PLAGUE JOURNAL August 2020: A Victory Lap for China & New York
PLAGUE JOURNAL August 2020: A Victory Lap for China & New York
Two places with the most to explain are hailed as victors by members of the old guard at the New Yorker.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Social Capital Making Us Unsafe and Safe
Another of the New Yorker’s anachronistic and now fading flank, Adam Gopnick, attempted a blend of essay and social theory, perhaps influenced by the ideas of David Frum and Jonathan Kay, who believe that “high trust” societies beat the coronavirus. Gopnick cites a few studies and draws some unlikely conclusions. His article, from August 8th, is called “The Paradoxical Role of Social Capital in the Coronavirus Pandemic.” Paradoxical indeed. He argues that New York is a place of high social capital, citing the “game clubs, boat clubs, ball clubs and all sorts of clubs” of an earlier era (the quote is from Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park). He mentions the 19th-century “cosmopolitan coffeehouse,” which became a “citadel of social trust.”
Although the concept of “social capital” seems a bit hard to pin down, Gopnick is satisfied that New York has it: “We know that coffeehouses increase social capital by reading the memoirs written in them more than by studying civic statistics from Warsaw and Berlin.” He cites a study from Italy that reads a bit like the studies proving that Sean Hannity killed thousands of his viewers or that we could have saved 36,000 lives if we’d only taken the virus indoors a week earlier. The Italian study is full of academese, designed to impress, not illuminate: “The internalisation of the externality created by personal mobility is likely to depend on citizens’ capacity to contribute to the ‘public good.’” There are colorful charts that go up, then down. Gopnick believes, apparently, the idea (contained somewhere in the gibberish) that moving around indicates high social capital.
Halfway through, we get his thesis: “Places with a great deal of social capital got hit worst by the virus, and then recovered fastest.” Despite the shaky premise, he continues with confidence: “It’s a paradox of place: people who were not socially distanced at the start of the plague had an easier time learning to social-distance by its end.” The fanciful explanation is typical of summer 2020 media nonsense. The New Yorker had pages to fill even though the country has been asleep for five months except for the protests and riots (and the New Yorker slept through the riots). Why would we believe that New York has more “social capital” than San Francisco, which also has plenty of coffee shops and personal mobility but wasn’t “hit worst” by the virus? Why would we believe that New York has more social capital than Rome or Prague or Austin or Tokyo, all of which were relatively untouched by the virus? Conversely, are we to believe that empty northeastern Arizona or northern Arkansas or northern Brazil had high levels of “social capital,” making them dangerous before they were safe, like New York? Or that the rural regions of Utah and the Australian Outback lacked social capital (after all, they were safe from the beginning)? Gopnick lives in New York and writes for the New Yorker. He is making excuses for his city, which had among the highest death rates in the world. He wants us to believe that thousands died because they were so civic-minded.
Gopnick seems to miss that places with massive early cases saw correspondingly sharp declines. The virus burned through a vulnerable population. The faster it moves, the quicker it recedes. People infect those around them, causing localized clusters. An unusually long stretch of gray weather with lows in the 30s allowed the virus to spread explosively throughout March and April in New York. Governor Cuomo’s disastrous decision to put 9,000 sick people into nursing homes added to the spread. The sharp upward curve falls when the virus has burned through vulnerable clusters and has nowhere else to go. Gopnick’s understanding is flawed: New Yorkers were not civically mobile in early March and civically safe in May. They shared the same fate of every modern city under similar skies.
He takes the obligatory shots at Trump: “Instead of converging on obvious truths—the limited but real values of mask-wearing, the confidence that quack cures won’t solve the problem, the necessity of vigilant watchfulness—we are told every day that all empirical arguments are merely, well, masks for clan rivalry.” He makes the same blinkered assumptions about red states that the media have made from the start, suggesting they put their citizens at risk because of resentment against people like Gopnick: “The results are already clear. The rush to reopen in the so-called red states was motivated partly by commercial impatience but also largely by a kind of irrational rage at the ‘élitist’ social networks that depend on the diffusion of scientific expertise.” Or maybe the states he deplores simply preferred not to destroy businesses and create widespread suffering when there was no scientific evidence to support the lockdowns-and-masks strategy. (We had plenty of “experts,” but no “scientific expertise.”) In any case, how is “vigilant watchfulness” a strategy (and what other kind of watchfulness is there)? When discussing Trump and the virus, the press have mostly practiced empty sloganeering.
Gopnick is the one engaging in quack science, in this case quack social science. The science of weather and climate and sun and immune systems is real, and the red states he vilifies have the low death counts to prove it, while his highly civic New York remains near the top of the list of the world’s most dangerous places during the first half of 2020. He engages in pure psychobabble: “Where we struggle to create good will toward our fellow-citizens, illness rises and then abates. Where we encourage it only toward our kind, illness increases.” Whose kind? What kind? Where the hell did I dine? We are in the foggy realm of Miniluv and Minipax. He seems to suggest that Republicans in Texas killed Democrats in New York—something like that. It’s hard to tell. The modern New Yorker has no room for clarity or sense.
China Crushes the Coronavirus by Taking Firm Action, or Not
Peter Hessler, another New Yorker staff writer, wrote his New Yorker story. Hessler lives in China, so he reports about what it’s like to live in China. He doesn’t go as far back as some of the New Yorker old guard, but he is from an earlier New Yorker that valued writing. His story, from August 10th, is called—naturally—“How China Controlled the Coronavirus.” For some reason known only to those who publish stories about crushing the coronavirus, the article featured a photograph of hundreds of Chinese people in a vast swimming pool. It was essentially the same image the New Yorker ran with Elizabeth Kolbert’s article telling us how Iceland beat the coronavirus and the same image that would run in a hundred or a thousand U.S. articles about dangerous people at beaches or pools in Republican states. Crowded swimming pools signify victory where we like the politicians (Iceland with its female socialist leader, China because they are authoritarian) but dangerous where we don’t like the leaders (Florida, Missouri).
Hessler is a good writer, so his story is a good read, but it’s not about how China controlled the coronavirus. Hessler is a writer of personal essays and a good observer of the world around him. Although the article describes many things that happened in China during the pandemic, controlling the coronavirus was not one of them.
Hessler’s kids returned to school in week 11. He flew on a plane in week 13, which he refers to in the article as the “post-coronavirus era” (a notion that would be vilified by the news media a few weeks later during the August Republican National Convention, when some Republican speakers referred to the pandemic in the past tense). Hessler returned to his college teaching job on May 27th, although now he conducted classes over Zoom.
He says, “The Chinese lockdown was more intense than almost anywhere else in the world,” which could be true but would be hard to know or quantify. China has 1.4 billion people. Hessler saw only a sliver of the country and nothing of the rest of the world. Reporters routinely make these sweeping statements about vast regions and the behavior of millions or billions of people. He delivered the standard media endorsement of strictness and obedience, even if many of the least-strict countries had very low fatality rates.
Typical for the genre, he gives us a rundown of China’s swift and decisive actions:
The strict Chinese shutdown, in combination with border closings and contact tracing, had eliminated the spread of the virus in most communities. February 20th, the day of my lockdown trip to campus, turned out to be the last day that the Chengdu authorities reported a symptomatic case from community spread. The city has a population of about sixteen million, but since late February there have been only seventy-one symptomatic cases, all of them imported.
Chengdu is nearly in the middle of China, on a vast plain, far from any coast, a bit like Kansas. Temperatures range widely, both daily and annually. Winters are sunny; summers are grayer. Although Chengdu in January saw many lows in the 30s, including almost all of the final week, February was warming up, seeing just two days with lows in the 30s: the 16th and 17th, three days before the last case from community spread on the 20th. March lows barely dropped below 50, hitting a low of 49 four times. As in eastern Europe, most of Russia, most of China, and the great plains of the U.S., the coronavirus doesn’t move well in continental climates under sunny skies and warming temperatures.
Despite the headline and Hessler’s claim of a strict lockdown, his story makes the Chinese appear to have been quite lax. Discussing his classroom, he writes, “During week six, I asked, ‘Are you currently allowed to go outside in your community? Are there any restrictions on your movement?’ Again, the responses were unanimous: from Yunnan to Jilin, my students were now mobile.” Five months in, New York restaurants are still closed. Yet just six weeks in, Chinese people moved about freely.
He writes, “I occasionally saw the Chinese term for social distancing—anquan juli—on official notices, but I never heard anybody actually say the phrase. Certainly it wasn’t practiced in public. Once the lockdown ended, subways, buses, and trains quickly became crowded; during my trip to Hangzhou, I flew on an Airbus A321, and all of the hundred and eighty-five seats were occupied. When I interviewed people involved in business or diplomacy, we shook hands like it was 2019.” His trip to Hangzhou was in May of 2020.
I don’t know anyone who flew on a U.S. plane in May. Many people I knew were afraid to leave their houses. Months later, U.S. airlines still require empty middle seats. Hessler says that when his daughter returned to elementary school, “with so many people in a modest-sized classroom, any distancing was a game of inches.” He talks about a heavy focus on contact tracing, and about isolating infected people, even children and babies. But mostly, after the initial period, things sound normal. We are left wondering whether the people who manufactured the headline implying authoritarian triumph even read the article—or maybe they read it and didn’t care. The stories had by now become so ubiquitous and doctrinaire that the content didn’t really matter. The headline alone led us to assume that China had crushed the virus with lockdowns, masks, obedience, and the six-foot safety bubble. Even those who bothered to read it may think it was all about masks and lockdowns and distance and may not have grasped that Hessler was describing behavior that would be viewed as mass murder in the U.S. (if it had taken place in a red state).