(All data from Johns Hopkins or ncov2019.live/data as of September 16, 2020)
Politics and Science have never mixed well, at least not since 1633 when Pope Urban VIII’s inquisitor ordered Galileo to kneel and renounce his position that the planets rotated around the sun and sentenced him to house arrest and silence until his death in 1642. This was the political respect shown to the man Einstein referred to as the Father of Science. Things have changed less than we might have hoped.
A “Political Scientist” thinks in terms of credit and blame, failure and success, winning and losing. A real scientist seeks understanding and questions both for and against all possibilities in pursuit of truth. When asking about America’s experience with COVID – 19, the first and most obvious question is “Which America?”
Are we talking about America’s Northeast bubble? New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island each have experienced over eleven hundred deaths per million of population. Together, these five contiguous states have lost over 1580 citizens per million of population. No other political subdivision in the world has lost so many of its citizens. If these states had been able to replicate the experience of the rest of America, forty five thousand lives would have been saved.
Differences in death rates do not just happen. They result from differences in resources and policies, differences in population density and demographics, differences in isolation, medical facilities and reporting of cases and deaths. “Political Scientists” both within these bubble states and elsewhere have often chosen not to examine cause and effect. They absurdly blame chance or federal leadership, even though federal policies directed more resources, not fewer to this suffering region. Real scientists would not prattle such nonsense.
To underline the local responsibility for this carnage, these high death rates were not caused by an exceptional rate of infection. With 12.3% if America’s population, the five state bubble had 32.0% of U.S. deaths, but only 13.0% of the confirmed cases. The states in the bubble either did not protect their most vulnerable population or they did not care for their infected population or they miss-reported too many deaths. It is fanciful to stretch the imagination beyond state lines to look for a cause.
If we look outside this Northeastern bubble, mainstream USA, 87.6% of our population, 289 million people in forty-five states have had quite a different experience. In this other America 472 people per million of population have perished. The table below compares the two American experiences to our peers and to places where we might seek insight.
Country Deaths/M Country Deaths/M
US 12.5% “bubble” 1580 France 463
Belgium 827 Netherlands 368
UK 632 Israel 128
Spain 638 Germany 114
Italy 594 Japan 12
Sweden 567 South Korea 7
US 87.5% mainstream 471
By the numbers, mainstream USA has managed the pandemic more effectively than most of our European peers. Real scientists would insist on understanding these numbers. “Political scientists” prefer to ignore numbers in favor of invective and out of context quotations. The same people argued against lockdowns and travel bans that now fear even grammar school openings. Many ignore Sweden’s outsized death rate for a sparsely populated country and express a strange admiration for their “taking a different path.” Criticizing a lack of testing is especially curious since the United States has performed more tests both in total and per capita than any other country in the world. Scientific minds take a different path. They seek to formulate hypotheses and gather evidence. They try to offer some performance standard and illustrate a better result before spouting gratuitous evaluations.
If we look at our European peers, we should recognize solid performance by America and Americans. Anyone who claims we have failed to manage this pandemic owes it to self and all to describe a better path and provide some evidence that path could have been taken and would have yielded a better result. Americans who live in, and especially those who manage the Northeast bubble should take a long hard look in the mirror before they criticize Washington or the rest of America.
Considerable thought has been given to the clearly superior experience of Germany, Israel, South Korea and Japan. Each of these countries has their own story and there are honest discussions about lessons to be learned. The reasons for each are a unique mixture of demographics, testing, isolation, treatments, experience with earlier epidemics and national scale. A century from now, historians are likely to marvel at how much we all have learned and how fast. Hopefully, they will also marvel at our ability to survive the even more toxic virus of hatred for constitutional order driving an ever-growing wedge between reality and “Political Science!”
Michael Moffitt
September 16, 2020