J.D. Vance Explains COVID-19 to Conservatives
I found this useful. J.D. Vance has a nice and compact Twitter thread where he rebuts concerns fellow conservatives have been airing about COVID-19. A sample:
"4. The economic damage we’re causing with COVID-containment lockdowns is a cure worse than the disease, and will lead to a lot of human suffering. So we should end the lockdowns soon.”
I’m sympathetic to this argument, in part because a lot of people freak out if you even mention the economic cost. This isn’t about dollar worship or stock prices—a lot of conservatives are genuinely worried about the anxiety, stress, and death that comes with a severe recession.
That said, one big problem with this argument is that it overstates how much of the “lockdown” has come from policymakers.
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In other words, a lot of the social distancing appears organic, and independent of the policy response. That doesn’t mean good policy can’t help (or bad policy hurt), but the idea that our economy just hums along absent lockdown orders from the president and various governors is implausible. It turns out that people get freaked out about catching a deadly disease and adjust their behavior accordingly.
Further, China’s manufacturing indices suggests continued stagnation. India is locked down. Western Europe’s hospitals are overrun. Singapore appeared to have things under control, but has shut down again. Japan delayed the Olympics, and appears to be getting worse
You can criticize globalization all you want (I do all the time). But a consequence of globalization is that you can’t thaw your own economy while the rest of the world is frozen, even if concerns over the virus are overblown. American politics can do only so much.
He also highlights the valid concern about how to catalogue deaths. CDC has advised to count it as a coronavirus death if they either have it or have coronavirus-like symptoms. He addresses one of the rumors floating around that coronavirus deaths are really just what otherwise would have been catalogued as pneumonia death. There's a lot wrong with this theory, (namely data lag) but perhaps the most striking stat is the all-cause death count from NYC.
That chart made me go "oh fuck". The all-cause death rate is lagging, but already the number of reported coronavirus deaths is close to surpassing every other cause of death combined. It's plausible that too many deaths are attributed to coronavirus, but there is no way that NYC is mistakenly mislabeling every single death as coronavirus-related. The estimate based on those models is that the death rate has tripled over baseline.