A little night music

It turns out that pretty much the only two variables that mean anything in regard to how bad the COVID pandemic becomes within a particular nation are the age of the population, and the level of social trust found in that nation, particularly towards the nation’s government:

When it comes to deaths caused by infections, no single variable explains everything, or even all that much, with the exception of age. The coronavirus strikes the old with particular viciousness, and so the age of a population explains 47 percent of the variation in fatality ratios between countries. This helps explain why richer countries have seen a disproportionate number of deaths: Richer countries are older.

But age was alone in its ability to predict fatality rates. Nothing else — not body mass index, not smoking, not air pollution, not cancer prevalence, not universal health care, not hospital beds — explained very much.

More unexpected was what the researchers found when they looked at the factors that predicted how many people got infected. Some of the obvious candidates — population density, G.D.P. per capita, and exposure to past coronaviruses — failed to predict much in the way of outcomes. But both trust in government and trust in fellow citizens proved potent.

This yields the paper’s most striking finding: Moving every country up to the 75th percentile in trust in government — that’s where Denmark sits — would have prevented 13 percent of global infections. Moving every country to the 75th percentile of trust in their fellow citizens — roughly South Korea’s level — would have prevented 40 percent of global infections.

“When confronted with a novel, contagious virus the best way for governments to protect their citizens is to convince them to take the measures to protect themselves,” Bollyky said. “Especially in free societies the success of that effort depends on trust — trust between citizens and their government, and trusts between citizens themselves.”

That’s Ezra Klein in the New York Times, and naturally the rest of his 2,000-word piece goes on to excoriate the Republican party for spending decades destroying trust in government, undermining belief in science, poisoning the airwaves with lies . . . just kidding folks!

You all know Ezra better than that. He’s gonna both sides this baby if it takes using the pundit equivalent of the Jaws of Life to pry some kind of bizarro world non-partisan conclusion out of the tangled wreck of our present circumstances.

Thus our friend the Republican party doesn’t show up at all until the 25th graph, and then only in such an innocuous guise that you might be excused for failing to recognize the entity he’s describing:

There are lots of policy recommendations that work to curb the coronavirus: Masking, social distancing, vaccinations, testing, quarantining and so on. But for any of them to work, they need to be followed. This has been, certainly, the Biden administration’s insuperable challenge. It can make vaccines available, but they can’t make people take them. They can make masks available, but they can’t make people wear them. The context for the Biden administration’s entire response was a Republican Party divided over the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and aware that the road to 2024 ran through opposition to Biden’s coronavirus policies.

The Republican Party is not in any meaningful sense “divided over the legitimacy of the 2020 election.” I mean Jesus jumping Christ on a pogo stick, is Ezra Klein keeping up with current events? The Republican National Committee just issued a Maoist-style purge and renunciation of the two (2) Republican members of the House of Representatives who aren’t going along with Donald Trump’s fantastical lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Trumps rejects that legitimacy categorically, which in turn requires the Republican party to reject the election’s legitimacy categorically, because Donald Trump controls the Republican party.

I mean obviously Klein knows all this, but apparently it’s part of his employment contract to present a profoundly bowdlerized GOP, in which Liz Cheney is just as important a member of that party as Donald Trump, the dozens of psychopaths who make up the Freedom Caucus, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, etc. etc. etc. That’s your “division” right there!

Oh it gets better:

So what if you assume political polarization and media disinformation are here to stay, and you need to work around them, rather than ignoring them?

Note that this sentence is almost the only series of words in this entire (long) piece that even gestures at acknowledging why Americans have such low levels of social trust compared to civilized countries. But apparently at bottom it’s just this inexplicable thing that happens to be in our national air, like too much pollen or something.

I bet you’ll never guess Klein’s answer to his own question:

When you reframe the question, other possibilities reveal themselves. As an example: Only 36 percent of Republicans trust Anthony Fauci. I think the Republican campaign against him has been largely unfair, [seriously Ezra?] but that he is particularly polarizing among the people the Biden administration most needs to reach is simply a fact, and one it has chosen to ignore. Perhaps new voices were needed, including high-profile ones chosen for their appeal to those most inclined to doubt Biden and avoid vaccination.

Klein is no dummy, so shirley he’s perfectly well aware that Anthony Fauci — someone that maybe .01% of Americans had even heard of 24 months ago — has been demonized for reasons that have exactly nothing to do with anything about Fauci himself, and that literally anybody else in Fauci’s position would have been smeared in exactly the same way, and will be in the future.

But hey, if the alternative is accurately describing what’s been happening America for the last decade or five, Klein is going to go with the totally useless proposal that he even acknowledges isn’t going to actually do anything except “on the margins” which is pundit-speak for totally useless:

I asked Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, about the absence of messengers with credibility among Republicans, and his response struck me as understandably but depressingly fatalistic. “I think this question of polarization around vaccinations is very, very complicated,” he replied. “I mean, you saw President Trump get booed when he himself advocated people getting booster shots. So this isn’t as simple as ‘Can you put more conservatives out there talking about vaccinations?’”

That’s certainly true. And I don’t mean to single out Fauci, or overestimate the value of replacing him. Any Republican who joined the Biden administration would be seen as a traitor by much of the conservative base. But improvements are made on the margins.

Klein’s conclusion is a heroic attempt to treat the social disease that is the contemporary Republican party as if it’s identical with America’s national character, which means we’re just going to have to work around it somehow:

That our political and social problems are maddeningly difficult to solve doesn’t make them any less necessary to at least try and ease. Whatever basket of pandemic policies the Biden administration tries — be they the vaccine mandates the Supreme Court just gutted, or new testing infrastructure, or variant-specific boosters — will not work if the social context in which those policies play out continues to deteriorate. And it is deteriorating: 88 percent of Americans say the pandemic has left us more divided, which is higher than in any of the other 16 countries Pew surveyed.

We erred this time by believing ourselves not just more capable, but also more united, than ultimately proved true. Now that we know the truth about ourselves, and the havoc our divisions will wreak on any pandemic response, the problem we need to solve becomes clearer.

What does good pandemic policy look like for a low-trust, high-dysfunction society?

The truth about ourselves?

What’s destroying this country just as surely as the Republican party is the refusal of elite media types like Ezra Klein to look reality in the face, and then call things by their true names.