Thursday May 18, 2023

IN THIS ISSUE: COVID Didn't Change Us; It Exposed Us

COMMENTARY: COVID Didn’t Change Us; It Exposed Us

By Martin Davis

"Friend to Friend" by Usonian is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Now a year beyond the unofficial move from isolation to community post-COVID, this much seems certain. We are a markedly different people than we were before shutdown in April 2020.

But are we really?

As the information rolls out about how we have been changed by the COVID epidemic, there’s an argument to be made that the pandemic hasn’t changed us so much as it’s entrenched us. And we have a lot of work to do to recover the better angels of our nature.

And the evidence that this entrenchment was coming was evidenced early in the pandemic, specifically over the issue of masking.

The False Battle over Masking

Hind-sight is 20/20, and from the comfort of life fully immunized, living in a country that has reached herd immunity, we can look back and see how we might have done things differently.

To be fair to those in the medical profession, COVID was an unknown commodity. It was a unique virus, meaning it was unknown to humans and thus we had no natural immunity to it. Early high death rates, especially among older adults, raised fears that we could be facing a calamity not seen since the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, when some 675,000 people died, or 0.006% of the nation’s population.

And indeed, more than 1.1 million people have died, or 0.003% of the nation’s population, since the outbreak. Further, long COVID has created problems for 11% of people who had COVID. That number is down, however, from 19% in 2022.

So the physical toll of COVID is clear. But what of the mental toll caused by the isolation that the disease led policymakers to enforce?

A report by the Kaiser Family Foundation in March found that:

“Over the course of the pandemic, many adults reported symptoms consistent with anxiety and depression, with approximately four in ten adults reporting these symptoms by early 2021, before declining to approximately three in ten adults as the pandemic continued (Figure 1). Additionally, drug overdose deaths have sharply increased – largely due to fentanyl – and after a brief period of decline, suicide deaths are once again on the rise. These negative mental health and substance use outcomes have disproportionately affected some populations, particularly communities of color and youth. As the end of the declaration of the public health emergency nears – on May 11, 2023 – many people continue to grapple with worsened mental health and well-being and face barriers to care.”

What has complicated the personal mental health toll that isolation caused people is the social impact isolation has had – most notably in our public realm.

The first sign of this for many was the debate over masking.

Masking was grounded in legitimate concerns about disease spread, but quickly was politicized and served as a marker dividing more-politically conservative individuals and more-progressive ones. Though as we will see, this generalization is far from perfect.

Ballotpedia tracked this debate over masking and found it is more complicated than left/right. In fact, there were no less than six major lines of argument against masking. Many of these fell along the Republican/Democrat divide, but others (such as “masking has negative social impacts”) found a bipartisan audience, especially as the pandemic advanced.

The hyperpartisan nature of the masking debate, however, overshadowed the more-complex story and drove all the attention to shallower issues of dubious worth. For example, masking “limits personal freedom.”

This pattern of serious issues and debates being overshadowed by shallower, less-serious and more-politically attuned arguments, has played out repeatedly. And today, it continues to cripple our discussion nationally and locally cross a range of social issues.

The False Battle in Education

The negative impacts of isolation on youth is not in question. A July 2022 study by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that 84% of schools agreed that isolation had negatively affected students, and in a number of ways. Among the problems noted were:

“increased incidents of classroom disruptions from student misconduct (56 percent), rowdiness outside of the classroom (49 percent), acts of disrespect towards teachers and staff (48 percent), and prohibited use of electronic devices (42 percent) to the COVID-19 pandemic and its lingering effects.”

But like the masking debate, the school debate turned from a focus on the impact of isolation on students into a political battle over “parents’ rights” and anger over what schools were teaching.

This battle put Glenn Youngkin in the governor’s mansion, and has fueled the campaigns of Republican politicians nationally. Locally, Tara Durant, a Republican candidate for Senate District 27, has steadily beat the Youngkin drum about parents’ rights, but in mailers and on her website rarely addresses the challenges that students are facing.

In Spotsylvania County, conservative candidates for the school board are beating the same drum. Chris Harris has carried the “public schools have failed” banner and continues to insist on parents’ rights. But on the real issues facing teachers and students in school – how to re-socialize students who lost the opportunity to learn those skills during COVID – there is not a peep. And he certainly has demonstrate no ideas for making things better.

This politicizing serious issues proves effective politically with people who don’t take the time to look more deeply into issues. A simple answer, after all – Just give all power to parents – is easier for people to grasp than the vast nuances and difficulties teachers and students face day-in and day-out.

But the devastation this disingenuous play has is real.

The False Debate over Mental Health

This same pattern of ignoring the serious problems that COVID exacerbated and chasing phantom issues is also evident in the gun-violence debate.

In report after report after report after report after report, we see that gun violence – particularly against people of color and socio-economically disadvantaged populations – surged during the pandemic.

Why? The answers behind this are enormously complex, but research suggests that mental health is not the overriding issue.

As John Rozel and Jeff Swanson wrote in an opinion piece for the Association of American Medical Colleges:

“We will never solve the problem of gun violence in America by “fixing mental health.” That is a simplistic notion, one that focuses on a serious but different public health problem.”

And yet, that is precisely what the conservative response to this pandemic-fueled crises is doing. Placing all the blame for the spike in violence on mental health so that Republicans don’t have to touch the sacrosanct Second Amendment, which they continue to misread as a thumbs up to unlimited firearm use.

Gov. Youngkin has done this repeatedly in Virginia – following the shootings at UVa, and following the mass shooting at the Walmart in Virginia Beach – he refuses to look at the deeper issues that would address gun violence, and instead goes for the politically expedient “mental health” answer.

It’s Machiavellian politics at its worst.

Finding the Will to Change

Our broken national political conversation wasn’t dealing with the pressing social issues that were present before the pandemic arrived, and it isn’t dealing with them any better now that the pandemic has exacerbated them.

And things are not going to get better until we get serious about the hard work, and the hard solutions, it will take to turn things around.

But solutions do exist. And we see many here in the local Fredericksburg area. Start with Fredericksburg Vice Mayor Charlie Frye’s “gun giveback program.” A lone effort by a few people to get guns off the streets that might be used to elevate gun violence numbers still higher. And there are larger efforts, such as Fredericksburg School Superintendent Marci Catlett’s bold moves to revive the city’s struggling public schools.

There are people outside the city to admire, too. In Spotsylvania County, the school personnel who came together to assist the county’s growing population of homeless students by launching Treasure House are facing head-on the problem in a nonpolitical, solutions-based approach.

The list of local innovators and nose-to-the-grindstone workers who’ve displaced politics for people, no doubt, could go on for several thousand more words. But the point is made.

Yes, the pandemic has made many of the problems that we face – homelessness, student behavior, mental health, gun violence – much worse.

The pandemic has also made clear, however, the difference between those who are committed to solving our problems, and those who are baldly using people’s pain to advance a political agenda.

Youngkin never cared to govern Virginia, he wanted to rule the nation. The citizens of this commonwealth are simply a convenient focus group to test out what ideas will place him in the White House – consequences to citizens be damned.

The Spotsylvania School Board and Mark Taylor never cared about student achievement. They want to usher in a right-wing utopia in Spotsylvania that welcomes like-minded people and dehumanizes all others. (Nota bene: A column that was to run today that lays out this argument will run Saturday instead, as I await for representatives of the school board and the pastor of Grace Church of Fredericksburg to respond to my request for interviews.)

Post-COVID we are not a different people.

The problems we face today are the same ones we faced before lockdown. They’re simply more intense now. Just like our political anger and overreach for simple answers rather than realistic, solutions based answers has also become more intense.

COVID did change us, however. For too many, it’s led to doubling down on weak-minded, cynical policies that serve the self and not those they’re fortunate enough to represent.

But we also see examples of those who are rising to be better versions of what they were prior to COVID.

The struggle between the two is real. In America’s past, the virtuous have time and again carried the day.

We must believe that they will again.

Hope, after all, is the only glue that holds us together as a community, and as a nation.