Federal and state officials across the country have altered or hidden public health data crucial to tracking the coronavirus' spread, hindering the ability to detect a surge of infections as President Donald Trump pushes the nation to reopen rapidly.
In at least a dozen states, health departments have inflated testing numbers or deflated death tallies by changing criteria for who counts as a coronavirus victim and what counts as a coronavirus test, according to reporting from POLITICO, other news outlets and the states' own admissions. Some states have shifted the metrics for a “safe” reopening; Arizona sought to clamp down on bad news at one point by simply shuttering its pandemic modeling. About a third of the states aren’t even reporting hospital admission data — a big red flag for the resurgence of the virus.
The Politico article specifically cites Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds’ indefensible move to hide from Iowa citizens the staggering of infection rates in the state’s meatpacking plants, Georgia’s inflation of testing numbers by including antibody testing in its mix (while undercounting the number of hospitalizations), and Florida’s efforts to hide the number of nursing home patients who have died as a result of the virus, and that state’s deliberate lowering of its death count, as reported by the Miami Herald.
Politico gamely attempts to paint a “both sides do it” picture by pointing to Democrat-governed New Jersey’s downward revision of nursing-home deaths to maintain consistency with its non-nursing home-related tallies, quoting one GOP state legislator’s opportunistic criticism of that, but the fact is that New Jersey’s “alteration” of that data was done with complete transparency and is a far cry from Florida’s surreptitious distortions, or Arizona’s quiet abandonment of its modeling. Likewise, an erroneous change in Illinois’ policy on reporting nursing home fatalities that was corrected within 24 hours hardly compares with suppressing infection data from meatpacking plants, notoriously one of the most virulent hotspots for COVID-19. The fact is that this systematic program of falsifying the data is almost entirely a Republican-driven phenomenon, whether Politico wants to acknowledge that or not.
As the article demonstrates, this willingness of GOP-led states to fudge their data, despite the misleading impression it provides to the public, derives directly from cues telegraphed by the Trump administration, which from the start has deliberately de-emphasized the severity of the virus by “selectively using scientific advice and models in their quest for a swift reopening.” Politico specifically cites the distortion of one report by former pharma lobbyist and current HHS director Azar, who deliberately misrepresented the research and recommendations of scientists from the American Academy of Family Physicians, all to further the administration’s policy of swift reopening:
For instance, HHS Secretary Alex Azar warned during a recent Cabinet meeting that the U.S. could see 65,000 additional “deaths of despair” if the country does not get back on track to normalcy soon.
In reality, the study he cited explicitly warned against lifting lockdowns before health data showed it was safe to do so.
“Some might use this report to argue that this is why our economy needs to open up fast. But that’s NOT what we are saying,” wrote the authors of the report, which was published by the American Academy of Family Physicians and Well Being Trust...[.]
The consequence of this intentional (if not explicitly coordinated) Republican effort to downplay the pandemic’s lethality has been a confusing and contradictory “patchwork” of distorted information, bewildering to most Americans who are not particularly science-savvy, and leading to what one public health expert characterizes as an “unheard of level of chaos in the data, the protocols, [and] the information.” It has resulted in millions of Americans selectively filtering what they choose to believe regarding their own vulnerability to the virus, based on disinformation intentionally fostered by the GOP to spur efforts to reopen the economy for its own political ends, despite the potentially disastrous health consequences.
This, of course, is the Trump administration’s goal. If the economy remains in its current state of morbid hibernation by the close of summer, without a demonstrable uptick that Trump can point to, his chances for re-election are practically nil. Likewise, the fate of the Republican-dominated Senate is now in serious jeopardy, as it is directly tied to voters’ perceptions of Trump’s pandemic response and the trajectory of the economy. The abandonment of further efforts to assist individual Americans economically devastated by the losses of their jobs is also a calculated effort by Republican Senate Majority Leader McConnell to force citizens back into the workplace. The dysfunctional federal response to the crisis and the mirroring of that dysfunction by GOP-led states are really all of a piece in a massive political gamble being waged with American lives.
The problem for the GOP is that there is really no reason to believe these efforts will make any difference to their political fortunes. The science clearly affirms that this premature rush to reopen will simply result in more lives lost, which will in turn simply exacerbate the economic calamity as people continue to avoid businesses and public gatherings, no matter what assurances they receive from so-called leaders who put their own political fortunes ahead of their citizens.
It was probably too much to expect a polarized country, one that put two of its last three presidents into power with a minority of the popular vote, to respond with a unified voice to an unprecedented public health catastrophe such as this. Had this pandemic occurred during the Obama administration the protests would have dwarfed the pathetic (if highly publicized) demonstrations we have seen, the vilification of Obama would have reached hysterical levels, and the charge to “reopen” would have been louder, more dramatic, and probably impossible to stop.
As it stands today, though, everything that happens to this country between now and November is going to land on the heads of the Republican Party. They own this pandemic, and all the consequences that flow from it, and they’re taking their cues from a desperate White House whose only concern now is its own survival. When people start dying in droves after being forced back into the workplace, and when the economy fails to rebound as a result, there’s only one party they’re going to blame.