Yesterday I noted the mass delusion that has taken hold of Republican governors across the United States, who appear to have fallen for he magical thinking modeled by Donald Trump that the coronavirus would go away on its own, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. But as this Washington Post report makes clear, in Arizona the refusal to believe in science was paralleled by remarkable incompetence and topped off by an effort to suppress the science as well. Shockingly and depressingly,
Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even more than the confirmed number of cases in hard-hit Brazil [. . .]
This week, Arizona reported not just a record single-day increase in new cases — with Tuesday’s tally reaching 3,591 — but also record use of inpatient beds and ventilators for suspected and confirmed cases. Public health experts warn that hospitals could be stretched so thin they may have to begin triaging patients by mid-July.
Arizona’s state of crisis is directly attributable to a series of incompetent decisions by Republican Governor Doug Ducey and other officials. The Post reports that until last week, local governments could not require mask-wearing, and public experts and others argue that “state leaders did not take the necessary precautions or model safe behavior [. . .] even in the face of compelling evidence and repeated pleas from authoritative voices.” The Post also notes that, “[W]hen forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.”
The notion encouraged by the state that the crisis is over and normalcy has returned is perhaps the single most damning failure of Arizona’s pandemic response. This means that Arizonans continue to behave in ways that endanger themselves and others, which in turn escalates the risk to all. Such misinformation also undermines public willingness to resume restrictions on activity that can help stop the spread of the virus.
The Post report also suggests the frightening extent to which Doucey and his team not only ignored scientific evidence, but sought to manipulate it to bolster their case for a premature relaxation of restrictions. “The state ended its partnership with the university modeling team whose projections plainly showed a rising caseload in Arizona,” though reversed itself after that decision provoked objections. State health officials also switched up the testing count methodology in a way that could make it look like the rate of positive results was lower than it actually was.
Arizona is yet another example of how a Republican governor’s decisions were aligned with the message broadcast by Donald Trump that the U.S. is past the worst of the pandemic, with Doucey speeding up the lifting of restrictions on some businesses the day before Trump visited the state in early May.
President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has been an epic disaster, a mixture of incompetence, psychopathy, and self-delusion. But in Arizona, Florida, Texas, and other Republican-governed states, GOP governors have reflected and amplified the president’s failures in their own particular ways, giving substance at the state level to the president’s broad strategy of pretending the virus is no big thing. They have refused to make mask-wearing obligatory, they have opened businesses while caseloads were rising, they have sown confusion about whether growing numbers of cases were merely due to higher testing rates, and they have failed to implement adequate contact and tracing programs. Really, it is sometimes hard to imagine how things could possibly have been worse had America’s most vicious enemies had been put in charge of the coronavirus response. GOP governors have been the president’s partners in mass death all along the way; the coronavirus disaster is a Republican disaster. There is no path to saving ourselves, and our fellow Americans, let alone our teetering economy, that does not run through total repudiation and electoral destruction of this failed party, at both the state and federal levels.