It is an obvious point that hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves — lax coronavirus regulations in some states are contributing to cases in neighboring states, as citizens travel freely between them. This recent ProPublica article is the first piece I’ve read that explores this point in detail; it drives home that our coronavirus catastrophe can in many ways be linked back to the lack of a national strategy, allowing for inconsistent rules between states that amplify the virus’ spread. In fighting a pandemic, we are only as strong as our weakest links, as data from the Washington-Idaho and Illinois-Iowa border regions demonstrates.
In eastern Washington, officials in cities like Spokane believe higher rates in the state are due to Washingtonians traveling to cities and towns in Idaho with far looser or non-existent coronavirus restrictions. Ironically, it appears that many of these visitors are looking for a vacation from coronavirus restrictions, but fail to internalize the fact that areas with less restrictions are more, not less, dangerous places to be. And in both Washington and Illinois, insult is added to injury as locals shop in neighboring states, sapping local businesses while also vectoring the virus into higher-restriction areas.
The ultimate example in virus exportation appears to be this summer’s biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. Attended by nearly half a million people, more than 80% of whom were from out of state, epidemiologists view it as a massive super-spreader event with such vast and tangled webs of contagion that thorough contact tracing efforts are impossible. While hundreds of cases in states like Minnesota can be traced back to the event, “experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg,” according to The Washington Post. And apart from exporting the coronavirus far and wide, the event is also viewed as having sparked a massive surge in cases in South Dakota itself, which in recent weeks has vied with North Dakota as the state with the highest infection rates.
In the Propublica account, as well as other stories of those who attended the Sturgis superspreader event, you encounter deep strains of denialism, magical thinking, and paranoia. Again, the idea that people might seek escape from coronavirus restrictions by visiting places where the virus is both more prevalent and more easily caught feels reckless and illogical. It is not so simple as the lax states and localities being in the wrong — in resort locales in Idaho, their errors have been amplified by outsiders crowding in and pretending as if they had entered magical covid-free zones. Again and again — and particularly prominent in accounts of the Sturgis rally — you also find people who are “willing” to “risk” covid, without registering the fact that their becoming infected means they might pass it on to others who aren’t so willing to risk it — a fact that’s glaringly important with a virus that only appears to sicken half of those infected with recognizable symptoms.
You know I’ve been unsparing in holding Donald Trump and his Republican enablers responsible for the mass death visited upon America for the past nine months. From the start, Trump set the tone and scale of the governmental response by downplaying the virus’ risk and the need for decisive countermeasures. As various observers have noted, his interest in fighting the pandemic took back seat to maintaining the appearance of a healthy economy, as well as shifting responsibility for fighting the virus onto the state level so as to avoid accusations of failure. The door was opened for unscrupulous, ignorant, and immoral elected officials around the country to parrot his denialism and pretend that the virus was no big thing. With such failure at the top propagating downward, a broader dereliction of duty in protecting lives became inevitable.
As sickening as this level of brutal cynicism at the level of GOP leadership is, in some ways more disheartening are the individual choices that millions of American have made to participate in a mass denial of science, common sense, and common responsibility. It is a denial that I still find impossible to fully grasp. Alongside the pandemic, it is as if the nation has experienced wide-scale insanity, a related but wholly separate affliction.