this pandemic has caused is so great we simply are unable to grasp it. By January 21st, 400,000 families will have suffered months of separation of loved ones. These family members, separated and alone, will have died an indescribable death of suffocation or complete organ collapse. This is an enormous catastrophe. Image the entire city of Tampa suffering a lingering and horrifying illness only to die. Try to picture 400,000 funerals, wakes, Shivas, and Salat al Janazah. Envision 400,000 burials. An entire city is no more. New graveyards are being built each day. Everyone is dead.

What is the evidence that U.S. leadership has proved a fatal ingredient? Comparison of national responses to the pandemic. It’s always difficult to compare nations and how they respond to a common crisis. In this case, however, in addition to South Korea and Germany, we have comparative data from Canada, Singapore, Taiwan and other countries. The response developed and executed by the United States leadership (Trump: “I guess I’m in charge”), would receive a low score even if we were grading on the curve. Our response has resulted in vastly more cases and deaths, and one of the highest case fatality rates in the world. By any calculation I can do, we seem to be the victims of a failed response at the federal level. Is it our unique history in insisting on distributive power? The other governments are far more centralized than the US. Is that a serious impediment to reacting smartly and quickly to a crisis? Is the difference the result of leadership skill deficiencies and a willfully ignorant population? In this piece, I argue that it is the latter for we have effectively responded before.

How Did We Get Here?

A perfect storm made up of the following: A President suffering from a seriously damaged personality. Combine this with the fact that a sizable segment of the population is unable to sort fact from fiction, and we have two of the ingredients for a crisis: A willfully ignorant President misleading a large but ignorant minority for his own neurotic and selfish reasons. Let’s look more deeply at the first ingredient:  Trump, and his particular neuroses, in order to understand how we got here in the first place. The grandiose narcissist has a suppressed urge to prove his worst fears are true. Counter-phobic response syndrome is typical of such people. The coward acting like a bully is perhaps the best known example. Those who suffer a narcissistic injury spend a lifetime fearing they will be discovered as the frauds they deeply fear they are. Such feelings are so deeply suppressed even a skilled therapist cannot help some patients reach their actual feelings. Such sufferers plunge headlong toward a drastic, cataclysmic personality crash, one demonstrating to them and the world around them that they are rejected, unloved, disrespected, unadored and frauds. This often ends in an emotional breakdown. If Trump loses, as expected, he will engage in his most extreme behavior to date to prove the rejection is false, that he was actually endorsed by a vast majority, that he was cheated, that the Democrats engaged in fraud and criminal acts. This will be believed by his ignorant but faithful followers.

On the Subject of Ignorance

Let us take up the second ingredient in this perfect storm. This crisis has played out differently in America than any other wealthy country. It is due in part to a sizable minority buying Trump’s rejection of reality. His misleading statements and outright lies have been accepted and internalized by a sizable segment of the American people. When the poorly educated call the well-educated ignorant, when those who did not do well in school call educators stupid, when those who do not test well call those who do dumb, when those who dropped out or barely graduated high school call those with Ph.D.’s idiots, we know there is a problem with the core underpinnings of our society. When ignorance prevails over deep thought, analysis, logic and facts, we know there is a crisis. This crisis has been waiting for an opportunity. I attribute this degree of widespread ignorance to the failure of our fundamental concept of a common education. We once thought public education was the best answer to mayhem, chaos, anarchy, unbridled passion and the demise of civilized society. This was an American invention—free grammar schools. This was a marvel of the western world. Yet, we are collectively one of the least well educated in the industrialized world, as measured by standardized tests. But, this is a matter for another column.

The nation has been dividing itself alone lines of intelligence of a certain kind—the capacity to think; to search out factual information; to use deductive reasoning; to draw valid conclusions from data that is complex and not always completely clear; to read complicated material and comprehend not just a thread of information but the deeper points and meaning of the material; to be able to place information in a context, make connections among seemingly disparate factors; and to see various ways of framing and reframing the same information. These have become evident as a cluster of intellectual skills that separates Americans more and more. One term for this is “conceptual complexity”. Along a spectrum from simple to complex I now observe from social media an increased skewing at either end by two groups who identify as conservatives, but among conservatives, a subset who repeatedly post Trump slogans as diehard loyalists, and at the other end of the spectrum those who identify as liberal and a subset who seem to be either independent or progressives. This increasingly evident state of affairs has exposed America to an utterly dismal scenario: a President who rejects reason, complicated thinking and science, and a sizable following that share his ignorance. Given this President’s decision to wash his hands of any responsibility and insisting people should be responsible has run headlong into the dilemma I describe. A sizable percentage of the American people are not being responsible, in part, because they believe the dangerous lies about Coronavirus coming from the White House—it’s like the flu; if you get COVID you’ll get over it just like I did; masks can cause more people to get sick; it’s a political hoax designed to hurt the President.

How Ignorance Has Affected Behavior

There still seem to be plenty of folks who believe that SARS-CoV-2, the new Coronavirus, is no more deadly than seasonal flu. This false information started with Trump. Even though CDC and other legitimate sources of information have refuted this false claim, it hangs around. Without spending too much time on false information, or “alternative facts”, this is a dire lesson in how propaganda works and why it is effective and why it is dangerous. Trump decided in January that the new Coronavirus was a threat to his Presidency and his re-election. This is evident in the news coverage in which he variously denied it would be a problem, although we know from Bob Woodward that he knew differently, then blamed it on the Chinese, and finally pushed it off to the governors to solve. He did not want it tainting his Presidency. By believing the false information coming out of the White House, large numbers of Americans have ignored the science, refusing to wear masks, or take seriously the need for social distancing. The result: 230,000 deaths by November 1st.

One of the biggest and most dangerous lies coming out of the White House was that this was nothing more than the flu. What are the facts? In the study published Feb. 18 in the China CDC Weekly, researchers found a death rate from COVID-19 to be around 2.3% in mainland China. As it turns out, that is roughly the case fatality rate in the United States. It does not take much looking to turn up actual facts, credible information. The death rate from seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S., according to The New York Times. The sad truth is that Trump’s followers have been conditioned to reject reliable information sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post, the BBC News, AMA, and the research findings of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Harvard University School of Public Health, the CDC, and NIAID.

The net result of too many people believing too much false information is an additional 200,000 projected deaths. This should be abhorrent but not to Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows. He just said, in effect, we’re listening to Dr. Atlas and his cockamamie idea of herd immunity. “We’re not going to control this virus.” This bunch is waiting for a magic bullet, which may or may not arrive by February. If everything goes perfectly, we could have a limited number of vaccines injected in two steps by March or April for essential workers and the most vulnerable Americans, according to the CDC. Nothing ever goes perfectly. They have nothing else. Trump doesn’t even want to hear the word, COVID, COVID, COVID.

Herd Immunity or Herd Mentality?

Let’s examine this terribly false and misleading claim expressed by the White House, and never rejected although it has been debunked. Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski, and his protégé, Dr. Scott Atlas, are pushing herd immunity–meaning that enough people (estimated at 70-80%) become infected and immune to stop the spread. They seem to conveniently forget all about the inevitable fact that during the enormously heightened apex of the curve, hospitals are not able to respond to all of those with respiratory failure. The death rate from this experiment with herd immunity would surge due to simply more cases of the infection, and because hospitals would be forced to let some patients die in order to save others. Their idea is seriously flawed but it has been tried in Sweden and the Netherlands. Total failure has followed in those cases and they have reversed course. The point seems to be to determine whether we could tolerate more deaths, more cases, more overloading of the hospital system in order to somehow shorten the time period of the illness. In a country the size of the United States in both population and geography, we would see a rolling wave of severely heightened curves that would continue until 80% of the population is infected and immune.

Let us do a little math to test Dr. Wittkowski’s and Dr. Atlas’ ideas. Eighty percent of the American population would be 261,000,000 people sick within let’s say a month or two. As it stands, the number today is still below 10,000,000. Even with this number hot spots are reporting shortages of beds, personnel, equipment and protective gear. Consider that the number today, under herd immunity, would be more than 26 times that number of cases. Think of that for a moment. When the pandemic would reach its climax of 261 million infected the cost would be 6,525,000 souls across the racial, gender and age distribution (assuming a case fatality of 2.5%). Wealth could not protect you in this dystopian scenario. This is not science. This is murder. And, yet, for reasons I presented above, a large segment of the population have accepted this outcome as the direction we should take.

Common Sense

Can we avoid another 200,000 plus deaths projected by CDC by January 2021? There seems to be ample disbelief about the science of FFR or respirator masks worn for protection against the spread of COVID-19. I have been looking through the research literature for my own and my family’s benefit, as much as anything. I do wear an N95 mask for reasons that are scientifically sound. Such masks are not perfect but they are as effective as any tool we have to control the spread of the virus. These masks are not intended to filter 100% of the actual virus particles themselves. If not worn properly, they lose efficiency rapidly. They are intended to filter only a percentage of the virus particles from the exhalations of others. For that purpose, they are effective. They are equally effective at blocking the exhalation of particles. The 3M industrial filters (N95) were able to capture over 95% of particles down to 0.007 micron–10 times smaller than viruses in one study. To refresh our memories, a micron is one-millionth of a meter, a little more than one twenty-five thousandth of an inch. The CDC is now estimating that we could save 100,000 lives between now and the end of January 2021 if people would just wear appropriate masks, meaning N95 masks or cloth masks of several layers. The nation has had nearly a year to ramp up protective masks. This has to become priority one for the next President.

The one thing Biden is promising can become a huge factor in ending the pandemic: mandate wearing protective masks at all times when outside the home. Period. Can he do this? Will it be effective? Yes, to both. Under his emergency powers, he can order a mandate, and he can set up a system of enforcement. During WWII each community had a civilian force to enforce the rules regarding rationing and compliance with air raid drills. Although most readers will not remember, I do. When the air raid siren went off, every light in town went off and stayed off until the alert ended. If someone forgot, a knock would come at the door. Warnings were issued followed by harsher penalties. Hoarders existed during the war effort. But, again, every community had designated inspectors who could enter the homes of suspected hoarders and search for illegally obtained goods. This may all sound drastic to our current freewheeling society. But, this is a drastic matter. Failure to enforce appropriate mask wearing will continue to kill unless and until, a large majority of the population has been inoculated with an effective vaccine.

Finally, I’m  now beginning to realize for the foreseeable future we face a crisis, apart from COVID. When this bubble bursts and all those who’ve shown their true colors in support of a deeply dysfunctional and corrupt regime are still with us. They have exhibited their deeply flawed thinking, misguided beliefs, their sellout to a charlatan, and their seriously bigoted mindsets for all to see on social media. These blind Americans who have repelled family members, stopped speaking to parents, and alienated themselves from friends, have had their ignorance authenticated by the President of the United States. Their emotional content is frightening, distasteful and palpable. We face serious issues trying to cope with these lost souls. I am now convinced that it will take decades of effort, maybe even then admitting failure.

In short, I fear that Trump’s legacy will be with us for the long term—no matter who wins the election.

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