Meet the Villain That Ignited a U.S. Pandemic

Roger LeBlanc (for Welcome To Fakeville!)

Many U.S. leaders deserve blame for turning the COVID-19 epidemic into a pandemic. The CDC botched testing-kit development. The President screwed up international travel restrictions. Governors responded too slowly and incrementally.

Top medical and political officials prefer to deflect that blame or, even worse, defend their mishandling of the situation. And that has led to a parallel pandemic of myth:

• “It’s like the flu.”
• “It only kills old people.”
• “The death rate is bad only in countries with poor healthcare systems.”

Myths like these obstruct solutions to the medical emergency we face. And one bad actor perpetrated them all: innumeracy.

John Allen Paulos popularized the term innumeracy in 1988 with the publication of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. In his book Paulos cites numerous examples of poor government policy enacted because policymakers failed to understand simple math.

Thirty years later innumeracy wanders unobstructed through this COVID-19 tragedy, finding ways to make it worse. Innumeracy goads people to laugh at those wearing masks or gloves. It demands people take insult when someone requests further separation. It chuckles as swaths of potential victims latch onto false comparisons.

Although there’s plenty of blame to go around, for illustration purposes let’s slam the buck down on President Trump’s desk for a few paragraphs:

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.” President Trump, January 22, 2020

With no testing or contact tracing in place at the time, nobody could know the number of infected people in the U.S. A back-of-the-envelope calculation using the transmission rate and number of people the patient had recent contact with gets you part way to an educated guess of total infected people. Hint: the number is much larger than 1.

“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus [sic], with 22 deaths. Think about that!” President Trump, March 9, 2020 tweet

Yes, let’s really think about that.

The President compares apples to oranges here:

• The flu is a pervasive illness most Americans are exposed to. Last year’s statistics related to it are final. We know what happened with 100% of reported cases.
• Coronavirus is a novel virus. Rather than capturing the virus’ effect over a full year, the statistics he quoted capture less than two months’ of activity. And because outcomes are unknown for two to four weeks, on March 9 we knew outcomes only from COVID-19’s first month here and only from 38 states. COVID-19, as well as the President’s logic, had yet to make its full rounds. In the following week, the number of U.S. cases doubled and spread to the remaining 12 states.

According to Trump’s own reportage, the U.S. went from “one person coming in from China” to 546 confirmed cases in 47 days. Anybody with a basic understanding of numbers — say, a person qualified to be President — would’ve recognized that the statistics within their own statements demanded immediate action:

• A 500% increase in cases (from 1 to 546)
• A 12% fatality rate in cases old enough to be resolved by death or recovery (22 deaths out of about 180 cases older than four weeks)
• A fatality rate so much higher than the flu’s 0.5% rate that all policy decisions based on comparisons to the flu should cease (as should all public statements mentioning the flu)

Instead, on March 24 the President announced he wants to open up the economy again. He declared the worst is over even as the New York Times reported the number of cases is doubling every three days in NY State. Other leaders at the state and national level echo Trump’s sentiment that “We shouldn’t let the cure be worse than the problem.”

Trump and those agreeing with him will certainly get their wish. Prematurely backing off on efforts to control the virus guarantees the problem will remain much worse than the cure.

But don’t take my word for it, take a good look at the still-increasing numbers. And trace the bloody tracks of innumeracy as it races unchecked across a nation fatally attracted to myth.

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