Covid: Year One

Covid: Year One

Errors of excessive pessimism

Matthew Yglesias

Mar 5, 2021

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump stand in front of a graphic titled "30 DAYS TO SLOW THE SPREAD" on March 31, 2020

(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

I think of this first week of March as my Coronavirus Anniversary Week because it’s the time when COVID-19 first started to really impinge on my life.

Back on March 2, 2020, I took the Amtrak up to New York so that I could speak at a big conference of all the Vox Media revenue teams happening at a hotel in Brooklyn on the morning of March 3. That was the last of my once-frequent trips to New York. As long as I was heading up to NYC, I thought it would be a good opportunity to stop by the Penguin Random House office in Midtown and actually meet the editor of “One Billion Americans” and some other people from the Portfolio team. At the time, I kind of assumed I would see them again, but it turned out to be the only time we met.

On the evening of the 2nd, I met up with New York people for food and drinks at a restaurant in Chelsea. We sat indoors. It didn’t occur to me that over a year would pass without me doing that again.

And what’s interesting to me about all this is that it’s not like I was some kind of Covid denialist. In fact, I’d already gone on a huge Costco run to make sure my household was supplied to hunker down. I brought a pack of Clorox wipes with me to sanitize my seat on the train. I was nervous on the subway.

Journalistically, it was also a liminal space. Vox was covering the COVID-19 story, but just in our health and science team. The politics team was very focused on the Democratic primary. Right after my March 3 panel, I hopped on a train back to D.C. so I could get to the office to cover Super Tuesday with colleagues — again, the last time that we would do that.

And I think it’s important to look back on what “we” — both as individuals and as a collective — got wrong during this period to try to understand what we should think about going forward.

Excessive optimism or excessive pessimism?

A lot of people I’ve spoken to tell me that they experienced what was retrospectively-excessive optimism about the pandemic during this period.

If I try to look back at my texts and other documentary evidence, I would actually say that I was experiencing something closer to excessive pessimism. My view was that COVID-19, while a very serious problem, was not an apocalypse-scale health threat out of “The Stand,” and that basically it would blow through the country relatively quickly, kill millions of people, and then be done.

James Hamblin’s February 24 Atlantic article, “You Are Likely to Get The Coronavirus” was influential in my thinking. His basic points were that containment was very likely to fail because the SARS-Cov-2 virus wasn’t really deadly enough to stop people who had it from running around spreading it. And even a crash vaccination program wouldn’t be fast enough to stop the virus.

He quoted Marc Lipsitch, saying “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable,” and that 40 to 70% of the world population would get sick. I figured America is very plugged-in to global commerce, so we’d be in the high range of that, and one to two million people would die. I was nervous about getting sick personally, but also fatalistic about it and glad that there was no reason to think I was in any particularly high-risk categories.

Hamblin ended:

Italy, Iran, and South Korea are now among the countries reporting quickly growing numbers of detected COVID-19 infections. Many countries have responded with containment attempts, despite the dubious efficacy and inherent harms of China’s historically unprecedented crackdown. Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years. All of these measures come with risks of their own. Ultimately some pandemic responses will require opening borders, not closing them. At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned: The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem.  

That seemed about right to me. There would be sort of desperate, flailing efforts at containment that were simultaneously too harsh and also didn’t work.

Obviously, none of this was right!

The dictator didn’t show up

The really big meta-thing that I got wrong here is that I saw the United States as governed by a president with an authoritarian personality who led a political coalition disproportionately made up of elderly, and therefore vulnerable, people. Donald Trump was known to personally be germaphobic, but also I thought of rank-and-file conservatives as more attuned to external threat-type scenarios.

I thought Farhad Manjoo’s January 29 column “Beware the Pandemic Panic” was sort of wrong (I loved Kelsey Piper’s anti-anti-panicking piece in Vox), but I thought he had the politics of the argument correct, where restrictionism would be a right-wing thing.

A bit later, Jacobin ran a story about the situation in Italy, characterizing COVID-19 panic and travel restrictions as part of Italian far-right politics. I famously have sympathy for some right-wing authoritarian views like police departments should exist, so the fact that this was a right-wing idea didn’t necessarily trouble me as much as it troubled Jacobin. But I did see it as a right-wing idea. In early March, my then-colleague at Vox did a piece on “Your Rights in Quarantine” where, again, I think the implicit framing was that Vox’s audience of mostly liberal, college-educated professionals would be chafing against restrictions rather than railing against “covidiots” who opposed them.

Bob Kuttner wrote this in the American Prospect on March 2nd:

I give Trump about a week to do a 180-degree pivot away from virus denial, and toward martial law. He’s always wanted to be a full-on dictator. The virus gives him his opening. As clueless as he is, this will soon dawn on him.

I was not confident enough to write that take. But it struck me as a reasonable concern. You can pretty easily imagine a world where George Floyd dies on March 2, protests explode the next day, and then Trump and city police departments wield the threat of the pandemic to mobilize mainstream opinion in favor of a harsh crackdown on protestors.

To make a long story short, relative to my expectations a year ago, America came out of the pandemic pretty well:

We imposed more and longer-lasting restrictions on activity than I thought were feasible, and they proved fairly effective — by the time vaccines were developed, the vast majority of people had simply avoided infection.

The economic response to COVID-19, though chaotic, was broadly successful and made a reduced pace of economic activity tolerable.

The political response from the Trump administration was a total shitshow — endorsing the quack HCL cure, developing guidelines that he then cast aside, ignoring his own team — but it actually avoided the big thing I was worried about, namely that he’d use the pandemic as a pretext to stymie opposition politics.

Now obviously, if you compare the United States’ current situation to Australia instead of my expectations from a year ago, we look terrible. And I don’t think the “Australia is an island” excuse works, either. It’s simply not the case that COVID-19 came to the United States by sneaking over the land border with Mexico. Nor was there a logistical barrier to shutting down air travel between the United States and Europe. Instead, the kinds of travel bans that work were never considered, and we relied instead on the loophole-ridden ones that are ineffective.

But what my expectations missed, in essence, was the possibility of flattening the curve.

America flattened the curve

In retrospect, it clearly would have been preferable for the United States to do what Australia or Taiwan or Korea did and suppress the spread of the virus. Twelve months ago, I thought the only real alternative to that was a largely uncontrolled spread of the virus, while some people tried to shelter themselves personally.

But there turned out to be a third way that Americans were briefly united in enthusiasm — flattening the curve.

A March 19, a CNBC piece described curve-flattening like this: “A more gradual uptick of cases will see the same number of people get infected, but without overburdening the health-care system at any one time. The idea of flattening the curve is to stagger the number of new cases over a longer period, so that people have better access to care.”

That was the rhetorical turn the country took in March. Epidemiologists and science communicators conveyed to us that we could slow the spread of the virus and avoid overburdening hospitals, even if we didn’t ultimately reduce the number of cases.

Later, this was enhanced in some circles with the idea of “raising the line” to increase health system capacity.

Graphic from Vox titled "Raising the line while flattening the curb"

When I look back on the past year, I think a big thing that went awry is that at some point in the spring, conventional wisdom among the kind of people who originally spread these “flatten the curve” charts changed.

By late April, as Brian Kemp was lifting restrictions in Georgia, Amanda Mull described it as an “experiment in human sacrifice” — i.e., he was letting people get sick and die for the sake of economic growth.

Screenshot of headline "Georgia's experiment in human sacrifice," subtitled "The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives for the economy."

Everyone is entitled to a little over-the-top rhetoric in their headlines. But what I think is striking about that kind of criticism that got lobbed at Republican governors is that Kemp’s actions were completely consistent with “flatten the curve” logic. If there’s not a big outbreak, you can open up things and let cases rise so long as you don’t overburden the healthcare system, keeping the curve flat enough to not breach the line.

Then this is where Trump’s politics flew off the handle. Instead of trying to get everyone aligned around a set of metrics that would both validate Kemp’s opening and also specify a circuit breaker where you’d pull back, he started going all Covid-denialist. Blue states fundamentally were never on track for suppression (in part because even the most restrictive states like California didn't have enforceable rules against travel). But then somehow, even though both red states and blue states were essentially following the same curve-flattening strategy, it ended up being a huge, polarizing culture war. Then even worse, the most polarized aspect of the whole thing became masks — an intervention that’s great because the costs of compliance are incredibly low.

But we ended up in an absurd situation where Trump, instead of reiterating the curve-flattening logic, went full-on quack and denialist while refusing to model even slight gestures toward good behavior. The endgame was that while we ended up better than I’d expected, we did way worse with curve-flattening than Canada or Germany for no particular reason. Trump could’ve said that masks are good, and GOP governors could have encouraged some restraint over the holidays, and it would have saved a lot of lives.

At the same time, to this day I rarely see public health writers acknowledge that they — not Trump — initially described the purpose of social distancing measures as managing hospital capacity rather than suppressing the virus. When you look back and say “how is it that this was all less controversial back in late March of 2020?” the reason is that the stated strategy for fighting the virus was different!

We can do it!

If I could take a time machine back to February 2020 to speak to policymakers about getting a better outcome, I think I mostly wouldn't focus on prophecies of doom, nor would I try to get people to worry more about the coming pandemic.

What I would tell them instead is good news. Most of all, I would tell them something that I personally and the vast majority of the lay public had no knowledge of whatsoever: Modern technology for vaccine development has gotten dramatically better, and we’ll have three to six effective vaccines in the world within a year.

Reasoning backward from that insight, it would have made sense to put more emphasis on speedy data collection (human challenge trials) and redundant manufacturing capacity. If we’d been more optimistic about the science, we could have spent more on delivering its potential and gotten out of this jam even faster.

Similarly, if we’d been more optimistic in the spring about our ability to hold the economy together, it’s possible that Trump wouldn’t have gotten so panicky about reopening.

And if we’d been more optimistic about Georgia’s ability to open things up a bit without provoking an NYC-style meltdown, it’s possible that blue states wouldn’t have gotten so weird about restricting access to playgrounds and letting schools open (with masks, HEPA filters, open windows, etc.) in the fall.

Twelve months ago, I was too fatalistic, and I think that deep down so was a lot of the public health community. Then when the public health world got more optimistic, Trump and the right turned too pessimistic. But if he’d put his energy into pushing the envelope on vaccines while being compliant on masks rather than vice versa, he could have emerged from this whole thing as a huge hero.