What Mike Pence’s WSJ Covid-19 coronavirus op-ed got wrong - Vox
"The White House is pushing a narrative that renewed concerns over the coronavirus’s spread are merely a media concoction — a worrying strategy in light of the recent spike in cases in some parts of the United States.
What’s actually happening in the United States is much more complicated, and new research on the recent spike in Tennessee reveals some subtle ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic may be evolving.
Why the White House’s coronavirus narrative is wrong
The White House’s view is best represented by Vice President Mike Pence’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday: “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’”
The vice president ticks through various data points — increased testing numbers, low positive test rates in many states, a steady plateau in new cases nationally, and a decline in deaths — to make his case.
For starters, Pence’s choice of frame is a misnomer. The experts I’ve spoken with aren’t talking about a second wave at all.
“We are still in the first wave; we’re not yet seeing the second wave,” David Celentano, who chairs the epidemiology department at Johns Hopkins, told me last week.
Pence’s preference for focusing on the national numbers obscures the very basic fact that America is not experiencing one Covid-19 outbreak but many. The virus is hitting different places at different times and spreads differently depending on a variety of local factors.
Part of the reason for the national plateau in cases is a decline in New York City and the surrounding area, which were hit hardest by the coronavirus at first. But other places, spared in the early weeks of the pandemic, have now seen their first significant surge.
The states with new Covid-19 spikes — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, etc. — were able to lock down and stave off the coronavirus for a while because it hadn’t saturated their communities in the way it had New York and other early epicenters where the virus first landed in the United States. Social distancing prevented their outbreak from growing exponentially.
But now those states are seeing problematic trends, trends that Pence conveniently ignores in his op-ed: Hospitalizations are increasing and the rate at which Covid-19 tests are coming back positive is on the rise. Both suggest that the increase in cases is not simply the result of more testing, as Pence would clearly prefer Americans to believe, but also more spread within the community.
In other venues, Pence has outright falsely claimed a decline in cases when the opposite is true. As CNN documented, Pence said at a White House event that Oklahoma’s cases are falling but that’s wrong; new cases are up 123 percent over the last two weeks and the positive test rate has more than doubled over the same period. Local health officials say they wish the Trump campaign would postpone a planned rally in Tulsa because of the new spike.
Pence is right that, mercifully, daily coronavirus deaths have declined nationwide (to date, at least 117,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, though that is likely an undercount). But deaths lag behind all of the other pandemic indicators; they are the last place where any new spread would show up in the numbers.
First, people test positive and get counted as a new case. Next, those who develop severe symptoms are hospitalized and added to those figures. Last, some of the people who end up in hospital will die. It’s only at the end of the disease’s course, which can take several weeks to reach, when new trends in the pandemic are reflected in death data.
There is one other way in which Pence’s spin is troublingly Pollyanna-ish. He portrays the plateau in national cases as reason for celebration. But as Max Roser with the University of Oxford pointed out on Twitter, the US has not suppressed the virus to nearly the degree that Europe collectively has. (And don’t blame more testing; the US continues to see a higher positive test rate than many European countries.)"
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What Mike Pence’s WSJ Covid-19 coronavirus op-ed got wrong - Vox
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