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By David Wallace Wells
Opinion writer
In the U. S. For the US and Britain, suddenly there is a high-profile debate about the early days of the pandemic and how each country is responding. Did the mitigation measures imposed in the spring of 2020 work, in a climate of anxiety and uncertainty?Given the costs, did you value it?
In the United States, this verbal exchange was sparked by a Department of Energy leak on the origins of Covid-19 and by a spate of hearings initiated by the Republican House majority on those origins and the American response: the effects of targeting. of on-site shelters and school closures, vaccine progression and mask recommendation, and more. In Britain, it was caused by a leak of more than 100,000 tabloid-ready WhatsApp messages between Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Affairs. Care the first 15 months of the pandemic and other prominent British government figures, adding Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who at one point, misinterpreting the number of decimal places he puts in an estimate of the death rate, seemed to conclude that Covid was only 1/100 as fatal as it was. “If you’re over 65, your threat to die from covid is probably as wonderful as your threat to fall down the stairs,” Johnson wrote to his team in August. aust 2020. “And we did not save the elderly from using the stairs. What do you think?”
Tellingly, the British scandal centers on Hancock, who achieved the highest degrees of public notoriety when he was forced to disobey his own social distancing orders to stop at the home of his assistant with whom he was having an extramarital affair. It is also telling that the scandal arose because the ghostwriter Hancock hired to help him profit from this infamy, herself probably skeptical of the lockdown, but all failed and, shortly after the book was published, sent the messages to The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, for much of the country’s leaders, the country’s leaders have been criticized for their incompetence to some extent, but more commonly for their hypocrisy. (Johnson’s own senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, memorably compared it to an uncontrollable basket, but was eventually forced to resign because of the fallout from social distancing holiday periods. )
On the other hand, to the extent that Americans vilified their leaders during the pandemic, it wasn’t primarily out of hypocrisy (remember Gavin Newsom’s French laundry dinner?), but out of harshness. In Britain, the WhatsApp leak was painted by the British press as a cool animated film of irresponsible leadership. In the US, the equivalent leak was the “Twitter files,” when the company’s internal deliberations on pandemic messages were scrutinized through quasi-journalists subsidized through Elon Musk some time after he took control of the company. The rhetorical emphasis was to paint the recommendation of public fitness as quasi-totalitarian, as if those who enforced the restrictions regarded severity as ideological in itself.
Given Americans’ panic over mitigation measures in spring 2020, and the number of infections and deaths to come, the concept that the reaction to the pandemic was largely explained by overreach and overreach would possibly seem extreme. But in its mildest form, trust is no longer limited to the skeptical margins of the anti-establishment social media.
Last weekend, the Times published an investigation into pandemic expert recommendations contemplating the option of some other outbreak, and it seemed to me that in almost every case, even those who took the most competitive side of the argument backed mitigation measures that were no more potent, weaker, or more cavernous than those that had been put in position in 2020. They did so even though the hypothetical disease they imagined was more transmissible and more deadly than the novel coronavirus (and even though it was affecting both young and old). That is, in the face of a disease that would spread faster than Covid, it would kill more inflamed people than Covid, with a mortality burden, compared to that of Covid, obviously rebalanced towards the other young people, they would vote, in general, to do less.
This is not a consultation limited to virtual reality-style summary debates on opinion pages and social networks. In at least 30 states, the Washington Post reported last week, legislatures have already passed laws restricting public fitness powers in the wake of the pandemic. The states are under Republican control, but not all, and the restrictions legislated so far are intrusive: In many cases, they extend outright bans on fitness officials or governors who issue mask-wearing orders, end schools or businesses, restrict large gatherings in places like churches or vaccine tests or protocols. But what is most striking is how little attention they pay to the specific attributes of long-term epidemics: treating a long-term disease that spreads like measles but kills one in five children, infects the same as a disease that spreads like swine flu and kills no one. And it prevents the public health government from doing anything about it.
Stop and think for a second: as the country emerges from 3 years of death, disruption, and suffering, dozens of states have made the decision not only that long-term mitigation measures deserve to be conscientiously targeted and calibrated, or that they deserve to be limited in time, or that they deserve to incorporate trade-offs and cost-benefit calculations from the start. They made the decision that the most productive way to prepare for these diseases in the long term is to tie our hands in advance.
Is this the lesson the county deserves to learn from its experience with covid-19?More than a million Americans have died and several hundred more continue every day, keeping the country on track for more than 100,000 covid-19s. 19 deaths per year. Polls continue to show significant public support for mitigation measures such as masking, whether it is there or not. those who were Covid hardliners were not punished for their policies, nor were skeptical or non-interventionist governors. That dynamic can also be replaced again, as the county’s departure draws its exhaustion into a true pandemic attitude, which many episodes of the Opinion’s Next Pandemic series verify. to provide. But for now, on the point of politics and public discourse, a surprising American consensus is hardening: When covid-19 hit, the counterattack did too much.
Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina calls this “a new phase of the pandemic: revisionism. “To me, this almost feels like a mental fog, with the deadliest public fitness crisis in a century already so blurred in our collective memory that we ourselves speak in the summary point principles as if they bore no relation to the brutal truth of the first pandemic, generating discursive themes so disconnected from genuine history that they can be used for any proper narrative purpose.
This is not to say that the first few months of the pandemic constituted an eternal mitigation ideal, or even that they were as well calibrated as they could have been. But I am sure that any possible infection delayed until mass vaccination was a victory for public fitness and that we cannot just retroactively copy and paste the personal social tastes we established after Omicron: after years of vaccination, the spread of disease and herbal immunity. and mass death, in our memories of 2020 as if we were rebooting a pandemic video game now knowing how to play it more productively. And yet, instead of thinking hard about how it has replaced gambling and how other cases require other responses, we seem to be modeling long-term pandemic policies based on the world we now inhabit rather than the one we had when the virus started. to spread. . More often than not, no one turns out to notice this presentist sleight of hand, perhaps because so few of us don’t forget the celebration of 2020 outright and instead cling to imposed narratives about the rush.
Consider the story that is circulating lately, through essays, columns, podcasts and observations on the geopolitical context of the pandemic, about China. Starting in the fall, first with protests against the country’s “zero Covid” policy, then with news of ending: foreign observers, who added me, warned about the humanitarian disaster the country was heading for. Given that more than a billion people have been almost not exposed to the virus itself and that a vulnerable elderly population has not been exposed to it, the spread of some highly transmissible variants of Omicron is expected to produce more than one million deaths in a short period of time. When this brutal wave came, Western commentators rushed to claim some sort of victory in the debate club and called China’s damn Covid containment policy, for so long a global outlier, a transparent failure.
Knowledge tells a more confusing story and illustrates that those questions are rarely binary or universal. According to estimates published last month by the Times, probably one million Chinese, and in all likelihood as many as 1. 6 million, died when the country eased its covid. Restrictions. It’s a heartbreaking record, especially in just two or three months. But that would mean that the number of capita-consistent deaths in China from the pandemic was still less than a third that of the United States.
And that would possibly underestimate the gap. The Economist maintains what is probably the most productive database of global excess mortality during the pandemic, and the incredibly wide diversity of its estimate for China is telling: we know far less about the ultimate burden of disease there than in almost any other country. But the highest result of The Economist’s estimate for China, 220 additional deaths consistent with 100,000, represents a number of deaths from the pandemic that is slightly part of the lowest result of the U. S. estimate. In the U. S. , 390 deaths consistent with 100,000. one country, the number of deaths consistent with the capita in the United States would be 4 times higher. That is, judging by the excess mortality, if China failed in the pandemic, the United States failed 4 times more.
Of course, mortality is not the only way to make a judgment about the reaction to the pandemic. But while many other facets are difficult to measure directly, economic functionality is a smart indicator of the extent to which the pandemic has disrupted everyone’s daily lives. a country.
The United States has, by global standards, an enviable track record. Thanks in large part to unprecedented federal aid measures, the country stands out. It is the only one among its peers that not only since the initial shutdown of the pandemic, but also, since the end of 2021, has exceeded the expected levels of economic growth for that quarter, even before the pandemic hit. But even by this metric, China’s economic record is better, along with China’s GDP. increasing, according to the IMF, from $14. 3 trillion in 2019 to $18. 32 trillion in 2022, an expansion of around 28%. US GDP, on the other hand, fell from $21. 4 trillion to just $25 trillion, or 17%. Of course, Chinese knowledge is notoriously unreliable and the countries were on other expansion trajectories before the pandemic, which means it’s not entirely fair to compare them in such a simplistic way. But it also makes it hard to look at China’s track record and just think “catastrophe. ” In 3 years, the country’s population died much less and the country grew much more.
What, then, is the exact nature of China’s “failure”?One answer is lockdown and the “zero covid” policy itself. I am surprised by the disruptions of vaccine deployment, given the much higher rate among the young and middle-aged. than between the elderly and the sick. Another could be that the mistake was necessarily a matter of sequence: that the last mistake of China’s reaction to the pandemic was to suffer its maximum catastrophic wave not when the planet was at its maximum paralyzed by panic, but when the rest of the world that the disease was no big deal.
But here the experience in China is also striking, at least as far as it can be seen, a sign that three years later, the Chinese are also willing to trade undimmed streaming for some freedom from pandemic restrictions. Remember, while economic headwinds actually played a role, “Covid Zero” ended in part with unprecedented national protest. There was no apparent equivalent protest against the hands-off technique that followed, no visual surge of outrage at the option of a million deaths and the indifference of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. to this butcher shop “Can a million Chinese die without anyone knowing? Michael Schuman asked in The Atlantic last month, wondering how many other people outside the country had heard of the recent deaths inside it. But the national consequences, or lack thereof, are even more astonishing: that a million more people can die without the country really caring. Or maybe it shouldn’t be so clear as a sign of global convergence: that 3 years later, the whole world agreed. Even longer stamina are also normalizing mass death now.
David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), editor of Opinion and columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth. “
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