It’s No Surprise When Someone Gets Covid
The disease is endemic. And even 74-year-olds can have mild cases that aren’t debilitating.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Oct. 2, 2020 4:28 pm ET
Not quite nobody expected this latest twist in our year of living derangedly. On waking to the news that shook markets and discombulated our politics Friday morning, I thought back to an email, typically flippant, I sent colleagues a few weeks ago: “Biden secret plan: let Trump be the candidate who gets Covid . . . an October surprise I wouldn’t bet against.”
The reason begins with the advice the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave on its website early and for months after the outbreak began in Wuhan, that most Americans could expect to encounter the virus in coming months.
Another reason is the extraordinary effort, detailed in the Politico news website, to keep Joe Biden, the oldest nominee ever to be a major-party candidate, isolated and unexposed to risk. These efforts were apparently second only in extremity to those of the Russian government, as detailed in the New York Times this week, to keep Vladimir Putin hermetically shielded from the virus.
As early as February, when the feds were belatedly starting to look for Covid beyond immediate arrivals from China and people who interacted with them, I thought it worth pointing out that if a new virus were significantly more widespread than believed, a place to look would be the Democratic field, including Bernie Sanders. Presidential politics, especially during the primary phase, involves many activities that fit under the heading of superspreading.
A lot has been learned since the early days, which will benefit Donald Trump and his wife and others embroiled in the White House outbreak. My own family is basically an inkblot of the early confusion and disorder that accompanied the new pandemic when it first emerged from China. One elderly relative was taken in the wave that swept through nursing homes. Another heard for a month that symptoms were likely Covid but testing was in short supply and available only for patients who needed hospitalization. Only weeks later my relative was diagnosed with cancer, not Covid.
I learned something about a recent media furor when I finally cracked Bob Woodward’s new book. When the president told him on Feb. 7 that the virus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” this was news to Mr. Woodward, by his own admission—the master reporter had hardly paid attention to an outbreak in China that was already being compared to the 1918 influenza.
And on March 19, when Mr. Trump said he was “playing down” the disease to avoid “panic,” Mr. Woodward was equally oblivious to every important element of context in the intervening six weeks. On Feb. 28, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Robert Redfield and a colleague, on whose hands time did not hang heavy, published in the New England Journal of Medicine an analysis showing that widely reported fatality rates for Covid-19 were dramatically overstated; the disease would likely prove roughly as deadly as the flu.
Mr. Trump, on Mar. 4, went on “Hannity” himself to debunk a 3.4% fatality rate then being touted by China and the World Health Organization. “Mr. Trump has a point,” commented the New York Times, having itself questioned the WHO estimate a day earlier.
At the time the chaos in Northern Italy was unfolding on the world’s TV screens. Putting the fatality rate in realistic perspective was an urgent and necessary priority for any government. Mr. Woodward apparently understood not a thing about any of this when he interviewed Mr. Trump. Amazingly, he still understood nothing about it six months later when he published his book.
Managing public psychology was always going to be a complicated element of a complicated challenge. A man Mr. Trump’s age, or Mr. Biden’s, has a statistical life expectancy that makes him no shoo-in to complete a presidential term under the best of circumstances. But treatment standards have improved. In early days, anybody with symptoms might have done well to avoid ventilator-happy hospital care.
Mr. Trump, at 74, is at higher risk for a bad outcome than a 30-year-old would be. But most 74-year-olds survive Covid and many never have debilitating symptoms. Our media are prone to hysteria, oversimplification and fetishizing random things—case-fatality rates, masks, etc. Reporters and editors have a distorted single-variable mentality. Covid is deadly in a small percentage of cases, currently estimated at between 0.1% and 0.41%, especially among older people in ill health. The major urgency always arose from too many cases happening at the same time and endangering our ability to provide care.
Stay tuned but let’s not assume, in Mr. Trump’s case, that the equivalent of a gas attack from one too many Big Macs is an incipient heart attack. I doubted the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s presidential intentions when he entered the 2016 race. I wasn’t sure he was happy about winning. But I’m skeptical of those now suggesting he might welcome an excuse to bow out. He likes the job and believes he’s defending America from bad things by fighting to hold on to it.
