Jonas Gustavsson/Sipa USA via AP Images
A near-empty downtown street in New York City
First Response
This space has been focusing lately on the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis: the various bailout programs, the plight of essential workers, how people will survive amid a second depression. The backdrop to all of it, of course, is a churning machine of mass death. And we should use some occasions to put it in the foreground.
It’s human nature to deflect, to avoid talk of death, to focus on “reopening the country” and peaks on a curve, and maybe some comic relief from the president on swallowing disinfectants whole. But we crossed a milestone yesterday, or at least a “milestone,” for reasons I’ll explain shortly. We hit 50,000 officially recorded deaths from coronavirus in the United States.
The number-trackers have tried to dial this back under 50,000, by deciding not to count 5,100 people in New York City believed to have died from coronavirus but who went without testing. The city includes them in their own count. This is why it’s imperative to use the phrase “officially recorded.” So many deaths aren’t being included in counts because the individual died at home without being tested. The excess mortality over a normal year appears to be fairly uniformly twice as high as the official death toll from COVID-19. Some of that could be from other ailments exacerbated by a fear of going to the hospital under these conditions, or a lack of medical capacity. But based on those numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were approaching 100,000 deaths right now.
These are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, neighbors and friends. We know coronavirus has touched the worlds of politics and sports and movies and music. We know it’s ravaged communities like nursing homes and prisons, and hit populations like health care personnel and transit workers and frontline employees in warehousing and retail. They fill up obituary columns, with names and faces and anecdotes about lives led. They can’t be blocked out as we think about the other side of the curve, devise ways to get to sunnier times ahead. At least 50,000 people are dead, a cataclysmic event in American history.
Read all our Unsanitized reports
I should add that there’s no definitive indication that we’re on the downward slope of this catastrophe. The model latched onto by the White House and the media about 60,000 total deaths was obviously faulty and outdated, even though it’s inexplicably still being used. We have bounced around at around 2,000 deaths per day for a week or so, and the aggregate tells you nothing about where the individual states are in their curves. Some, like New York, have peaked. Others, like Ohio and Florida and Massachusetts and Arizona, plainly have not. Still others, like New Jersey and Texas, are somewhere in between. The long plateau reflects a conglomeration of all these different timelines, and it means that there will be at least as many, if not more, deaths on the downward slope as there were on the upward slope.
After being scared off by the initial “two million deaths if you do nothing” evaluation, the White House started touting a range of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, then abandoned that for the 60,000 estimate once that was produced. The earlier range looks far more likely. And of course that’s without any new spike from premature ends to social distancing measures or second wave in the fall, both of which seem pretty likely. Testing shows a small, three-day-long uptick after nearly a month of stagnation. It’s still nowhere near the level needed for comprehensive testing and tracing.
We know perilously little about this disease: why it causes strokes in otherwise healthy young people, why the immune response can become so overwhelming that it kills people, whether you can catch it more than once. Science will eventually provide us answers, treatments, and vaccines. Until then we cannot forget the reason why we’re staying inside, the reason why we’re pulling bandanas out of our closets, the reason why we just can’t go to our favorite pad thai place with our friends.
I feel guilty of this forgetting myself. If you have stories about people you knew that succumbed to this virus, email me. At least 50,000 are dead, probably many more. We can be strong and resilient without blocking them out of our memory.
Check This Out
I was on KALW’s Your Call with Rose Aguilar, discussing the Paycheck Protection Program. Listen here.
I was on Democracy Now yesterday talking about the coronavirus response bill, here’s that video.
The Prospect’s coronavirus coverage is at prospect.org/coronavirus.
Small Town America Struggles
Viewed along the lines of overall cases, West Virginia is one of the more untroubled states in this crisis. Yet hearing Democratic Senator Joe Manchin talk about the direct effects on his state on a press call on Thursday brought home the all-encompassing nature of this crisis. The problems on the backroads of America were all in place before the crisis hit; they just happen to be more prominent now.
According to Manchin, several rural hospitals have closed this year in West Virginia. The hundred year-old Williamson Memorial just shuttered Tuesday; it was the only hospital serving Mingo County, a historic coal mining community. The drop in elective surgeries and traffic is destroying already cash-strapped facilities. Manchin also highlighted the lack of broadband. “Telehealth is wonderful if you have Internet service, and if you’re in rural America, you don’t,” he said. Doctors are reimbursed for telehealth but not audio calls that frequently are the only option in rural areas. Closed school systems are drop points for school breakfasts and lunches for poor residents, but the bifurcated food supply has strained those networks. As much as a quarter of all pork processing facilities are shut, and hog farmers and cattle ranchers cannot afford to wait with their animals. “This ends up driving the prices down even further,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), who participated in the call from the back of his tractor. “If that continues, you’ll see a lot of broke cattle operators and small and medium-sized feeders.”
Some Senate initiatives for these distinct problems include urging protection of food supply workers, making county and rural hospitals eligible for the small business program, and improving measurement of rural broadband so gaps can be filled. I don’t have a lot of hope for any of this. Consolidation and simple neglect took a toll on rural America for a long time. There’s no slack in the system to rebound from a crisis of this magnitude. And there’s little will to renew the New Deal promises for universal service, with rural broadband as an analogue to rural electrification. Heck, the imminent destruction of the postal service would harm rural areas most of all.
In a crisis, whatever was already damaged the most will bear the brunt of the pain. That’s been true in communities of color, and even without the caseload, it’ll be true in places America has left behind.
Today I Learned
- Trump wants to condition a postal service bailout on charging more to ship Amazon packages, something that will kill the postal service and not really affect Amazon. (Washington Post)
- The medical supply chain looks more and more like a political patronage system. (NBC News)
- The daily White House coronavirus briefings are going away, as they have finally been seen as a liability. (Axios)
- Immunity passports have no guarantee of working, because we haven’t proven the nature and extent of immunity. (Financial Times)
- Businesses want a “liability shield” to reopen, inoculating them from lawsuits from those who catch coronavirus in their shops. (Washington Post)
- CBO sees a $3.7 trillion deficit this year and a 40 percent drop in GDP this quarter. (Reuters)
- Meanwhile, the market for insuring shipments is collapsing, which threatens global trade. (Wall Street Journal)
