Covid Exposure: The Half-Life of Unity

Within weeks of the start of the pandemic media started reporting Covid inside a narrative of partisan failure

In this 5 year retrospective of the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve talked about my experience in the earliest days of the pandemic in the center of the storm in Seattle and about the catastrophe of how Covid hit New York City in a unique and brutal way.

In those early days, some people didn’t seem to realize that this event had broken the old world of partisanship and narrative. There were reporters sniping at Mike Pence over the lack of tests and masks. There were congressmen who saw this crisis as an opportunity to be leveraged for their own pet projects. While NYC was in a panic and the country was in the grip of lockdowns and fear, a politicians were leveraging the relief bill to fit a grab-bag of evergreen political goals. According to the Congressman James Clyburn, “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision”.

For most of April, while Covid was ripping through the northeast states, the sense of things was that this pandemic hit us unprepared, but that it had hit all of us unprepared. No one was really to blame for what was happening, we were all trying to simply deal with the crisis in front of us.

By the time May rolled around, the Covid wave in the New England area was on a downward trajectory. The predictions that every state would become NYC were clearly false and the people who had been promoting that pessimistic vision had mostly moved along to being wrong about other things without reflecting on their own failures.

Only Red States Are Bad

By late April, some states were looking to exit all encompassing stay-at-home orders. This gave us some hints about how the media would be covering this crisis.

You might remember that Georgia was one of the first states to push for reopening in late April. This was a move widely condemned by the media, Democratic operatives, public health officials, and nearly every major technocratic pundit. They all blamed Governor Brian Kemp for his reckless move that would cost lives.

What people don’t remember (because no one was talking about it) is that Colorado reopened about a week after Georgia. The media reports of Colorado’s opening were very interesting to me because they didn’t exist. Most of the reports about Colorado’s reopening were just local news and contained none of the condemnation that Georgia endured.

This screenshot was taken May 4th, 2020.

The irony of this is that, at this time, Colorado had less justification for reopening than Georgia did. At this time, Colorado has higher Covid deaths and higher Covid positives than Georgia.