Safety Nets, Testing and Cultural Differences

United Airlines’ pledge to keep middle seats open is now ignored, “hero pay” for grocery and fast food workers is over for too many, forbearance on evictions in some jurisdictions is ending, distancing requirements are increasingly being ignored, unmasked crowds at restaurants and beaches gather and people are going back to work in close proximity. Americans. We hate being told what to do. It may be the only uniform cultural trait we share these days. We are old line ultra-rightwing Christian traditionalists, Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. Liberals and progressives. Hair-dyed-weird colors edge-testing creatives, skin of black, brown, white, etc. Politics blue, red and purple. Left, right and moderate. Urban and rural. We are everything!

We are, however, still dying and getting infected in record numbers. We’re number one! We’re number one! USA! USA! With less than 5% of the earth’s population we have 25% of all the CV-19 deaths on the planet, with more CV-19 deaths than any nation. We clearly have one of the least effective programs to deal with a pandemic among First and even Second World nations. As states prioritize getting back to work and play (beaches, parks, entertainment venues... and lots of consumer-related business), they are effectively undoing two months of lockdown and safe distancing policies. Not one single state has met the “decline in infection rate” CDC guidelines as a prerequisite to reopening, but virtually all states are sequentially reopening their economies anyway.

The detailed CDC guidelines that the doctors wanted to release for everyday usage was rejected by the White House, and so on May 14^th, a meaningless, watered down (close to useless) set of CDC guidelines, with pictures for the reading-impaired, was released instead. The President is clearly goading scofflaws to ignore continuing safe-distancing guidelines and go back to work or play. The results are obvious. In Orange Country, south of Los Angeles, as the beaches reopened, there was a spike in infections shortly thereafter. The correlation is dead on, but OC officials are saying that they cannot link those new infections to their efforts to reopen the country. Lying and denying are new American cultural values.

Which brings me to a cultural analysis. In societies used to orderly approaches, or where there is a relatively homogeneous population with clear and unified appreciation of a common threat, which face a common threat, the response to COVID-19 was much more rapid and much more effective than the US’ scattered and delayed effort. There is an equal containment amplifier in countries with higher educational standards, where science and math enjoy elevated status. Most developed countries have one national school district and deploy their educational budgets to create as much equality as possible. Those with higher scientific and mathematical proficiencies prioritize scientific information over political opinions.

The United States has about 13,000 autonomous school districts, and while New York, California, Texas and Florida (representing the Bible Belt, Wall Street and the Silicon Valley) set the tone for text books and curricula, we still have debates about the necessity of teaching creationism (“intelligent design”), avoiding controversial topics involving sex education (despite the fact that abstinence has only occurred recently because of a pandemic!) – denigrating science to “just one theory” to the delight of our global competitors – while bona fide instruction on the how the US political system is really structured is severely lacking.

You can see that as protestors carry signs that their right to work and assemble without protective gear or safe distancing is protected under the Constitution’s due process and free assembly/freedom of religion provisions. Of course, there are constitutional protections, but just like you cannot yell “fire!” in a crowded theater (unless there is a fire) without facing arrest, or tell people to murder and execute others, courts have long accepted that governments may exercise reasonable restrictions (which include lockdown and safe distancing requirements) in obvious emergencies. Not to mention that nowhere in our body of laws is there a provision that allows individuals, without presenting an issue to a court, to impose their own interpretations of the Constitution or duly passed statutes and regulation and act accordingly. More on American iconoclasm later, rebels with or without a cause.

Want some examples based on national traits? Germans (historical Teutonic-values discipline, organization and efficiency), South Koreans (a clear hierarchical social and religious ethic, used to unifying against a common enemy), and Swedes (small and very homogeneous culture used to working together to maximize the total social good) have produced excellent CV-19 containment results. Germans and Koreans nailed down testing early, and the Swedes just imposed their own innate “acting in the best interests of everybody” behavior patterns. We know for sure that without accurate and substantial testing, we are simply not going to understand where out efforts need to change or where they work. We don’t even have a uniform standard for tests, and even those applied to White House staff are notoriously inaccurate.

Where earnings are protected by substantial safety nets (see by May 12^th Safety Nets for a summary of basic European practices), the rush to reopen and drop protective requirements is a whole lot less intense than in the United States, where the federal and state governments had to rush to install fairly ineffective and not-well-thought-out emergency economic stimulus packages to cover what is automatic in most of the European Union. The US efforts clearly were too little too late.

Nations where there are severe political schisms, histories of civil protests and defiance of government, or nations with exceptional heterogeneity, have fared far worse. Think Italy, France, Spain, the UK and, most of all, the United States. Although hugely populated Brazil and Mexico have yet to generate full CV-19 responses, it’s clear they are not doing well. The former’s President Jair Bolsonaro, an open admirer of Donald Trump, is a CV-19 denier even as thousands of bodies pile up in cities and towns all over Brazil with no place to put them. Mexico’s laissez faire President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has a different approach: just lie and tell everyone it is not that bad (sound familiar?):

“The Mexican government is not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths from the coronavirus in Mexico City, dismissing anxious officials who have tallied more than three times as many fatalities in the capital than the government publicly acknowledges, according to officials and confidential data.

“The tensions have come to a head in recent weeks, with Mexico City alerting the government to the deaths repeatedly, hoping it will come clean to the public about the true toll of the virus on the nation’s biggest city and, by extension, the country at large.

“But that has not happened. Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals in Mexico City say the reality of the epidemic is being hidden from the country. In some hospitals, patients lie on the floor, splayed on mattresses. Elderly people are propped up on metal chairs because there are not enough beds, while patients are turned away to search for space in less-prepared hospitals. Many die while searching, several doctors said.” New York Times, May 8^th.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in a country that also seems to have defined fractious politics, Trump ally and Conservative UK PM Boris Johnson, himself recently recovered from a near-fatal bout with CV-19, has a renewed respect for the disease but is equally torn by his earlier efforts to minimize its likely deadly impact. In a May 10^th national address (and a sometimes-contradictory address to Parliament the next day), Johnson replaced the “stay at home” mandate with a totally ambiguous “stay alert” admonition instead. Huh? Precisely. The UK has the highest CV-19 death toll in Europe, so, like the United States, they clearly have been doing things completely wrong. That vector does not seem to have changed.

“The reviews from ordinary Britons, together with many commentators and political foes, were scathing… ‘What the hell does ‘stay alert’ mean?’ [British historian Frank] Carlyle said… At 70, Carlyle is a scholar of the Roman Empire who lectured for years at local colleges in Liverpool. But he is best known in the northwestern city — the Beatles’ birthplace and a maritime hub of centuries’ standing — as a radio commentator, tour leader and public speaker… ‘What are we staying alert for?’ he asked in a phone interview. ‘I haven’t a clue, and I’m not a stupid person. It confused me.’

“In his address Sunday [5/10], Johnson said people who cannot work from home should be actively encouraged to return to work, but said staying home was best when possible. He encouraged people to walk or bicycle to work, but also gave his blessing to commuting on public transportation, urging staggered start times and adhering to social distancing practices.

“Face coverings in certain settings were recommended, but not obligatory. School reopenings were mentioned, but on a vague timetable beginning next month. Sporting events might start up again, but it wasn’t clear how. Quarantining of arriving air passengers has been mentioned as a likelihood, but again with no detail on when or how.

“Many people were also left uncertain as to when the new rules were supposed to take effect — Monday [5/11], the day after Johnson’s speech, or later. The government clarified that the intended date was Wednesday [5/13].

“That day, commuters posted images showing crowding on some buses and subway cars on the London Underground, known as the Tube. One Twitter user in the seaside city of Blackpool memorably described her 7 a.m. journey as a ‘covid party bus,’ adding: ‘I’ve never felt so unsafe!’” Los Angeles Times, May 15^th.  But lacking safety nets and a culture that supports mass compliance with scientific logic for the betterment of the nation, Americans have an even more serious disadvantage in getting past COVID-19.

In the end, the United States is a stubborn country; too are many easily seduced by anyone who will sustain their beliefs no matter how illogical or incorrect. Donald Trump has long since figured out that there are so many in this category that he could build a political base on little else. He brought them out of the woodwork and aggregated their political power. Writing for the May 17^th Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus shines a bright light on this inherent American strength… and weakness. “To hear public health experts describe it, defeating the coronavirus is a massive but straightforward problem, difficult but not impossible while waiting for a vaccine.

“First, administer tens of millions of tests to find out who has the disease. Then trace all their recent contacts, using a cellphone app that tells the government whom they met. Finally, track down all those people and order them into isolation for 14 days, possibly in a quarantine hotel… Now think about that scenario… In a country where armed men are marching to defend their right not to wear masks, how will intrusive measures like those go down?... Answer: Not easily.

“‘My public health friends are working out brilliant solutions for the technical problems, but they haven’t confronted the challenge of political culture,’ Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford’s Medical School, told me… ‘What are we going to do if millions of people refuse to take the tests? What are we going to do if they refuse to isolate themselves or close their businesses?’… He’s right. Our political culture often puts individual rights before communal interests. We’re not obedient people by heritage; the Constitution enshrines our right to rebel…

“But in the face of a pandemic, it gets in the way of protecting the larger community… We’ve already seen widespread protests against the shutdown orders imposed by many governors — protests encouraged, bizarrely, by President Trump, even though the governors are following White House guidelines… There’s been scattered violence by hotheads who refuse shop owners’ requests to wear masks… A security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Mich., was shot and killed after he ordered a maskless customer to leave. A clerk at a Target in Van Nuys ended up with a broken arm after he was slugged by a mask-averse knucklehead.

“Even before widespread contact tracing has begun, some have denounced the idea — especially the proposed phone app — as an unwarranted data grab by Google and Apple… And conspiracy theorists are busy denouncing the pandemic as a hoax cooked up by Bill Gates, the Democratic National Committee, or some other imaginary supervillain.” Perhaps the outcome would be different if the scofflaws and folks who believe passionately in “rights” that simply do not exist were not openly encouraged by the President of the United States. With our President’s rather dramatic lack of concern for much else other than the economy – along with lots of conspiracy-theory-loving followers – we are likely to continue to be the world’s leader in total CV-19 infections and deaths.

Meanwhile, the second wave of CV-19 has already begun. Wuhan is noting rapidly rising new infection rates. Premature reopenings, as noted above in California’s Orange and San Bernardino Counties, Palm Beach Florida, Marshall County Alabama and parts of Texas, are statistically linked. The President tells us to ignore those bogus numbers and get back to work. He’s only a got a few months to restore the stock market before the election… a few thousand additional deaths just cannot be that important. Common sense, where are ye? As McManus warns: “We’re America, and we’re going to do it our way — no matter how long it takes and how many mistakes we choose to make.”

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I am watching a nation of lemmings rush headlong into the sea.