I live in the south, and though many people here don’t realize it yet, we’re about to get slammed with a wave of COVID-19 infections. In conversations with family members, friends, and coworkers, a frustrating trend has popped up where, even after being presented with valid data or charts showing the increases in COVID-19 cases in the south, they still seem largely unbothered. When you ask why this is, you typically get one of two responses.
The first retort that comes up from people here in the south who aren’t taking the pandemic seriously is that they think hospitals are greatly exaggerating the number of cases they have in an effort to acquire three to four times more money from insurance companies. This piece from USA Today explains some of the details behind that. While it would be possible for a hospital to exaggerate their numbers and receive more money, the amount of the increase in funding is far less significant than fearmongers would have you believe. Additionally, the piece seems to indicate that only Medicare is subject to these possible manipulations, not private insurers. Regardless of these finer details, allow me to pose two questions.
Many people claim to know nurses and other hospital staff who provide them with “insider knowledge” of this alleged insurance fraud. But how could one trust the word of such a source, if that source is a person who regularly sees such fraudulent and immoral activities transpiring and doesn’t have the integrity to speak out publicly or report them?
If the rise in COVID-19 cases is primarily attributable to dishonest hospital staff, why are states in the sun belt experiencing such an explosion of cases while other areas of the country are not? Do the people who live there suffer from a lack of morals that allows them to be comfortable with their complicity (a lack of morals which, if based on areas with more reported COVID-19 cases, doesn’t seem to affect the northeast or the west coast)? Or is it more likely that the demonstrably less defensive responses of the states with the most severe increases (Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, etc.) simply led to an increase in new infections in the region?
Another rebuttal they’ll offer to support their dismissal of the gravity of the pandemic is the high number of people who experience mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It’s true that many people who have COVID-19 won’t know it. However, we may not be looking for symptoms in the right places: from the start, we’ve compared sickness caused by the coronavirus to the flu. We looked for respiratory symptoms, but we didn’t necesarily spend a lot of time looking at what other dots we could connect. It’s possible that we missed some things, and new evidence suggets as much. Just this week, we learned that in addition to the serious respiratory symptoms many COVID-19 patients are experiencing, they’re also experiencing serious neurological symptoms. From an opinion piece in The New York Times by Melinda Wenner Moyer:
Earlier this month, French researchers reported that 84 percent of Covid patients who had been admitted to the I.C.U. experienced neurological problems, and that 33 percent continued to act confused and disoriented when they were discharged.
According to Dr. Mady Hornig, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the possibility that neurological issues “will persist and create disability, or difficulties, for individuals downstream is really looking more and more likely.”
Note that the French President is a very liberal man, and it wouldn’t make any sense for the “fake news media” (which presumably exists in France) would drum up false conspiracies about COVID-19 to make their President look worse.
If you’re in the south and you still don’t believe this is a big deal, you may not be thinking rationally. Maybe you’re stuck under the spell of Trump’s demagoguery, forced to deny the validity of anything that could cast him in a negative light. Or, maybe you have COVID-19, and it’s affecting your cognitive abilities. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to take a hard look at the data that supports your arguments and question its legitimacy (assuming you have any data to point to).
If you’re in the south and you’re capable of rational thought, check out these charts. They’re frightening but they’re informative, and it’s important for everyone to understand the weight of the threat we face. This is not a left versus right issue. Like it or not, how you react to this will affect others, and how others react will affect you.
