PLAGUE JOURNAL July 2020: Throwaway Stories: The New Yorker Fights the Coronavirus with Rage & Lobsters
During a slow news period, the New Yorker sees nothing but Trump.
[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.]
Boilerplate Tirade from the New Yorker
By the middle of June, the press was thrilled to see increasing cases in the Sunbelt, and they seemed disappointed that more people weren’t dying. Cases were surging and spiking, because of Republicans. That was their story. Amy Davidson Sorkin provided a gloss of the dominant view in a June 28th New Yorker article called “The Tragedy of the New Coronavirus Spikes.” Things were grim (always grim or grisly), and politicians were to blame. Like every article in the New Yorker, Sorkin’s was about Trump. She rued the recent increase in positive cases, which she referred to as “horrific levels, particularly in Texas, Florida, California, and Arizona.”
It was the familiar charge of people who don’t grasp numbers (or want to mislead): Florida, Texas, and California are the three most populous states. They all had vastly lower per capita rates than New York and its surrounding states. Testing had increased dramatically since spring, and the sensitivity of the testing was extremely high, so it was logical that positive test results in our largest populations would grow. Yet the severity of cases had declined significantly in warm weather. Half or more of all cases were asymptomatic in many places. Fatality rates remained low even in these states that were allegedly surging and spiking.
Summer Heat & the Effects of Air-Conditioning on Viral Spread
June temperatures were in the 90s in Texas and Florida in much of California. The average June daily high in Dallas and Los Angeles was 92. In Miami, it was 90. Arizona has a smaller population than these other Sunbelt states but much higher temperatures. Phoenix temperatures averaged a daily June high of 107. Arizona shot past the other hot states in the early summer for positive cases—although remained far below the Mid-Atlantic states in terms of fatality rates.
People had gone indoors, out of the sun and into dry air-conditioned homes, restaurants, and bars—the only places where masks are not required, rendering mask laws and compliance to them largely irrelevant. Trump had nothing to do with it; nor did governors. Southern governors allowed bars to open, but so did governors in most other states. People were indoors, passing around light warm-weather doses that caused little illness in young and healthy populations, nothing like the cold-weather versions in gray regions in the winter.
Neither Sorkin nor anyone else at the New Yorker saw nature, only bad people, the same bad people they always see. Sorkin seems contemptuous of people outside of the Eastern Seaboard, writing, “The pandemic’s early course seems to have lured some Republican politicians into complacency, as if a MAGA cap could be a protective talisman, or as if, when it comes to covid-19, bad things could happen only to subway-riding city dwellers.”
The ideology was predictable, and unsupported by information: “Some even acted as if the virus’s depredations could be tolerated as long as they fell most heavily on low-income, elderly, or marginalized people.” She ignores that the virus hits well-off people in comfortable air-conditioned homes staying out of the elements, people like Chris Cuomo and Tom Hanks and the guy who wrote “Stacy’s Mom.” She provides no information to support her assertions, trusting that we will accept them as true because we’ve heard them so often.
It is true that older people are disproportionately hit, as they are in a typical flu season (although the 1918 flu hit young people), but she provides no evidence of Republican politicians acting callously towards their older citizens. For that, we have to look to New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and a handful of other blue states in the East and Midwest that enacted unconscionable policies for nursing homes and their vulnerable populations.
The spreading occurring in the summer heat had disproportionally shifted towards young people, who socialized with friends at home or passed their hours in noisy air-conditioned bars and restaurants, among the only public places in America that did not require masks. Although older people could theoretically spend their nights shouting and being shouted at in nightclubs in Austin or Mesa, they were unlikely to do so in large numbers. Young people need to get out, and the beaches, pools, ballparks, even state parks and national parks—all the places where spreading would not occur—remain closed or severely restricted in most places.
Everywhere we look, we find political attacks masquerading as analysis or science. Davidson hates Trump, which is good for her career at the New Yorker but clouds her sight. “There is something frighteningly sad about the fact that many Republican leaders may stop seeing the pandemic through the lens of Trumpism only when the virus starts hitting more of their constituents.” (The breathless frighteningly sad sounds more like Vox or the Huffington Post than like the old New Yorker.)
Even in the summer, she believes that the virus is still about to come for the irresponsible Republicans. It’s only a matter of time. The headlines and stories have been saying so since the beginning: you’ve been lucky so far, but it’s coming. I imagine they will be saying it years from now. Sorkin knows only what she reads and hears but cannot see what is in front of her. Phoenix under 120-degree sunny skies is not the same as New York under 35-degree gray skies. People would not die in the same numbers. The only thing they have in common is that people go indoors.
Why does Sorkin decide leaders who believe in fewer restrictions than she does are seeing the pandemic through the “lens of Trumpism”? Where is her “science” to back this up? Until irrational fear spread in March, the World Health Organization recommended against lockdowns as a pandemic response. Perhaps Sorkin sees the world only through a lens of anti-Trumpism, and perhaps Trump and Trumpism have nothing to do with the spread of the virus. Her version of anti-Trumpism closes businesses, causes severe economic distress, leads to despair and violence. Regardless of the party of the political leaders, the warm-weather version of the virus is not as deadly as the cool-weather version, and choking off civic and economic activity won’t save lives.
Lobsters: a Throwaway
Everyone wrote the same story he or she would have written without the pandemic, simply inserting our new virus into their narrative and adding a few jabs at Trump. Louis Menand, a longtime New Yorker writer, wrote a throwaway July 4th article called, “This Fourth of July, Consider Trump’s Lobster Fib.” It wasn’t really about lobsters, or anything at all. It was just filling space. “No one will die because of Trump’s lobster tweet. But the stuff he makes up about the coronavirus is killing people.” That’s the stuff. There was no thought, no research, just some doddering and slack prose that sounded a lot like Ta-Nehisi Coates:
What is appalling is that this was predictable. A man who is incapable of not making things up about the crowd size at his Inauguration is not going to start suddenly caring about the science when he is confronted with a disease that he knows nothing about.
What is appalling? This, apparently. What is this? And why are we following a sentence about someone who is incapable of not doing something, someone who is not going to start doing something about something he knows nothing about? The New Yorker is very negative these days.
The inauguration was more than three years ago. (And why is it capitalized here?) Menand’s lazy references were no more informative than Spike Lee’s regular recitation of “on both sides” to condemn Trump years after the Charlottesville events, more hallelujah than illumination.