In early 2020, our federal government failed us in both ways. There was no sensible discussion of the history of pandemics, and no procedure to test for the new plague. In January, it failed to do what was so obviously necessary: acquire a test for the new coronavirus and apply it on a massive scale in the United States. The president’s administration had disbanded the sections of the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security meant to deal with epidemics, as well as a special unit in the Agency for International Development that was meant to predict them. American health experts had been withdrawn from the rest of the world. The last officer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assigned to China was called back to the United States in July 2019, a few months before the epidemic began.
The president had overseen budget cuts for institutions responsible for public health, and in early 2020 announced his intention to cut them again. As the year began, Americans were denied the basic knowledge they needed to make decisions on their own, or to press their government to take action. On February 1st, the surgeon general of the United States tweeted “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Risk is low for #coronavirus / But high for the flu.” Since we were not testing, he had no idea what he was talking about.
In January and February 2020, the novel coronavirus spread silently through the country. During those two essential months, when the mathematics of contagion demanded an urgent response, and when testing and contact tracing could have contained the epidemic, we did less than nothing. Mr. Trump praised himself while ignoring the warnings he was given. On January 24th, he praised China for its response to the coronavirus: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” On February 7th, he renewed his praise: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.”
When Americans known to be infected were evacuated from a cruise ship in February, they were flown back to the United States on an airplane with hundreds of other people who were not yet infected. The people infected en route then scattered freely throughout the country. This indefensible sloppiness by the federal government guaranteed that the disease would spread. As February came to an end, Mr. Trump spoke of a “miracle” that would save us: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
The secretary of commerce predicted that the virus would bring jobs to the United States, while his department arranged for American manufacturers to sell protective medical masks to China. In fact, tens of millions of jobs disappeared, American unemployment rates reached highs not seen since the Great Depression, and shortages of masks cost American lives. On February 24th, Mr. Trump insisted that the coronavirus was “under control.” This was not true. In early March he said that anyone who wanted a test could get tested. That was a lie. By the end of February, the United States had tested only three hundred and fifty-two people, about as many as the graduating senior class in the high school down the block from my house. South Korea had by then tested seventy-five thousand people.
The time lost in stupefaction and mendacity, the first two months of 2020, could never be regained. By the end of April, South Korea was down to fewer than ten new cases a day, while the United States had more than twenty-five thousand new cases a day. At the end of April twice as many people had died in the Connecticut county where I am recuperating (population less than one million) than in the entire country of South Korea (population fifty-two million). By the end of May three times as many people had died in New Haven County than in all of South Korea. This was no fluke. The seven American counties with the most covid deaths would now rank among the top twenty countries. These are the simple truths.
Since the truth sets you free, the people who oppress you resist the truth. In any catastrophe, especially one of their own making, tyrants will find a mixture of blaming others and excusing themselves that includes an enticing element of what we want to hear. In early 2020, people naturally wanted to hear that there was no coronavirus in the United States. But we cannot be free and deluded. History remembers the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain unkindly because he told his people what they wanted to hear in 1938: that there need be no war. History remembers Winston Churchill kindly because he told the British what they needed to hear: that Hitler had to be stopped.
Before I got sick I was reading The Lord of the Rings to my son and daughter. A noble character in Tolkien’s saga, the wizard Gandalf, is a teller of unwanted truths. He has great powers, but cannot save the world by himself. His task is to build a coalition by convincing others of the reality of a threat. Time after time, Gandalf is ignored by the less wise, scorned as a bearer of bad news. In the story, as in life, people choose ignorance to supply themselves with an excuse for submission: how could we have known, what could we have done? This is one way to be human, but it is no way to be free. Gandalf finally retorts that without knowledge freedom has no chance. People lose life and liberty if they cannot identify a threat and make preparations. Not wanting to know means asking for oppression. Not wanting to know about disease means asking politicians to surveil your body, and to manipulate you with the emotions that accompany mass death.
The truth takes work. Facts do not often line up with what we believe, want to believe, or are led to believe. Facts are what we apprehend when we place ourselves at the right distance between our emotions and the world around us. Getting to the facts always requires some labor, work that the people at the top of the federal government chose not to do. It would have taken just a bit of effort, and just a bit of courage, to admit that there was a problem, and to organize tests and tracing. Since these were lacking, a hundred and fifty thousand Americans died needlessly.
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A test for a disease reflects knowledge of a microbe and of our bodies. When we test we extend factuality into the world, one person at a time. The knowledge that arises from a test is about you and the world. It is shared: you know what the test takers know. Had we tested Americans in early 2020, we would have spread factuality into our country, and given doctors and everyone else a sense of what to do.
Mr. Trump proclaimed that he understood the mysteries of the world, promised Americans a miracle, and hawked eye of newt. He promoted hydroxychloroquine without basis; it was associated with higher death rates in patients, and seems to have killed a number of veterans to whom it was administered. A federal official who quite properly questioned the allocation of taxpayer money to it was fired. Another who reported shortages in needed equipment was also fired. This is how tyranny works: the truth tellers are banished as the sycophants huddle close. Mr. Trump then wondered aloud whether Americans should inject themselves with disinfectants.
We did not test for coronavirus for a reason that has been understood for thousands of years, at least since Plato. No one likes bad news; an unchecked ruler never hears what he should from his yes-men; he then projects fictions, which he may actually believe, upon everyone else. This leads to suffering and death, which means more bad news, and so the cycle starts again. Once Mr. Trump made it clear that his priority was to see low counts of infected Americans, the simplest way to please the tyrant was not to count. On March 6th, Mr. Trump said that he preferred to leave infected Americans on a cruise ship because “I would rather—because I like the numbers being where they are—I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” Two months and tens of thousands of needless deaths later, Mr. Trump still evinced the same attitude: “by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad.” On June 15th, Mr. Trump proclaimed, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” Five days later he praised himself for an order to “slow the testing down.”