I'm sorry, this dumb article awoke something in me and I had to fisk it.
On Wednesday, the United States set a devastating new record in the coronavirus pandemic:
3,124 people dead in one day.
I guess "devastating new record" is the new "grim milestone?"
On an average day, we lose 1,795 people to heart disease and 1,642 to cancer. So does that mean COVID is worse than either of them? This isn't an average COVID day. Although we have less than a year of data, COVID deaths appear to be seasonal, hitting heavier when there is less sterilizing UV radiation, less vitamin D-forming sunlight, and more people staying inside with each other rather than going out. I would accuse the writer of cherry-picking, but they were handed this datum on a plate, so they didn't even have to put that much effort into it.
This was the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded 3,000, but it's the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded a dark benchmark that so many people have invoked, over and over again, since the beginning of the pandemic:
It's more people lost in one day to COVID-19 than were lost in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
To be a little more precise, it's 1.05 9/11s. But the 9/11 is the wrong unit to use. It wasn't designed for this, it was designed to measure sudden and violent deaths of working people. COVID mostly kills elderly people. The impact of their death is much less than a 9/11 death, and on an individual scale they are missing out on less life than a person who is murdered in their 30s. If an 85-year-old retiree dies, it is a tragedy for the family and he misses out on a few rounds of canasta with the boys. If a 30 year old fire department lieutenant dies, the operations of a vital emergency service are diminished and he loses a good 40-50 years of life. If you scale that up over thousands, the effect is even more pronounced. The 9/11 is just completely inappropriate here.
There's been criticism from various corners of those who make this comparison, but it's understandable why it comes so readily to mind. The startling juxtaposition is meant to jar people out of the tendency to let all those COVID-19 deaths become a faceless statistic. The idea is to get people to take the virus seriously, since it's far more likely to kill you than a random attack by terrorists.
The probability that the virus will kill me is very low, because its fatal mechanisms don't operate very well in a person my age. And that's not just a theory: we have a sample of millions, and we can estimate the probability that a person from any given cohort will die of COVID-19, and for me it's very low. We have no idea what the probability of death by random terrorist is, because such things are planned in secret (and usually not random). We can't estimate the probability that an unknown person will attack an unknown target at an unknown time using unknown means for an unknown reason.
But there's a political side to this, as well: Liberals or leftists who draw this comparison are trying to draw attention to conservative hypocrisy. The Republicans who are pooh-poohing mask-wearing and social distancing are the very same Republicans whose panicked and partisan overreaction to 9/11 led us into two disastrous wars.
The reaction to 9/11 was not partisan. In any case, it was appropriate for the Federal government to have
a reaction to 9/11, because national defense is a Federal responsibility. Things like how close people stand to each other and what accessories they wear are not. The Federal government's only roles in the pandemic should be protecting the Federal workforce, Armed Forces, and veterans; defending the borders; and deposing governors who infringe on Constitutionally-protected rights like the free exercise of religion.
If the deaths of 2,977 people in one day from a terrorist attack was so world-changing , why do conservatives refuse to treat the death toll of this pandemic seriously? As difficult as this is to process, the coronavirus has killed nearly 100 times as many people as died on 9/11.
I think we treat it more seriously than this guy does.
The answer, unfortunately, is because of the American culture war, which is getting uglier and more uncontrollable all the time. While the right used to mock "identity politics," the tribal sense of identity among conservatives seems to trump all other considerations these days.
I see what you did there. And no, "conservative" isn't a tribal identity or an idpol wedge. We aren't conservative because we belong to a group. We have conservative inclinations and tend to group together.
Enough of this stupidity. Hat me.
www.foxnews.com
