A Rebuttal to the Trump Administration’s Dangerous Claim that COVID-19 is “Low Risk”
Note to Reader: I wrote this article in Early March 2020, when donald j. trump and his administration were widely promoting the idea that COVID-19 is “low risk”. Based on input from colleagues in Italy, it was clear that this was a falsehood. Recently, reporting from Journalist Bob Woodward clearly documents that the president and his administration KNEW WELL how high a risk SARS-CoV-2 was posing to the United States. But even more striking, the president of the United States clearly admitted to Mr. Woodward that he was going to “downplay the risk”. His justification for lying to America? He did not want to “cause a panic”. In legal terms, even an amateur observer of the law will immediately recognize that the president’s behavior represents criminal negligence — causing mass scale death of Americans. (Update: 9/10/20, as America has lost over 191,000 citizens to COVID-19).
I’ve heard it said, including by the president of the United States and his representatives at the CDC and within the Department of Health and Human Services, that “the risk of COVID-19 is LOW”.
This is a dangerous position to take — because it is causing inadequate vigilance, by nearly 50% of the American population who seem to have faith in their current federal government, about what is almost certain to be an evolving, but real, catastrophic risk.
So, I hope I can convey a few points that might help frame the actions we need to take with urgency.
While it is true that a 1–2% mortality risk from this virus means that the vast majority of people who contract the virus will NOT die, and that this mortality incidence is on par with that caused by the Flu virus, the comparison between COVID-19 and the Flu are dangerously inaccurate for three reasons:
1) Unlike with the Flu virus, we do not have a vaccine or a specific medication, like Tamiflu, to mitigate against the mortality risk posed by COVID-19 — however “low” it might be. This means we cannot really prevent it using any existing medical means. We can only try to contain it or deal with it when it hits our persons and communities.
2) Whereas in the year 2020, the Flu virus is endemic to the human immune system and to most regions of the world, COVID-19 is NOT. So, a far greater absolute number of people around the planet, including in the US, are highly likely to be susceptible to this new virus than they are to the Flu. By logical extension, if a far larger absolute number of people could contract the disease because it is a new virus, a 1–2% mortality rate for COVID-19 can kill a lot more people, numerically, than the Flu does by the time it is done spreading. As an apt analogy, think about why pathogens that were endemic to the “Old world” ended up wiping out vast numbers of native Americans when the European migration to the American continent started: the European immune system could tolerate the pathogen load and fight it off, because these bugs were endemic to Europe, but not to the native “New World” population. Additionally, there’s this superficial thought out there that the Flu kills over 20,000 people in the US every year, whereas COVID-19 has ONLY killed a few hundred 100 people worldwide, so it can’t be as bad — and that the whole thing must be blown out of proportion by a media gone mad. This is a profoundly dangerous downplay and conflation of the emerging risk of this virus….Because it does not allow for the FACT that COVID-19 is an evolving infectious disease that could easily turn into an exponentially (or logarithmically) growing viral pandemic, as it is showing itself capable of being in Northern Italy (see caption image), potentially affecting billions of people on all continents; whereas the Flu progresses on a nearly linear and plateaued seasonal incidence around the world..
3) All the arguments made to dampen the potential threat posed by COVID-19 essentially follow three lines of thought: a) utilitarian, b)political, or c) irrationally optimistic. The “utilitarian argument” states that the majority of people with COVID-19 will NOT die, only 1–2% will — and those who do die, are unhealthy to begin with anyway. The “political argument” states that the whole COVID-19 “hysteria” is caused by “media hype” — almost insinuating a sinister motive of the press to mislead the people, as the current POTUS has dangerously implanted in many an American consciousness. Finally, the “irrationally optimistic argument” wants to close its eye to this risk, because accepting the reality of this risk would create inconvenience to the already busy and complex day-to-day lives we live. The down-players of this risk, use one or all three of these arguments to negate the potentially catastrophic risk of COVID-19. But in the end, all three of these arguments, which are being used by about 50% of the population (it seems, nearly perfectly along party lines, as is the case with the debate over climate change), will lead to one dangerous place: “AN ASSUMPTION OF BENIGNITY” about COVID-19.
As I think about this problem, I am struck by how so many friends, neighbors and loved ones in America are unable to critically think about the nature of “rare but catastrophic risks”, in general. Or, how to think about emerging varieties of any particular threats of this nature (i.e., “rare but catastrophic risk”), to human life.
Thank God our civilization in 2020 seems only to have to deal with mostly “RARE” catastrophic risks. What a testament to the success of our utilitarian socio-political constructs and culture!
But let’s hope that we don’t become victims of our own wild success in the 21st Century!
I leave you with this thought, if you are a friend or reader who knows the story of my family’s fight for public health in the face of a “rare, but catastrophic risk”: Simply making the ASSUMPTION that COVID-19 is “no big deal”, or that it is a “relatively benign” and “low risk” problem, or that it is a product of “media hype”, is as serious an error in judgement, as is the ASSUMPTION Gynecologists make about uterine fibroid tumors in women being benign, when they use Laparoscopic Power Morcellators that cause catastrophic dissemination of cancerous cells in women.
I hope the reader can trust that I’ve thought quite critically about such risks, “rare, but catastrophic”!
