After months of dismissing mask-wearing for halting the spread of the coronavirus, after refusing to lead a national effort to stop it, after 130,000 Americans died, after setting a single-day record number of new COVID-19 cases (over 50,000) twice this week, after months of daily reprising Kevin Bacon’s “All is well” scene from “Animal House,” Donald Trump, acting president of the United States, has had a “come to Tony” (Fauci) moment.
Well, all right, I guess masks aren’t all that bad, Trump said, looking at the floor and shuffling his feet. “I’m all for masks,” he says now. Hey, they make me look like the Lone Ranger(?), he said, brightening. But he still thinks wearing them around others should be voluntary.
People listen to this guy. 130,000 Americans never will again.
But “there’s only so much reality-warping this administration can get away with,” Molly Roberts writes at the Washington Post in explaining how Trump lost the culture war he himself started:
Of course, the anti-mask army never really had an argument for its obstinance except that the president said so — and the president said so, it seems, to try to downplay the epidemic out of existence, even though he has ended up downplaying the worst of it back into existence instead.
The naked-cheeked were trying to project toughness, but the point of personal protective equipment was never really personal protection so much as the protection of other people. This contempt reached its peak of embarrassing absurdity at the reelection rally in Tulsa, where a man arrived clad in an adult diaper that read, “I COVID my ass to stop the spread!”
Is he still above ground, I wonder?
Americans do not understand how the virus spreads any more than Trump does, finds a study released Monday:
Researchers at the Social Cognition Center Cologne and the University of Bremen conducted three experiments, each involving more than 500 adults from the United States. A sizable number of them did not see the point of social distancing or mask wearing because they made a simple mistake about statistics. People tend to think coronavirus spreads linearly when it really spreads exponentially.
[…]
The study authors referred to the difficulty people have understanding this as the ‘exponential growth bias.’ “In general, people have difficulty understanding exponential growth and erroneously interpret it in linear terms instead,” explains first author Joris Lammers in a press release. When people don’t understand, they massively underestimate how fast coronavirus spreads. Likewise, they also underestimate how big a difference social distancing makes on stopping the spread.
Alison Escalante of Forbes takes a couple of stabs at visually illustrating the difference. But what came to my mind was the old mousetrap and ping-pong balls example of how chain reactions work. Those of a certain age may remember first seeing it in Disney’s Our Friend the Atom (1957). Scroll to timestamp 5:30.
Someone at the Ohio Department of Health thought of that example three months ago. They released a video to illustrate both how viral spread works and how social distancing slows it. Is our Trumpers learning?
An unopened box of still-serviceable N95 masks left over from the swine flu pandemic (2009) has gone into service here. Since this crisis hit, I wear one to shop for groceries every two weeks — as soon as the doors open in the morning when there are only a handful of others in the store.
A redheaded woman monitors the self-check registers. She is working her shift every time. Wearing a cloth mask, every day, month after month. Still healthy, she was there again on Monday.
Maybe there is a lesson there. Not that the acting president would ever learn it. Not in time, anyway. Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout is running the White House.
Take the garbage out November 3rd.
(h/t SR)
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.