On Thursday the U.S. will celebrate Thanksgiving. That will cause an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases and in the number of deaths.
The states could have intervened but did little to prevent this from happening. The politicians are reluctant to act because the U.S. public at large follows an ideology that is incompatible with a pandemic.
The CDC warns of Thanksgiving celebrations:
As cases continue to increase rapidly across the United States, the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to celebrate at home with the people you live with.
Gatherings with family and friends who do not live with you can increase the chances of getting or spreading COVID-19 or the flu.
In my view that warning is not strong enough.
There should be more draconian measures and restrictions of freedom to prevent higher Covid-19 casualties.
In October Canada already celebrated its version of Thanksgiving. The result was a notable acceleration of the pandemic.
Source: George Rutherford, UCSF – bigger
More can be done and more should be done to prevent this from happening in the United States.
But there are people who argue even against stronger warnings:
This week, a survey reported that 38% of people planned to gather with 10 or more people for Thanksgiving, and just a third said they would wear a mask. Twitter reacted predictably. Public health experts and doctors pointed to rising COVID-19 case numbers in many states and scolded (often in all caps): DO NOT HAVE THANKSGIVING.
Of course, there is no doubt that large gatherings, indoors, and without masks is a recipe for the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2, but at the same time, I worry that the abstinence-only approach — the just-don't-have-Thanksgiving approach — is not the right way for public health experts to respond.
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I think public health experts should not just listen, but hear what people are saying. Americans are saying that despite all the damage done by COVID-19, despite the rising cases and at-capacity ICUs around the country, their desire for human connection is so great, that they are willing to take the risk and have Thanksgiving. Americans are, in effect, expressing the longing and desperation of their soul.
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Instead of admonishing people to not gather, public health experts should begin from the starting point that people really want this — correction, people are saying they need this. Given that the desire is so strong, what advice can we give to minimize the risk? How can we reduce — not eliminate risk.
As Thanksgiving family meetings happen indoor with everyone talking and eating together in one room there is little one can do to reduce the risk and to avoid new infections except to call off the event.
That is why I think that the states should have intervened more by restricting travel and the size of private meetings.
That is not happening because for many people in the U.S. this is not about 'longing' or a 'need' but about a mistaken understanding of freedom:
Here's a question for all red-blooded liberty-loving American patriots: Who has a greater lived experience of freedom at the moment, citizens of Vietnam or the United States? Vietnam, of course, is a one-party Communist state, with fairly strict limitations on freedom of speech, the press, and so on, while the U.S. has (at least for now) a somewhat democratic constitution and (at least formally) some protections for civil liberties.
But in Vietnam, there is no raging coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to swift action from the government, that nation squelched its initial outbreak, and has so far successfully contained all subsequent infection clusters before they got out of hand.
Vietnam is free of Covid-19 and its people are mostly free to do what they want to do. The same goes for China were Covid-19 restrictions are now minimal. People are free to travel within the country and to live a normal life. The few local outbreaks that are still happening are rigorously hunted down. Still, the Associated Press depicts those interventions as an assault on the ever ephemeral 'freedom':
Chinese authorities are testing millions of people, imposing lockdowns and shutting down schools after multiple locally transmitted coronavirus cases were discovered in three cities across the country last week.
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In Manzhouli, a city of more than 200,000 people, local health authorities are testing all residents after two cases were reported on Saturday. They also shut down all schools and public venues and banned public gatherings such as banquets.China has resorted to its heavy, top-down approach each time new cases of local transmission are found — shutting down schools and hospitals, locking down residential communities and entire neighborhoods, and testing millions.
Tianjin authorities shut down a kindergarten and moved all the teachers, family and students to a centralized quarantine space. They also sealed the residential compound where the five cases were found.
China's approach to controlling the pandemic has been criticized for being draconian. It locked down the city of Wuhan, where cases were first reported, for more than two months to contain the virus, with the local government shutting down all traffic and confining residents to their homes. Domestically, however, China has called its strategy “clear to zero” and has boasted of its success.
China used science and strong public health measures to defeat the pandemic. Being draconian in doing that is the only way to really get a pandemic under control. The AP's negative tone about the anti-Covid-19 measures is typical for U.S. media:
Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials.
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Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining.
That may have been caused partially by anti-Trump sentiment in the media:
Among U.S. major media outlets, stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine are more numerous than all stories combined that cover companies and individual researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines.
Trump surely could have done more. Still, he is now getting too little credit for his successful Operation Warp Speed which has created three reasonably good vaccine in record time.
But would the people in the U.S. really have followed Trump's or any others president's advice if he had called for or ordered more restrictions?
I find that unlikely because the preeminent ideology in the U.S. is this false understanding of 'freedom' which is incompatible with a pandemic:
Life for Vietnamese people has returned to normal, with a few sensible precautions. If their success holds for a few more months until a vaccine can be deployed, Vietnam will have dodged the pandemic nearly perfectly.
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Meanwhile in the self-appointed "land of the free," on Sunday[, November 15,] the seven-day average of daily COVID-19 deaths was 1,148.
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The bleak irony of American life is our boastful and hyperbolic national conception of liberty has left us as one of the most unfree peoples on the globe. There can be no freedom without government, a lesson currently being inscribed in blood, and stacked up in the mobile morgues that are overflowing with corpses in more cities around the country every day.
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All the political freedoms I supposedly enjoy as an American citizen are useless in the face of this unending tsunami of death and misery. The plain fact is that the average resident of Vietnam — under a repressive dictatorship, let me emphasize — has more freedoms in the places where, for most people, it really counts: the freedom to leave the house, the freedom to see and touch one's family and friends, the freedom to go to a restaurant or a bar or a movie or a concert, and simply the freedom from constant grasping fear of invisible death.
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In reality, as Vietnam demonstrates, the only way to have freedom during a pandemic is with a competent, aggressive state that does intrusive, coercive things on a hair trigger, the very instant they become necessary.
The U.S. and other 'western' societies have failed to understand that. Individual liberties are all fine. But they must stand back when the liberty of the general society is endangered.
Emergency medicine (triage) knows the concept of minimizing 'life years lost' when deciding to either save patient A or B. The patient who has more potential life years left is preferred to survive.
We may need a similar concept for 'freedom' where the aim is to maximize the amount of total freedom not for individuals but for the society as a whole, not within a short moment but over a considerable period of time.
This what China and Vietnam have done. Their draconian local measures have harshly restricted the freedom of relatively few but maximized the freedom their societies could allow themselves. In the end even those whose freedoms were restricted the most, the inhabitants of Wuhan for example, have gained more freedom than a runaway pandemic would have allowed them to have.