Denying the deniers

You cannot imagine my guilt at having been a denier…

The words are from a Dallas Voice article by Tony Green, a self-declared gay conservative. He voted for Trump and he knew Covid was a hoax. Until he got it.

If he alone had got it, that might not have been too bad. But six had gathered in his house and from them it fanned out throughout an extended family, infecting fourteen. Some had no symptoms, or recovered fast. But many had a horrible time, including Tony Green, who thought he’d recovered only to collapse and wake up in hospital, surrounded by ten worried doctors. He went through a lot of suffering before making it.

Covid-19 can extremely unpeasant even if you survive

And two of the people infected didn’t make it at all.

He told the Washington Post:

This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.

He doesn’t even know whether it was he or one of the others who brought in the infection. It hardly matters. The only real point is that they found out the hard way that this infection is no hoax and that it’s brutal.

What’s most astonishing about the story, though, is that Green admits his guilt. He has the strength of character to accept that he was wrong. So many Covid deniers simply will not make that admission. Because their conspiracy theories are beliefs, not science, so they are based on faith, not evidence. No amount of evidence will persuade them.

Here in Spain, deniers were claiming back in August, when deaths hit the lowest levels we’d seen since the spring, that practically everyone was now surviving. So why would one bother with a vaccine? 

At that time, something like 275 patients a week were dying of Covid in Spain. In the UK, the figure was 276. It would take just a tad over three weeks for the UK’s Covid deaths to outstrip its total of murder victims in 2018. In Spain, it would take just over one week. I’m assuming no one would want us to stop fighting murder, on the grounds that practically everyone survives every year unmurdered.

Even at this low point, however, the United States, led by Trump, the congenial wit (sorry, I mean congenital halfwit), was averaging nearly 6700 deaths a week. Which means it would take around two and a half weeks to reach the annual level of murders. Since then, the Covid deaths in the US have fallen further, so now it would take nearly four weeks to reach the same level as murders.

Whatever the deniers say, none of these numbers are practically zero. Many more people are surviving than dying, but the deaths, to my simple thinking, are far too high to be acceptable. And, while they’re falling (for now) in the US, they’re climbing in Spain and the UK. Besides, as Tony Green points out, Covid doesn’t just cause death, it can cause great suffering too.

He learned to take it seriously. Why can’t other deniers do the same?

As Green wrote in the Dallas Voice:

…to do nothing is to be foolish. To ignore or question the validity of this virus, its contagiousness or the consequences of selfish attitudes is — at this stage — completely stupid.

There are sacrifices to be made, because whatever the deniers say, this level of pain and death should not be acceptable to anyone. Those sacrifices can be painful themselves, of course. For instance, we met an Australian couple the other day, keen to get home and to family before she gives birth to their first child.

Australia had just around 76 deaths a week in September, though the numbers seem to be climbing again.

The couple we met had just had their flight home cancelled. They’ve been told the Australian government is laying on rescue flights. “Rescue” may sound free, but it isn’t. They will have to find 5000 dollars to cover those flights, and be able to get to wherever they’re taking off from at short notice. They will then be flown to a quarantine camp in the Northern Territories, where they will be held for two weeks in huts in the desert, for the cost of a five-star hotel (2000 dollars). Next they will have to travel from Northern Territories to their home, at their own cost, and there they will have to quarantine again for two weeks, again at their cost.

I couldn’t help agreeing that this didn’t sound like caution. It sounded like the Australian government gouging its own citizens trying to get home. As though they were turning Covid into a business opportunity…

But then I remembered Tony Green again.

“I promise you, if we continue being more worried about the disruption to our lives than we are about stopping this virus, not one American will be spared.”

What he says about Americans applies to us all. We can perhaps be more humane than the Australian government, not known for its humanity. At the same time, we can be a lot more effective than the US or UK government, or the many quarrelling governments of Spain.

Above all, we can’t afford denial. I wish more deniers could learn that. Without having to go through Tony Green’s experience.