Why Covid Wasn't 9/11

We all saw the worst of 9/11 live with our own eyes. The worst of Covid was hidden away in a lonely hospital bed.

For all the many millions of words spilled about Covid over the last 4 years, it’s interesting that the formal aftermath has been what it has been. As Jonathan Martin mused:

When I think about what happened with Covid and the narrative landscape of it, it seems obvious why there has been no “extended discussion” but maybe it would be valuable to lay it all out.

Yes, Covid was the largest mass casualty event this country has seen since WWII. And, no, there are no memorials or discussion on whether or how to commemorate. I think the easiest way to explain that is to compare it to the mass casualty event that is so memorialized, it is practically a national holiday: the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

How To Stop 9/11 and Covid

The act of 9/11 was sudden, unexpected, brutal, and visible: millions of Americans watched live as hundreds of people suffered violent and fiery deaths. Much of the news in the following weeks was trying to get a handle on exactly how many casualties there were. We knew about the aircraft passengers, the office workers, the heroic firefighters. There was so much chaos in the immediate aftermath that posters of the possible dead were stamped on the memory of a nation.

But, for all the chaos, we knew exactly what had happened. And we knew that this tragedy was preventable.

In the months that followed, the American peoples’ minds raced with “what ifs” that would have saved those nearly 3000 lives. If only someone had stopped the terrorists from bringing box cutters onto the plane. If only the plane cockpit was more secure. If only we had kept a closer watch on the men who caused the attacks. If only we had kept an eye on Osama bin Laden. If only Al Qaeda didn’t have a place to plan their attacks. If only we could have disrupted the terrorist pipeline.

We knew the path from planning to execution and we let ourselves imagine a world in which we could have disrupted that path and prevented that event. We were easily able to propose a world in which the event didn’t happen. Most of these proposals became policy or law, up to and including the long-term invasion of countries that were suspected of providing safe harbor for the perpetrators of this event.

The policy outworking of 9/11 was drawn directly from the specific details of how 9/11 unfolded.

The same is not true with Covid.

There is a jet black humor in any discussion about how we could have prevented Covid because everyone knows that the primary way to stop Covid would have been in the very earliest days of the pandemic. But we can’t agree on how the pandemic started.

There is still a violent debate over how the pandemic came to pass. Was it a natural zoonotic event, a jump of the virus from animals to humans in a Chinese wet market? Or was it a lab accident? Was the virus collected from the wild and stored in a virology lab from which it escaped? Or was it the result of a chimeric experiment?

The answer to these questions will result in a vastly different set of policy proposals to avoid a future pandemic. While we could easily identify the points of failure that led to 9/11, there is no area of agreement on how Covid began. As a result, we can’t really propose how to stop the next one.

Death in the Shadows

Moving past the question of what can be done to prevent the outbreak of another novel virus, we come to the question of why such a devastating mass casualty event with over a million deaths has made so little impact on the psyche of the nation. How can it be that death of this scale has been so quietly and calmly accepted?

The events of 9/11 were violent and sudden deaths. They all happened in a single day and many of them occurred while people watched in shocked horror, witnessing the very raw nature of life and death play out before their eyes.

Covid caused 500 times more deaths than the events of 9/11, but they were also largely hidden from us. Instead of watching unidentified people plummet to their death on live TV, we were kept forcibly from our grandparents and friends while they died, alone and afraid, on a ventilator in a hospital room.

Even though we were far more likely to be personally impacted by Covid as a mass casualty event, we didn’t see it because even hospitals in the reddest of red states isolated the dying from their family and friends. In the space of the medial profession, partisanship didn’t make much of a difference in their policies. Hospitals are run by public health experts and the vast majority of public health experts in red and blue states alike agreed that the sick should die alone.

With an air of generosity, they granted the dying the false grace of one final family Facetime before they lingered their last few days in isolation. When the sick finally did succumb to the disease, the deceased were denied the dignity of a funeral, their families were not granted the ability to honor them and grieve appropriately.

Why isn’t there more recognition of the scale of death in Covid? Because we were denied the social and cultural patterns that allow us to process death. Our loved ones died in the flicker of florescent hallways while we waited in the parking lot for the news.

When those deaths showed up the following week in the national statistics, their family members were blamed for their deaths. The pundits and narrative makers lamented that we killed our loved ones because we weren’t cautious enough about Covid. If we had only cared enough, none of this would have happened. If only we had masked up, if only we had isolated, if only we hadn’t gone to church or school or that family event.

This highlights another contrast between Covid and 9/11. After 9/11, there were no additional airline bombings or hijackings. You could make the case that the preventative measures put in place were, in fact, working to prevent another 9/11.

But with Covid, none of the recommendations to stop the avenue of death were effective at actually stopping the avenue of death. Covid killed the masked and unmasked alike. It swept through states with the highest restrictions in exactly the same way it swept through the most open states and municipalities. The people who were smug about deaths in red states in the summer discovered in November that their own caution would not provide the salvation they had been promised

We were told specifically and repeatedly by experts how we could stop Covid. It was embedded in mandates both public and private. People were fired over it. Children lost years of school because we were following the CDC guidelines. Even in Tennessee as late as 2022, I couldn’t go into a hospital without a mask on. But it didn’t make any difference. We all watched it not make any difference.

The dead were hidden from us while the living were subjected to bureaucratic bumbling and the sluggishness of an increasingly obstinate and out-of-touch public health apparatus that seemed to place their greatest restrictions in the opposite direction of the risks.

What these hearings have shown us is not what lessons we can learn but that no one has learned any lessons. Why is there “no extended discussion about how to prevent or mitigate the next virus?” There has been. We just argued for 3 years about how to prevent and mitigate viruses. We disagreed, often violently, with each other. Many people who were ignored, dismissed, and attacked ended up being completely correct.

When we ask the people who forced our family members to die alone and masked our children for years why their heavy-handed mitigations did nothing, they shrug their shoulders and say “well it’s not my fault” and we can see in their eyes, that, given the opportunity to “mitigate” the next virus, they would do exactly the same thing to exactly the same result.

The lessons of pandemic preparedness were known before the Covid pandemic. If we ever do end up getting any sort of objective retrospective on Covid, we will probably end up with a document much like the now-famous “Disease Mitigation” paper from 2006.

But we are still, even now, too close to the event for an objective review. There is still too much pride to admit the failures, especially in the field of public health. These kinds of worldview updates are generational and I hope we will see a return to the mean on this topic as the experts who attempted this grand experiment in disease mitigation are replaced by the kids they experimented on.

New readers: I end every newsletter with a review of a short cartoon from either Disney or Looney Tunes. I find it a good way to remember that there is so much joy and laughter to be had outside of whatever things in the news have captured our attention. In my opinion, the main reason to subscribe to this newsletter is to watch these cartoons and laugh with us.

Looney Tunes: Acrobatty Bunny (1946)

The circus comes to town and, naturally, it settles itself on top of Bugs Bunny’s rabbit hold. The first few minutes to this is fun because it contains references to both Dumbo and Pinocchio. It’s the Looney Tunes animators poking fun at the seriousness of the Disney team. All good-hearted fun, I’m sure.

The main antagonist in this piece is Nero the lion and the entire thing is a classic of Bugs Bunny’s style where the disagreement starts out small but escalates through the course of the film until the villain is shot out of a canon. The short is gag-tastic with a few good laugh-out-loud moments but otherwise just solid execution on the theme.