PLAGUE JOURNAL June 2020: Update: Flattening the Curve Kills People; Crowds Save Lives
Changing the rules in June. NYT re-defines the curve. A TV doctor encourages crowds.
[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.]
Flat Is Bad
On June 17th, two days after Donald G. McNeil’s scare-mongering conversation on the NYT “Daily” podcast, the Times “Wednesday Briefing” email included a chart comparing daily deaths in the U.S. to those from a “contiguous 16-country region of Western Europe with a nearly identical population.” We have no idea if it is, in fact, a nearly identical population because the Times is routinely careless or deceptive with numbers, but we’ll go with it. The chart looked familiar. There were two lines, each forming a mound-shaped curve. Europe’s curve went up much faster and higher, peaking at more than 3,000 deaths a day in early April before falling steeply all the way to zero by late May or early June, with a slight rise and fall after that.
The U.S. curve, by contrast, shows a much more gradual rise that doesn’t go nearly as high, topping out a bit above 2,000 in late April before beginning an extended gradual decline. By the end of the graph in mid-June, the U.S. line is declining but, at about 700 U.S. deaths per day, is still considerably higher than the European line. Overall, the number of deaths looked roughly the same in the U.S. and the European countries.
Suddenly I remembered where I had seen the chart before: this was the real-life counterpart to all the instructional charts from March showing us what “flattening the curve” would look like, always accompanied by articles telling us why it was so important. The Times showed one of these charts and explained the idea laboriously in an article from March 27th called “Flattening the Coronavirus Curve.” The article told us we needed to slow new infections and spread them over a longer timeframe to avoid exceeding hospital capacity. The Times was bullish on flattening the curve. It was the phrase of the month. They warned against letting the pandemic run wild: “Some commentators have argued for getting the outbreak over with quickly. That is a recipe for panic, unnecessary suffering and death. Slowing and spreading out the tidal wave of cases will save lives. Flattening the curve keeps society going.”
With the new June chart, we finally had our report card: we had flattened the curve. We did it! The European line was the scary one, the recipe for panic and death, spiking fast and falling hard. The U.S. line rose slower, never got as high, and was now declining gradually. Their curve went up like a rocket, while ours rose and fell gradually. We flattened the curve! Stupid Europe had not flattened the curve.
Was the New York Times pleased with our result? Were they showing this colorful chart to celebrate our success and thank us for our performance and sacrifice?
Reader, they were not: “Europe has succeeded at crushing the virus, and the U.S. has not.” They credited Europe’s superior decisiveness and clarity, saying, “European countries have used a combination of lockdowns, public health guidance, tests and contact tracing to beat back the virus.” They didn’t explain how Europe’s superior lockdowns sharpened their curve, causing so many daily deaths by early April, after telling us in March that locking down would flatten the curve.
The Times simply re-defined the goal. In March, they said, “Slowing and spreading out the tidal wave of cases will save lives.” In June, after their chart showed that the U.S. had slowed and spread out the tidal wave, they told us our flat curve was killing people.
All Curves Are Local
The curves tell us nothing about any given region anyway. There is no single “U.S.” result. New York and New Jersey look like Europe, because they had European weather from March until June. The spreading was rampant in grey 35-degree weather on both sides of the Atlantic. The overall U.S. number is a blend of very high rates in a handful of states on the East Coast and vastly lower rates in the West, which has arid continental weather and hot deserts.
In Northern Europe and the mid-Atlantic U.S., the virus rampaged through vulnerable populations. The faster it spread, the faster it ran out of nearby targets. When our hard-hit areas along the east coast fell to nearly zero, the relatively as-yet-untouched regions of the Sunbelt saw rising temperates, which sent people indoors into stale, dry air-conditioned air. These populations were susceptible because the virus hadn’t spread during the winter and spring, when the South had been warm and sunny. America’s curve is a blend of the sharp-curve East and the flat-curve West and includes tropical Hawaii, sub-tropical Florida, and arctic Alaska. We have countless local curves.
Yet even in New York, the hospitals were never over-run. We flattened the curve even in even the most aggressive environment. More accurately, the curve flattened itself. We had nothing to do with it. The coronavirus was far less lethal than our journalists would have us believe (although a handful of blue-state governors ran up the body count with their terrible nursing-home policies). But the stories needed eyeballs and clicks, so they told us we were killing people while Europe had crushed the virus. Because of Trump.
Pandemics and Nature
The world has experienced pandemics since the first hunter-gatherers settled down and began farming twelve thousand years ago. They are natural occurrences with predictable trajectories, which is why we saw all those curves in the media back in March. Diseases that burn fast and hot, with high fatality rates and quick deaths, like MERS and SARs and the virus in Contagion, spread fast and burn out quickly. More familiar illnesses like the common cold or flu spread slowly and stick around longer. The coronavirus curve looks a lot like the normal flu curve. The temperate, oceanic climate of Europe caused runaway infections in February, March, and April. Few Europeans have air-conditioning. Because they open windows in the summer, they didn’t experience the broad if less lethal summer spreading that we saw across the Sunbelt in May and June and the Midwest in June and July.
Many hospitals are furloughing medical staff because they are empty. The press spread the word about flattening the curve until they needed new stories about danger and Trump and Republican governors. They would define anything as bad to keep the fear and rage high.
The Times “Wednesday Briefing” email continued to hector, quoting a political scientist named Jonathan Bernstein, who said about the U.S. approach, “Government efforts to inform the public about the pandemic have been a colossal failure, which means that most people are hearing mixed and muffled messages about what to do.”
He is correct but fails to implicate the press. Bernstein continues, “It’s not surprising that a lot of folks are believing misinformation as a result, and others are just throwing up their hands.” Of course it is not surprising: it is the very goal of the Times and the rest of the media.
The two sets of curves from the Times just three months apart include a final revealing detail. In the first set, from March, the scary theoretical sharp curve was red, and the desired flat curve was blue. In the second chart, after they decided that the flat curves kill people, the scary flat curve is red and the desired sharp curve is blue. But of course: Trump and the red states cause all the problems, then and now. The curves could have been any color, but the Times likes blue and red to distinguish good from evil. Very clever, NYT.
MSNBC’s TV Doctor Vin Gupta Endorses Large Gatherings
The TV networks looked to other pretend experts and scientists hoping to make a name for themselves. An alarmed-looking expert named Vin Gupta began appearing on the major talk networks early. A YouTube search turns up an MSNBC clip from March 23rd, just a week into the lockdowns. The talking head, Nicole Wallace, begins predictably with an advertisement for science and expertise, saying, “There is no discrepancy among medical and science professionals. The front page story in the New York Times had, I think, over a dozen doctors and scientists interviewed with a near-universal call for more severe or more restrictive social distancing or that it go on longer. It would represent a real disregard for science if we did anything other than that, wouldn’t it?” Gupta responds affirmatively: “I think you nailed it, Nicole.” Holy cow—we wouldn’t want a real disregard for science.
An MSNBC talker citing New York Times doctors and scientists is like Tom Cruise citing experts from the Church of Scientology. We get no information, and we can’t trust the sources. Gupta seems to know nothing, but he is getting airtime, which must be intoxicating.
He appeared repeatedly throughout the winter and spring, always alarmed and badly shot, with the obligatory Apple earbuds hanging out of his ears, on the usual shows on the usual networks. His message was always the same: lock in, shut down, suit up, await further instruction. He adopted every position held by the networks giving him airtime. He urged “universal mandated masking” and lockdowns. Strictness was the highest virtue. He didn’t explain why we suddenly needed to do all these things that had never been done before. We were supposed to take it on faith.
Hydroxychloroquine Scare-Mongering
In mid-May, Gupta joined the criticisms of hydroxychloroquine after Trump announced he was taking it prophylactically. “It’s definitely not totally safe,” Gupta said, without citing a single case of injury or harm. He says it has a “litany of side effects,” although doctors have prescribed it for decades with virtually no side effects. As a doctor himself, he must have known it’s among the world’s safest drugs, so safe that even pregnant women can take it. He’s angry that prescriptions increased, although prescriptions come from doctors, not from Trump. He cites a French study indicating that people on the drug suffered from cardiac arrhythmia, which is likely a reference to the discredited study published and quickly retracted by the medical journal the Lancet. He then ridicules Trump for his obesity and love of hamburgers and criticizes the president’s doctor, saying, “He should be putting his integrity and his medical license above whatever personal agenda he and the president may have.” Later, Gupta says, “No doctor of any repute would prescribe hydroxochloriquine for prophylactic or treatment of COVID-19. Case closed.” Not true, of course, as thousands of knowledgeable and experienced doctors were experimenting with this time-tested and safe drug to fight the coronavirus, but Gupta was drunk on his fifteen minutes of TV fame and wanted to please his celebrity handlers.
A week later, on May 25th, on Laurence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC, Gupta was performing his normal fear-mongering and righteous anger, saying, “Universal masking protects those who can’t escape to the Hamptons or who can’t go in to telework. It’s going to really impact our front-line workers, our grocery-store clerks, our nurses, our respiratory therapists, those who are by the way predominantly women, who are predominately people of color, that’s who it’s going to protect.” Whether he really thinks front-line workers” are primarily women or “people of color,” who can say? A majority of nurses are white (sources range from 62% to 74%). It doesn’t matter. Gupta knows no one will challenge him for his peacocking.
Racism Cures the Coronavirus
The following day, May 26th, the protests began, and the looting and the riots. By June 6th, apparently, safety required an entirely different approach. The ‘science’ had changed. In a discussion with Brian Williams on MSNBC, Williams set things up by applauding the “fierce urgency” of the protesters, who braved variable weather and the coronavirus.
Perhaps Williams and Gupta knew they simply couldn’t ignore the thing in front of us all, as they had been silent for nearly two weeks of riots and protests after telling us for months that any gathering of any size would kill us all. Gupta rushed his answer and stumbled a few times, as if he’d just practiced in front of a mirror:
You’re touching on an important question and something that people have picked up on. How can someone in my case, for example, advocate a strict lockdown, of everybody, and the economic catastrophe that resulted, and then also say it’s okay to go protest. Well, here’s the thing, Brian: we, as doctors, as nurses, as respiratory therapists, what we value more than anything else is prioritizing risks by how deadly they are. And that’s why all of us are saying it’s okay to protest. Because the social inequities propagated by elements in our law-enforcement institutions, by our healthcare system writ large, are, simply put, deadlier to the most vulnerable in America than the coronavirus. The statistics bear that out. Poverty alone causes at least 300,000 deaths a year.
So he’s a joke, and a menace. If vague “inequities” are deadlier than the coronavirus, why had he been demanding we close small businesses for the last three months? (Target and Wal-Mart were safe, but restaurants and barbershops had to go.) Wasn’t he contributing to the 300,000 poverty deaths by calling for draconian and unscientific lockdowns—and by now supporting the “protests,” which included widespread property damage and the burning and looting of many small businesses? How were these mobs, whether peaceful or not, helping to relieve poverty and save hundreds of thousands of lives? No word about that. If poverty was “deadlier” than the virus, why had he talked only of coronavirus, of masks and lockdowns and self-isolation, for the last three months? Perhaps he doesn’t care about poverty or safety, but only about airtime and self-promotion. When he made his inane statement, he looked like a hostage in a terrorist video reciting a script given to him by captors.
If nothing else had exposed the fear-mongering and misinformation from the press, this should do it. I found the clip on YouTube the day after it aired on MSNBC—but I never found it again. MSNBC must have understood that this had gone too far, destroying any credibility remaining for Gupta, Brian Williams, and MSNBC. Either Google or MSNBC must have pulled it almost immediately.
Yet—undeterred! Twelve days later, a Gupta clip appeared from an 11th Hour episode with Brian Williams, with the YouTube title, “Gupta: Trump Rally Like Playing Russian Roulette As COVID-19 Spikes In OK.” Blaming Trump is all that matters. Science has nothing to do with it. Burning cars and looting stores is safe, even necessary, while a political rally for someone you dislike is deadly.