Leading the World

My first blog post of this pandemic is dated March 18th, so we are starting our third month in this strange, stay-at-home, COVID-19 dream-state. Of course, this is the first day in Portugal with 'Phase 2' rules. For example, dine-in restaurants and museums and monuments are open, though with restrictions. The weather is really warming up here, and the crowds and the traffic are increasing daily. But there is no place that feels too crowded; people are still cautiously distancing and wearing masks.

The above video from The Atlantic is an excellent history of the pandemic, with contrasting statements from global leaders. Edward Luce in the Financial Times also provides an excellent look back, proposing that the pandemic might be the point when the US loses its position of global leadership:

Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America’s first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t.” “All I say is, ‘Be calm,’” said the president. “Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”

He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency. 

In hindsight, Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.

Another Atlantic article shines a favorable light on Taiwan's rising stature because it successfully stopped the virus and is now exporting PPE to the US (Taiwan has not reported a new case in ten days). In fact, staffers at the White House, including Jared Kushner and Kayleigh McEnany, are wearing 'Made in Taiwan' face masks.

Yet another article in The Atlantic describes some discrepancies with the recently published data on the CDC web site regarding testing. Without a national testing strategy, the US approach to the testing data is similarly decentralized. Without a central authority or reference, it is too easy to introduce doubt about any one source. Unsatisfied with accusing the media of creating 'fake news', the US has perfected a framework in which there is no real news.

Meanwhile the IHME, one of the sources used to create distrust of models, has increased its projection to 147,040 US deaths by August 4th. The CDC's Dr. Redfield seemed to confirm this, saying the US death total would pass one hundred thousand by June 1st.

A quick look at our two test subjects, Georgia and Portugal: both have a population of just over ten million, both reported their first cases on March 2nd, and both were about the same place on April 24th, when Georgia began to re-open – 22,491 cases and 899 deaths in Georgia, against 22,797 cases and 854 deaths in Portugal. Portugal began to re-open on May 3rd. The graphs show that Georgia has held steady since mid-April averaging around seven hundred new cases per day, while Portugal has dropped to around two hundred. The totals are beginning to tell a similar story – 37,552 cases and 1,609 deaths in Georgia, versus 29,036 cases and 1,218 deaths in Portugal.

Compared to Portugal, Georgia has added over eighty-eight hundred more cases (8,822), and well over three hundred (346) more deaths in three weeks.

Writing in the Washington Post, Stephanie McCrummen describes the scene at a mall in suburban Atlanta. Without national or state leadership issuing clear guidelines based on definitive data, the public is delightedly and dismissively dining, drinking, shopping, and getting manicures and haircuts.

[M]illions of Americans now find themselves free to make millions of individual decisions about how to calibrate their sense of civic duty with their pent-up desires for the old routines and indulgences of life. 

In this grand gamble, Georgia has gone first, with Gov. Brian Kemp (R) dismissing public health experts who’ve warned that opening too soon could cause a catastrophic surge of deaths, placing his faith instead in the citizens of Georgia to make up their own minds about what risks and sacrifices they were willing to accept.

Portugal drops out of the top twenty-five countries for number of COVD-19 cases, having recently been passed by a rushing Belarus and oddball Sweden. Coming up quickly: Bangladesh, the UAE, and even Singapore may re-pass Portugal in the next week.

The US is easily leading the world in both cases and deaths from COVID-19, with over one and half million cases and over ninety thousand deaths. The US has just over four percent of the world's population, but nearly thirty percent of all the deaths during this pandemic.

cases: 4,833,333 global • 1,529,144 USA • 29,209 Portugal • 440 Taiwan

deaths: 317,223 global • 90,996 USA • 1,231 Portugal • 7 Taiwan

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UPDATE: Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm not the only person who finds fault with Georgia Department of Public Health's awkward graphs. Matthew Fleischer from the LA Times calls the DPH data 'a lie'. And turns out there is a significant local controversy over the numbers, as reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution – the DPH graphed county data from May before data from April, thereby creating a downward slope.

Rearrange numbers, make optimistic graphs, confuse the public, re-open. Keep in mind the US CDC is located in Atlanta, Georgia.

The general situation is properly summarized by Prof. Tom Nichols in this Amanpour & Company interview; there is no adult supervision:

I think the [re-open] protesters are confusing freedom with nihilism.

This is not freedom in the way adults understand freedom, this is freedom in the way children understand freedom. 'I'm going to do things even if they're bad for me, merely because I can.' 

This is not how mature citizens in a democracy help to make a democracy function.