Tag Archives: coronavirus

Testing, Testing, Testing

Health, Social policy

If we’re not willing to remain sheltered in place indefinitely, and if we’re not willing to lose up to a million lives to the coronavirus, the alternative is massive testing followed by contact tracing. Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Paul Romer of NYU claims to have done the math to determine how much testing we must do to bring the virus under control and keep it there. He is interviewed by Dr. Aaron Carroll for his weekly podcast, Healthcare Triage.

In the interview, they refer to R0 (“R zero”), which refers to the rate of transmission of the disease. If R0 equals 1, each person with the virus infects exactly one other person. If R0 is greater than 1, the disease spreads exponentially. If R0 is less than 1, the disease eventually dies out. Romer believes he has determined how much testing we need to do to keep R0 below 1.

You may have noticed that in my last post, I referred to the possibility of losing up to 2 million lives in order to achieve herd immunity.  This was assuming a mortality rate of 1%.  Romer assumes a mortality rate of .5%; hence he arrives at a figure of 1 million deaths.  Of course, the true mortality rate is unknown.

You may also be interested in reading:

“There’ll Be More Death”

“There’ll Be More Death”

Health, Politics,

The American oligarchy has spoken. For wealthy Americans, the cure is worse than the disease. We will restart the economy, regardless of how many lives are lost. Donald Trump is deliberately implementing a policy that he knows will result in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.

From President Trump:

There’ll be more death. The virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass and we’re going to be back to normal.

We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. . . . Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open.

I used to say 65 thousand, and now I’m saying 80 or 90. And it goes up, and it goes up rapidly.

And look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people.

From Governor Greg Abbott, as he announced the reopening of Texas businesses:

Listen, the fact of the matter is pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that when you have a reopening—whether you want to call it a reopening of businesses or just a reopening of the economy—in the aftermath of something like this, it will actually lead to an increase and spread.

From former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

The American people have gone through significant death before [in World Wars I and II] . . . and we’ve survived it. We sacrificed those lives.

Christie added that the sacrifice was necessary “to stand up for the American way of life.” When asked whether the American people would be willing to tolerate this many deaths, he replied, “They’re gonna have to.”

Drawing on a military analogy, Trump and Christie have referred to those who are about to die as “warriors,” hoping we will see them as having sacrificed their lives for their country. In fact, Trump is not making war on the coronavirus but surrendering to it in order to achieve herd immunity. As Vox columnist David Roberts noted, rather than referring to workers, the elderly and the sick as “warriors,” a more appropriate term might be “cannon fodder.”

How many Americans will die? On May 4, the New York Times leaked a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicting that, if we reopen the economy, we will have 200,000 new cases and 3000 deaths per day by June 1. This is up from the current 25,000 cases and 1700 deaths per day. Epidemiologists predict that, assuming a mortality rate of 1%, allowing deaths to continue until we achieve herd immunity will result in about 2 million American deaths.

As usual, as Trump and his surrogates were making these grim announcements, the corporate media were obediently obscuring their importance by distracting us with trivial “issues” such Trump’s decision to tour a face mask manufacturing facility without wearing a face mask.

Letting the virus run its course conveniently coincides with Trump’s reelection strategy of hoping that a majority of Americans care more about their pocketbooks than the lives of their fellow citizens. Despite unanimous recommendations from experts that we need more COVID-19 testing, Trump rejected their advice, saying that “by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”  Does “ourselves” refer to the American people, or just the Trump administration?

It’s easy to dismiss Trump as an obvious sociopath, but he speaks for the American financial and political oligarchy that is quietly but ruthlessly taking pages out of the class warfare playbook. They began by passing trillions of dollars in bailouts, and ensuring that the majority of the funds would go to those corporations and individuals who are least in need of the money. (For details, see this article.) Needless to say, these bipartisan corporate welfare bills passed Congress almost unanimously.

However, in order to restart the economy, the corporate class still faces two problems. First, in order to reopen businesses, they must persuade workers (and sometimes consumers) to risk their lives and those of their families. This is to be accomplished through economic blackmail. Although figures are hard to come by, a high percentage—perhaps a majority—of working Americans are either ineligible for unemployment, or have not received it yet due to a bureaucratic system designed primarily to prevent fraud. Many of these same people have lost their health insurance. These workers will have to choose between risking death from COVID-19 and starvation.  (The weakest link in Trump’s plan may be the fact that consumers will usually not have to make this choice.)

Trump issued an executive order directing meat packing plants to remain open during the pandemic in spite of unsafe conditions. Republican governors of three states, Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas, have announced that workers who refuse to return to work when their workplace reopens will be ineligible for unemployment benefits. Denying benefits to people who have turned down a job is apparently legal and is likely to spread.

A second possible problem for corporations is that, should they fail to provide safe working conditions, they might be held legally responsible for the deaths or illnesses of their workers. Senator Mitch McConnell has announced that one of his conditions for approving any future coronavirus relief is that Congress grant employers immunity against any lawsuits from employees or their survivors.  Trump’s Justice Department has stated that they intend to take the side of meat-packing companies should they be sued by their workers for not providing a safe environment.

Whenever we turn on TV, we are bombarded by insipid messages from corporate America claiming “we’re all in this together” (and presumably all equally in need of the sponsor’s product). This message becomes a form of black humor in a country where not everyone has been rescued by the government and not everyone will be protected from harm.

You may also be interested in reading:

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

The Changing Demographics of COVID-19

Health, Politics, , ,

The media have given us a stereotype of the Americans most likely to have contracted the coronavirus. You probably think of COVID-19 as a disease primarily affecting the country’s urban poor. You have probably also read the news that African-Americans, and possibly Latinos, have been stricken at a rate higher than their percentage of the population. These generalizations are accurate, but things are changing.

In a brief paper, Dr. William Frey of the Brookings Institution analyzed date compiled by the New York Times in order to compare the demographic characteristics of those counties hardest hit by the virus at different points in time.

In the above chart, the second bar from the left shows the characteristics of those counties with an infection rate of 100 or more per 100,000 population as of March 29. The bar at the left shows the population baselines. As you can see, the hardest hit counties were more likely to be in the Northeast, more urban, and more likely to have voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

The next three bars show the characteristics of the new counties that reached the 100/100,000 rate during each of the next three weeks. These counties are increasingly located in the West, South and Midwest, they are more suburban and rural, and they are more likely than the early counties to have voted for Trump. In other words, the counties that are most affected by the coronavirus are gradually coming to resemble the demographics of the country as a whole.

This table shows a similar picture. Majority-white counties are catching up with counties with more minorities. The newly-affected counties are less likely to have a large immigrant population. The income data, however, are less consistent with the media stereotype, since the early counties contain more higher income people. I assume this is because the virus first took hold in cities with high income inequality like New York and Seattle. Over time, however, the income distribution is starting to resemble the baseline for the country.

These demographic shifts seem likely to have political implications. At the very least, white rural Republicans are not going to be able to dismiss the pandemic as somebody else’s problem. Frey suggests that they will become less receptive to Trump’s attempts to reopen American businesses. Fear of mortality will spread. In the past, such external threats have tended to help conservative candidates, but the situation is far too volatile to make a one-sided prediction. Will some people who voted for Trump in 2016 blame him for not keeping the danger away from their community?

You may also be interested in reading:

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , , ,

Social psychologists have known for a long time that (a) politically conservative people are more responsive to fear-arousing threats, such as news about terrorism or weather emergencies, and that (b) reminding them of these threats causes people to become more conservative in their attitudes. Due to COVID-19, this is a time when we are all confronting our own mortality. (How many of you, in the last six weeks, have thought about the current status of your will?) This raises the question of what effect the coronavirus will have on the 2020 elections.

This week the Association for Psychological Science reprinted a 2016 research study by Alec Beall and colleagues entitled “Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U. S. Federal Elections (And If So How)?” Unfortunately, the study is gated, so only members can read it, but I wrote a blog post about it on December 31, 2016, shortly after its publication. Here is that post. After you’ve read it, I’ll return with some comments (also in italics).

 

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month (a) and the week (b) before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

 

Addendum

It’s interesting to speculate about how the coronavirus affected the 2020 Democratic primary contest. The first known American death due to COVID-19 occurred near Seattle on February 28. The sudden reversal of fortune in which the most conservative candidate Joe Biden burst into the delegate lead at the expense of the most liberal candidate Bernie Sanders began with the South Carolina primary on Saturday, February 29, and continued with the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. Over that weekend, one of the top news stories was the dramatic spike in the number of infections in Europe. President Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, by which time the Democratic contest was essentially over. It seems plausible that the coronavirus was a background factor that helped convince Democrats not to risk going into the 2020 election with a candidate that Trump might brand a socialist, and to choose a more familiar candidate.

I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus will guarantee the reelection of President Trump or the election of any other Republican candidate. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the data in Beall’s study were collected within just a few days of the peak of publicity surrounding the Ebola virus. A lot can happen between now and November. In the unlikely event that the coronavirus is no longer a problem, its effect on the elections may be minimal. In the case of the president, the success with which he is perceived to have responded the emergency should logically be more important than the existence of the emergency itself. But the polling done thus far suggests that there is very little agreement among partisans on how effectively Trump has dealt with the crisis. And the Ebola study suggests that the pandemic could even influence the outcomes of down-ballot races for political offices have no direct effect on the epidemic or our recovery from it.

If nothing else, Beall’s research should alert us to the importance social context during an election, including external threats that are sometimes overlooked because they are not explicitly political. It should also make us mindful of politicians and media sources that attempt to either exaggerate or downplay these events.