Almost every day this blog publishes the John Hopkins Covid-19 numbers. They are undercounts of both deaths and cases, but they give the trendline. Recently the trendline has very slowly started to move down.
Meanwhile, Trump and many governors have started to move to ease isolation requirements. This map shows that only five out of 50 states (and Puerto Rico) aren’t easing.
There are three problems here.
First, the curve hasn’t been crushed. In fact, in some states, it’s still increasing.
Second, even once a curve has been crushed, to keep it under control without a vaccine, you need to test and trace. The US would need to hire hundreds of thousands of tracers to do this, and would need many more tests than are currently available. If you don’t test and trace, one person can infect many other people, and then all those people infect many other people.
Third, Covid-19 takes about two weeks from infection before people show symptoms, and two weeks more before they start dying. During that asymptomatic period, carriers are contagious.
What this means is you can have a significant outbreak going on and not know it is happening. That’s why countries that got Covid-19 under control crushed it into the dirt, then put everyone coming in from outside the country into quarantine, and they test like mad.
Humans are really bad at making decisions where the consequences are delayed. (See Change, Climate). Even a two week- to month-long delay is more than the decision makers in many countries, including the US, can handle.
So, the numbers seem to be in decline, and there will be removal of restrictions, and then the numbers will start increasing again in two to six weeks. Because infection rates will be moving off a larger base, they will create a second wave where people start dropping like flies–much larger than the first wave.
This is acceptable to the people who run the US because they have jobs where they can work from home, and if they don’t, like in the White House, they can test every day. It is the lower class who will be forced to go back to work and to die.
That’s not a problem for American elites; killing unimportant people for money is pretty much what they do for a living.
It’s possible this narrative can be cut off if those states which are handling Covid properly close their borders to non-isolating states, presumably by calling up the national guard. There is also some hope because Americans are generally not flocking back to venues like restaurants–even in States which have re-opened.
But overall, this looks like the first wave passed its peak, is slowly declining, before the second wave comes in and culls the poor for the rich. Numbers of deaths will be in the hundreds of thousands at a minimum. If this is bungled completely, it could be that 80 percent of the population will have to get Covid-19 to create herd immunity, and that a little under one percent will die. The rich will isolate and test throughout all this, of course.
This is a worst case scenario, and many mocked the possibility even two months ago. Surely, they said, American elites couldn’t fuck this up that much?
They can, and they are. But it isn’t fucking up. They’re now isolated and in little danger. They’ve bailed themselves out, given themselves even more control over the economy than before. If ordinary Americans get sick, die, or can’t pay rent and go hungry, well, why should American elites care? It doesn’t effect them.
That’s their bet.
As for you, do what you can to prepare. We may get lucky and get a vaccine earlier than expected, but if not, the US has made the choice to let Covid-19 continue to wend its way through the population.
And remember, Americans, if you decide you’d rather not die so the top one percent can own more of the US, they have names and addresses.
Never riot in your own neighbourhood.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
