With an inept president in charge, America’s devastating second wave was inevitable
It seems that even during a pandemic, the president’s interests must come first. But with more than 40,000 new coronavirus cases a day – predicted to rise to 100,000 cases a day – voters aren’t buying what he’s selling anymore. Holly Baxter reports
At a Senate hearing on 30 June, the infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci delivered a sober description of the current situation in the US. Coronavirus cases are going up, he said, and the situation is spiralling rapidly out of control. While other countries have managed to bring the pandemic under control, a culture of dismissing masks and lockdowns as assaults on people’s freedom has led to a dangerous reality. States like New York – once the epicentre of the virus, and subject to quarantining orders by other, less affected southern areas – are now in cautious recovery, but more isolated states – Florida and parts of the south-west, such as Arizona – are seeing disease rates skyrocket.
“How many lives might be lost when all this is over?” asked Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren via video-link. Fauci, sat in the Senate alongside a handful of DC colleagues, replied: “I can’t make an accurate prediction but it will be very disturbing, I guarantee you that. Because when you have an outbreak in one part of the country even when other parts of the country are doing well, they are vulnerable… We can’t just focus on the area that has the surge. That miputs the entire country at risk.”
That week, Fauci said, the US was reporting 40,000 new coronavirus cases per day. By next week, he warned, it would be unsurprising for that number to continue along the same trajectory to 100,000 per day. As Democratic Senator for Washington state Patty Murray put it, “126,000 lives lost was once considered on the high end of the spectrum [for the entire pandemic] — but the year is just half over.” So bad is the current situation in the south that New York has now banned almost half of the American population from entering the state without a 14-day quarantine, an unthinkable development just a few short weeks ago.
Despite President Trump’s bizarre claim that the US might be able to avoid having so many cases if it just stopped testing for Covid-19, somebody in his campaign is clearly taking the threat seriously. A Make America Great Again (MAGA) rally planned for the week of 6 July in Mobile, Alabama was cancelled a few days before it was due to go ahead, though spokespeople for the campaign refused to explain the exact reasons why.
Presumably altruism wasn’t the only deciding factor; after a poorly attended rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that drew ridicule from those Trump most fears — people on Twitter — he’s said to be demanding his officials do all they can to avoid another such catastrophe, and a state with a new stay-at-home order is unlikely to produce an enviable crowd. Spikes in death and illness rates that follow any big gathering for the president are unlikely to gel with “Keep America Great” messaging, either.
All of this has put Trump in a difficult position: how does a reality TV president, known for his bombast and his politically incorrect chants, win a second term when a pandemic keeps large swathes of his target demographic indoors? Whether or not he is, in Nancy Pelosi’s words, “at risk” and “morbidly obese”, the risk of catching Covid-19 clearly outweighs the reward of continuing to sit in the Oval Office.
The same calculations, however, won’t get his supporters out on the streets. Poor people who work in manufacturing jobs have a lot to loose by travelling to a rally right now: their health; their ability to go back to work; any spare cash they might have, which may have been whittled down by jobs losses during an economic crash.. Who cares if they get to join in a chant or two about Sleepy Joe Biden or Crooked Hillary or Corrupt Obama? They’ve got bigger fish to fry. That same line of thinking might even prevent them from turning up to the ballot box later in the year.
Coronavirus couldn’t have come at a worse time for Trump. It came quick enough to ravage the American population, and the election was far enough away that the consequences of him backing “liberty-seekers” in places like Michigan became obvious. Opponents of lockdown and stay-at-home orders have been proven – inarguably, through objective numbers that tally up instances of human suffering – to be wrong. Those who downplayed fears now look foolish.
Proclamations that the pandemic was over and the economy needed to “get going again” were clearly ridiculously premature. Boasts about the US being “the best in the world” at prevention, or treatment, or testing, or containing have all been exposed as lies or fantasy. And the longer Covid-19 is allowed to continue to infect the population, the worse the effects on that excellent economy Trump was planning to campaign off the back of. One $1,200 stimulus cheque per American isn’t really going to cut it.
What way out is there for a country that got so conspiratorial it became self-destructive? For years, Trump and his administration have stoked the fears of a xenophobic section of the population, one which has always held government and “the establishment” in low regard — low enough to vote for a self-declared “outsider” to “drain the swamp” – but now is in full-scale panic. They nodded along as Trump told them coronavirus was just another flu, that it was created by Chinese officials in a Wuhan lab funded by Bill and Melinda Gates. They laughed when he referred to the “kung flu”. But now their hospitals are filling up, and even their Republican representatives are appearing on TV and begging them to stay home, anxiety etched upon their faces, their voices hoarse and serious.
And now demonstrations for Black Lives Matter have ignited a global conversation about racism, and so racism doesn’t seem like such an attractive campaigning tool any more; it feels a little 2016. Polling shows that a majority of Americans across every demographic now support the aims of BLM. Yes, that includes white people, those without a college degree, and people aged 65-plus. The “kung flu”, “build the wall” and offhanded comments about immigrants from “shithole countries” now feel very 2016. Tweeting out a video of a man in Florida with Trump campaign flags shouting, “White power!” also is unlikely to do much good; the president himself must have realised that, having enacted a rare Trump U-turn and deleted the 28 June tweet a few hours later.
Such stockpiling points to the psychology of the Trump administration: why buy up so much, unless you believe a prolonged spike is about to happen?
The legacy of all that lying, joking and conspiracy-mongering spells trouble for Trump. For one thing, some voters who came out for him last time round just aren’t buying what he’s selling any more. Mary Kirby, a 67-year-old grandmother from a small town in Montana, told The Independent in an interview with political reporter Chris Riotta last week, that despite voting mainly on the issue of abortion — Kirby describes herself as “pro-life” and has strong views against abortion access for women — she intends to cast a ballot for Joe Biden in November.
Losing voters like Kirby should be of great concern to Trump, who he has attempted to court with bible-holding photo ops and even the hosting of a disabled child “who could have been aborted” at his State of the Union speech earlier this year. “I don’t like Trump, and I don’t believe him for a minute that he’s pro-life,” Kirby told Riotta. “I believe he’s an opportunist.” The professional wind-up merchant may well have flip-flopped and blustered enough to do irreparable damage to his character in the eyes of such voters. The pandemic is simply the final straw.
The more serious legacy of Trump’s behaviour over the past four years, however, is the uptick in people who distrust “experts”, especially doctors and journalists. Cries of “fake news” have been used to silence honest reporting on the Trump administration’s failings; and wink-wink-nudge-nudge claims about “globalism”, Bill Gates, “corrupt healthcare guys” and “lying doctors” who sit in hospitals supposedly overrun with coronavirus with nothing to do have made Covid-19 so much harder to treat.
Protests in April and May where gun-toting, MAGA hat-wearing demonstrators clashed with healthcare workers dressed in their scrubs and face masks shocked the world; they didn’t, however, shock anyone who had seen what Trump supporters were saying on social media about the “hero” nurses and doctors Democrats were celebrating and Trump, conspicuously, wasn’t. “THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO!!!” wrote angry tweeters when a light-hearted video of nurses in full PPE doing a short dance routine in a New York hospital did the rounds. “This is proof of the CORONA HOAX.”
Trump no doubt realises — too late — how serious America’s problem is now. While the UK’s government has talked regularly about the development of a vaccine, he has rarely mentioned such efforts during press conferences, knowing perhaps how much vaccine sceptics were emboldened by his rhetoric in years gone by. Notably, the US recently bought up almost the entire world’s supply of remdesivir, an antiviral drug which shortens the duration of Covid-19 symptoms. Such stockpiling points to the psychology of the Trump administration: why buy up so much, unless you believe a prolonged spike is about to happen?
And why spend on treatments, and talk up possible “cures” such as hydroxychloroquine (which we know now to be functionally useless, and in some cases worse than useless, when it comes to coronavirus) or even UV light and intravenous bleach (don’t try it at home) rather than pour funds into vaccine development and focus on increasing education and awareness about inoculations?
The answer seems pretty clear: to walk back claims about vaccines could hurt Trump’s re-election chances, and even during a pandemic, the president’s interests come first. If he does win, the cost will be ongoing and high: predictions based on the number of Americans who say they would not take up a coronavirus vaccine suggest that even if one were widely available tomorrow, the US would never be able to achieve herd immunity.
In Palm Beach County in Florida on 29 June, one commissioner’s meeting made face masks in public mandatory as cases spiked among a vulnerable population of elderly people. Residents took the floor to voice their disapproval: “You cannot mandate people to wear masks knowing that those masks are killing people,” said one woman. “It literally is killing people. And we the people are waking up… and every single one of you who are obeying the devil’s laws are going to be arrested. And you, doctor, are going to be arrested for crimes against humanity.”
Others stood up to concur, decrying “TV brainwashing” and heathens who “want to throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door”, as well as making claims that the virus could be spread by 5G and that the qualifications medical experts in Florida hold are invalid. Talk about “waking up” is very common in conspiracy theory communities, usually accompanied either by mentions of “taking the red pill” (a reference to The Matrix, where protagonist Neo takes a red pill to wake up to the reality of his existence) or “sheeple”.
But the truth of the matter is that the pandemic would have been bad in the United States under any administration. That’s because the problems are systemic and structural
Back at the beginning of May, when coronavirus cases were still at dangerous levels in my home city of New York but barely registering in southern states, I interviewed some lockdown protesters who believed coronavirus was a “hoax”. As a second wave built across the United States and primarily affected those states where my interviewees live, I took a look at their social media again this week, to see if their beliefs have changed much in the intervening two months. Sadly, it seemed that they had not. “I will not be masked, tested, tracked, poisoned or chipped to support this orchestrated Covid-19 lie… This is not my new normal #IDoNotConsent,” one retweet on Indigo Leo’s timeline read.
“Long-term psy-op was to create mass panic and hysteria surrounding airborne contamination to the degree that [people] would stand in line and plead to be injected with the very contagion that they naively believe will render them immune from the regenerating virus,” said another. “If masks work, why don’t we just give them to prisoners instead of releasing them?” said a third. All three of these retweets occurred within a few hours on Indigo Leo’s timeline.
Big Momma Carol had retweeted from one of her followers: “I just got word Covid will be gone in 126 days, pass it on.” She also shared a false claim that “the HIGHEST NUMBER of Covid cases occurred in states that implemented lockdown AND the FEWEST cases have been in states that DID NOT lock down.” Both Indigo Leo and Big Momma Carol, alongside others who I spoke to and who operate under pseudonyms online, peppered their continuing coronavirus conspiracies with allegations about Black Lives Matter being either a violent organisation or one that shares values with the Ku Klux Klan, and claims that politicians and media were unfairly attacking Trump.
When I asked the New York-based physician Dr Eugene Gu about the climbing coronavirus rates across the US right now, he told me that he “certainly” thinks the country is in the middle of a second wave, pointing out that in California alone there has been a 50 per cent spike in coronavirus cases and a 43 per cent spike in hospitalisations over the past 14 days.
“As a vocal Trump critic, I'm always ready to make a scathing remark against the president,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is that the pandemic would have been bad in the US under any administration. That's because the problems are systemic and structural. The US spends more money on healthcare than any other nation on the planet, yet we are among the worst at fighting the coronavirus pandemic because we do not have single-payer universal healthcare. Fighting a pandemic requires a country to marshal its healthcare resources to help everyone from the poorest patient living in a tent on the street to the richest patient living in a mansion on the mountaintop. Our healthcare system is designed to only serve the rich. The best and brightest doctors in our country specialise in plastic surgery and dermatology because that's where the rich spend their money. Healthcare is a for-profit business in the US, not a public service like it is in the UK, Japan, and other developed countries. And now we are paying for it dearly.”
That for-profit, money-oriented system has lent credence to the idea that health-related crises may secretly be being engineered by billionaires out to make a quick buck for those tempted in by conspiracy theories. Vaccines aren’t just a subject of debate in the US because of their efficacy or spurious allegations about their connection to autism but also because they are costly, and many families who are strapped for cash find themselves forking out inordinate sums of money to inoculate their children against a seemingly never-ending catalogue of illnesses.
Similarly, a disease that requires expensive hospital treatment prompts Americans to want to “follow the money” in a way that those who live under universal healthcare systems might not. Couple this with a divisive political environment and a long tradition of rural suspicion against the government and you end up with gun-carrying Trump supporters on the street, demanding an end to what they see as Democrat-led stay-at-home orders.
“While there are vocal anti-vaxxers within the community in the US, I believe that most Americans are eagerly waiting for a safe and effective vaccine for the coronavirus and will jump at the opportunity to take it to protect themselves and their families,” Eugene Gu said. Nevertheless, he added that the consequences of anti-vaxxers’ refusal to play ball could be dire: “Those who do not take the vaccine will pose a threat to the immunocompromised, very young children, and the elderly who either cannot take the vaccine or have such weak immune systems that the vaccine does not work effectively for them. That is the biggest danger that anti-vaxxers likely pose to the rest of society, which is indeed awful.”
Sick days are strictly rationed in the US, with some having no paid sick days at all. The system means that workers who are ill often struggle on, coming into the office in order not to miss a paycheque
Dr Daniel Rosen, a bariatrics surgeon who pivoted during the pandemic to focus on population-testing for Covid-19, told me he spent a lot of time in the weeks when New York was at the epicentre of the pandemic travelling between people’s houses with testing kits, because “while the hospitals were making arrangements and preparing for the worsening epidemic, no one was there for all the people who were trapped in their houses and potentially sick with this disease”.
The work was often “gruelling”, he said, adding: “The positivity rates at that point in New York – especially Brooklyn – were sky-high. Around 50 per cent of the people who I tested in the first few weeks came back positive. For reference, the average in the US right now is 7 per cent.” Dr Rosen spent April and May catching Ubers between houses and apartments, and he managed to test over 1,000 patients in just eight weeks.
He’s now grappling with the fact that New York is reopening and some are making their way back to work. Sick days are strictly rationed in the US, with some having no paid sick days at all. The system means that workers who are ill often struggle on, coming into the office in order not to miss a paycheque; effectively, it incentivises those with coronavirus to spread it, just as the high-cost healthcare system can incentivise people not to seek help even when they are gravely ill.
Dr Rosen is now working with businesses to try and avoid outbreaks with a combination of tests for present infection and for coronavirus antibodies: “We have helped business owners to screen their entire employee pool prior to reopening so that those who are infected could be quarantined and not risk spreading the virus to other workers,” he explained.
“Primarily, that strategy is to identify those actively infected and have them quarantined – with no loss in pay – so that employees are not incentivised to lie about their results and keep coming to work and exposing others because they need their paycheque. Those employees who tested positive can then be retested over time until they are confirmed negative and then can safely return to work.”
Current guidelines for returning to work mean that doctors can attempt to protect employees from losing money by simply providing the employer with percentages showing how many people in an office have antibodies, are currently infected, or have tested negative for both. Once the employer has that information, the hope is that they will reassure employees nobody will be left unpaid for quarantining — and then those workers who did test positive for a current infection will presumably identify themselves to their bosses and go home for the mandatory 14-day period.
Dr Rosen is optimistic about how New York, once so badly hit, will weather the second wave brewing elsewhere in the States: “I do believe that there will be an increase in the number of infections from the low levels we are seeing now, but with a positivity rate of under 2 per cent,” he told me. “I don't believe we will see a return to exponential growth that we are currently seeing in states like Arizona or Florida.”
He believes that the problem will now lie with an out-of-control spread among southern states, exacerbated by the political beliefs of that population. “On New York’s streets there is near-total compliance with mask wearing, at least in Manhattan and more densely populated boroughs,” he said. “Inside dining will likely remain outlawed throughout the summer.”
Dr Gu echoed that idea, saying that he thought indoor dining in particular was what had caused those skyrocketing rates elsewhere. Because of New York’s strict local laws, they concurred, the risk of southerners bringing coronavirus back into New York is fairly low. “All that,” said Dr Rosen, “and the lack of MAGA devotees eschewing masks and coughing on our babies to show they won't be controlled by the ‘deep state’ should help us get through the summer without things needing to be shut down again.”
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