The slow-motion trainwreck

I can’t write about the pandemic without writing about how horrible Trump is. This is important for the audience of people who read this blog, because most of the readers are Trump supporters. I voted for Trump (but won’t make that mistake again). I was excited as anyone when he beat Hillary. Even though by the time of the election, I already know that Trump was full of shit on a lot of things and he didn’t even understand his own policy platform. I knew that Mexico was never going to pay for the Wall, but I was optimistic that the Wall would be built anyway. (Of course, no Wall was built.)

Maybe Trump is going senile. I hope he’s going senile because that would excuse me for voting for him. How could I have known in 2016 that he was going senile and was no longer the same person who he was when he was younger? If that’s really what’s happening.

Back in 2016, I was optimistic that Trump would become more Presidential once he actually became President. I can’t say that ever really happened, but during the last year especially he has declined into being even less Presidential than he was when he was running for office back in 2016. So maybe the senility explanation will hold up. Or maybe it’s just a Trump personality flaw that he retreats into bozoness when faced with adversity, and there has been a lot of adversity for Trump during the last year.

Maybe, if we are lucky, Tucker Carlson, one of the few smart people who understands and supports what a Trumpist national policy actually means, will run for President in 2024 and win. But that’s a real longshot.

But regardless, you Trump supporters need to STOP believing what Trump says and stop repeating his stupid talking points which have become more and more divorced from reality. Clearly, Trump is not able to process the reality of the pandemic. Trump supporters make excuses for Trump saying that the virus was a hoax, but it’s pretty clear that Trump truly believes that the virus is a fake narrative was made up by his enemies and the virus would go away if we just stopped paying attention to it.

How else do you explain Trump’s intentional sabotaging of our efforts to control the virus? Encouraging people to protest the shutdowns, encouraging people not to wear masks or socially distance, preventing the federal government from actually doing anything useful to coordinate our response to the pandemic, leaving it up to the governors of the 50 states, with each state doing its own thing.

The latest Trump talking point that this followers are repeating is that deaths have been going down, therefore everything is good and under control and we don’t have to do anything. To the extent that deaths have been declining because we have better treatments for the virus than we had back in March, that’s great, but it’s a dangerous assumption to make that that’s the only thing that’s happening and treatments will continue to get so much better that we can stop worrying about the pandemic.

The two major reasons why deaths have been declining despite rising cases (other than better treatments) are:

(1) Deaths are a lagging indicator. It takes a week before an infection because a reported case, and then another four weeks before a reported cased becomes a reported death. Thus the increase in cases that began in mid June haven’t had enough time to cause a large increase in reported deaths. Furthermore, because actual infections lag reported cases, and because infections increase at a geometric rate and not a linear rate, there could a big wave of infections that haven’t been reported yet as cases. So I have no doubt that an increase in deaths will come.

(2) The latest cases have been disproportionately young people because they have been the ones who have been going to bars and parties and protests. We know that young people have a much lower fatality rate than older people. But this doesn’t mean we can relax. Infected young people are still contagious and they will infect their older family members and “essential” workers. Also, it’s not yet clear that young people suffer no consequences from a mild case of the virus. It could be that a worrisome percentage of people, even young people, with mild cases of the virus could have longterm health consequences. The medical community is still learning about this virus.

Right now, the U.S. looks like a slow-motion train wreck. States with rising numbers of cases are shutting some things down, but I don’t think enough things are shutting down to lower the R0 below 1, which means that infections will still increase and hospitals will become full and there won’t be enough resources to treat everyone who’s sick, and not only will the fatality rate for the virus increase, but people will die from other causes because emergency healthcare won’t be available for them. Eventually there will be an “oh shit” moment and strict lockdowns will be instituted, which means we will be back to where we were in March, the last three months totally wasted, while in other countries they have gotten the virus under control and are able to SAFELY open up the economy because they have few cases plus robust contact tracing.

And about contact tracing: the U.S. also sucks at that. A combination of a “diverse” population that doesn’t voluntarily comply, and a lack of political will to get tough and make people comply.

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Apparently, another totally false Trump talking point that needs to be addressed is that the only reason there are a lot of cases in the U.S. is that we are doing a lot of testing.

Scott Gottlieb, former Commissioner of the FDA (appointed by Trump) shows that’s totally false:

New York State on 7/4: More testing. Fewer cases uncovered. When the virus is under control, testing doesn’t uncover more cases. It’s a tool for keeping the epidemic at bay. pic.twitter.com/vBZSHxLWMH

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) July 5, 2020