Bringing on the second wave

We're number one!  With over forty thousand dead, the US is now the world leader in covid-19 mortality, having probably overtaken China's actual death toll, never mind the absurdly-low figures admitted by the regime there.  Some countries such as Italy and Spain have had more deaths relative to population, but at least they've managed to "flatten the curve" and bring the pandemic under some degree of control.

But haven't we?  Probably not, and there's no way to be sure.  The amount of testing being done in the US is so grossly inadequate that the official figure for total infections -- about 800,000 as of today -- is completely meaningless.  There could be millions.  There probably are.  In a few locations where social distancing has been extremely strict, the rate of deaths (somewhat easier to measure accurately) appears to be slowing, which suggests that the tough measures are working there -- but for the country as a whole, we simply don't know.

And even though the first wave of the pandemic is nowhere near being under control, a combination of mass public stupidity and Republican malevolence is already about to trigger the second.

Trump has repeatedly minimized the problem and ignored the experts to insist that precautions need to be relaxed so the economy can start growing again.  Republican state governors have followed suit by rolling back such precautions or, in some states, not implementing them in the first place.  Many churches around the country have defied closure orders and made themselves into amplifiers for the pandemic.  The spring-breakers who flooded Florida's beaches before they were closed seem to have started several outbreaks of infection in the places they went back home to.

The latest wrinkle is a series of small, astroturfed protests in the capital cities of states with strong lockdown policies.  Given the crowded conditions at these events, they'll likely lead to new infection clusters in the places these wingnuts go back home to, just as the spring-break crowds did.  And the intent is to create the illusion of a wave of mass support for relaxing precautions, even though in fact Americans overwhelmingly oppose doing so.  It's a massive slap in the face to the health-care workers whose hard work and sacrifice have managed to achieve whatever progress has been made.

At least a third of our country's population labors under the mental sway of decades of militant anti-intellectualism and science-denial emanating from fundamentalist pulpits and right-wing fake-media propaganda outlets.  With their president, their red-state governors, and their pastors all chivvying them along, they are not going to listen to Dr. Fauci or the scientific establishment.  They'll go back to church, back to the beaches, back to everything else they're so furious about having to stay home from.  It's already starting to happen.  And among those populations, the pandemic will explode.

Most other advanced nations don't suffer from this problem to anything like the same degree because, to be blunt, they have less religion, better education, and a greater deference to expertise.  I know it's contrary to the American character to be deferential to anything, and by and large this is a positive trait -- but in dealing with a biological crisis, it's just a matter of common sense to recognize that people with years of medical or scientific training and experience understand the problem better than preachers, politicians, or businessmen.

This must-read post by David Frum lays out the Republican strategy.  Their hope is that they can re-open the economy (and thus improve their chances in this year's election) while mostly limiting the resulting rise in deaths to the poorest working-class element of the population whose jobs put them at the most risk of infection -- people who don't vote Republican anyway, largely belong to minority groups, and are deemed expendable.  Those workers, after all, will be the easiest to force back to work because they have the least resources.  Limit the benefits available to the unemployed, and they'll have no choice.

It won't work.  First, if these wealthy parasites think that a bunch of janitors and meat-packers and warehouse workers aren't smart enough to figure out they're being sacrificed on the altar of the stock-market Moloch, they've got another think coming.  They will figure it out right away and there will be strikes and mass demands for safer conditions.  It's already happening at places like Amazon.  Normally, in a time of high unemployment, such workers would simply be replaced -- but that's going to be harder when the job comes with the serious risk of a horrible death by disease.

Second, it's not going to be possible to confine the rising death toll to those groups.  It's the fundie and Trumpanzee masses who genuinely refuse to recognize the reality of the covid-19 threat and refuse to take precautions against it.  They're the ones who are behaving in ways that will expose them to infection in the second wave, and will grow more emboldened to do so by the rhetoric and actions of Trump and other Republican leaders -- and the rural population skews older and less healthy than the urban.  Given the incubation period of the virus, they will spread it among themselves for some number of weeks before the resulting rise in symptomatic infections becomes visible enough to warn them of the danger -- and by then it will be too late.  Especially if they continue to resist social distancing and lockdowns out of stubbornness, covid-19 will "wash over" the deep South and rural America, while the blue cities tighten up their precautions to minimize viral spill-over from the affected regions.  The death toll could even reach into the millions as earlier worst-case scenarios projected.

Frum says that Trump's fall-back plan for this eventuality is to inflame the culture wars so as to re-direct his followers' anger toward his opponents.  I don't think that will work either.  It's true that Trump's talent for blame-shifting, and the stupidity of fundamentalists, have both tended to exceed expectations at every turn -- but the second wave in red America will simply be too devastating, and too obviously linked to the premature relaxation of precautions, for the usual bullshit to work.  Yes, the Trumpanzees have stood by their man through endless outrages, but those outrages have almost all involved inflicting pain on somebody else -- immigrant children, gays, minorities, women who need abortions -- and, if anything, they voted for him because they expected him to hurt the people they hate.  They haven't yet been through a situation where they themselves suffer mass misery and death because of his incompetence and cruelty.

And as icing on the cake, all of this will not do much to re-start the economy.  The stupid people may be a third of the population, but they don't generate anything like a third of the economic output.  The mostly-blue cities are the engines of the economy, along with the states they dominate politically.  If the west coast and the northeast, Chicago and Dallas and Atlanta and Miami, remain locked down, the national economy is not going to recover.  If anything, as Dr. Fauci recently warned, premature relaxation of precautions will delay economic recovery.  Certainly the cities will not re-open as long as the second wave of the pandemic is on the rampage outside the gates.

Natural selection still works -- on people stupid enough to let it.