17 thoughts four years after Covid

We've made frustratingly little progress in figuring out how to do better

George Makari and Richard Friedman wrote an article in The Atlantic recently positing that Joe Biden is suffering in the polls due to Americans’ “unprocessed Covid grief.”

This take resonated with a lot of people I know, but really did not resonate with me.

And yet thinking about the story — and about the pandemic — filled me with a kind of hard-to-control rage that really was consistent with their diagnosis of society-wide PTSD. I wasn’t sure what to make of my own feelings about that, until I read Philip Zelikow’s thoughts in a different New York Times article on a related subject. What Zelikow says, which I think is much closer to how I feel, is that the trauma is a sense that the system failed and nobody is even trying to fix it:

“Since the Biden administration never conducted an investigation of the crisis,” Mr. Zelikow said, “and also the Biden administration never developed a serious package of reforms to react to the crisis, the administration basically left the impression that it accepted that the government had failed, but just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

I’m not sure that I exactly fault Biden for this. Trump’s ongoing quest to regain office meant there was no real prospect of a serious inquiry that had bipartisan buy-in. And trying to do an inquiry without Republican buy-in would have risked making things worse. But I do think the reality that there has been no reckoning is disturbing in part because one clear takeaway from the pandemic should be the value of unity of effort. There’s limited upside to the CDC ordering people to wear masks on airplanes if the President of the United States isn’t going to back them up and encourage people to comply. And in part, thanks to the lack of reckoning, we barely even have consensus on basic factual questions about what happened.

Makari and Friedman write that “many people don’t regularly recall the details of the early pandemic—how walking down a crowded street inspired terror, how sirens wailed like clockwork in cities, or how one had to worry about inadvertently killing grandparents when visiting them.”

The sirens thing threw me, because I’m pretty sure sirens didn’t wail like clockwork in Washington, DC. The authors, though, are medical school professors in New York City, where the early pandemic death toll was sky-high, and where the sirens were wailing constantly. But nationally that original wave was smaller than the surge of sickness and death that came many months later in the winter of 2020-2021. That wasn’t people caught by surprise by a novel virus, it was people exhausted by prolonged social distancing and driven by the cold to socialize indoors rather than outdoors. My family and I and most of our social circle were behaviorally cautious through that whole period but by that time, the rules were not actually very strict even in blue territory. But the schools were closed. And not only were the schools in DC closed (something people have at least argued about a lot), the National Zoo was closed, even though it’s outside and bars and restaurants were open. I did not have, at the time, an incredibly strong opinion about what Covid policy should look like. But I was extremely annoyed by the extent to which it was an incoherent mishmash.

Such an incoherent mishmash that I struggle to even put together a coherent “four years later” after action report.

So instead, here are some disparate thoughts.

Seventeen thoughts four years after Covid

1. The intense partisan and ideological polarization around Covid that became such a dominant aspect of the experience was, I think, pretty contingent. Trump put travel restrictions in place on March 12, which was a week ahead of Australia closing its borders. Australia quickly followed that with restrictions on internal travel, which Ron DeSantis asked for on March 14.

2. The prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, was a right-wing populist whose public profile pre-Covid was dominated by anti-immigration stuff. He was, in short, a very Trump-adjacent figure. And Australia, of all the countries on the planet, is probably the most socioculturally similar to the United States of America. If the Australian right could implement hard lockdowns to control the virus, I believe the American right could have as well.

3. This probably would have saved a ton of lives. Australia and other countries with tougher lockdown policies saw dramatically lower mortality.

   

4. Had Trump become a hard lockdown guy, I think it’s plausible that huge swathes of the discourse would be different. The USA would have joined right-wing Australia and other very order-oriented Asian countries and had much lower death rates than we saw in Europe, progressives’ favorite continent. Of course, progressives’ favorite European country is Sweden, and Sweden had a social democratic prime minister at the time — a prime minister who famously declined to impose much in the way of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). In today’s world, conservatives note that Sweden had a lower death rate than the United States, despite its laxer policies, while progressives note that Sweden had a higher death rate than its Nordic neighbors, suggesting that sociological or demographic factors helped all the Nordics and the lack of lockdowns hurt.

   

5. Had Trump embraced hard lockdowns, then the George Floyd protests would have violated those rules and he would have pushed harder to disperse or suppress the protestors. At that point, ongoing protests (and, at times, riots) would have been understood as anti-lockdown measures.

6. I think the specific hypocrisy of some progressive public health figures endorsing the Floyd protests is somewhat overblown. Not that the critics are wrong, but they are missing the forest for the trees in terms of the significance of the pandemic intersecting with Floyd. The big point I would make about this is the one that John McWhorter made in June 2022: The protests were a pressure release valve for people bored by NPIs, and that exaggerated the mass fervor for the cause.

7. After Floyd, it became completely inconceivable that any liberal jurisdiction in America would actually enforce any kind of tough Covid rules. The idea of cops arresting people for not wearing masks properly on the bus or kicking doors down to bust-up illicit house parties was always a little bit far-fetched, but post-Floyd it was totally impossible.

8. Trump, by this point, was totally anti-NPI. And yet the actual policies of the federal government were surprisingly restrictive. Just as a random example I happen to have witnessed, the Gettysburg National Battlefield visitors center was closed until the end of June, and when it reopened had lots of Covid-related restrictions in place. That’s not a huge deal, but if Trump wanted to reopen America, he was oddly lax about actually reopening federal facilities. Trump’s CDC recommended that everyone wear masks and then he said he didn’t agree with that.¹

9. Speaking of drift, I think an under-discussed aspect of the Biden administration is they initiated a bunch of rules right when they took office and vaccine distribution was just starting and had no plan to phase them out, seemingly ever. When they got sued over the airplane mask mandate, they fought in court to maintain it. But then when they lost in court in Spring 2022, they dropped the case and never mentioned it again.

10. Something I really liked about the otherwise mediocre-at-best movie Dumb Money is that it attempted a realistic portrayal of the sheer range of experiences that different people had during Covid. The lead character is a white collar remote worker. But you also see nurses. And retail workers. And a delivery guy. And a billionaire who is sufficiently Covid incautious to have moved to Florida and bring a masseuse to his house, but sufficiently cautious to make the masseuse wear a mask. One of the most surreal aspects of the Covid experience, to me, was reading a lot of media coverage that seemed to presume that the experience of being a highly Covid-cautious teleworker was typical, when in fact most working-age people were doing in-person jobs the whole time.

11. The entire social distancing playbook was devised based on studies of the 1920 flu pandemic. Those studies concluded that NPIs were successful, but the cases being studies involved NPIs that only lasted for 4-6 weeks. In other words, there was a huge known unknown about the feasibility of maintaining this sort of policy over the long haul.

12. The time from Trump’s initial “15 days to slow the spread” to George Floyd’s death was 10 weeks.

13. I rode the metro or took a bus in DC a handful of times pre-vaccine. Every single time, the vehicles were nearly empty (most people were being cautious), but some of the people using public transit were breaking the mask rules and nobody ever tried to enforce them.

14. I think it’s underrated the extent to which the post-Floyd reluctance to enforce rules and the prolonged and harmful school closures were actually two sides of the same coin. Somewhat contrary to myth, the closures were mostly in line with parental demands — blue state parents, especially non-white ones, were reluctant to send their kids to school, and that’s an important reason they stayed closed. That doesn’t change the fact that (as I predicted way back in April 2020) the closures were very harmful. One thing about education in the United States is that traditionally, it’s been understood to be non-optional. To get schools open, you would have needed to be willing to enforce the attendance rules, which was just as much of a non-starter as the idea of enforcing the mask rules.

15. Relatedly, there is now a huge chronic absenteeism problem in America’s schools.

16. As liberals flailed, a distressingly large share of conservative commentary on Covid centered on just making things up. Instead of making all these good points that I am making about Covid NPIs, they would say the disease was no worse than the flu. Or that it would magically evaporate by April. Or that the Covid deaths were a result of classification error. None of that is true, and its widespread circulation contributed to the much lower vaccine uptake among conservatives, and ultimately, the much higher death toll of the disease among conservative Americans.

17. If you compare the US to other countries with much lower death tolls, you can see that post-vaccine the gap narrows considerably (without coming close to closing). Even a really successful lockdown regime couldn’t be sustained forever, and there was a price to pay in Australia and Finland and everywhere else once you opened up.

Strong but wrong

Way back in 2002, Bill Clinton offered Democrats the advice that “when people feel uncertain, they’d rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.”

This has been quoted a lot over the years, but until Covid, I honestly never really understood what he was saying. But I can appreciate now that there was something more appealing about a wrong-but-coherent viewpoint like “Covid is no big deal and you can cure it with ivermectin so just go do whatever” than there was to the incoherent mishmash of liberal America. Better than either of those things, of course, would be to either actually save lives with tough measures (Scott Morrison in Australia) or else equip people with accurate information while also leaving them free to choose (Stefan Löfven in Sweden).

But I found the Covid endgame in blue America to be incredibly aggravating, because it all devolved into a series of quasi-pointless political games. Things were open or closed based on lobbying clout, not public health analysis, and nobody was enforcing rules anyway.

Meanwhile, really big failures by federal public health agencies — failures that occurred during Trump’s presidency — in making tests available and disseminating useful guidance have gone unaddressed, because nobody wants to reopen the books on the pandemic. But I think the lesson we really need to learn is about the importance of asking what governments are actually comfortable doing on the enforcement side and reasoning backwards from there.

If you are willing to stop people from gathering, then closing schools as a complementary measure may make sense. But if you’re not willing to do that, then don’t selectively make public agencies the only thing that’s shut down. And if you are, in effect, relying on voluntarism to flatten the curve — which seems reasonable, most people actually prefer not to get sick and are perfectly capable of taking non-mandatory countermeasures if they know what to do — you need to work really hard to equip people with the tools they need. Rapid at-home Covid tests became ubiquitously available during the Biden years, but would have actually been useful under Trump.

Making high-quality masks freely available and telling people about their benefits would have been a lot more useful than making ineffective cloth masks “mandatory” and then not enforcing the mask mandates.

And most of all, I think people should try to remember that partisan politics is mostly about very durable policy disagreements (taxes and spending, abortion), and it’s a really bad idea to map crisis-management onto these ideological grooves. Trump genuinely botched the early pandemic response, which was a completely legitimate thing to blame him for. But that convinced a large swathe of Democrats that hawkish Covid policies should be an enduring progressive policy commitment, whether or not the changing circumstances warranted it.

1. CORRECTION: I originally said that the CDC imposed a mask mandate on air travelers under Trump, which is not the case. The airlines did the mandate themselves, and it didn’t become a federal rule until Biden.