We’re coming to the end of a terrible 2020, with the New Year in sight. I’ve seen at least one article emphasizing that it won’t always be like this, and we can look forward to a better 2021.
Perhaps. But we’re still living in 2020, and we’re going to be for some time after the calendar flips to 2021. In fact, if we are not careful and if we are not lucky, the worst of 2020 will be in the first months of the new year.
Yes, we’re getting rid of Trump—but not just yet, and he’s currently sowing more destructive chaos. And yes, the first million Americans have gotten the first jab of the vaccines that may give us the possibility of ending this pandemic, but not anytime soon. Meanwhile we may still be busily making that happy ending harder. Partly because we’re not truly facing the import of 2020.
“This is the deadliest year in U.S. history,” the AP reported. Preliminary data suggests that by year’s end some 3.2 million Americans will have died in 2020, almost half a million more than in 2019. In absolute numbers, American deaths have never exceeded 3 million in one year.
It appears that the difference between last year and this year is almost entirely due to the Covid crisis. The current official death toll is moving towards 350,000. The death rate accelerated in December, exceeding 3,000 for several days in a row, and sometimes edging close to 3500. This represents the “Thanksgiving surge,” or deaths resulting from covid infections traced back to Thanksgiving travel and gatherings.
So in December the New York Times featured an essay on the meaning of death, and the Washington Post published a story puzzling why Americans aren’t paying more attention or taking more precautions, theorizing that it is harder for people to respond to large numbers than it is to individual deaths. This theory seems an incomplete and possibly dubious explanation. At worst, it’s an inexcusable excuse. Not just morally, but in terms of societal survival.
There was no moral excuse for allowing travel and gatherings at Thanksgiving—for not shutting down the airlines and the trains, and monitoring the highways. And there was less moral excuse for allowing it at Christmas.
But obviously that didn’t happen, and travel did. The evidence on how much travel there was (and is) is mixed. Airlines saw the highest numbers since March, though half or less than last Christmas. I have to believe that many people took precautions, even if they were in fact insufficient. But maybe people just gave up, or gave into their fatigue, or don’t care. Because in my very limited purview, I’ve seen less mask wearing and distancing, not more.
Whatever aspects of human nature, politics and societal behavior are involved, another surge—the Christmas surge—is now expected. As a country we are barely making it through the Thanksgiving surge in hospitalizations, and some places it’s worse than that.
Another surge on top of this one—beginning in a couple of weeks and rising in intensity and numbers through January into February-- could cause catastrophic failures in hospitals and the medical systems of entire cities or regions. Shortages of equipment are already showing up again. I can’t even imagine what it is like to be a front line medical worker, working feverishly in a relentless nightmare, while knowing that people outside are blithely ignoring simple precautions that might slow this thing down instead of accelerate it.
Meanwhile the political system has failed those who need it the most, leaving them frantic and hopeless, if not actually hungry and homeless. But the covid crisis may be coming for even more of us, because we are failing each other.
It’s true that in terms of the smooth running of society, especially for the currently better off, the deaths of a lot of old people don’t much matter, or the deaths of minority and other hourly workers, as long as it’s not more of them that can be easily replaced. But hospitals in crisis can be a crisis for almost everyone, and frayed or broken supply lines eventually take their toll on society as a whole.
The high number of infections means the next surge will very likely be worse, resulting in larger numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. Add to that the likelihood of new and more infectious strains appearing in the US in the next month or so. That we’ve gotten through even the Christmas frenzy of buying and sending with supply lines intact is no guarantee that the system won’t break under further strain. And once it breaks, the chaos could spread.
We’re left to do what we can as individuals and on a personal level with family and friends, even if it’s not much. Many are doing so, and they are the eventual source of hope. Others are doing their best, at times their heroic best, to keep societal systems working, amidst fallibility and folly. Hope rests with them as well.
But personally I’m keeping my metaphorical champagne cold for a couple of months after New Years before it’s safe to celebrate.
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