Reminding Americans that his best decisions originated in his gut, Trump later bragged to the media that long before the declaration form the World Health Organization whose declaration had prompted his speech, “I felt it was a pandemic,”–he expressed confidence for our nation, for whom “our top government health professionals” were working to protect America, without the need for any outside help–continuing the narrative of America going it alone in a global crisis, without realizing the deep dangers of further eruptions, inflammations, and morbid residues that would spread across the national body, oblivious to the executive, even as that global spread was being mapped in terrifying real time. Trump’s responses privileged travel restrictions, selective screening for national reentry, tax deferrals, and small- change economic “stimuli,” but ommited change in the status quo save an advisory to “ignore non-essential travel.” But what was essential was left unclear, even as the NBA announced its season suspended. We were encouraged not to be concerned about an economic downturn, rather than given a plan to deal with public health emergency for which the nation was unprepared and had no intention to change its essential infrastructure of health care.
Perhaps the illusion of a choropleth’s buckets suggested only one red dot in the United States existed of less than five hundred confirmed COVID-19 cases showed the panic was overly elevated, and lay outside our borders.
The gravity of address appeared designed to mask the folly of declaring an obstruction of all travel from continental Europe, or more specifically the Schengen area of the European Union, in a unilateral manner. After having self-contentedly patted himself on the back for having suspended travel from China, as if to stave off the spread of Coronavirus to the United States, he touted a logic of national exclusion, the one size fits all remedy, least suited to a global pandemic.
Unlike earlier alleged national emergencies, as building the wall, he was less belligerent. This time, his voice was more monotone, sounding as if he had been forced to give a statement. Even if we had watched the number of cases of COVID-19 grow across the nation, from March 2-9 over the previous week, Trump fell back on inveighing to his audience about staunching the danger at ports of entry to the nation, as if we had not all be watching infographics prepared by statistics offered by government agencies, even as he knew that he had been sitting on evidence of the virus’ spread since December.
And it seemed that the transmission of the pandemic across borders, and of two-week incubation. was evidence of the rise of a new way Coronavirus inhabited global space, and indeed a new kind of globalism, akin to those that Bill Rankin analyzed in global grided maps as new ways of experiencing geographic space that President Trump was unable to process. Even as the curve of Coronavirus cases had finally flattened far more in China than elsewhere, the continued assurances that “we” were fine, in good medical care, and had nothing to panic about were made as if under strain. Declaring his fourth national emergency the following day, the goal was, similarly, to free up funds for disaster response, but now he wanted to insist that we were all ok, even if we knew that we weren’t, and publicly available data clearly showed otherwise.
Although not indulging rhetorical demonization the virus after a locality outside the nation–“the Wuhan virus” seemed perhaps too scary as it evoked the “Spanish flu”–in describing a “foreign virus” he suggested travel policies could provide protection, inviting us to be ostriches and immerse our heads in the cold, reassuring sands. Given the level of disconcertedness of his audience, the address’s utter absence of empathy was not so much surprising as disconcertingly unreal, given the difficulty of demonizing anyone in a health crisis and pandemic was so visibly globally expanding on unprecedentedly rapid scale.
The exponential growth of COVID-19 cases outside of China, despite the small relative number of attributable deaths, was unreal. This was a scenario quite different from anything we had encountered before; it was hard to map the graphs onto displayed Trump’s alarming unbalance as he tried to explain a set of statistics we grasped, it seems, more fully than he had: as he had tried to tell us to keep things in perspective, equating the still- incomplete data of deaths because of influenza and COVID-19, suggesting the transient nature of the panic of world health organizations in declaring a global pandemic, and assure us that this too would pass, he seemed more willfully out of touch than we were accustomed to see him.
Was this speech an entry to a recognition of the behind the scenes reality, a place we were not usually allowed to go as observers? It was surging how President Trump seemed to balk or blanch at the very word “global”–as if it were a sure sign something was wrong, rigged, and exaggerated. The plateauing of Chinese cases seemed trotted out as if this were somehow meant to suggest that the national emergency had been contained, rather than was about to expand. Even as he told the nation that the the United States was the “most prepared” nation when it came to Coronavirus policies, he seems to have revealed little interest or awareness of how it spread, or of the health concerns of the American people, as they looked to the rise of COVID-19 cases abroad, and heard of the blossoming of increased but still improperly tallied cases in the United States, and seemed unconcerned about the need to tally them–as if this was not the bare minimum of preparation.
As Trump continued to offer empty assurances, thumbs flickering as if to undercut his monotone, he seemed to think there was still a chance to blanket out the maps of dots of infection of the body politic, at multiple sites, as if there was still a chance that the uninfected as of yet heartland would listen, and be reassured if he could transcend the moment and trasnsfix the nation for ten minutes–
And it soon became clear, as we were making and watching these maps, that they were incomplete in their data counts: the poor data of positive testing that was being compiled by the CDC will perhaps provide a further tragedy within the mapping of COVID-19 and the absence of public education, as the Trump administration seems to persist in desiring an absence of open data, understanding the spread in the optic of power, and in terms of his ability to impose controls–but has revealed far less interest in getting data to the nation in ways that might be helpful, in ways that were already clear in his address on March 12, 20200, but only became clearer as the terrible risks of a lag in the release of valuable public information and the scope of official undercounts was revealed in the comparison between the independent data counts harvested by the Covid Tracking Project (see previous link!) and CDC data on public tests for the virus revealed a week after Trump’s duplicitous national address–an undercount that revealed the asymptotic rise of tests administered since the project began in March, and tests were first broadly offered.
The hope is to rectify huge undercounts of people tested, positive results of infection, negative results, and cases still pending based on aggregating public statements of local health authorities, local trusted tabulations or counts, official websites with double controls, tabulating distributed data with regular timestamps, otherwise unavailable from CDC. Often, the rules of testing are so tied to manifestations of physical signs of illness or exposure, and the paucity of promised test kits. Many states where CDC counts are low because of the absence of infection tallies in many stats, and low counts in others.
The problem is in large part about a massive failure of tabulation and of transparency. Due to budget cuts in the Trump Era, the CDC seems in itself no longer able to engage in the regular tabulation of tests given or confirmed, and has withdrawn any hope to provide accurate data, relying on local undercounts, resulting in a huge abdication of its responsibility of ensuring public health. Despite an eventual concentration of those afflicted in the United States, the huge under testing relative to other nations where the virus spread terrifies. And promises before Trump’s address of administering “roughly 1.5 million tests” never materialized, despite past success in distribution of H1N1 kits in the other world of 2009. With CDC counts being potentially wildly inaccurate, policies of testing diverge in states and lag far behind abilities to react to viral transmission that is often unclear until the incubation period passes–and fail to be tested for treatment even if they are carrying COVID-19.
The limited preventive measures that would be placed into effect would prevent the entrance of the virus that had already broadly spread for months–the absurd allowance flights to and from Britain would not be affected served to register his pleasure in Brexit, perhaps, while wreaking revenge at the European Union he has long disdained for not pulling its share of weight –as far back as 1995, when first voicing his public political pronouncements began–acting’s if the viral outbreaks that were Eruope’s problems were not the world’s, but in fact came from the Schengen group, but had still not arrived here, as if transmission could be contained by sideswiping allies to disrupt the possibility of coordinated response.
To be sure, Trump may have been watching data visualizations and charts that gave him a poor sense of the disease–Maggie Haberman left it open whether his COVID-19 policy reflected his dependence on FOX as his prime information source–as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson played down the danger, and Carlson described a “mysterious illness” spreading in China, playing down the local urgency of a public reaction to a disease that seemed to “have jumped from bats and snakes–which are commonly eaten in the part of China–to people,” pushing the coronvirus outside our borders and our concern even as it claimed lives. For in the United States, FOX billed it as the most recent iteration of the “Left’s . . . smear campaign,” using metaphors of vitality to describe undue attempts to stalk panic, akin to crying wolf, and disrupt confidence in government.
The maps of infections of Europe were concentrated as choropleths, but many have a disproportionate relation of map to bubble that make it seem as if the entire continent was infected, without letting us know what percentage of the population of each nation–but building buffers that count “total cases”–which only mean total reported cases. The irresponsibility of such a use of GIS has been discussed by Kenneth Field in his to-the-point blog, but the cat seems out of the bag, for many who prefer to “consume” information by charts. The total “cases” provide a poor sense of actual levels of concentration, but could profit from resizing map symbols, or a reduced geographic scope–or being sized to cases per millions, or dot density plot of greater sophistication, rather than rely on a choropleth that is a case study for poor visualization practices, showing little sense of geographic distribution, of population differences, normalization by time of identifying cases of the coronovirus, or numbers of test given over space that would make the sheer numbers legible, rather than merely waving what is effectively a red flag.
As Trump spoke in the Oval Office, atavistic echoes of his past history of outraged pronouncements seemed to still echo in his head in the hope of resurrecting rallying cries that fell suddenly on increasingly unreceptive ears. The language of crisis was however muted, but cast in a national optic that strained credulity. at last, given the national lenses in which he viewed what it was hard to deny was a global problem, beyond the confines of state territory. This was the problem of being forced to think globally when the American President had not only deep reluctance but a deeply tragic cognitive impossibility to do so. He had been elected President in some part by virtue of this appeal of this very inability.
Musings on Maps 
Such a good post!!! So insightful and spot on and horrifyingly true!
Painful to read but well-observed.