On the menu today: There’s no getting around it — the numbers for new cases, hospitalizations, ICU-bed use, and deaths from COVID-19 are getting worse than ever, even as the first vaccinations are almost ready to start; Andy McCarthy explains a bit more about “safe harbor day”; Kevin Williamson wonders if we can ever restore trust in government authorities — and whether we would want to; and some late-breaking really good news about the Pfizer vaccine.
The Pandemic Numbers Reach Awful New Highs
There’s a good chance you’re sick of reading about the coronavirus. I’m not particularly eager to write about the coronavirus. But the current circumstance is so grim and so bad, that we ought to overcome our instinct of not thinking about this massive, lurking, invisible problem for too long, and just absorb the scale of the challenge we face as the holidays approach.
We’re probably in the worst spot since March, even with the improved treatment options. The first vaccines will be administered in a matter of days, and for the most vulnerable Americans, vaccination is just a few weeks or months away. But Americans are exhausted of living limited and restricted lives, and our elected officials have burned through all of their public trust and authority. One year of quarantine restrictions, business closures, school closures, fighting over wearing masks, and all the rest have brought our collective mental health to a record low.
If you scoffed at the assessment “the worst spot since March” above, the country has averaged about 196,000 new cases per day for the past week. (Back on December 3, the country reported 219,000 new cases!) About 102,000 Americans are hospitalized with the virus right now. The country has averaged 2,200 deaths per day for the past week. The surge of new cases caused by people getting together for the Thanksgiving holidays is starting to show up in the figures right around now.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control states the U.S. has suffered more than 281,000 deaths. Worldometers puts the U.S. death toll past 290,000 as of this morning. As I wrote back on September 15: “It is reasonable to wonder whether the death toll will reach 300,000 Americans by the end of the year.” By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed 2,939 Americans. We lost 15,203 just last week.
The hospitals in your neck of the woods might be doing fine — or they may be at capacity. But Megan McArdle is correct, the key issue is not just the number of ICU beds available; it’s whether a hospital has sufficient staff to take care of those patients. The Department of Health and Human Services and the University of Minnesota put together a Hospitalization Tracking Project. The project has an imperfect system for measuring capacity; it takes the percentage of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients and the percentage of ICU beds occupied by patients at the facility level, and then averages it for each county for each week listed. In 126 counties across the country, the average hospital is at least 90 percent occupied.
South Dakota’s largest hospitals are at capacity, with a few patients airlifted to Colorado and Wyoming for treatment. New Mexico’s largest hospitals are at capacity. Two hospitals around Youngstown, Ohio, are out of ICU beds. Bakersfield, Calif., is down to 17 remaining ICU beds. The state of Arizona has 143 remaining ICU beds open, about 8 percent of capacity left.
The virus is spreading around faster, in large part because the weather is turning colder and people are spending more time indoors. Some health experts think that people who don’t like a state’s restrictions and who live near a border with a more lenient state are driving across the border, shopping or interacting with others, and then driving back.
If it were March, we could ask Americans to stay home for a stretch. Some governors and mayors will probably try this route again. California governor Gavin Newsom is enacting strict stay-at-home orders again. But way too many politicians — particularly California politicians — have been caught violating their own orders, and I suspect Californians will ignore the orders when and where they can. The rules often don’t make sense. Why are Tesla employees considered “essential workers”? Is outdoor dining really the way the virus is being spread these days? Why are the Golden State Warriors allowed to practice, but the San Francisco 49ers cannot? Batting cages are closed? The batter is alone when he’s in the cage! Who’s he going to infect?
If you don’t want to obey the restrictions, you’re going to look for evidence that the restrictions aren’t really needed. And you don’t have to look too hard to find the evidence you want to see. The elected officials who are enacting the restrictions — often by executive fiat — keep demonstrating that they don’t actually see going to a fancy restaurant, or flying to see relatives, or visiting their timeshare in Cabo San Lucas as genuinely dangerous.
You may have heard about Arlington County, Va., enacting an ordinance that banned groups of more than three people from congregating in public places such as sidewalks, declaring violators would be subject to a $100 fine. (That’s a particularly tough rule for families of four.) The Arlington Chamber of Commerce said that the fine didn’t actually change anyone’s behavior, as far as they could tell. Besides the blatant unconstitutionality — the right to peaceful assembly is right there in the Constitution, fellas, you can look it up — the law was apparently never enforced. What was the point, then?
The world threw a once-in-century problem at us. The United States responded well with Operation Warp Speed and our heroic doctors, nurses, and other care providers. Our supermarket stock clerks, Amazon warehouse workers, meatpackers, truck drivers — everyone who kept our country going, at risk to themselves, rose to the challenge.
But we were beset by poor leadership in a lot of other places. Besides the idiotic governors and mayors listed above, our president kept insisting it would “disappear, like a miracle,” when nothing indicated that was going to happen anytime soon. President Trump has barely spoken of the virus over the past few weeks, other than one announcement about the vaccine, and remains obsessed with overturning the results of an election he lost. Congress still hasn’t managed to reach a deal on coronavirus relief.
An unprecedented, invisible, hard-to-detect threat emerged before America’s elected leaders, and instead of rising to the challenge . . . they let it win.
Happy Safe Harbor Day
There is no federal law that prevents a state from altering its certification between Tuesday (December 8) and next Monday (December 14), when the Electoral College actually casts its votes in each state. But getting a state to reverse its certification would be extraordinarily difficult. Federal courts would almost certainly refuse to entertain a lawsuit challenging the certification at this point. Any challenge would have to be pursued in the state, where the officials would not have certified if they did not consider the matter closed.
Thus, the slim chance that any Trump campaign lawsuit challenging Joe Biden’s victory can make headway gets slimmer by the minute.
Maybe a Lack of Faith in Institutions Is Really the Default Setting for Us
Our Kevin Williamson makes the important point that the widespread perception of how the American government is supposed to operate — full of bipartisanship and trusted authority — is more or less built on a myth.
What’s been lost since the Eisenhower years isn’t widely shared prosperity (we are radically better off today than we were then) or uprightness and honesty in government (Eisenhower treated his wife shamefully and had Richard Nixon as his vice president), or even social stability (the anarchy sowed in the 1950s was reaped in the 1960s), but something altogether different from any of these: trust.
American government had never enjoyed more prestige than it did at the end of World War II. The corruption and waste of the U.S. war-mobilization project were Brobdingnagian, but this fact never really entered the national consciousness. World War II was the good war — if you can’t feel good about whipping the Nazis, you can’t feel good — and it was perceived (wrongly, but that hardly matters) as the event that ended the Great Depression and brought the United States into the new prosperity it began to enjoy in the postwar years. World War II had convinced many Americans that government was practically omnicompetent, capable of executing any program to which it committed itself . . .
These institutions together formed a mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing structure of credibility in an environment charged by victory in the war, the economic boom that followed, and the awesome power of modern science made urgent and manifest by nuclear weapons. For a moment, these institutions managed to enjoy and cultivate that credibility and prestige without being made arrogant, corrupt, or complacent by it.
The problem is, every now and then you have a giant problem that requires trust in institutions to overcome. It doesn’t do us much good to come up with a working vaccine against a terrible disease if too many of our fellow citizens think that vaccine is secretly a plot to cause autism or implant microchips in us or some other sinister plot.
ADDENDUM: Late breaking genuinely good news: A U.S. Food and Drug Administration review found that the coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech “provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose.”