The 4th wave: Between impending doom and turning the corner on Covid
The New Coronavirus sure is a nasty bug. But the worst virus afflicting the United States at this key turning point in the pandemic is a virus for which there is no vaccine.
What to call it?
Writing about the London bubonic plague, Jonathan Swift described the main problem then which is the main problem now:
I must here take further notice that nothing was more fatal to the inhabitants of this city than the supine negligence of the people themselves…
Nothing accounts as much for the new surge which threatens to become a fourth wave as the inane negligence of the people themselves and many of their leaders, particularly Republican governors and other GOP officials. This explains the surge of the virus in many states.
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis opened the state and preempted local mayors from imposing or enforcing public health measures. What followed was predictable. Social distancing? Mask wearing? A few blocks of Miami Beach became party central, with scenes more reminiscent of the era of Rome’s decadence than of the beach blanket movies of the 1950s.
Sadly, many of the revelers who threw caution to the wind in search of a good time were African Americans. Who needs racist killer cops like the ones on trail now for murdering George Floyd when you put yourself at risk of catching a virus that could kill grandma?
This was not a socially conscious, black lives matter kind of crowd, to be sure. Still, the main responsibility lies at the feet of DeSantis, the adult in the room who could have prevented much of the debacle but instead enabled it.
A different story is playing out in Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer has tried hard to quell the pandemic but has been prevented from cracking down by the GOP-controlled legislature and has had to face down assassination plots by white supremacists and menacing armed incursions into the state capitol that presaged the January 6 events in Washington.
This has implications not just for Michigan but for the whole nation, as the New York Times reports.
Virus Surge in Michigan Is a ‘Gut Punch’ to Hopes of Pandemic’s End
- Infection levels in the state have exploded in recent weeks, amid an outbreak that is one of the largest and most alarming in the U.S.
- The trend points to a disconcerting phase of the pandemic: Vaccines are rolling out quickly, but upticks in cases raise the prospect of a new surge.
Just when it looked as if we finally might be turning the corner on Covid-19 as vaccinations ramped up and most sensible people had adopted as second nature the necessary public health rules—masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds and enclosed indoor spaces—a fourth wave of the pandemic has begun to build. Cases have been rising, especially in states that have opted to open wide. Deaths are still dropping, but deaths lag cases and hospitalization rates, and they are almost sure to spike if cases keep rising.
The emergence of new, more contagious and lethal variants of the virus, accounts for some of the spike. But the bigger factor is the epidemic of denial and disregard for the life of others that has never abated.
It is false and convenient to blame the Chinese. Viruses do not have nationalities, but that has not prevented racist ignoramuses from scapegoating Asians, setting off a wave of vicious anti-Asian hate crimes, another legacy of the malicious rhetoric of Donald Trump and the incessant drumbeat of the ultra-right media that is still disseminating the malicious lie that Covid-19 was engineered in a Wuhan lab.
The China virus and Kong Flu were the defeated former president’s favorite terms for Covid. A better term would be Trump Tragedy. Even Dr. Deborah Birx, she of the signature scarves and the silent complicity, lately has acknowledged that the Covid death toll could have been kept at 100,000. That means that even one of the major Trump apologists now has implicitly admitted that Trump is to blame for hundreds of thousands excess deaths.
That is good, Dr. Birx. Confession is good for the soul, as the Catholic Church has always known. But we already knew about Trump’s culpability. Please do not look now for exculpation or absolution. Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci, who swam in the same sewer as you but never soiled himself, you will never get your reputation back. It is as gone as are all those lives.
Where do we go from here? CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has warned of “impending doom” while pleading with Americans to not let up on mitigation measures. The pessimism is justified by the surge in travel, the unwary crowds that are sure to gather during Easter, and the simple fact too few Americans are heeding her plea. And, while “supine negligence” was the problem in the London plague, here in this country the negligence is not supine. The attitude of the naysayers against mitigation measures are self-righteous and belligerent.
It has come to this: Trump made us into an analog of Brazil. For a long time, the United States has been trending toward Brazil. Unconscionable levels of economic inequality. Racism as much practiced as denied. Police brutality against people of color and the poor. And a science-denying, environment destroying authoritarian jackass as president.
Although there are some signs of hope, especially a new leader in this country not in the thrall to narcissistic magical unrealism, a lessening of vaccine hesitancy, science empowered by the to lead the way, and a new consciousness regarding racial bias and inequality, irrationality never dies, especially here, where unlike in Europe, legions of people still believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote: “Science arrives at its own form by expelling every mythical and metaphysical component from itself.” But he also warned that “the battle, which theoretical cognition believes it has won for good, will continually break out anew.” [New York Review of Books, April 8, 2021, page 53]
The pandemic revealed the extent to which this is true of this country. Denial of basic facts—Covid-19, the resounding popular vote defeat of Trump, global climate change—amount to all the proof needed. The crypto-anti-Semitic Q thesis, the existence of a whole universe of false news outlets—Fox, Newsmax, and the many others farther out on the lunatic fringe guarantees the persistence of the loony right into the future. The battle, which reason had thought it had won for good, has broken out again and it will be around long after Covid is only a painful memory.
