Tuesday: Numbers. This is the 54th day of our family’s quarantine, the 51st day I’ve posted.
The Girlfriend, The Kid, and I have all been sick (with something; we don’t know what — The Girlfriend had her blood tested this week, so we should know soon if she has antibodies developed in response to the virus — if we can trust the results). During these 54 days, New York City has become the world’s epicenter: more than 173,000 cases; more than 43,000 in the hospital; more than 19,000 dead. Numbers.
Fifty-four days ago you could call Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, book an appointment for the next day, even the next hour. Now the cemetery is holding more than a dozen funerals a day; it’s booked for weeks. Funeral homes are turning down cremations. (One, out in Flatlands, got shut down for storing 60 bodies in four trucks, one unrefrigerated.) Near the cemetery, at the end of 39th Street, on the pier out past the Costco, the city has installed a bunch of freezer trucks: an emergency morgue. Unclaimed bodies are still being shipped to mass graves on Hart Island.
Numbers. Each day, I tally the numbers of new Covid-19 cases in the state of New York, as well as the number of those killed by the virus, both in New York State and in the United States. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed the percentage of cases and deaths in New York declining, the number of U.S. dead rising.
Some social media friends don’t believe it. A media hoax, they say. A plot to create a socialist government. A ploy to inoculate us. Don’t be sheeple, they say. Do your own research.
I venture down a rabbit hole. “Why did Obama give the Wuhan lab $334 million dollars?” asks a high school classmate, among a list of 33 questions meant to unsettle. (“Why not question everything? … I don’t care if your Republican or Democrat, if your not asking these questions you should.”)
OK: Listen up, sheeple. For context, it helps to know that Trump and the GOP have settled (for now) on a re-election strategy designed to salvage not just the presidency but Mitch McConnell’s control of the Senate. That’s tough in the face of a mishandled pandemic, devastated economy, and likely hundreds of thousands of dead. The gist: Blame China; blame the WHO; blame Democrats; sow confusion about Trump’s role.
It also helps to know that Trump’s strategy from the jump has been to gut government agencies of knowledgable staffers who might a). be a source for news of discomfort to him; b). complicate or block the grifts of him and his friends. (Michael Lewis wrote a book about it.)
Our Wuhan lab story is a tiny piece of that. For two decades, the National Institutes of Health (which funds $32 billion a year in international biomedical research) has funded through grants a New York-based research organization called the EcoHealth Alliance, which studies infectious diseases caused by interactions between animals and humans. The Alliance’s partnership list is extensive; its board and staff impressive; its charity rating stellar. Their two main aims: promote conservation; prevent pandemics.
One of the Alliance’s areas of study: connections between bat species that host viruses with a close genetic relationship to the coronavirus associated with the viral illness SARS (8,000 infected in 26 countries in 2003, 774 dead). In 2014 the NIH provided a $3.4 million, five-year grant for the Alliance to collaborate with researchers at, among other places, the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study bat coronaviruses. The project generated 20 scientific reports on the risks of coronavirus transfer to humans. The Wuhan Institute got a maximum of $600,000 to collect and analyze viral samples. (Other groups to get grant funds included institutes in Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore.)
“The reason we do this work is to protect public health,” the Alliance’s president told USA Today. “The viruses that are a high risk to public health are not in the U.S., they are in China. If we want to know anything about the next pandemic, we need to be working in the countries where these viruses are.”
The NIH last summer re-approved another five-year Alliance grant, which was to send another $76,000 to the Wuhan Institute.
The seed of my social media friend's claim? On April 11, the U.K.’s Daily Mail, citing unnamed “senior [British] government sources,” reported that the Wuhan Institute had been conducting research on mammals and that the virus may have leaked from there. (The Daily Mail is unreliable at best; no credible information of such a leak exists.)
Two days later, GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump favorite, tweeted the news, then repeated it on Fox, linking Wuhan and the Obama administration. On April 17, a reporter from right-wing Newsmax asked Trump about the grant, which Trump said he would cancel. (“Who was president then, I wonder?” Trump mused.)
On April 21, GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, accusing the Chinese government of covering up the virus’s origins: “This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure, but it all points toward the Wuhan labs.”
On April 26, Rudy Giuliani tweeted about it.
Trump has mastered this crude but effective propaganda technique. Stamping out the lies is about as effective as whack-a-mole. We’ll be hearing about Biden’s (and Schumer’s and Pelosi’s) links to China through the fall.
None of the dynamics underpinning such stories will go away soon, including if Trump loses. The disinformation machine has been churning for 30 years, fueled by the economic success of right-wing radio and Fox News. They’ve been joined by the likes of Sinclair Broadcast Group and Herring Networks (owner of Trump favorite OAN), along with dozens of digital outlets, now fueled by social media acolytes. The politicians and consultants working on this type of campaign won’t go away after 2020.
I’ll post this entry as a response to my social media friend, but I’m under no illusion it’ll make a difference. (The Girlfriend says every such gesture wastes valuable time and energy; I reassure her I wouldn’t investigate all 33 of my friend’s questions.) The right-wing disinformation bubble is, if not hermetically sealed, resistant to perforation. Thus the grotesque gaps between Republicans and the rest of us about whether to end social isolation.
Meanwhile, governors are ending quarantines even as the virus sickens and kills more. (Look at U.S. stats if you remove New York City from recent trend lines.) We’re sending more workers, mostly poor and people of color, to be “sacrificial.” The administration continues to combine graft and incompetence in ways that sicken (literally). The fight against government disinformation spreads to states like Arizona. The virus proves wily.
The upshot: I feel enraged. Empty. I don’t know why I’m writing. I don’t know why it matters. Though I appreciate them, virtual back pats, likes, the new “huggy” emoji leave me unconsoled.
I check email before I go to sleep: a mistake. The New York City Teaching Fellows has sent a group email. The program for this summer — my new job, involving a summer of intensive training, then an almost certain hire at a public school in the fall — is canceled. “Difficult news.” “Crisis is having a profound impact.” “Expected hiring restrictions.” They’ll prioritize the 2020 cohort’s applications to future programs. “We wish you strength.”
My unemployment extension ends in July. Then what? A fifth of the nation is unemployed. I’ve watched my two chosen professions — journalism and public higher education — gutted over the past three decades; now, with public K-12 education headed to the chopping block, this is the third job I’ve had swept from beneath me. I’m not asking for pity; I need a job.
(New York state numbers on Tuesday: 321,092 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.7 percent; 230 dead, to a total of 19,645 up 1.2 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,457, to a total of 65,050, up 3.9 percent.)
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