Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins has been writing about the pandemic since the early days of its discovery and spread. He takes a contrarian view of the disease, as compared to most other media members. He takes the pandemic very seriously and he fully supports the extraordinary program to develop a vaccine as rapidly as possible.
But he is skeptical of the the obsession with counting "confirmed cases" and the possibility of accurately measuring the true extent of a disease that is highly contagious yet is also often (though not always) asymptomatic or has only mild symptoms, similar to colds and the flu.
Covid Was Hiding Among Colds and Flus
Too much focus on Washington and magic fixes has impeded grass-roots adaptation.
wsj.com
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Nov. 27, 2020
Here are some Covid realities that we’ve long alluded to that might be useful to spell out in the current surge.
U.S. government scientists now estimate that 40% of cases are asymptomatic and 80% of symptomatic cases are mild—in short,
88% of subjects don’t know they are infected or have no great incentive to find out if they are suffering from Covid or some more familiar bug.
An American adult typically suffers two colds a year, while school-age children may suffer 10 or more, and 20 million of us get the flu. A conservative estimate, then, is that 13 million Americans every day suffer from something not readily distinguishable from mild Covid (never mind asymptomatic Covid).
This perhaps explains why, despite conducting 186 million tests since the plague arrived, we’ve found only 12.7 million cases. Most who have Covid aren’t getting tested; among those seeking tests the large majority are suffering from something that isn’t Covid.
The implications have been slow to sink in. Embarrassing as America’s early testing fumbles were, the consequences were likely small. The odds were heavily against us being able to detect multiple outbreaks, seeded here and there by travelers from overseas, amid millions of colds and flus. (Indeed, false positives from every kind of test would have swamped any effort to identify Covid cases before they reached a critical mass.)
Government should have quickly freed the market to supply the diagnostic testing that the public demanded, but such
testing was never a means to control the epidemic or even measure it. Maybe 186 million tests a week would do the trick, but not over nine months.
Though Donald Trump and the media enjoy obsessing about each other,
a Washington fix was never in the cards beyond mobilizing supplies and expediting a vaccine. The job was always going to fall on the shoulders of 330 million Americans, with guidance from local leaders, to adapt to oscillating waves in their communities.
Recent British random testing revealed that 86% of Covid carriers were asymptomatic (at least for Covid) at the time of testing. An Italian study finds Covid was present in Europe three months before it exploded in Wuhan. The new virus was always more widespread and invisible than we wanted to realize. What causes it to explode suddenly on local hospital systems remains a puzzle. One lesson appears to be that a sensible strategy, rather than broad lockdowns, should focus narrowly on superspreading activities among the young and then the occasions by which the virus is transmitted to the elderly and vulnerable.
A wit once said war is too important to be left to the generals. In a similar vein, the political consequences of Covid are so dramatic that even experts have been bewitched by the imperative to mythologize the pandemic.
A disease that infects 10 million people and kills 2.5% will kill the same number as a disease that infects 100 million and kills 0.25%, but they need to be approached differently. The latter is what we’ve been facing. The former is the picture we have been consistently painting for the public with our obsession with “confirmed cases.”
Such collective delusions don’t occur because every contrary wisp is silenced. Quite the opposite: The cat was constantly escaping the bag.
Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, a media favorite, was an early skeptic of the test-and-trace panacea given symptomless spread. In April Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker all but admitted to an
uncomprehending radio reporter that such efforts were a show for the public.
A few leaders—Angela Merkel in Germany, New Jersey health chief Judith Persichilli—were clear that most citizens should expect to encounter the virus. But even German and New Jersey politicians have emphasized “confirmed” cases because it gives the illusion of control. Ditto the media, because
the illusion of controllability allows politicians to be blamed for not controlling it.
No major U.S. media outlet has yet broken with this convention. In Britain, by contrast, two separate efforts have been under way for months using random testing to form a more realistic picture of the pandemic. Likewise, a U.S. Senate committee last week heard evidence that the drug hydroxychloroquine, instead of being a cure-all, is effective in the disease’s perversely untreated early stages. This was too much nuance for our press. It mostly reverted to the story line that HCQ is a useless drug that Mr. Trump promoted.
We have a media that overwhelmingly sees its job as
repeating things, rather than finding things out and understanding them. A free press has been less of an
asset in dealing with Covid than it might have been.
