Covid shaming is what our horrible leaders want. Stop playing into their hands.
As we head into a dark Thanksgiving, Covid martyrs continue to miss the point entirely.
During our Covid hell, the most callous displays of indifference towards humanity haven’t occurred at crowded house parties or big weddings. Instead, they’ve taken place in press rooms across the country, from Washington D.C. to Sacramento.
Anybody who’s shaming their fellow citizens, opposed to our horrible leaders, is missing the point entirely, and frankly, part of the problem. Nobody in government at any level should be able to live this down. Stop taking your eyes off the ball.
Donald Trump’s Covid denialism is one of the most criminal acts in U.S. presidential history. We know he was aware of the virus’ lethality as early as February, because he said as much to Bob Woodward. And yet, he continued to downplay it, refusing to even acknowledge the seriousness of the threat. The Trump Administration never developed a nationwide testing plan or even provided lip service to basic mitigation strategies. At one point, Trump, who wound up contracting the virus himself, said “Covid affects virtually nobody.”
To date, nearly 249,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. The CDC projects we could reach up to 282,000 deaths by December.
Mitch McConnell’s refusal to work on another Covid relief bill is just as criminal as Trump’s heartless incompetency. People are dying and businesses are shuttering. But there’s no help from Washington. As a result, we’re left to police behavior — and turn even further against ourselves. It’s a culture war Republicans think they can win, and so far, they’ve been right. There are a myriad of reasons why Trump received 71 million votes. One of them is governors like Gavin Newsom scolding their jobless and anguished constituents to stay home, while attending crowded dinners at $350 per plate.
Another is Andrew Cuomo, who’s presided over 33,576 Covid deaths, and yet, wrote a book extolling his incredible leadership.
How shameful. All for me, none for thee.
The most surefire way to curtail our raging pandemic would be to shut down the country for another six weeks and pay everybody to stay home. But that’s not going to happen as long as Trump is president, or frankly, as long as McConnell remains in charge of the Senate. So we need another solution. For many Democratic governors and mayors, that means endorsing asinine policies like allowing indoor dining and closing schools.
On Wednesday, Cuomo lashed out at a reporter who asked him whether NYC public schools will be open tomorrow (hint: they won’t be)!
There are no answers right now. We are nearly 10 months into Covid, and people are still being asked to stay away from friends and family. That is an utter failure on the part of our leadership. Social connection is an integral part of the human experience. Pleasure should not be stigmatized.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. When Governor Charlie Baker issued a mask mandate requiring face coverings to be worn at all times, he criminalized the simple act of breathing fresh air. In addition to being socially regressive — let your aerosols fly in your private suburban backyard, mask up if you don’t own property — it’s not based on any science. The messaging has been this way for 10 months. The end result is a jaded citizenry, says infectious disease epidemiologist Julia Marcus.
“The doom thing has been so non-stop and so ubiquitous, now that we really need people to listen, they’re done,” she told me on the phone. “We can’t sustain that level of fear and vigilance for such a long period of time and expect people to be able to keep engaging.”
There is a startling lack of perspective among the Twitter Covid vigilantes. Yes, the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is with your immediate household, and yeah, that might just be yourself. And the only way to ensure you won’t contract Covid, and potentially infect others, is to stay isolated all winter long. Some people plan on doing that, but statistics show they’re in the minority. Almost 40 percent of Americans say they plan to participate in holiday gatherings of more than 10 people, and a third don’t plan to ask others to wear masks.
None of that is advisable, but mean tweets won’t stop people from getting together. Instead, they prevent us from talking about practical risk mitigation strategies. There is a middle ground to be had. If you live alone, you may decide the mental health benefit of spending Thanksgiving with your parents outweighs the risk of traveling to see them. Frankly, I don’t know anybody who hasn’t formed some sort of small Covid circle over the last several months. There are game nights and movie nights; wine nights and wig nights; potluck brunches and mimosa lunches. And nobody seems to be getting sick — at least according to Instagram.
But of course, most of my social circle consists of white gay men who work their white-collar jobs from home. They don’t use public transportation and few even shop for their own groceries. I am counting myself in that group. It is a luxurious, albeit monotonous, bubbled existence.
While that’s anecdotal, it shows compromise can work, and underscores how social gatherings probably aren’t the main source of Covid transmission. The limited public data backs this up. The majority of new clusters in Massachusetts from Sept. 27 — Oct. 24 were attributed to household transmission. They accounted for about one third of new infections last month.
With that in mind, it makes sense that the high-risk Covid areas in Massachusetts are mostly communities with large numbers of essential workers who live in multigenerational households.
Covid shaming is a distraction, and plays into the hands of our corporatist status quo. People like Bill De Blasio want you to call the Covid snitch line, rather than calling their office and demanding why people in their city aren’t better taken care of. As Ed Yong puts it in an Atlantic essay, chastising other people is the easy way out.
“Tattered social safety nets are less visible than crowded bars,” he writes. “Pushing for universal health care is harder than shaming an unmasked stranger. Fixing systemic problems is more difficult than spewing moralism, and Americans gravitated toward the latter.”
We’ve been failed from the top-down. There’s no more relief or coherent public health message. We’ve been left to fend for ourselves, and shouldn’t be in this dismal situation. Over the weekend, Taiwan hosted a massive electric music festival.
And we’re being shamed for seeing our parents over the holidays? Talk about misplaced outrage.
We should rage against our abysmal leadership — not against ourselves.