How many people died because Trump mocked mask-wearing? We'll never know
In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death," attendees of a festive ball held during a mysterious pestilence meet their doom.
If one were "reporting" it today (say, for McSweeney's), the lede might be something like: "Prince Prospero's recent masked ball, hosted in his locked-down palace during these ongoing Plague-times, reportedly has led to the hideous, writhing deaths of all in attendance."
Modern-day versions of Poe's story (first published in Graham's Magazine in 1842, as "The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy") could be any of the multitude of political super-spreader events we've seen in the past couple years, from Donald Trump's Rose Garden celebration of Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's infamous parties during COVID lockdowns (for which he just survived a no-confidence vote by his own party) to the White House Correspondents Dinner in April, where attendees showed proof of vaccination and were tested but did not wear masks.
Masks work, and as we learned as ever more infectious variants emerged, they work particularly well when they are made of the right material and are worn properly. No one of any political stripe ever wanted to wear a mask, contrary to what the conspiracy theorists may tell you, but civic-minded people donned them when venturing out into public spaces.
COVID infections are on the rise again in most U.S. states, and the coming fall and winter are likely to be bad all over again. But Americans, almost to a person, seem done with masks.
For political purposes, Republicans were taught early and often by Trump and their other leaders to consider any pandemic mitigation measures — social distancing, masks, vaccines — as a sign of weakness. So it was no surprise to learn that people in so-called red counties around the country died at higher rates.
As reported by the Pew Research Center, the U.S. death rate in the first wave of the pandemic was much higher in urban areas, but with each subsequent wave the death rate began to grow in less populous regions. After vaccines became widely available, rural areas started to see death rates four times higher than urban areas. Counties where only 40% of residents were vaccinated had death rates six times higher than counties where at least 70% were vaccinated. In political terms, Trump voters have died at much higher rates than Biden voters. This is also true by the measure of total deaths, even though more than 80% of the U.S. population now lives in urban areas. (You can see how your own county has done in this New York Times map.)
Nearly all the higher death rates result from people who choose not to be vaccinated, but much of the viral spread that led to those deaths can be ascribed to the pushback about wearing masks. As a tribal act of resistance against imagined tyranny, people refused to mask up or would defiantly "mask down" with, say, their nose exposed. Or they would completely go toddler and have a massive public meltdown.
Officially, 6 million people have died worldwide as a result of the pandemic. But the World Health Organization recently announced that due to the under-reporting of excess deaths by countries since the start of the pandemic, the actual number is conceivably more like 15 million. During the pandemic, many people avoided seeking needed medical help for any number of other issues.
Given that much of the population around the world remains unvaccinated, new variants will undoubtedly continue to emerge. Two omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, are more transmissible and are ready to spoil any and all festive occasions we might be planning this summer.
Public health experts in the U.S. have said that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved if that person we've been not-quite talking about, our former president, had not politicized efforts at mitigation. Dr. Deborah Birx, who as coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force tried her best to get real information to the public during all of those surreal, circus-like Trump press briefings on the pandemic, says that more than a third of U.S. deaths could have been avoided if that administration had actively encouraged people to wear masks and practice social distancing.
The malignant political machinations of Donald Trump around nearly every aspect of public health and valid information during the early part of the pandemic continue to metastasize to this day. How could we even begin to estimate how many lives might have been saved by a more active, more positive response?
One approach is to look at what happened in other countries where leaders did not turn the pandemic into political gain.
Trump largely ignored "Stop the Spread," which was the slogan devised by the task force, but refashioned it as his self-serving Big Lie: "Stop the Steal." (Poe would have appreciated that hideous plot twist.)
Bill Maher has said on multiple occasions that when he sees someone wearing a mask outside, he wants to punch them.
Meanwhile we are still fighting about the overall efficacy of wearing masks and mask mandates. Bill Maher has weighed in any number of times on his HBO program, pointing out how inconsistent people can be, how the rules around wearing masks always seem to change, and effectively saying, well, fuck it. In an April show, he even said that when he sees someone wearing a mask outdoors, he wants to punch them. He repeated that in a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, which one opinion writer rightly termed "Maher's cacophony of misinformation."
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How many people died because Trump mocked mask-wearing? We'll never know
