In a story predicting two more years for the coronavirus pandemic, CNN (5/1/20) quoted Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota: “This thing’s not going to stop until it infects 60 to 70% of people,” he said. “The idea that this is going to be done soon defies microbiology.”
CNN should have noted that accepting a 60–70% infection rate means accepting a million deaths or more, assuming a fatality rate of 0.5%—which may be a conservative estimate.
The network should have also noted that it’s not a law of microbiology that requires that we allow the coronavirus to infect hundreds of millions of people, but a choice made by governments—as the varied results obtained by different countries demonstrate.
China, the country where the novel coronavirus first infected humans, is Exhibit A. By the time Beijing recognized the danger—not as quickly as it could have, but quicker than most governments with more warning—the outbreak had spread far beyond its initial focal point of Wuhan. On January 24, the country locked down Wuhan’s Hubei Province and much of China’s economy; spread of the disease quickly ebbed, from a peak of 4,602 daily new cases on February 14 (averaged over seven days) to 46 per day on March 14.
(How can you believe China’s numbers? One, because its outbreak is one of the most studied epidemics in history, with analyses of its spread appearing in the world’s most prestigious medical journals–FAIR.org, 4/2/20. Two, because international air travel has resumed between China and neighboring nations, and if Beijing was pretending to control an epidemic that it actually hadn’t, this would quickly be discovered as Chinese travelers failed health screenings at airports.)
There’s a usually unspoken assumption that the US just can’t do what China did—which was to execute a strategy based not just on discouraging but on halting transmission of the coronavirus. It can’t be that quarantines are seen as incompatible with democracy; we have quarantines, after all.
The idea seems to be that effective quarantines are incompatible with democracy. But that’s not true either, as nations with elected governments like New Zealand, Taiwan and Iceland have also managed to bring new cases down to near zero.
It may be unlikely that the United States will summon the political will to implement a realistic plan for not just delaying, but stopping Covid-19. But it’s crucial for media reporting on options in the fight against the outbreak to distinguish
Sidebar: ‘Sweden’s Apparent Success’
“In Sweden…the government defied conventional wisdom and refused to order a wholesale lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’ of the coronavirus epidemic,” the New York Times (4/28/20) reported. “And, to a large extent, Sweden does seem to have been as successful in controlling the virus as most other nations.”
Reporters Thomas Erdbrink and Christina Anderson went on to marvel at “Sweden’s apparent success in handling the scourge without an economically devastating lockdown,” presenting it as a model for other countries:
As other nations in Europe begin to consider reopening their economies, Sweden’s experience would seem to argue for less caution, not more.
In fact, when the Times described it as being “as successful in controlling the virus as most other nations,” Sweden actually had the tenth-worst per capita death toll from the coronavirus in the world—beaten only by San Marino, Belgium, Andorra, Spain, Italy, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Ireland. Swedish deaths per capita, at 238 per million, were 29% higher than those in the United States—whose response to Covid-19 few would describe as an “apparent success.”
Sweden’s results can best be compared with those of neighboring Scandinavian countries, with which it shares the advantages of comparatively low population densities, well-funded healthcare systems and relatively few international visitors in the winter months, when the virus was spreading across borders. The neighbors’ rates of death from Covid-19 were far lower: Norway and Finland’s were one-sixth as high, while more densely populated Denmark had had one-third as many deaths per capita.
It’s safe to say that when comparing coronavirus outbreak strategies across countries, the New York Times ought to use more caution, not less.
