Sneaky COVID, a Marketing Genius

Sneaky COVID, a Marketing Genius

“Florida now has the lowest covid rate in the continental United States. And they’ve done it without 

mask or vaccine mandates. This is why [Florida Governor] Ron Desantis terrifies the coronabros. 

Because all their shutdowns & mandates, which destroy freedoms, provide no benefits.” 

Tweet (10/27) from Conservative Radio Personality, Clay Travis 

One of the disease’s most interesting features is the cyclical nature of its outbreaks, if left alone without much in the way of prevention. It’s almost as if COVID-19 had a massive social consciousness, a way to create over-confidence in targeted populations, encouraging people to let their guard down. And then “bam,” a surge. It seems to like unwary populations… makes for a nice incubator of potential nastier variants.

How many times have you heard experts tell you that declining infection and mortality numbers are convincing evidence of the end of pandemic outbreaks… only to learn of a surge later. We’ve seen it in the UK, Korea, Singapore… and clearly in the United States.

You’d think we’d be wise to the virus’ tricks. The two months of terror followed by a plunge in number followed by a surge for a couple of months, etc., etc., etc. The probable reality, unless and until an affordable cure or containment treatment is found (and there is some progress here), is that COVID is going to be part of our daily existence for the foreseeable future. HIV-AIDS, which exploded in the 1980s and beyond, is still with us. No cure. Effective containment. But still here. Will that be the story with COVID? Who knows? Florida’s current infection rates are now the lowest in the land, and conservative news sources are delighting in sending a rather risky and erroneous “it is all over even without mandates” message as illustrated above.

“According to the New York Times’s David Leonhardt, ‘Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall.’ And ‘the Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has followed this pattern.’

“Florida is no exception: Cases started rising there in late June and started falling in late August — right on schedule. Likewise, all the states where COVID cases have fallen the most during the past two weeks — Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina — are states that endured huge peaks in mid-September. And the higher the peak — the more people recently infected — the sharper the descent.

“Epidemiologists aren’t sure why COVID seems to come and go in two-month intervals. Maybe that’s how long it takes to reach the easiest targets within a particular cluster of humanity; maybe people themselves ‘follow cycles of taking more and then fewer COVID precautions, depending on their level of concern,’ as Leonhardt put it. Probably it’s a bit of both.

“There’s a certain logic at work here. One day, experts predict, SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, spreading seasonally around the globe in ever-evolving variations that might make a lot of people feel ill for a few days but are ultimately much less damaging and deadly because everybody has some degree of immunity through vaccination or prior infection.” Yahoo News, October 27th. Ultimately, maybe… but hardly yet. In fact that downturn has certainly benefitted a number of red states –  like Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina —states that experienced COVID peaks in mid-September. Typically, the higher the peak — the more people recently infected — the sharper the descent. And the sharper and more devastating the rise when a surge returns. It has happened so consistently.

But as a severely over-politicized disease, the cyclical nature of the surge-subsidence pattern, acknowledged by DeSantis himself, lends itself to politicians and their trusting sheep with an unending need, repeatedly, to declare success and that the pandemic has run its course. They don’t say much when that COVID down time is followed by a massive surge, one that is always far, far worse in those states that minimize the severity of the disease and refuse to mandate the obvious solutions: masks, social distancing and vaccination. 

Well, we are in one of those downturn moments right now. And this seems to reinforce those who have opposed mandates of any kind anywhere within their jurisdictions based on some clear misinterpretation of “constitutional rights” to personal freedom and choice. Funny, that is the same personal freedom and choice that some conservative states firmly reject for women seeking control over their own bodies in “free choice” vs so-called “right to life” states (the latter usually also condoning the death penalty).

“The tragedy is that, unlike before, the vast majority of these deaths were preventable. DeSantis and his defenders might argue that it’s only a matter of time before the worst of Delta hits places like California too, further proving that a more cautious approach to the virus ‘provide[s] no benefits.’ But that doesn’t explain why Florida’s peak daily COVID death rate was 2.5 times higher than California’s last summer — and nearly six times higher this summer. It doesn’t explain why California fell about 10 places on the state-by-state list of cumulative death rates at the same time Florida climbed nearly 20.

“And it doesn’t explain why whatever price Californians paid this summer — no lockdowns, no business closures, no shuttered classrooms, no official curbs on indoor drinking or dining; just masks and tests in school and masks and vaccinations at some indoor businesses — was less acceptable than the price tens of thousands of Floridians paid when they lost their lives.” Yahoo News. If you think it’s over, “stand back and stand-by.” We’ve been here several times before.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you truly believe that COVID is all but over, there is a bridge you can buy very inexpensively… in Brooklyn, New York.