The Blind Spot

From election surprises, to travel meltdowns, to sudden deaths, to hospital crises, no one seems to want to say the word "COVID"

The day after the 2022 Midterms, I heard almost every possible interpretation of the surprising results. The Democrats had done much better than expected and feared, and youth voter turnout was unusually high. On cable news and twitter, data analysts and pundits picked apart dozens of explanations and contributing factors, from the ultimately-flat Crime Wave narrative to the nationwide gratitude for student debt forgiveness. There was, however, one word I didn’t hear on CNN or twitter: COVID-19.

COVID has killed 1.1 million Americans in roughly 1,000 days, or an average of 1,100 Americans dying daily for 2 years and 10 months. Of those 1,100 daily average deaths, 93.2% were among people over the age of 50. Older Americans are well known for the high voter turnout, as well as their conservative bent.

It’s glaringly obvious that an extra 1,000 deaths of individuals over 50 every single day for nearly 3 years would have an effect on the electorate- but not a single analysis even mentioned pandemic deaths. This is frankly, very odd. I’ve worked in campaign data, and political statisticians tend to want to take every possible variable into account; from voters’ shopping preferences, to their racial background, to their likelihood to listen to K-pop, to their hair color and first car model. Yet here we have a very, very large variable, receiving no attention or weight whatsoever.

Even assuming an ideological commitment to pretending COVID ended, no mention of 2020 or 2021 deaths? No mention of, arguably, the biggest historical tragedy of modern times? COVID deaths weren’t considered as a possible cause of the shifting electorate, then dismissed after statistical analysis; they were quite simply erased from collective memory.

Coverage that pointedly omitted mention of an ongoing mass death event had an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feel to it, as pundits debated the efficacy of Republican messaging without mentioning their years-long anti-vaccination stance that led to disproportionate death among their voters. Blonde women on TV laughed and argued with guest pundits nitpicking any and every factor that played into the electoral results without touching the dreaded p*nd*m*c third rail. Even when “lockdowns” were brought into the conversation about DeSantis in Florida, no one seemed to recall what those lockdowns had been in relation to.

This pandemic erasure is hardly an anomaly; it can be seen in reporting about hospitals, travel, illness, schools, celebrity deaths; just about everything.

Over the past week, we were all treated to wall-to-wall coverage of the holiday travel nightmare unfolding across our nation’s airports, with detailed analysis of Southwest’s outdated software that ultimately collapsed their scheduling system. But Southwest has used that software for many years, many holiday seasons; it only collapsed over the Christmas following the removal of mask mandates on flights.

On December 21, before the system collapse or the winter storm, Southwest sent an urgent memo to all employees warning of a “State of Operational Emergency”. Employees “alleging” illness, it stated, needed to provide a doctor’s note for their absences, pointing to absence-driven staffing issues that have plagued the industry for months. This exact outcome- the continual short staffing of every frontline industry as COVID spreads unabated, which worsens in the wintertime- was predictable when masks came off (pandemic experts refer to this as the “Fuck Around and Find Out” model). I myself vowed that I wouldn’t fly until masking returned, not only because of personal risk, but due to the inevitable collapse of functionality under the weight of the “back to normal” fantasy.

Mainstream news outlets have framed the short staffing occurring in every- yes, every- frontline industry as unique events that are all just happening to unfold in every country at the same time. Pilot shortages were simply due to retirement and poor management. During a railway strike brought on by lack of paid sick leave, socialist outlets urged us to stand in solidarity with them, never mentioning that masking in public is crucial solidarity to workers without sick leave. There were a slew of pieces about the “job crisis” that implicated workers as lazy layabouts who simply “don’t want to work anymore.” There were articles about hospitals lacking nurses, doctors, and pediatric staff, attributed to years of mismanagement and cutbacks alone. Thinkpieces about a burgeoning labor movement demanding better treatment ignored high rates of death in frontline industries. Unions striking as their workers pointed to unrealistic scheduling- the result of staff shortages- did not require masks at their protests.

From the airlines, to healthcare, to education, to restaurants, every industry that requires workers to be in-person, face-to-face with customers, has seen drastic issues with staffing since COVID began. Those staffing issues worsened when masks came off. This is precisely the outcome public health experts warned of when “the urgency of brunch” was pursued as national pandemic strategy.

The disastrous results of Back-to-Brunch as policy could not be more apparent. Still, no one says the word COVID. No one says the word mask.

Another bizarre case study: the spike in sudden deaths, largely attributable to post-COVID effects like the well-documented risk of heart attack, stroke, clots, and heart failure that follows COVID infection. This study found risk of heart failure increased 72% after COVID, even after a mild infection- and it’s hardly an outlier. In October, Cedars-Sinai reported “COVID-19 Surges Linked to Spike in Heart Attacks,” to little fanfare. Their study found, among other things:

“although acute myocardial infarction deaths during the pandemic increased across all age groups, the relative rise was most significant for the youngest group, ages 25 to 44. By the second year of the pandemic, the “observed” compared to “predicted” rates of heart attack death had increased by 29.9% for adults ages 25-44, by 19.6% for adults ages 45-64, and by 13.7% for adults age 65 and older.”

This massive spike has been observable on the personal level; almost everyone now knows someone who suddenly dropped dead in their 60s, 50s, or even 40s and 30s. And as even the COVID-unaware begin to observe the trend anecdotally, anti-vaxxers have found fertile new ground to peddle their conspiracies.

Vaccines are not causing the spike in heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, and blood clots, but that hasn’t stopped anti-vaxxers from running with the public concern over these observable events; a recent documentary called “Died Suddenly” claimed to show that COVID MRNA vaccination was causing the statistical spike. (Obligatory pre-vaccine article discussing the already-observed post-COVID heart damage here). But as the media worked to discredit the documentary, they apparently had one priority even more important than debunking this dangerous misinformation: never mentioning that COVID itself is causing sudden death. Point-blank refusing to report the severe risks of even seemingly “mild” COVID, they undermine their rebuttals by ignoring the spiking deaths altogether.

This communications decision, apparently made by both the Biden administration and its media allies, throws fuel on the already dangerous anti-vaxxer movement. Instead of explaining the source of the sudden deaths (repeat COVID infection) and pushing for pandemic safety (masking and ventilation), the media and Biden simply imply that no such deaths are happening. By denying the deaths which are plainly visible statistically and in people’s everyday lives, both Biden and the media compromise their credibility at a time when public health communication is urgent.

I can give two examples from my personal life of pro-vaccine liberals becoming wary of vaccines because of the disastrous decision to downplay and hide the vascular damage caused by COVID.

Case one: an intelligent, Biden-voting friend from college with two young children. She became uncertain about vaccinating her kids after “hearing about heart attacks” from other mom friends. I sent her studies showing how post-COVID was the real risk factor for heart damage and cardiac events, and she agreed to get her kids vaxxed and herself went on to get the booster.

Case two: a close friend admitted to the hospital with high d-dimer, clotting factor in the blood which can indicate pulmonary embolism. His boyfriend, also quite intelligent, googled blood clots in young, healthy and fit people, and the first explanation he encountered? Anti-vaxxer propaganda implicating MRNA for blood clots. Based on that information, the top result on google that offered any explanation at all, he posited that the potential bloodclot may have been a side effect of vaccination.

Were the CDC, Biden, and prominent outlets like the New York Times doing their job communicating the risks of COVID, neither of these people would have encountered anti-vaxxers first while seeking an explanation for what the public can plainly observe: a large spike in deaths among working age people, in particular due to sudden cardiac events. Instead, a google for “spiking sudden deaths” and “heart attacks COVID” would have brought up pages and pages of headlines about the clear vascular effects of COVID infection.

Sudden celebrity deaths are no exception to the general trend; we’ve seen young people like noted chef and author Julie Powell tragically drop dead, with zero mention of her concurrent COVID-19 diagnosis in prominent media outlets. This week, soccer legend Pele passed away from a lung infection following his admission to the hospital for COVID; headlines proclaim simply that “he died.”

Even the hospitals, incredibly, aren’t impervious to pandemic erasure. Reporting on fatal shortages in the UK, Canada, the US and Australia focuses almost exclusively on staffing issues (never mentioning staff sickness or death), with illness burden waved away by the flattening “tripledemic” language. We are indeed entering some sort of super-pandemic; a severe COVID wave, accompanied by unprecedented surges in RSV, flu, strep throat, scarlet fever, and pretty much every viral and bacterial infection under the sun. But the surge in other infections can also be attributed to COVID; as I extensively discussed in my last article, COVID weakens the immune system, in particular that of children.

The “Urgency of Brunch” approach to public health hasn’t merely minimized COVID; it has disappeared the pandemic from view entirely. It hasn’t merely downplayed the deaths, it won’t even acknowledge them. The normalization of mass death is so thorough that people whose job it is to track infinitesimal changes to electoral make-up forgot they happened at all. The normalization of mass infection is so complete that mommy bloggers are complaining about their children’s severe and concurrent illnesses without any concern that a child being continually ill might be bad for them.

This year on Christmas Day, unmasked travellers across the country screamed at unmasked ticket agents, while unmasked leftists criticized unmasked liberals for the DOT’s non-response, while unmasked kids suffered yet another reinfection with a disease known to spike risk of heart failure 72%. Next year on Christmas, the picture will look much the same unless we confront our collective denial and acknowledge that COVID won’t go away because we pretend not to see it.