The Political Nature of Responding to COVID in the U.S.

This continues discussion begun in "The Rate of Covid-19 Spread in the U.S.: Optimism in Reading and Interpreting Graphs".

A friend pointed out that I had posted this COVID graphing website (Flip the Script) earlier, and at that time, the U.S. was in the middle of most countries battling COVID. Back then, many news outlets compared numbers without adjusting for different population sizes, which led to wide-spread anxiety. The friend felt relief when she'd seen the graphs adjusting for different populations. It's possible the news outlets didn't know any better.

However, countries (mostly smaller in size and population) have done better than the U.S. at limiting the spread. I discussed this earlier, albeit indirectly. How this should be resolved is a present debate in the U.S.

According to one poll (see NPR website on April 23 based on a poll taken between April 15-20), some states are opening about when (or before) a majority of agree when the U.S. should open. I have organized NPR's data which was strangely out of order, probably confusing most readers trying to make sense of the data:

• 3% want it open now, meaning April 15-20 [3% of the population*]

• 14% can wait less than a month [that is, 17% of the population want to be back to normal by April 21 - May 15ish]
• 37% can wait for it to open in a month or three [54% of the population ~ May 15 - July 15]
• 10% can wait for it to open in four to six months [64% of the population ~ August 15 - October 15]
• 34% can wait for more than six months [98% of the population  ~ November +]

Why would anyone organize the data any differently?

This means that most of the population wants us out and about by June, more or less.

One determining factor for how long someone is willing to wait might be how hard hit was the area where each person was polled. So a New Yorker or a Californian may want to stay home.

Another determining factor would be how much money a person has in the bank.

But no one is asking about questions about why we do or don't want to stay at home. Could it have less to do with health than with political repercussions? Could how we feel about staying at home have to do with the political party we root for?

The greater the economic devastation = ousting Trump. The least amount of economic devastation = a plus for getting Trump back into office. You can already see writers laying the economic devastation due to stay-at-home orders at the Trump administration's feet (I've read others but this is from The Atlantic Monthly):

The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic, and the Trump administration’s failure to prepare for it even as it crippled the world’s richest nations, cannot be overstated. Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed. Tens of thousands line up outside food banks and food pantries each week to obtain sustenance they cannot pay for. Businesses across the country are struggling and failing. The economy cannot be held in stasis indefinitely—the longer it is, the more people will suffer.

The association is drawn by juxtaposition. However, if it's the Left that wants to stay home and it causes greater economic devastation, then who should be blamed?

I vote for no blame, but who doesn't love the blame game? I'll go first: Let's blame the ewoks.

Could the Trump administration have better prepared for it? Maybe so. Maybe we should have been stricter. But opinions will fall along party lines. The hindsight of armchair quarterbacks is remarkably keen.

Here's an opinion piece that supposedly addresses how lethal the virus is, saying that more of us are probably infected but we haven't been tested. The reason it appears to be more deadly than a flu virus is that we hadn't had a vaccine ready.

I gleaned this second hand. I haven't signed up to read The Wall Street Journal as I don't want extra spam in my email box.

This intriguing idea is at least partially true since not everyone will go to be tested. But I'm not sure I buy the idea completely. That would mean ten to thirty times the current population listed as having been infected were actually infected. So instead of 1.5 million cases, fifteen to forty-five million Americans were infected, most of whom didn't show serious symptoms. Possibly?

Whatever the case, we must move forward.

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I have another post to write, extracting more data from the graphs. It will lead us to hard questions for both political parties. (I mean beyond, "Why is it so hard to make a good Star Wars movie?" and "Why do people put nuts in cookies and how can we stop these evil-doers?")

* Isn't it interesting how much attention we give to that 3%? How many worried news spots have you seen about them? Well, it is a sizable chunk of the population. But sometimes things are magnified to make them seem like 30% of the population.

On the other hand, how can we know what size a population we're dealing with until we ask the question? But had anyone asked? Now that we know, why haven't more connected the dots?