What if COVID were 10 times less deadly? Asking the right question about the pandemic
The internet groaned last week under the weight of a hypothetical question posed by a New York Times columnist: What if COVID were 10 times more deadly?
The best that can be said for this question is that it raises a more relevant and realistic one: What if COVID were 10 times less deadly? That’s the question that should be guiding our pandemic policy and politics, but California and the country keep asking the other one — the wrong one.
The first befuddling riddle was presented by columnist Ross Douthat as a “counterfactual” effectively imploring us to reframe about 680,000 reported American COVID deaths, more than a tenth of them in California, as not so bad. After all, it could have been worse!
Sure, according to one recent attempt to arrive at the global toll by measuring “excess mortality” against a pre-pandemic baseline, the coronavirus has likely killed over 6 million people worldwide in less than two years. But apparently, we’re supposed to be relieved that it wasn’t the medieval Black Death, which killed over 10 times more.
It’s an argument frivolous and flexible enough to minimize any disaster — even if it’s the worst pandemic in a century or more, and even if much of the American carnage could have been prevented by a degree of political competence approaching our vast material and scientific resources.
Unlike the counterfactual first question, the second has the virtue of reflecting an actual fact for many of our fellow humans. No country has lost 10 or even five times as many people per capita to the pandemic as the United States. But plenty lost 10 times fewer.
That’s putting it mildly. The study of global excess deaths by researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Tübingen in Germany, taking advantage of a data set that is often more reliable than official COVID counts, found that several countries suffered fewer losses during the pandemic than they normally do — probably because their precautions prevented deaths not only from COVID but also from influenza and other causes. In societies as divergent as South Korea, Australia and Norway, excess mortality was therefore a negative number.
By this measure, these places managed the pandemic not just 10 times better than the United States but infinitely so.
That California is a relatively safe state in a dangerous country was a point of increasingly outspoken pride for Gov. Gavin Newsom as he approached his decisive victory over the recent recall attempt. The state’s weekly death rate has dropped to the lowest nationwide, and California has lost about 15% fewer people to COVID as a share of its population than the national average over the course of the pandemic.
But while not even Mississippi, the most devastated state, suffered twice as many deaths per capita as California, half a dozen others, including Oregon, lost only half as many. California’s toll is more than twice the apparent global average and, like the country’s, 10 or more times worse than the most effective national responses.
So, yes, it could have been worse, but it could have been much better.
And yet the recall campaign, like much of the country’s politics and punditry, persisted in posing precisely the wrong question. Newsom’s foremost challengers opposed precautions such as mask and vaccine mandates, making the counterfactual and counter-moral argument that the governor had prevented too many deaths. No wonder Newsom embraced his anti-pandemic policies more wholeheartedly than ever as the recall attempt came crashing to its pointless conclusion.
The could-be-worse crowd couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to press their backward case. By most counts, the COVID death toll just overtook the 1918 flu, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, to become the deadliest infectious disease in U.S. history. Judging by the excess mortality study, which figured the actual U.S. toll to be about 10% greater than the official count, the pandemic is close to out-killing the Civil War, the worst American mass casualty event of any kind.
As a share of the U.S. and global population, which was much smaller in 1918, the Spanish flu is the only such event of the past two centuries that really was worse — more than 10 times worse, actually. The difference is that the great influenza took its toll at a time when scientists had barely identified a virus, let alone dreamed of a rapidly deployed mRNA vaccine.
Also unlike COVID, the Spanish flu pandemic is mercifully behind us even as the coronavirus continues to unnecessarily end the lives of thousands of Americans and scores of Californians each day. Thanks in part to those intent on pointing out that we could have lost more rather than fewer, what could be worse is in fact getting worse.