Passover as a racist metaphor for immunity to a modern plague

Last update: Saturday 5/23/20

Last week a friend forwarded a Facebook message to me that asked, rhetorically, if it was really a "huge coincidence" that ten blue states with a total population around 104 million had ten times the number of COVID-19 deaths as ten red states with the same total population. When I realized that there was more than one way to interpret this question, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't as rhetorical as I had first thought.




Nevertheless, I still believe that my initial interpretation is the most plausible. To be specific, I believe that the disparity between deaths in red states vs. deaths in blue states is a political coincidence. However, going forward, I believe that national politics will be the most important driver of new deaths in all states:

• Blue states have, indeed, suffered far more COVID-19 deaths than red states, especially the states in the New York metropolitan area. The current COVID-19 deaths for New York (28,900), New Jersey  (11,081), and Connecticut (3,637) are 43,618 out of the national total of 96,610, which means that these states retain their position as the national epicenter of this plague. (Note: COVID-19 death stats from NY Times)
• President Trump was elected in 2016 by promising economic success; he will only be reelected in November 2020 if the economy has made substantial recovery from its current COVID-19 depression by then. So he is trying to restart the economy at a faster pace than his public health advisors deem prudent.
• Given the connectedness of our interstate economy, red states cannot make substantial recovery if blue states remain in lockdown; so the president is pressuring all states to reopen their economies.
• As an opportunist, the president also recognizes that a faster-than-prudent restart will impose a higher-than-necessary number of deaths. But given the small number of deaths in the red states during lockdown, most of the new deaths in the initial months of the restart will probably continue to occur in the blue states -- states that were not going to vote for him anyway ...
• There remains the bothersome possibility that his red state supporters may become rattled by the higher death counts. The last section of this blog note will explain how the president's previous divisive activities will help him finesse this possibility. It will do so by offering a partial answer to a truly bothersome question: what determines the level of deaths from COVID-19 during the restart that the citizens of any state will find acceptable?
• The president has expedited the restart by encouraging citizens to disregard the nation's public health experts, especially the CDC. This will make workers more likely to go back to work by reducing their misgivings about the safety of their workplaces. It will also make it easier for consumers to go out to restaurants, malls, airports, hotels, and sports and entertainment events.
  
  President Trump undermined the authority of the nation's health experts by invoking one of his most effective skills ==> creating confusion.  Many Americans look to their president for guidance, no matter who is in the White House.  So the president confused many citizens by blatantly ignoring CDC guidelines about social distancing and wearing face masks, by challenging the value of virus tests, by challenging the infection and death counts posted by the CDC, by not sheltering at home after close contacts with infected White House staff, by recommending "cures" rejected by the nation's public health experts, etc, etc, etc.
  
  Perhaps his cheekiest ploy to date has been to declare religious services to be essential services so they can never be locked down, then proclaim that governors cannot impose CDC guidelines on these services because of religious freedom. He did this to curry favor with evangelicals who were crucial to his election in 2016 and will probably be even more crucial in 2020. Of course this would almost guarantee that religious gatherings would continue to be super spreaders of the virus ... assuming that governors concede that he has the constitutional authority to enforce this proclamation. ... :-(
• All of the above gives the president reason to hope that on election day in November 2020, enough voters in the red states will vote for him again because they will have experienced substantial personal financial recovery as consequence of the national economic recovery that he encouraged. 

A more elegant version of my interpretation was recently offered by Peter Coy (Bloomberg, 5/21/20). Mr. Coy's explanation is more elegant than mine because it embodies a straight-forward application of the mathematical theory of games. To be specific, it interprets the president's amoral political strategy as the rational behavior of a desperate gambler. I encourage all readers to consider Mr. Coy's presentation.

This brings us, finally, to the topic referenced by the title of this blog note: passover as a modern racist metaphor. First, a couple of definitions:

• Racist -- For the purposes of this blog note, a racist is someone who attributes good or bad characteristics to people on the basis of their race, without sufficient data to support their attributions
• Passover -- Here's a quote from Wikipedia ..."In the Book of Exodus, God helped the Israelites escape from slavery in ancient Egypt by inflicting ten plagues upon the Egyptians before the Pharaoh would release the Israelite slaves. The last of the plagues was the death of the Egyptian first-born. The Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb. Upon seeing this, the spirit of the Lord knew to pass over the first-born in these homes, hence the English name of the [Jewish] holiday."

Black Passover ...
The first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported in February 2020. Neither that first victim nor any of the victims of the virus reported in the next few weeks were Black. Why not? An "explanation" enjoyed wide circulation on social media for a short while ==> Black people were immune to the virus. Some even suggested that this immunity was God's gift, a modern day pass over.  This led some Black people to think that COVID-19 was not their problem.

Of course this absurd "explanation" was blown away in the weeks and months thereafter by the fact that a disproportionate share of the victims who died from the virus in many U.S. states were Black. Black people were not immune. Indeed, they were far more likely to become hospitalized and die from the virus than White people.

White (limited) Passover ...
Reports in the media since April 2020 that Hispanic and Native Americans, as well as Black Americans, were more likely to become hospitalized and die from COVID-19 than Whites have given rise to the converse myth, i.e., that Whites were far more immune to the COVID-19 plague than America's minorities. So the virus is not a White problem; it's a minority problem. A recent article in the Washington Post by Michele Norris captured this sentiment, "The ‘us and them’ pandemic shows America is still impervious to black pain", (Washington Post, 5/21/20). 

President Trump has encouraged this "us vs. them" mindset among his most ardent supporters from his first day in office. However his "us" is not as clearly defined as his "them" -- "them" being minorities, immigrants, the "fake news media", liberals, progressives, and career public servants who have substantial expertise about anything (a/k/a the "deep state"). "Our" lives matter; "theirs" don't. Therefore his efforts to restart the national economy in a faster-than-prudent manner is positioned to greatly benefit from the fact that many of his most ardent supporters have little or no concern for the lives of those on the other side of this "us/them" line. 

As of the date of this blog note, approximately 100,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. If the president's red state supporters assume a roughly 80/20 split, then about 80,000 of "them" died, but only 20,000 of "us", which is not a very large number compared to the 330 million total population of the U.S.  About 60,000 people died from the flu in the 2019/2020 flu season. Assuming the same 80/20 split, then that 60,000 only included about 12,000 of "us", which is also not a very large number, certainly not nearly large enough to shut down the entire economy, which it didn't.

Would the president's supporters accept a 60,000 death count for their side in the COVID-19 pandemic? If so, the total number of dead would be 5 X 60,000 = 300,000 -- a number far higher than predicted by the most pessimistic computer models.

The point of this exercise is not to come up with an accurate estimate of the maximum death count that the president's supporters would find acceptable; the point is to recognize that the only death count they really care about is their death count, which many of them now assume is only a limited share of the total death count. So no one should be surprised if GOP governors receive high approval ratings from their constituents during the restart even if/when the total death counts for their states soar to levels that no one had previously anticipated.

Roy L. Beasley, PhD
Editor, Neoskeptics blog and twitter account

___________________________________
Related notes on this blog:

• Coronavirus Guide