PLAGUE JOURNAL December 2020: Europeans Are Superior; European Vacations Are Dangerous
The media blame July vacations for November cases, call for more masks and lockdowns. Blaming bad people and outsiders, missing climate and latitude.
[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.]
The belief in European obedience is an article of faith in our press. During the spring and summer of 2020, we learned that Americans are anti-science and disobedient. If only we were like Germany—or Canada or New Zealand or Iceland or Ireland or Denmark (but not the U.K. because Boris Johnson is a populist strongman)—if only we were like them, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The data never supported the argument. Northern Europe had, and still has, most of the world’s worst fatality rates (although many countries in the Southern Hemisphere have moved near the top since the Southern Hemisphere cooled). The European curve was sharper than ours in the spring of 2020, although such comparisons are flawed because there is no “European” or “American” curve. Curves follow climates, not borders.
People in the press know little about how the virus spreads. They care only about scare-clicks and election results, so when news began to arrive in the fall of 2020 that European countries were again experiencing some of the world’s highest infection rates, our media talkers were struck dumb. Not that it mattered; no one would hold them accountable for getting things wrong, and Biden was ahead in the polls. France is surging? Belgium is looking bad? Oh well—wear your masks, keep your distance, stick to your pod, close the restaurants and flower shops. Fauci said so. Science.
But the press needed stories, so they told us that Europeans had suddenly become careless after six months of exemplary behavior. Feeling proud and safe from their heroic behavior in the spring, they became dangerous in the summer by going on vacation. (By now, we’d seen a thousand scary photos of people in red states at beaches and pools, so we knew that summer fun was dangerous.) From good to bad, just like that.
These stories were delivered on podcasts and TV shows, less in print, perhaps because they wouldn’t have survived even the laziest fact-checking. The media re-hashed a few stories from August that blamed vacations for new cases in Spain or Hungary, which featured photos of people on the beach even though the beach was the last place spreading would occur.
The stories never explained how British or French tourists created new cases in Spain while cases remained low in Britain and France all summer. The people making up the stories had no idea how or where people were catching the virus, but our stereotype of leisurely European holidays offered a convenient story. We might as well decide that berets or waffles caused the increase in cases.
Spreading Fear of Outsiders
A hallmark of our fear-and-safety ideology is the demonization of the other. Brits and Belgians were safe as long as they stayed with their own, unsafe as soon as they traveled. When the Londoner visited Malaga or the Amalfi Coast, the virus went batshit. This xenophobia—superstitions around safety “pods,” elevators limited to one “party” at a time, restaurants and ski resorts that spread the virus to strangers but not among friends—has been among the most irrational of all the ideas pushed by the press and policy-makers since the beginning. Everyone I know who caught the virus caught it from friends or family, yet the press want us to fear strangers on the street, and many people went along with it. We spent the weekend with a bunch of friends—but it’s okay, we knew they were being safe. And we wore masks when we went out.
Why is it that places with the highest infection and fatality rates, places like New York, fear outsiders the most? The virus is already there. New Yorkers should warn visitors to stay away for their own good. Why are they afraid of people from Florida, where the rates of serious cases are so much lower? The scare balloon is always red. In Colorado, where I live, my news-reading friends fear Texans.
In the fourteenth century, Europeans blamed Jews for poisoning the wells, and massacred them all across Europe. The authorities looked the other way or participated in the killing. Today, we vilify Texans and Georgians and Floridians for failing to cover their faces, and we shout at them on trails and sidewalks for crimes against humanity.
Attributing Everything to Human Behavior; Ignoring Nature
An error common to all these flawed explanations about behavioral lapses is the failure to explain the sudden change in behavior. We are meant to believe that rising rates in the fall resulted from careless behavior in the summer, and that falling rates in the summer resulted from virtuous behavior in the spring. How then do we explain the runaway rates in March and April of 2020? Europeans must have behaved like savages, according to the safety narrative.
But we don’t really believe these things: we decide that the original outbreaks, no matter how severe or long-lasting, were acts of God. We give a pass on those. The people of Italy, Belgium, and New York were innocent victims. But the changes in outcomes, for better or worse, were caused by changes in human behavior. Although it came out of nowhere and happened to Europe, lockdowns and masks fixed it. Then a sudden reversal of behavior wrecked it, requiring everyone to lock down harder. Every outcome around the world resulted from this vacillating public behavior. God may have delivered the thing, but our only hope of beating it lay in masks and deadbolts.
On the rare occasions when reporters feel a need to explain initial bad outcomes from the spring of 2020, they reach for lazy explanations such as population density or international travel, but these things don’t much correlate with outcomes. If they did, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Atlanta, and Los Angeles would have the same rates as Brussels and New York. Because the popular explanations are wrong, the press have no idea why Europe was hit so hard in early 2020 when Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East were spared, so they make up stories.
The increasing rates in northern Europe in the fall were caused not by filthy foreigners or careless behavior but by weather (and by bad safety information in the press). In London, low temperatures fell to the 40s in October and November. To the north, in Manchester and Liverpool, temperatures were in the 30s. The strictest lockdowns were in the north. By late November, the only English region remaining in “Tier 1, Medium Alert” was in the southwest, a warmer tip of land extending into the sea. Most of England was in “Tier 2, High Alert.” The virus spread more widely in the cool north than it did in the warmer southwest.
A map published on November 26th indicating new lockdown requirements shows the effects of subtle regional temperature differences on outcomes. In the southwest, at the lowest lockdown level, the city of Plymouth did not fall below 40 degrees until November, when it happened five times: on the 4th, 5th, 26th, 27th, and 30th. Infections occurring on the 4th and 5th would not have led to rapid spreading, as temperature lows five to seven days later (after the incubation period) were in the 50s, above the range for explosive spreading. (Also, any spreading from the cool weather of the 26th, 27th, or 30th would not have affected this round of lockdowns, which were already in place by these dates.)
Manchester, on the other hand, at the highest lockdown tier before and after the new restrictions, saw lows in the 30s (but above freezing) twice in August, twice in September, three times in October, and eleven times in November (nine of them before the 26th). Two additional nights were at exactly 32 degrees. Because of the compounding effect of spreading in cool temperatures, a shift of a few degrees creates large disparities in outcomes. Yet we pretend that the people of Manchester are less virtuous, less well-behaved than the people of Plymouth. The virus cares not at all what reporters at the Times think, or how many restrictions we enact, yet the people at the Times continue to pretend they have the answers.
The Media Decide Coronavirus Incubation Expands to Four Months
Europeans take their holidays in July. New cases and fatalities had fallen to almost nothing across most of Europe by June, a few weeks later in places with colder winters such as Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany. European countries have a range of cultures and policies, but they share the same cool gray skies in winter. Cases spiked sharply higher in September and October when temperatures fell into the 40s and then the 30s.
Is it possible that our newscasters and politicians don’t know that the typical incubation period for the coronavirus is five and a half days? If an Englishman travels to San Sebastian in July and becomes infected, he may feel under the weather a week later—but not in November. If he drinks albariño under the Spanish sun without a mask, he is safe, and he is boosting his immune system. English coronavirus cases in November were transmitted in England, not in the Mediterranean four months earlier. The danger occurred at home, in the fall, under enduring lockdowns and gray skies.
Although the press had been casually telling us about dangerous European vacations since mid-summer, on December 4th the New York Times went all in with a story called, “Europe’s Deadly Second Wave: How Did It Happen Again?” It was one of their committee stories, attributed to three reporters, including Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the person who had told us confidently just two weeks earlier that new lockdowns would crush the virus by mid-December.
After the November optimism (for Europe—the U.S. would remain damned), now they were selling fear again. Like most corona stories, this one was vague and confusing, full of drama but lacking information. It began with dread and battlefield imagery: “By early June, scarred and battered, Europe was emerging from the depths of its fight against the coronavirus pandemic.” We learn how Europe had done it (and how the U.S. hadn’t): “Strict lockdowns in most countries had lifted health care systems off their knees, just as the United States and others were fighting record caseloads.” But then the Europeans got cocky: “The weather was warming up, the European Union was encouraging borders to reopen and Europeans were desperate for a break.” Then the Times gives us a line so powerful it stands alone:
“They paid dearly for it.”
The article offers no evidence that lockdowns helped or that vacations hurt. The Times simply repeats the familiar messages, assuming that if we hear things often enough, we will believe them. After telling us for nine months that Americans were uniquely anti-science and insubordinate, they were ready to expand the story a bit. Now that Biden had won the election, it was time to look for scare clicks elsewhere in the world. We learn that, after an EU official had promised in April of 2020 to cancel vacations, she reneged by announcing, “I am positive about summer vacation.” Uh-oh. We know from the headlines that fun is dangerous.
When Ernest Shackleton prepared for his polar explorations more than a century ago, he chose crew members in part for their willingness to participate in social and community activities, selecting singers, musicians, and poets. He created a newspaper for the expedition and solicited contributions from sailors and the crew. He expected everyone to participate in the cooking and the care of the ship’s animals, and he did so himself. He remained amiable and optimistic, and he shuffled his men’s sleeping arrangements so that they didn’t form factions. He knew the ravages that could visit the minds of men during extended periods of isolation, cold, darkness, malnutrition, and disease, especially if they were idle. Ultimately, although he lost his ship and was stranded for 495 days in arctic ice, he returned without the loss of a single life, among history’s greatest feats of leadership. Our media and most of our politicians prefer a different approach.
In the Times article, we see a photo of a couple dancing outdoors in Munich, apparently to show us how the virus spreads when people lack sufficient fear. The article complains of tourists having parties “in private villas in the Mediterranean,” as if people don’t have private parties in their own countries. Although the article invokes science and expertise, we get neither: “Research shows that these decisions—swift internal reopenings with nominal restrictions, coupled with cross-border travel—were at the root of the second wave.” There is no such research. If it existed, the Times would have offered it.
Instead, the article quotes a parade of officials giving us the standard hand-wringing about selfishness and carelessness:
“Europeans wanted it all,” said Prof. Devi Sridhar of the Edinburgh University Medical School.
By late October, Ms. von der Leyen, the European Commission president, acknowledged the mistakes. “Obviously the exit strategies were partly too fast and measures were relaxed too soon,” she said.
Favoring Attitude, Ignoring Latitude
It’s all the same old she said, she said, the familiar scolding from experts and officials. None of it makes any sense when we look at the data. The charts provided in the article track not at all with vacations but track perfectly with the arc of the sun and with temperatures. Europe sits at high latitudes, much of it between 45 and 55 degrees north. Days are long and warm in the summer, short and cool in the winter. Europe is unique around the world for having so many people living at such high latitudes. Lombardy sits at 45 degrees north, Paris at 48 degrees, Brussels at 51 degrees, London at 51.5 degrees. Most of the world is too cold (or underwater) for significant habitation at these latitudes. In North America, 50 degrees puts us in Winnepeg, four hours north of Fargo. North America’s largest cities—New York, Chicago, L.A., Toronto—are much farther south. Europe’s gray skies, short days, and cool temperatures (temperate, not freezing) breed coronavirus in the winter.
Coronavirus cases are at their lowest in late July when days are at their warmest and longest. They climb in late September, then jump sharply at the end of October. Understanding the role of weather would have allowed the press and politicians to provide useful advice (open windows, get as much sun you can, protect old people), but instead they bang on about summer vacations and masks and obedience.
July is the busiest month for European travel. One-third of all European travel nights occur in July and August. (The percentage may have been higher in 2020, as business travel slowed to almost nothing.) November is the slowest travel month. If travel caused spreading, the corona charts would be the opposite of what they are. We know that when the thing finds an inhospitable environment—for example when temperatures fall below freezing—cases fall immediately. If staying home slowed the virus, we’d have seen fatalities fall dramatically in late August and September as European travel declined.
Hours of Sunlight:
Temperatures (Belgium):
Update, summer 2021:
What the storytellers at the Times couldn’t see on December 4th when they published their article—but should have—was that cases would continue to skyrocket, reaching new highs all across Europe during the winter and spring of 2021 when travel was at its lowest. People travel in sunny weather when the virus is dormant; the virus travels in gray weather when people are dormant. The press push a handful of ideological messages but have no interest in the world as it is.
European Fatalities Winter 2021:
The article closes with more hand-wringing about dangerous citizens who want to get on with their lives and with another plea for obedience from another expert:
“My worry is that we’ll pay for Christmas parties in January and February lockdowns,” said Professor Sridhar of Edinburgh University. “Unless we see massive behavioral change, we are going to see January and February lockdowns,” she added. “The virus doesn’t care it’s Christmas.”
To the professional Grinches in the press and everyone else trying to bend our perception to their worldview, behavior explains everything. They hate nature because they can’t see it in their screens and they can’t control it, and because it’s easier to whip up rage at other people than it is to consider the world as it is.