COVID-19 Meets Mucho Macho

Is there something bold and defiant in a man flaunting the risk and intentionally venturing into daily life without a mask? Like Donald “get tough, law and order” Trump? Are masks for sissies and metrosexual men? Where common sense meets medical expertise, scientific fact if you will, the power of women in that society often determines how willing that community is to apply social distancing to daily life. While denial or a belief that God will make the decision, not man, often accounts for a rejection of any form of restriction on social interactions, public gatherings, and a wide-open economy, in regions where women are politically powerful, those reactions are rare.

In rural America, woman still have not achieved that “equal status” with their male counterparts. Black and people of color? Forgetaboutit. But all over the United States, from Washington DC to Atlanta Georgia, women are mayors. From Michigan to New Mexico, there is a rising tide of women governors. As well in the US Senate and House of Representatives. The schism is obvious. In a Trumpian era, where opening the economy wide is a GOP mandate, virtually none of those major red states that have opened up actually have met the CDC guidelines to justify that policy.

Where facts contradict the blatant lies from senior red state officials that it is safe to open, the answer all too frequently is to change the “facts.” Texas and Florida, two very large red states that have embraced the fastest reopening efforts, have record-breaking COPVID-19 infection rates. Denial is the rule of the day. Where CV-19 deaths are even reported, there is pressure to list the result of a CV-19 infection – like a resulting bout with pneumonia or stroke (very common among vulnerable CV-19 victims) – as the only cause of death.

When bureaucrats who are simply looking at the actual facts report what they see, they are often simply removed and replaced with a functionary willing to play the lying/obfuscating game on behalf of the fateful deciders. In Florida, for example, “[t]ension built for days between Florida Department of Health supervisors and the department’s geographic information systems manager before officials showed her the door, she says, permanently pulling her off the coronavirus dashboard that she operated for weeks.

“Managers had wanted Rebekah Jones to make certain changes to the public-facing portal, she says. Jones had objected to — and sometimes refused to comply with — what she saw as unethical requests. She says the department offered to let her resign. Jones declined… Weeks after she was fired in mid-May, Jones has now found a way to present the state’s coronavirus data exactly the way she wants it: She created a dashboard of her own.

“White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx praised Florida’s official coronavirus dashboard in April as a beacon of transparency. But Jones has asserted that the site undercounts the state’s infection total and overcounts the number of people tested — with the official numbers bolstering the decision to start loosening restrictions on the economy in early May, when the state had not met federal guidelines for reopening.” Washington Post, June 13^th. But what is particularly interesting is the difference between regions where urban women run the relevant jurisdiction vs conservative men.

New York Times OpEd contributor, Nickolas Kristoff, took an interesting look at CV-19 death rates, gender and political governance in his June 13^th editorial. “I compiled death rates from the coronavirus for 21 countries around the world, 13 led by men and eight by women. The male-led countries suffered an average of 214 coronavirus-related deaths per million inhabitants. Those led by women lost only one-fifth as many, 36 per million… If the United States had the coronavirus death rate of the average female-led country, 102,000 American lives would have been saved out of the 114,000 lost.

“‘Countries led by women do seem to be particularly successful in fighting the coronavirus,’ noted Anne W. Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. ‘New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway have done so well perhaps due to the leadership and management styles attributed to their female leaders.’…

“It’s not that the leaders who best managed the virus were all women. But those who bungled the response were all men, and mostly a particular type: authoritarian, vainglorious and blustering. Think of Boris Johnson in Britain, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran and Donald Trump in the United States… Virtually every country that has experienced coronavirus mortality at a rate of more than 150 per million inhabitants is male-led.

“‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the best-run places have been run by women: New Zealand, Germany, Taiwan,’ mused Susan Rice, who was national security adviser under President Barack Obama. ‘And where we’ve seen things go most badly wrong — the U.S., Brazil, Russia, the U.K. — it’s a lot of male ego and bluster.’” Overprotective maternal instincts or simply that women in higher office had to work harder and know more than most of their traditional male opponents? Whatever the reason, the United States got it wrong, and lots of other countries got it right… and remember, the fish stinks from the head.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and COVID-19 richly rewards those who flaunt its infectious proclivities with their own personal opportunity to fight that disease mano-a-mano!