COVID Mitigation Worked

 

Without a Plan

The impact of vaccines and behavior on US cumulative deaths from COVID-19

 America’s improvised strategy to fight COVID-19—public and private behavioral changes to slow transmission until vaccines could be deployed—prevented close to 800,000 deaths in the country. The ad hoc effort’s effectiveness is surprising because public health officials could not precisely target mitigation as they lacked precise information on the routes and mechanisms of the disease’s transmission.  -Brookings

What Worked?

Hand Washing

Masking

Social Distancing

Isolating

Testing

Lockdowns

Ad hoc measures to keep us safe were the best things we could do with no plan in place until the vaccine was developed. Research suggests without the ad hoc measures, COVID would have cost over two million lives instead of one million. It is estimated that vaccine hesitancy cost an additional 273 thousand lives.

There were two forces at work. The first group, people who had a a good idea of what needed to be done, forged ahead with solutions. 

The second group, people who were blown away by the enormity of the task, spent an inordinate amount of energy looking for somebody to blame. They looked for conspiracies from the CDC and HIH. They blamed the World Health Organization. They blamed China for deliberately releasing the virus as a form of warfare. Another conspiracy theory claimed it was a plot by the establishment to deny the president in his bid for reelection. None of this was supported by the facts. All of it got in the way, and put all of us at risk.

Thank God the first group persevered. 

Facts Matter: Three Myths About Pearl Harbor

Misinformation and Distortion

A Time Magazine article by Olivia Waxman punches holes in three myths about Pearl Harbor.

#1 The war did not start World War Two. Japan invaded China in the early 1930s, and Germany invaded Poland in 1939, drawing much of Europe into the conflict.

#2 The attack started a huge volunteer movement in the US to fight Japan. In fact, most combatants were drafted.

#3 The attack woke a sleeping giant. The fact is the giant was already awake with a draft in place, Lend-Lease and sanctions against Japan.

Deja-Vu?

"The U.S. was certainly not “sleeping” at the time of Pearl Harbor. The Roosevelt administration had been playing hardball with the Japanese for years, trying to get Japan to lay off its war of conquest in China. The U.S. had embargoed all sorts of strategic goods and raw materials to Japan: weapons, aviation fuel, scrap iron. And in the the summer of 1941, Washington had actually placed a freeze on all Japanese assets in the U.S. and made it impossible for Japan to purchase oil."

"The country was deep into the process of converting the economy from consumer goods to wartime production. So the giant wasn’t really “sleeping”, even if the fleet at Pearl Harbor was surprised by the initial blow."

"As to that Yamamoto quote? Well, it’s been impossible to find the actual source. Most of us first heard it in the blockbuster film Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970, so it’s more Hollywood than history. The producer said the screenwriter found [the quote] in a letter, but no one has really been able to produce the letter or confirm who the recipient was."

Getting It Right Matters

Over time, as stories are told and retold, they change. That may be because of our inability to remember narratives exactly as they were told to us. This is innocent enough. It could also be intentional like the reframing of the narrative of the Civil War by Southern historians to The Lost Cause. The Lost Cause offers justification to the cruelties of slavery and Jim Crow laws that denied human dignity. They even used the Christian Bible to reinforce their claims. Check out The Curse of Ham. The same thing is happening now around the false narrative of the January 6th insurrection. Trump and his enablers would have us believe their attempt to violently overthrow a lawful election is their patriotic duty.

Now What?

The sanctions against Japan sound familiar. Kind of like the threats against Russia today if they invade Ukraine. And the proposed sanctions against China as it flexes its military might. Are we headed down that path? This is unsettling, to say the least. Do we even have a choice? Jumping immediately to conflict leads to...what? What we do depends on getting the lessons of the past right.