My umpteenth COVID column

Stay tuned for even more!

I went back and looked through my archives to find the first column I wrote about the pandemic last year.  It was almost a year ago on March 9, and it was called “Wear your mask!  New CDC guidelines are confusing and contradictory.”  The pandemic was a little more than a year old at that time.  More than 500,000 of us had died from the disease – friends, family members, co-workers, people we didn’t know but had probably run into weekly or daily in local stores and businesses. Here we are 11 months later and the number of deaths is now 901,000.  Two thousand of us were dying every day a year ago.  Today, 2,500 of us are dying daily.  We are dying our way into history.

The Times had a story last week that said it best: “U.S. has far higher COVID death rates than other wealthy countries.”  Our death rate is higher than Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, and it’s way higher than countries like Japan, Korea, and Australia. 

Read down in the story a way, and you see why.  Our vaccination rate – the share of the population who have received two shots – is about 65 percent. Other developed countries are at 75 to 80 percent.  When it comes to booster rates, we lag even further behind.  While countries like Belgium and Britain are above 55 percent, we’re at 27 percent.

The story I wrote last year talked about how the CDC was making a hash out of its mask guidelines.  They were advising people who were vaccinated that it was safe to safe to meet indoors with unvaccinated people who were at low-risk for COVID “from a single household,” but cautioning the same vaccinated people to put on well-fitting masks and practice social distancing in public.  The guidelines were described as “a first step” to returning to an “everyday life.”

Here we are one year and two COVID variants later, and do you think we’ve returned to our “everyday” lives?  I don’t.  Here on Long Island, we wear our masks every time we leave the house except in our yard and inside our cars.  Everywhere else, we wear masks, and we don’t wear the ones sewn from pretty paisley cloth anymore.  We wear KN95 surgical masks, and we pull them so they fit tightly around our noses and chins and cheeks.  All of this, and we’re double vaccinated and boosted and we’ve both had breakthrough cases and we’re about as unlikely to catch the disease as we could be.

The Times had another story about the pandemic today that basically asked what we could have done better to control the COVID outbreak we have suffered through for 21 months now.  The reason the author, Ezra Klein, asked the question is because our COVID numbers are so strikingly worse than other countries.  While we have had 545 COVID cases per 1,000 residents, Canada has had 346, Switzerland 164, and Germany 188.  Japan has had 67 cases per 1,000 residents, Korea has had 28, and Taiwan has had 7.  Seven!

A recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet attempted to account for the differences between countries in case rates and fatalities. According to the Times, “They looked at G.D.P., population density, altitude, age, obesity, smoking, air pollution, cancer rates, exposure to previous beta-coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, health insurance coverage, pandemic preparedness ratings, trust in government, trust in fellow citizens, hospital beds per capita and more.”  The only common predictor of death from the disease was age.  The virus simply hits the old hardest. 

But none of the other factors that could be attributable to what you might call “health,” such as patients’ weight, whether they smoked, had ready access to hospitals or lived in areas of high air pollution had much effect on the deadliness of the disease.

What did matter to the numbers of cases and deaths in the various countries however was something far more amorphous:  trust.  “Especially in free societies the success [of protecting people from the disease] depends on trust — trust between citizens and their government and trust between citizens themselves.”  

You can give people access to vaccines, but you can’t make them take them, the article in the Times pointed out, just as you can give them access to effective masks, but you can’t make people wear them.  When you have a society as divided as ours, with one political party determined to use opposition to vaccines and health mandates like masking as a political issue to run on…well, we find ourselves with case rates and death rates right where they were a year ago even after the Biden administration’s best efforts to protect the public from the pandemic.

There is another story out this morning that COVID case rates have dropped to such low levels that New Jersey plans to lift mask mandates in schools in March when warming weather will mitigate against further spread of the disease.  That’s nice to see, and I’m sure Governor Murphy checked with all his state health authorities before announcing the change.

Not so in Virginia with its school mask mandate.  Glenn Youngkin, the newly elected governor of that state, didn’t check with anyone before he signed an executive order ending the state’s mandate on the day he was inaugurated with warm weather still at least two months away.  You want to know why we had 545 cases of COVID for every 1,000 residents over the last two years?  You want to know why over 2,000 people are still dying every single day a year after I noted that number in the first COVID column I wrote?

Republican politicians like Glenn Youngkin and Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have been willing to politicize the virus to get in office and stay in office, that’s why.  They care more about their poll numbers than they do their COVID numbers.  

Conservatives in the time of William F. Buckley claimed it was their job to “stand athwart history yelling stop.”  Today they’re standing athwart the sick yelling die.