In a few years, political scientists will perform the post-mortem on America’s middle class, gig workers and the working poor, and they will conclude that years of abject government failure caused their demise, culminating with its response to the COVID-19 crisis. While these families struggled to survive in 2020 amidst draconian and poorly conceived spread prevention restrictions, rich people commiserated on Zoom and watched their portfolios shoot higher as the S&P 500 rocketed +66% from March lows.
Corporations used $6 trillion of stimulus to shore up their balance sheets and redeploy capital opportunistically overseas. Perhaps no business benefited more from the COVID crisis, however, than the mainstream media. Their cocktail of fear, anger and condescension served in a highball glass called “news” was consumed at all-time highs.
Fox News and CNN alone added 5.4 million nightly primetime viewers in April, and they continue to hold their audience in a captive trance using a combo of the fear cocktail and a death ticker that scrolls along the screen, while their performers shout and point fingers (mostly at the people watching the other channel).
The only thing more staggering than our country’s total coronavirus deaths (now over 357,000) is how much that number is promulgated on TV, yet how little it is analyzed by those featuring it. There is nuance to this horrific number, proper examination of which would have led to much more effective social and political policies, particularly for the aforementioned ignored classes.
The mainstream media has no interest in exposing this nuance because apolitical analysis is not what they sell, nor is it what their customers want. And it does our government leaders no good to point out that they, once again, failed to appreciate how their elitist policies resulted in an outsized adverse impact on the poorer classes, while simultaneously failing at their primary goal – i.e. limiting COVID spread.
No place in the world right now is getting more “COVID surge” coverage than California. Los Angeles County (10 million people) and Alameda County (1.7 million) share characteristics that render them high risk for spread. Their populations are racially and socioeconomically diverse, densely packed, highly dependent on public transit and have multiple generation families in a single home, most of which are unable to do their jobs on Zoom when the arbitrary “stay home” orders are issued to “prevent spread.”
The reality that nobody with a voice seems willing to talk about is that an indiscernible fraction of the 11.7 million people in these two counties are actually dying from Covid. LA and Alameda Counties, respectively, report their cases and deaths by age and do not exclude victims who had pre-existing conditions. These numbers are below:
| LA County data, 10 million population | Alameda County data, 1.67 million population | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cumulative as of 1/5/21 | Cumulative as of 12/29/20 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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These numbers indicate that 813 people under the age of 51, total, have died from COVID-19 amongst the 11.7 million people who live in the two counties. They indicate that no children – zero – between the ages of 5 and 17 have died in LA County, despite over 82,000 in that age group testing positive for the virus. This under 51 group now represents over 600,000 positive cases, with a fatality rate of 0.1% (1 in 1,000) for adults under 51, and almost zero (0%) for children under 18.
The people selling content on TV or running for public office refuse to acknowledge this fact. When they are alerted to it, their response is usually the non sequitur “one death is too many,” or “so you just want let old people die?” But that deflection is merely a smokescreen to hide the fact that the bluer the state, the less likely its leaders considered the question – much less tried to solve for — “Who is this virus actually hurting and do our spread prevention policies reflect our acknowledgment of known facts?”
While the behavior of the policy makers reflected their understanding of the true COVID risks for the majority of their constituents, those leaders’ refusal to acknowledge the families living paycheck to paycheck and dependent on labor and service industry jobs led to their critical policy error – again. When the second wave came in December, leadership chose to re-up on a “stay home” spread prevention strategy that millions of Californians could not possibly follow, much less wanted to follow given their two choices: go clean houses and take the 1/1,000 risk of dying if you get Covid, or stay home and watch your kids starve.
A Steve Jobs level of imagination is not needed to construct a spread prevention policy that adds a small incremental tax on activities we know to be low risk (like outdoor dining), and redistributes those incremental proceeds to individuals who are older (and should not be leaving the house), or younger and are prevented from performing high transfer risk occupations. Funds could also be used to help schools reopen (lack of budget is the actual reason we abandoned a generation), and increase hospital capacity to care for those infected. Instead, the policy is “Everyone stay home until the virus goes away … even if you can’t.”
Adding insult to injury is the hypocrisy of the aristocracy.
The workers in Napa Valley’s famous French Laundry restaurant lost their jobs (again) in December, when their place of work was shut down to “prevent spread,” only a few days after they served a large party attended by their governor (indoors). Hair dressers were forced to make a living underground, again, despite Nancy Pelosi feeling safe enough to get her hair done in the salon that had previously been closed for being determined “unsafe.”
The LA Unified School District, with its 607,000 students (second largest in the Nation), more than 80% of which are on assisted meal plans, will not reopen in January due to “dangerous and alarming” testing data, even though, according to LA County’s own published data, zero children aged 5 to 17 have died from COVID since the outbreak began.
LA County had approximately 2,500 ICU beds in the system in March of last year: one for every 4,000 people. During 2020 small businesses, gig workers, and the working class were directed to give up civil liberties, first and foremost their right to make a living, and endure unappreciated hardship, all for the common good of “preventing spread.” And during that same period, did LA County prepare for the anticipated second wave by adding more ICU beds to its total capacity? No.
According to their own data, LA County has been at, and still has a total of 2,500 ICU beds. And while the hospitals are at 0% ICU bed availability, overwhelmed by the second wave surge, only 1,400 of those ICU beds are currently holding COVID patients. The rest are being occupied by seasonally normal ICU hospitalizations, unrelated to COVID. How is it possible there was no mandate to double or quadruple ICU bed capacity over the last 8 months in conjunction with requiring the paycheck to paycheck working class families to “just stay home?”
It matters because one metric being used to determine when it is safe for the table busser to go back to washing Gov. Newsom’s dishes is a threshold of 15% or higher availability of ICU beds. Thus, the people who are least harmed by the virus, most harmed by the restrictive spread measures and most in need of immediate relief … are unlikely to get relief anytime soon because their leadership put a relief criteria in place that it never even tried to achieve.
It is the final blow for our working class. First they had a decade of the Fed accelerating globalism without any meaningful programs to help them develop skills to participate in the new global economy, and then – based on reason that ignored known facts – we told them they could not work and their children would have to be home schooled, for what will likely be a calendar year.
A New Deal part deux could be a solution for these forgotten classes, but the first New Deal was a response to the Great Depression. We currently have markets at all-time highs, governors spending $12,000 – just for the wine – on their dinner tabs, and pandemic policies that do not even recognize the existence of these classes. An important first step would be acknowledgement of their existence and more nuanced spread prevention policies that take into account facts we know about the virus.
Joe Voboril is the co-founder and managing partner of Farvahar Partners.