PLAGUE JOURNAL July 2020: Attitude or Climate in Vermont? The New Yorker Credits Folksiness over Science
Bill McKibbon in the New Yorker fails to see the climate connection, substitutes with nothing.
[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.]
New Yorker writer Bill McKibbon specializes in folksiness, so he wrote a July 28th New Yorker article about how his folksy state of Vermont beat the coronavirus despite having a Republican governor. Vermonters did it with pluck. The article is part of the wide body of literature that tells us that Trump killed people and that we might learn things from places that didn’t. McKibbon’s title, “What Vermont and its History Might Teach the Nation about Handling the Coronavirus,” is the same as the titles about African countries and New Zealand and Iceland and Germany. McKibbon brags that Vermont has the fewest cases in the U.S., which shouldn’t surprise us as it has the second-smallest population. He doesn’t tell us that fatality rates are considerably worse than 2nd place, raking 7th at 91 fatalities per million (as of August 3rd). Maine, at the same latitude and with the same weather, has 92 per million. Wyoming, the only state with a smaller population than Vermont, has half the fatality rate, at 47 per million.
McKibben is impressed that Vermont has triumphed despite its red status, saying, “We also have one of the oldest populations in America, and we have a Republican governor, both of which, in recent weeks, have shown to be potential risk factors.” Although red states and cities have far lower cases and fatalities per capita than blue states and cities, everyone at the New Yorker knows that Republicans kill people. They know it because they read it in the New Yorker.
McKibbon recites the familiar story of lockdowns and closings, as if Vermont’s actions were different from those taken anywhere else on the globe. He cites a survey result that “seventy-eight percent of residents think that ‘people in my neighborhood trust each other to be good neighbors.’” As with the female leaders of New Zealand and Iceland and Germany, as with the “high-trust” societies credited in other articles and podcasts, apparently tone and unity scare away the virus.
McKibbon offers the standard New Yorker line about race: “There have been setbacks: as has been the case across the nation, the state’s population of color has been disproportionately hit.” When we follow the link, we see that it’s not true. Even though non-white Vermonters are more than twice as likely to live in multi-generational homes, almost three times more likely to be in prison, and have higher rates of “pre-existing conditions” than the overall population, they are slightly less likely to die from COVID. Non-whites, though more likely to test positive, constitute 5.9% of the population and 5.5% of the deaths. Once again, the writers and editors say what they want us to believe, not what is true. They are in the business of fear and outrage. They are in the business of removing Trump. The link itself is meant to convey a sense of authority, but the information in the linked article does not say what Mckibbon tells us it says. He and his editors expect us not to click.
McKibbon’s thesis is that Vermont beat the thing because Vermonters are nicer than Trump. He praises his Republican governor, Phil Scott, for making decisions “based on the science,” and says, “If you’re looking for an un-Trump, Scott is it.” He praises his fellow Vermonters for their obedience, saying only seven or ten people showed up to protest restrictions at the statehouse—but he has to admit, parenthetically, that five thousand showed up a few weeks later for a Black Lives Matter protest, so the “science” and obedience go out the window.
Latitude and Climate
McKibbon must know that writing for the New Yorker is a lot easier than it was back when they had fact-checkers. He touts the low case rate and fatality rate in Vermont, adding, “even though the epidemic raged in neighboring states.” Really? It’s not true unless you put all the emphasis on state and none on neighboring. Vermont borders parts of New York and Massachusetts, but not the parts where the virus “raged.” All of the areas neighboring Vermont have the same rates of infection that Vermont has.
Vermont borders Massachusetts to the south, New York to the west, and New Hampshire to the east. Maine is nearby, just to the east of narrow New Hampshire. Wikipedia editors have used the same map template for each of these states, color-coded to show coronavirus cases per 100,000, by county. If we were to cobble these state maps together like a jigsaw puzzle, we would see clear geographical patterns for coronavirus across the entire Northeast. In northern Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, where it’s cold in the winter, we see 0 - 30 cases per 100,000. Just to the south, across a massive swath of upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, we see a rate of 100 - 300 per 100,000. Farther south, across lower upstate New York, northwestern Massachusetts, and the southern parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, we see rates of 300 - 1,000 per 100,000. The virus becomes more promiscuous as we move from north to south, regardless of population density, state lines, politics, or folksiness.
When we hit the coastline below Maine and New Hampshire, we see one of the world’s most dangerous regions for the virus. The coastal areas of Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey show a preponderance of deep red on the Wikipedia maps, indicating 1,000 - 3,000 cases per 100,000. In New York City and northern New Jersey, the color is even darker, indicating more than 3,000 cases per 100,000, the highest level on the scale. We don’t know how high these actual numbers go, but we know that the ugly end of this scale in the temperate climate zone is at least 100 times worse than the benign end of the scale in the cold areas of northern Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine along the Canadian Border.
South of New Jersey, as the winter climate gets warmer and sunnier, rates begin to drop again. McKibbon writes the same story of governors and obedience that all New Yorker and other corporate publications write, because they look only at state totals and because their motivations are political, not journalistic. The virus doesn’t care about your level of trust or unity or obedience or what state you live in. It cares only about temperature and climate and immune systems.
The climate in the far northeast helped curb the spread of the virus in the winter and continues to help in the summer. The people of upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine have reasons to be outside. People live in these areas partly for their natural beauty and climate. Mild summers mean relatively little air conditioning in homes, very different from what we find in southern Arizona or Texas in the summer. A comment on the travel site Tripsavvy says, about Vermont:
Hotel/motels all have AC, but it’s rare for private houses (maybe 10-20% of houses will have a window unit in a room or 2). Yes, it can get into the 90s in August, but more typical highs are in the mid-80s, with lows in the 60s at night. We don’t have AC and it’s rare that we’re not comfortable using a fan or 2.
McKibben wrote a book called The End of Nature, but he missed the nature of his own state. In his mind, and the minds of his audience, only Trump and the rest of the red menace can cause poor outcomes (even though they don’t, relative to blue areas), and only obedience and kindly blue governors can produce good outcomes (even if Vermont has a red governor). To help explain Vermont’s “success,” McKibbon describes its village politics: “If a Trump-like figure rose to start delivering rants, he would be tolerated politely for a few minutes and then asked to sit down.”
The obsession with Trump blinds them all. The most dangerous states and the most dangerous cities—in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts—are overwhelmingly blue (though Massachusetts currently has a moderate Republican governor). Rhode Island has a female governor, so they must have crushed the coronavirus. But they did not. The virus ran wild in drafty, dry apartments and nursing homes in 35-degree weather under unrelenting gray skies along a stretch of 250 miles of coastline warmed by the Atlantic Current, and no amount of locking down, obedience, or masks would stop it. The media offer no plausible explanations for why these kindly blue governors who followed the “science” presided over so much sickness and death.
The old guard at the New Yorker are all desperately trying to find ink, to hang on a few more years before the young ideologues on staff skin them and eat them. Previously they wrote about literature or history or art, but Remnick’s New Yorker has swept itself clean of such bourgeois topics. It’s now all about the movement, so the old guard take potshots at Trump and hope to survive another day.