PLAGUE JOURNAL July 2020: Brazil; the New Yorker Chases Populists, Ignores Weather & Climate
In July, stories about populist strongmen are all the rage. The New Yorker joins the crowd with some dubious assertions and bad math.
[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.]
Populist Strongmen
A lengthy New Yorker article by Jon Lee Anderson on July 2nd (2020) was typically devoid of information and heavy on ideology. The title told us what to believe and reflected a trendy if nonsensical view: “Populists Inflame the Coronavirus Outbreak across Latin America.” We might as well write that populists embolden locusts. Like most journalists in our pandemic, Anderson places the blame on politics he dislikes.
Before winter came to the Southern Hemisphere, Latin America had vastly lower per capita fatality rates than North America, and the cases were in the empty, gray, wet north, not the crowded, hot, sunny south where the populists are. People who read Anderson’s three-thousand-word article probably felt better about themselves by the end of it but would be hard-pressed to say what they learned other than that populists are bad, which we knew from a hundred other Trump-inspired articles in the New Yorker. Nothing new there: cultural elites have always vilified “populists,” which simply describes leaders who are popular with the people. FDR was reviled by bankers and wealthy industrialists. The media hate it when someone speaks to non-coastal people.
Whether because of Anderson’s personal instincts, the carelessness of the press overall, or explicit direction from New Yorker editors under David Remnick, the article is a jumble of innumeracy and improvisation. Discussing Mexico, Anderson writes, “During the week when many hotels in Cancún reopened, Mexico reported the second-largest number of coronavirus deaths in Latin America: more than fifteen thousand.” He associates the opening of hotels with new deaths, and fails to mention that Mexico has the 2nd-highest population in Latin America, so the 2nd-highest death rate would be expected, not exceptional.
He writes, “In mid-May, Brazil secured a grisly world record: it had the fastest-growing coronavirus infection rate of any country on earth.” He doesn’t define “infection rate” although we know from elsewhere in the article that he probably means total cases, not per capita cases. Nor does he mention that by May, it would make sense that a large country in the Southern Hemisphere would have the fastest-growing rates in the world, as the Southern Hemisphere was entering winter and temperatures were sliding. Only Indonesia is more populous than Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere. Unlike Indonesia, Brazil is a huge country that runs north-to-south, so the climate along its southeastern oceanic coast was becoming a bit like the climate in northern Europe four months earlier, if not quite as cool or gray because the latitudes are not as high.
Anderson was eager to deploy the word “grisly,” which, along with “grim,” had become among the most popular words of our new normal. It didn’t mean anything, but it communicated the threat we faced from populist leaders. Rather than provide numbers, Anderson quoted officials and experts, one of whom said that president “López Obrador has restarted his trips around the country, without a face mask. While he does, Mexicans are dying quietly and stoically in their homes.” Pure yellow journalism.
Anderson’s arguments are full of non-sequiturs and contradictions. He says, about Brazil, “The country’s far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro, has made no effort to curb the pandemic.” Then he notes that Brazil’s geographical neighbors are also hard-hit:
Among Brazil’s neighbors, the fear of contagion has led governments to tighten their borders or shut them completely. Still, two nearby countries have suffered soaring rates of COVID-19. Ecuador has fifty-eight thousand cases and more than four thousand deaths. Peru—despite a three-month lockdown, enforced by the police and the military—has two hundred and eighty-eight thousand cases and nearly 10 thousand deaths.
So, while Brazil suffers because its Trump-like president “made no effort to curb the pandemic,” neighboring Ecuador and Peru suffer despite their draconian lockdowns. Damned if you don’t and damned if you do, I guess.
He might have noticed the climatic similarities among these three countries, which share their northern latitudes along some of the coldest, grayest, and wettest parts of the Tropics. Instead, he identifies a more surprising explanation, noting that “In the Amazon region, where river traffic flows freely in and out of Brazil, the virus has spread to devastating effect, with some indigenous communities very badly affected.” Never mind that in similarly sparsely populated southern Georgia or northern Arkansas in the U.S., non-indigenous Americans suffered high per capita rates of infection and death because of cool, gray weather. Anderson probably earns a New Yorker bonus for finding indigenous victims.
And what a leap of imagination he makes in service of ideology. He implies that in the empty Amazon, it is river traffic that spreads the virus “to devastating effect,” far worse than the trains of Tokyo or the buses of Hong Kong or the fifteen flights a day between Quito and Guayaquil in Ecuador. The New Yorker editors, once known for fastidious fact-checking, apparently don’t care about this implausible explanation, as it serves the greater mission of blaming populist strongmen for the virus.
Anderson discusses some other Latin-American countries, and mentions some policies, which vary widely in severity (and whose implementations he can’t know anyway). He mentions some numbers although no per capita rates, and he draws some conclusions, which are that Bolsonaro and other populist leaders are responsible for a lot of death. He blames them for politicizing the situation, apparently unaware of the wild politicization in his own profession. Or is he? The attacks are so similar from all New Yorker writers that they must be consciously coordinated.
He says, “Thanks in large measure to Bolsonaro’s negligence, Latin America has become the world’s virus hot spot, but the misery has not been equally distributed. The region’s chronic economic and social inequalities have meant that the poor, who often live in crowded slums and depend upon precarious daily earnings to survive, have been hit hardest.”
Have they? He provides no information and doesn’t seem curious to learn any. The high infection rates are in the gray, empty north, not in the crowded south where the favelas are (although they will spread southward as the Southern Hemisphere enters winter). The most pronounced effect of the coronavirus seems to be on our ability to think.