PLAGUE JOURNAL June 2020: Summer of the Blowhards: Donald J. McNeil Jr. at the New York Times
Early summer: aerosols and asymptomatic spreaders: the New York Times invents new threats.
[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 Daily Scare
A mid-June episode of the New York Times Daily podcast revealed the familiar blend of pretend-ignorance and alarmism that the Times and the rest of the media have practiced from the beginning. The episode was titled “What We’ve Learned About the Coronavirus” (6/15/2020), an odd choice when the message is that we’ve learned nothing at all. Host Michael Barbaro interviewed a Times “science and health reporter” named Donald G. McNeil, Jr. The con becomes obvious when McNeil inadvertently reveals that he does know a few things; he just won’t admit it. One wonders about the discussions that take place before the microphones come on. The Times must have a list of house rules governing what one can and cannot say.
Or maybe it’s simply impossible to process information if you are too close to the Times. I have a friend who understands how the virus spreads but whose own precautions misalign wildly with the threat. He can answer questions accurately about length-of-exposure and viral load, but his personal actions have to do only with masks and proximity. He is an avid reader of the Times, which seems to scramble the signal. We would all be safer if we could maintain a greater distance from the Times and the other news outlets, but they keep spilling through our phones.
Host Michael Barbaro begins by saying the pandemic “feels less desperate” than it did a few weeks earlier. He wonders, “Does that mean we’ve become complacent?” McNeil says yes, and adds, disapprovingly, “Some parts of the country are not afraid yet.” Fear is the goal, always. Only a moral failing would cause someone to want to go to work or the gym or visit a friend. The discussion is a call to panic and a misrepresentation of what we know.
McNeil, like almost all reporters and talking heads, seems uninterested in actual coronavirus data. When Barbaro asks if we are doing better or worse now than when states began opening up, McNeil, naturally, says “considerably worse” but offers no evidence. Many states began opening in April, shortly after the peak for fatalities, which reached a high of 2,770 on April 21st. During the week leading up to the podcast conversation on June 15th, the highest figure was 1,109, on June 9th. (The reporting is lumpy because of weekends. Reported deaths on the day before the discussion, a Sunday, were just 346.) New positive cases were also down from their peak, despite rapid increases in testing. More testing combined with a milder warm-weather version of the virus caused the case-fatality rate to fall throughout the spring and summer. By any measure—the number of fatalities, number of cases, case-fatality rate, hospitalizations, the severity of symptoms—things were rapidly improving in mid-June.
But McNeil wasn’t about to tell us anything about that. He says, “The places that were hit hard in the first wave, which is New York and the Northeast but also places far away from that like New Orleans, Seattle, and California, they are mostly coming down. They got seriously scared, they had intense lockdowns that lasted relatively long, they are wearing masks, they are practicing social distancing, and cases are coming down in those states.”
He’s making it all up. How would he know what people in New Orleans or Seattle or Bakersfield or Sacramento did in March or what they are doing now in June? He read something in the Times or heard it on TV and repeats it as if it’s fact. Neither California nor Washington were “hit hard in the first wave.” Washington made the news because of the church choir breakout and because they had some of the earliest cases, but they never had rates anything like those along the Mid-Atlantic coast. Per capita fatality rates in Washington and California were never high, and remain at just half the national average in June. If we look at the median, to remove the distorting effect from the Northeast, California is better off than 29 states. Washington is slightly above the national median but still in the middle of the pack. (New Orleans ranked high for fatalities, but not as high as the Mid-Atlantic states). There is no evidence that lockdowns had anything to do with results in these states or elsewhere. Results match the results in neighboring states with the same weather, regardless of politics or policies or lockdowns or masks.
McNeil is not interested in the data. He cites three places with Times-approved politics (all strongly blue), and he credits virtuous behavior for their “success.” The Times’ graphics routinely mislead by showing total counts rather than per capita counts. California has almost 40 million people, causing the Times map to display a massive red circle that eats the whole state, perhaps misleading McNeil to think they were “hit hard early.” The graphics don’t make California more dangerous than Delaware, but they do make it look scarier, confusing readers and possibly the writers and editors at the Times.
But McNeil probably knows better. He wants us to think that California was hit hard early so that he can tell us their superior obedience saftened them up. Of course, what comes next is the familiar list of bad states—all in the South, most of them red—whose citizens dared to come out of the basement prematurely. He offers one red scare balloon after another.
McNeil doesn’t seem to understand the common terminology of the pandemic. Back in March, we all learned about “flattening the curve,” which meant spreading cases out to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system. Flattening the curve meant spreading cases out of a longer period, not reducing the total number of cases.
When our curve ended up being flat enough to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system (success!), people like McNeil simply redefined the term. In places that are “coming out of lockdown and opening society,” he says, “you’re not flattening the curve; you’re allowing the curve to spike up again.” Sorry, McNeil, we’re not that dumb. The curve was flatter than you wanted us to believe, and the tails of the curve become a bit wiggly when it flattens, no longer shooting higher or falling dramatically.
Barbaro plays along with the idea that lockdowns are magical tools, summarizing for us, “The cities and the states that were hardest hit at the beginning seem to have enforced the strongest lockdowns, and therefore the virus infection rates seem to be going down there. . . .” Same old playbook: governors and obedience. If they say it often enough, many people will believe it. Neither Barbaro nor McNeil cites a statistic or result of any kind.
Do they believe what they peddle, or do they believe it’s okay to tell stories if they are in service of a greater good? Perhaps it’s just impossible to resist the message coming from so many others in the media. On May 4th, just two weeks before this conversation, the Times published a story with the headline: “Models Predict Sharp Rise in Deaths as States Reopen.” Back in March, a bad model (from Imperial College London) got the Times excited about lockdowns. The Times continues to gobble up every bad model that comes along, as long as the models predict widespread mayhem and can be used to justify draconian measures.
The May 4th article contains the familiar anti-Trump messages, saying, “As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks.” We are meant to be afraid: “The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, a 70 percent increase from the current number of about 1,750.” The actual rolling 7-day average death toll on June 1st was 1,035. A week later, it was 878. A week after that, it was 783.
The article wanted us to be outraged at a coming explosion in case counts: “The projections, based on government modeling pulled together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.” (Although the article didn’t make it clear, presumably the Times meant the end of June, not May.) According to the Times, the caseload would explode eight times higher if people left their homes—even as the weather continued to warm and the days grew longer.
On June 30th, according to the New York Times graph, new cases were 48,389—a far cry from 200,000, although up from 21,962 on the date of the article, an increase 202%. Over the same time period, however, daily testing increased 250%, which means per capita case rates were declining, not increasing. Over the rest of the summer, as testing continued to increase and people across the Sunbelt and then the Midwest went indoors into air-conditioned homes, case counts would climb again, but positive case counts tell us nothing about suffering or health consequences. The average daily death rate would not reach April highs again until early December, after temperatures across much of the country had fallen again into the 30s.
McNeil and the Times and the rest of the media have spun the same fear-inducing headlines throughout, when they might have told us that we are at our safest when the sun is out, days are long, temperatures are warm, and we are outdoors. Relaxing meaningless restrictions did not increase cases or fatalities.
Ass-Covering with Aerosols
Barbaro says that back in February, McNeil had told him that the main modes of transmission were “droplets” (from coughing and sneezing) and “surfaces.” He asks, “Did one of them turn out to be a much bigger vector than the other?”
McNeil, in an answer that should disbar him from practicing journalism, said, “Those two are still vectors although surfaces may be a little less than we feared, but the really important thing we’ve learned is that there is aerosol transmission, little tiny tiny droplets, the kind that hang in the air inside a room for hours, can hold enough virus to transmit this disease.”
(More about aerosol misinformation here.)
His duplicity is two-fold: first by pretending that the risk of the virus attacking us from surfaces “may be a little less than we feared,” when the evidence from tracing studies and the personal observations of billions is that there are no transmissions from surfaces; second by immediately diverting the conversation from surfaces to aerosol transmission, which is a feint also. A double lie.
People are not getting infected by walking into an empty room that someone sneezed in three days ago, or even three hours ago. People are not getting sick from a trip to the grocery store. McNeil’s attempt to scare and confuse is blatant, and Barbaro, who could have read up on the coronavirus himself at any time over the last four months, does not correct him. They are working toward the same goal, which is spreading fear, gaining clicks, getting paid, removing Trump.
After McNeil incorrectly states that we have transmissions from aerosols (“little tiny tiny droplets”) hanging in the air “for hours,” he confuses things further by mentioning the “droplets” we emit while talking, implying that droplets and aerosols are the same things. This conflation quickly became endemic in the press. McNeil implies that we only recently learned about this vexing aerosol problem, which alerted us to the dangers of being indoors. Perhaps he assumes people will associate “aerosol” with moving air, and he says, “So we are learning that transmission, particularly in indoor spaces where there is no wind, is probably a major spreader of this.” The statement is nonsensical (how can transmission be a spreader?), but what does he mean by “probably”? If he’s saying that the virus spreads indoors, of course it does. It always has. He keeps things vague, confusing, and scary. We just don’t know.
By pretending we only recently discovered the dangers of being indoors, McNeil and his corona crew at the Times relieved themselves of having to admit they were wrong to push everyone indoors for the last four months. We have known about the lack of outdoor transmission at least since April, even as governmental policies and recommendations throughout included slogans such as “stay-at-home,” “safer indoors,” “lockdown,” and “shelter in place.” The massive banner hanging above the entrance to the closed REI near me still says, “We’ll all get back outside soon.”
McNeil’s mention of aerosols was a diversion. A First10EM article cites a study about the flu from 2019, pre-coronavirus, which states, “Although airborne transmission is possible, large droplet or contact transmission is probably responsible for the vast majority of disease transmission.” Of course, anything is possible. We could get the flu from lightning or mosquitos or hang-gliding, but we probably don’t, and we shouldn’t create policies protecting against threats that are remote or non-existent. Other recent flu-related respiratory diseases such as SARs and MERs are also spread by droplets, not aerosols. There was no recent discovery of aerosol transmission. There was a need for the press and their hand-picked experts to invent new threats and find new explanations to justify their changing safety story.
Despite McNeil’s recent conversion, articles have been discounting the threat from aerosol transmission all along. From Medical News Today in early May: “Currently, organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) do not believe that the novel coronavirus is airborne.” (Aerosols and airborne mean the same thing.)
From the CDC in mid-April:
The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person.
Between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet)
Through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks
If airborne transmissions were occurring, remaining in the air and potent indefinitely, we would have a very different world. It seems unlikely that McNeil wouldn’t know the most basic empirical information about the coronavirus, but there it is. And he’s not finished.
Barbaro asks about asymptomatic transmission. McNeil begins with the widely known estimate that perhaps a third of those testing positive are asymptomatic. (The number may be considerably higher in many places.) Barbaro feigns surprise, saying, “Wow.” McNeil says, “And that changes a lot about how we handle this disease.” He decides that if we want to open businesses, we’ll have to test everyone daily because “one-third of your people are not going to be sick, but they’re still spreading the disease.” He says this just a week after the WHO spokesperson said that asymptomatic transmissions are rare, but neither McNeil nor Barbaro mentions that.
We know there can be pre-symptomatic transmissions because the coronavirus has a latent period that is often shorter than its incubation period, meaning people can become infectious before they become sick. Yet by April 2nd, a few months in, a WHO report stated, “There are few reports of laboratory-confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission. This does not exclude the possibility that it may occur. Asymptomatic cases have been reported as part of contact tracing efforts in some countries.”
So, there were rumors about asymptomatic carriers, just no confirmation. It would be impossible to prove that no one can get sick from an asymptomatic carrier, as many people won’t know how they caught the virus. And asymptomatic isn’t clear-cut: a person with a mild cough might attribute it to a simple cold, unaware he caught the virus. But low-probability events can be ruled out as major threats until compelling new evidence emerges. It’s possible that Sasquatch exists, and that he’s hungry, but we should watch for bears instead. What happens in a lab is irrelevant if people aren’t getting sick in the real world.
From their April statement to their June comment, the WHO’s position has been consistent: asymptomatic transmissions are “very rare.” Although Vox and many other mainstream publications objected, preferring a more alarmist version, no one can point to known asymptomatic transmissions. The Vox article rejecting the WHO statement was pure politics, a lengthy complaint, full of distractions, desperately arguing for masks (pointlessly, as masks were already widely required and worn indoors, and increasingly outdoors).
Here, as with everything corona, a simple look at the world around us can be informative. If we had widespread asymptomatic transmissions, we would appear to have spontaneous eruptions, as if by natural conception. If you search coronavirus by country, you’ll see that virtually every country identifies a first known case. In every country that I’ve seen so far, it is someone returning from abroad, often China or Italy. If asymptomatic people were infectious, many countries would apparently experience an autogenic index case. Someone got sick, but not from anyone else. The first fever would appear in someone who hadn’t traveled farther than his neighborhood bar, not in someone returning from Italy or Spain or Wuhan.
If asymptomatic spreading were common, many of the extensive and detailed tracing studies would lack a Patient Zero. Suddenly everyone at a restaurant or a birthday party would appear to have gotten sick at the same time. There would be no way to distinguish the carrier from the newly infected. In fact, we usually do know who the superspreaders are because they either have symptoms or develop them within a day or so of the superspreader event, although they may be mild. Even where the carrier is pre-symptomatic, she will usually get tested after developing symptoms, which allows the tracing and testing of others from the event. [Edit January 2022: We’ve long since ceased the kind of tracing done in early spreader cases. For quite a while now, the media and much of our citizenry just blame the maskless and unvaccinated for any transmission.]
McNeil conflates pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic because asymptomatic transmission is so much scarier, allowing—even obligating—him to advocate more safety, including millions of tests. His testing proposal is absurd, and is based on an absurd premise. His asymptomatic hypothesis has a parallel in the idea that we catch the virus from surfaces, which, if true, would mean we would have to scrub the entire grocery store constantly rather than just a few shiny things near the front for show. His asymptomatic hypothesis leads him to call for testing every single worker, every day, with “rapid results,” at a cost of 1.5 billion dollars a week—a prospect he views as a good deal.
Why Trust Legitimate Observations?
Amateurs on Twitter added to the call for performative safety over sense. A former administrator of Medicaid and Medicare for the Obama Administration, Andy Slavitt, in response to the WHO comments that “transmission from asymptomatic cases is rare,” wrote, “I believe this was an irresponsible statement even though it was based on legitimate observations.” Why trust legitimate observations when we have CNN and the Times and Andy Slavitt to tell us what to do?
McNeil cautions that antibody tests won’t tell us anything. He’s committed to the position that everything is dangerous. We must be fearful, and only strict obedience to extreme government restrictions will provide a way out, even then not for years. On the other hand, he “isn’t worried” about the protests, as long as they take place outdoors (now that we have learned about aerosols).
Here’s where the conversation takes a turn that makes it clear he does not believe most of what he has just said. Aside from a few modest revisions, McNeil’s message has been the same message the Times has been trumpeting since March. He pretends surfaces are dangerous, although they are not. He pretends that aerosols pose great risk, although they do not. He pretends that asymptomatic carriers spread the virus, although they do not. He pretends we only recently learned about the benefits of being outdoors, although we’ve known it all along. He was forced to abandon his stay-indoors position only when we saw tens of thousands of protesters and rioters across the country breaking all of his rules and surviving.
Yet when Barbaro asks McNeil what his own precautions are, McNeil says he works from home, wears a mask when he’s indoors with strangers (“as in the grocery store or pharmacy”), and will not return to work where he would have to be indoors with co-workers for extended periods. He advocates removing windows from buses and subways, and talks about “re-thinking” public workspaces to be smart about ventilation and airflow. In other words, he understands perfectly well how the virus spreads and what the risks are. In his discursive and confident answer, he talks only about the risks of being indoors with non-intimates (not that intimates can’t be dangerous, but we’ll ignore that).
Not once does he mention his routines and precautions for scrubbing surfaces, sanitizing, hand-washing, avoiding indoor spaces alone, or having himself and people close to him tested constantly. If he believed his words, he would fear fomites, avoid indoor spaces that someone may have inhabited within the last few hours or days, and would have himself and people near him constantly tested to make sure no one is an asymptomatic carrier. It turns out he just likes to scare people. We’ve been learning a great deal, but we know nothing at all. Things are getting worse. Stay tuned. We’ll let you know. It could be years.
The Times employs more than 4,000 people to deliver a constant stream of dogma and misinformation. Google algorithms favor the Times. I’d never heard of McNeil, so I searched him. I wasn’t surprised to see he has been peddling fear throughout. I found his name under a typical Timesian headline, from May 11th: “As States Rush to Reopen, Scientists Fear a Coronavirus Comeback.” Every news outlet ran this headline a thousand times, with the vague and unnamed experts, the fear, the lack of details. It might have been written by a corona-bot. The subtitle read, “Officials are under pressure to restart the economy, but many states are moving too quickly, researchers say. The costs may be measured in lost lives.”
For fun, I pasted the headline into a Google search, and I got six pages of the same story from all kinds of outlets, familiar and unfamiliar, before seeing anything other than the rigid orthodoxy—although one of the top results altered the words in the title a bit, to “‘I Think It’s Going To End Badly’: Health Experts Decry States’ Rush To Reopen, Saying It’s Based on Politics, Not Science.”
McNeil’s article from May 11th is vague and disjointed. The researchers mentioned in the subtitle do not appear in the article. Perhaps he made them up. He offers the standard line about states easing restrictions:
Most have not met even minimal criteria for doing so safely, and some are reopening even as coronavirus cases rise, inviting disaster. The much-feared ‘second wave’ of infection may not wait until fall, many scientists say, and instead may become a storm of wavelets breaking unpredictably across the country.
He doesn’t say what these “minimal criteria” are or why we should have faith in them, and he doesn’t name the scientists. He continues, “The re-openings will proceed nonetheless. The question now, scientists say, is whether the nation can minimize the damage by intelligently adopting new tactics.” The word “scientists” contains a link, so I clicked, only to land on another Times article called “Prominent Scientists Denounce End to Coronavirus Grant.” The article has nothing to do with minimizing coronavirus damage. It is about a dispute over a federal research grant. Perhaps the Times has a generator that assigns links to articles using keywords, in this case, “scientists.” Given the lack of information in McNeil’s article and the non-sequitur of the link, it seems the Times and other publications understand that few people read beyond the headlines and that almost nobody clicks the links. The links are there to provide the illusion of credibility and expertise. Researchers say. Lost lives. Danger. Science.
McNeil published this article the day I returned from camping in the desert and two days after I heard Dr. Drew’s comment about temperature. Even my friends who had been practicing extreme safety just a week earlier suddenly realized it was time to get outside and camp and bike and play guitars around a fire. We didn’t discuss it, but we knew that the stories were wrong and that the people in Georgia would survive a trip the barber. Our bodies and our eyes told us so.