There are people in America who fear that a coronavirus vaccine will be spiked with silicon tracking devices that will record every step they take. Yet they already carry objects in their pockets which do exactly that. Technically, they could leave their phones behind when they go out, but do they ever? A few manage to disable or scramble the homing signal, and if you’re one of them, my hat is off to you for your ideological consistency. I get it; I really do. In the midst of a pandemic, I can’t say I sympathize, but I know where you’re coming from. The rest of you: I don’t get it.
Whether the government keeps a file on you is debatable. We know they’ve got the technology, but can they acquire the inclination? If they outputted your data from the corporate mainframes where it’s stored, would they even know what to do with it? I’ve always felt that if those in power really wanted to screw with me, they wouldn’t bother to assemble a dossier: they’d just do it, and they’d worry about justification later on. That’s the way that the authorities operate, I’ve noticed — they go ahead and do what they want to do, and send in the clean-up teams later if they have to. Generally they don’t have to. There we are, flat on the macadam with the bulldozer treads in our backsides, and in no position to lead the resistance. KRS-ONE explained all of this to us in the late ’80s, and in rhyming verse, no less. Thirty years on, I’ve seen no indication that anything he told us was inaccurate.
No, data, like everything else, is only the authority’s friend when it can be marshaled to support what the authority is up to. When it can’t, it’s just drowned out. Executive regimes, I notice, are hanging on to the massive power they’ve accrued by their fingertips, and with gritted teeth, and public relations is an indispensable ingredient in the binding agent that keeps the governed stuck to the governors. For instance, it’s almost certainly true that the State House in Tallahassee has suppressed the number of Floridians who’ve died from coronavirus complications. The chief medical examiner even said so earlier this month. Now we learn that they’ve canned the woman who operates the dashboard of their virus website. She wouldn’t cook the books for them. She’ll be replaced by someone who will.
The minimizers — and they’re legion — accuse New York and New Jersey of inflating our death counts. We’re electorally insignificant, so they don’t mind kicking us while we’re down. We who live here don’t need to be told anything about the severity of the crisis. But it certainly seems possible that our governors are ginning up the numbers in one direction or another. How can we know for sure that they aren’t?
It turns out there’s a pretty easy way to check. The severity of medical conditions may be disputed and caseloads can be fudged by clinics, but death is tough to misinterpret, and bodies, as every Raymond Chandler fan knows, are hard to hide. Deaths can be safely predicted — there are entire industries that are predicated on expected fatality rates — because they tend to be consistent from year to year. If many more people died in April 2020 than they did in prior Aprils, in the absence of another variable, it’s a cinch that the spike can be attributed to the coronavirus. Epidemiologists even have a name for this. They call it excess mortality, and it’s one of the simplest and clearest ways to measure what’s going on and where it’s happening.
Alas, it is very hard to find excess mortality counts. Governments don’t want you to see them, and why would they?, people are scared enough as it is. It’s up to journalists to gather this data from available public sources. There’s only one newspaper I know that’s been putting in the work and collating what they’ve found; luckily for us, it’s the very best periodical in the English language. I could go on for awhile about why The Economist is so much better than any other magazine, and I may do just that in a future dispatch. For today, I hope it suffices for me to assure you that my faith in The Economist has little to do with its editorial outlook, which I broadly disagree with, and everything to do with the diligence with which the editors put the publication together. When you get a page of facts from The Economist, you know it hasn’t been pulled from a think tank or copied from a PR office or thrown onto the Internet in the chase for clicks. That’s not how they operate. They’re the real deal — maybe the last real deal around.
The Economist‘s tracker is consistent, and what it reveals isn’t pretty. Excess deaths are up, all around the globe, in numbers that will make your stomach turn. In places like New York City, the number of reported fatalities tracks pretty well with the mortality spike; even here, we appear to be underreporting, but not by all that much. In other parts of the world where testing is sporadic and medical services are hard to come by, the variance is startling. Jakarta has only attributed 14% of its excess deaths to the coronavirus. That’s the big city in Indonesia; further into the country, they don’t have much capability to confirm cases. They just have the coffins.
New York City has attributed more than fourteen thousand deaths to the coronavirus. The city is running about sixteen thousand fatalities above the expected baseline, which, to my non-trained eye, looks like it’s within the bounds of acceptable error (the statistics, I mean; there’s nothing acceptable about the deaths). What this means — and it means it conclusively — is that we aren’t exaggerating, and those who accuse us of exploiting the crisis are every bit the heartless jerks that it seems like they are. That doesn’t tell us why the case fatality rate in New York City has been so high, or how it spread so fast and with such lethal consequences. Nobody is off the hook. Once we get to the other side, whenever that may be, there’ll have to be a reckoning. But we aren’t lying outright about the body count. That’s more than the authorities in some other parts of the country can say.