We’re living in the age of pandemic theater.
Drastic measures are clearly needed to stop hospitals in cities across America from running out of beds for COVID-19 patients—including in my Brooklyn neighborhood, where the ICU down the street is 120 percent full.
Yet current policies are, like security theater, a form of “pandemic theater” that, for all the pain they are causing, are missing the most dangerous virus-spreading activities, and the populations engaging in them.
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Two sets of epidemiological data bear this out.
First, New York’s contact tracing data released last week showed that an astounding 74 percent of cases are coming from “household and social gatherings.” While in the early days of the pandemic—March to May—high levels of transmissions were happening in public places, now hardly any are, in part thanks to occupancy limits and mask mandates. In the new data, gyms accounted for only .06 percent of transmissions; restaurants and bars, 1.43 percent. Even if you adjust those numbers downward (since many household transmissions originated with contact outside the house), that is a sea change in transmission patterns.
And yet New York is hardly addressing social gatherings at all, instead planning to close (or further close) non-essential businesses as soon as next week. But these painful closings are meaningless if nothing is being done about the activities that cause over one thousand times as much spread. It’s like dusting the armrests of the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Of course, household and social spread is more diffuse and harder to detect. But I think what’s stopped local governments from taking it as seriously as it should be taken is that regulating it supposedly threatens privacy and freedom. After all, our society won’t tolerate cops knocking on people’s front doors to investigate what’s going on with the eight cars parked in the driveway, right?
Wrong. First of all, our society has tolerated exactly that for centuries if the people are likely to be Black and living in “dangerous neighborhoods.” As a constitutional matter, those eight cars provide ample probable cause to investigate what’s going on inside. And as a philosophical matter, we need to get back to the basics of what freedom even means. What happens at these social gatherings kills innocent people and fills ICUs. Those engaging in them aren’t just taking private risk; they’re causing great risk to everyone else. Like drunk drivers using their “freedom” to endanger others. They are a public health threat that must be stopped.
If necessary, local legislatures need to change COVID “guidelines” into “laws.” We don’t have blood alcohol level “guidelines” for driving, because drunk driving kills innocent people. So does spreading COVID. And then we need to go after the criminals who are negligently causing a deadly disease to be spread and causing our hospitals to overflow. If they are gathering indoors and unmasked, they are dangers to public health, and they need to be held accountable.
To take one odious example, it’s outrageous that over 100 unmasked revelers recently attended an indoor benefit for the New York Young Republicans Club (across the river in New Jersey, after The Daily Beast exposed the event and caused its Manhattan venue to cancel) and the only people facing legal consequences are the restaurant owners.
We don’t yet know how many cases of COVID, how many hospitalizations, and how many deaths were caused by that event. But everyone there should, at a minimum, face a steep fine, and if they’re repeat offenders, they need to get thrown in jail. Again, they are no different from drunk drivers, putting other people’s lives at risk.
I don’t care about what risks these people want to take for themselves; that’s their business. But just as it’s not a drunk person’s “freedom” to get behind the wheel, it’s not anyone’s “freedom” to be unmasked at a large private gathering. Because it’s putting other people at risk.
Without addressing these gatherings, closures are just pandemic theater. For all the harm and grief they cause, they fail to address the primary ways in which this disease spreads.
They also don’t target the right people.
New York City’s map of COVID cases is absolutely astonishing. Of the 10 ZIP codes with the highest per capita rate of COVID cases, nine swung for Trump over Biden in the 2020 election. Staten Island, in particular, is a deep shade of red on the heat map. So is Breezy Point, one of the most notoriously arch-conservative and racially segregated parts of the city.
In other words, this is a partisan pandemic. Not every Republican-leaning district is also high in COVID rate, but nearly every high-COVID-rate district is Republican-leaning.
Indeed, these Republican-heavy areas, which are also heavily white, are now far higher in rates of COVID than areas with high working-class and Black populations. Communities of color and essential workers have bore the brunt of the pandemic—and are still over-represented in deaths—but at this moment in time, it’s Trump supporters who are driving the spread. Why are we coddling them? Is the state government so afraid of what Tucker Carlson might say?
In fact, the city’s overall COVID rate would plummet if it simply didn’t include Staten Island, where average COVID rates are around 6 percent (compared with 2.5 percent in Manhattan) and run as high as 9 percent in some areas. Meanwhile, epidemiologically, there’s no reason to lump Staten Island in with the rest of the city, but not, say, Jersey City, which is far closer to Manhattan geographically and culturally.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the Trump-voting, Fox News-viewing, disproportionately white populations of Queens and Staten Island are inflicting massive harm on the more diverse, more liberal, and more precarious populations of the rest of the city, both in terms of filling hospital beds and of the draconian, blunt measures the state and city are soon to impose.
This is both unjust and unjustified. Obviously, no one should be treated differently because of their political views or the neighborhood in which they live. But from a pandemic control perspective, we know who and what is disproportionately causing the spread, and where it’s happening. It makes sense to focus law enforcement in the neighborhoods where more people are endangering public safety; from a public health perspective, they are the new “dangerous neighborhoods.” It makes sense to disincentivize scofflaws with fines and penalties. And it makes sense to protect the rest of us from their negligence.
But none of this is happening. Gov. Cuomo’s “micro-cluster” strategy is still far too macro unless it targets for meaningful law enforcement the most dangerous activities (social and household gatherings) in the most dangerous neighborhoods. Until that happens, it’s more pandemic theater than pandemic prevention. And it’s high time to drop the curtain.
