While the title of this piece may seem gloomy, even defeatist, it is not as dark as the title of a recent essay by Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic.
In his “The Virus Will Win,” Mounk wonders how a country “as rich, powerful, and scientifically advanced as the United States failed quite so badly at coping with a public-health emergency that experts had predicted for many years.”
However, as Mounk proceeds to discuss who and what helped to “get us into this mess,” the tone softens as he lists several reasons for the possibility that the virus may win.
Some of Mounk’s rationale for “If the virus wins”:
• …it is because the World Health Organization downplayed the threat for far too long.
• …it is because Donald Trump was more interested in hushing up bad news that might hurt the economy than in saving American lives.
• …it is because the White House did not even attempt to put a test-and-trace regime into place at the federal level.
• …it may also be because so many states moved to reopen before getting the pace of infections under control.
• …it may also be because the right-wing-media echo chamber is starting to downplay the risk that a second wave poses to Americans.
Mounk also addresses the recent mass demonstrations which “as righteous as they are…could well result in mass infections” and he does not exempt the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from criticism.
Mounk submits that we “were on the brink of doing something incredible”: Containing the pandemic and “averting millions of deaths [which] would constitute one of the greatest achievements in human history.”
For this, the credit “would have gone to the many ordinary citizens who lived up to their moral responsibility in an extraordinary moment,” to scientists, to “doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners, and clerical staff,” to those “suddenly declared ‘essential,’ workers who have long enjoyed little respect and low wages helped to keep society afloat.”
Mounk concludes:
Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story. But because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.
Pandemics reveal the true state of a society. Ours has come up badly wanting.
I believe that even “if the virus wins” is too fatalistic. Therefore the question mark.
However, it does not help when in my neck of the woods, Governor Abbott continues to sing from the same hymnbook the president and vice president are singing from.
After the number of people infected with Covid-19 across Texas’ hospitals hit a new high Wednesday – surging about 11% in a single day -, after seeing a record number of hospitalizations in Texas for five days in a row and after a sharp increase from a month earlier, Abbott is telling Texans not to worry.
Don’t worry because Texas still has plenty of hospital beds to accommodate the sick and the dying.
Don’t worry because we will soon learn to coexist with COVID-19 for a short period of time.
Don’t worry because the rising numbers could be attributed to the Memorial Day celebrations, to “bar settings,” to “some type of gathering,” to testing in jails, prisons and nursing homes, to the batching and averaging out of numbers…
Don’t worry because, as the president and vice president say, it is all due to increased testing — it is a good thing.
We’ll find ways to make the statistics lie look good.
Foremost, we must continue the process of opening up our state and our country, damn the China virus.
With an approach like this, we may come dangerously close to bearing out Mounk’s speculation.
