There Was No Winning: Shifting the Discourse Around The Fight Against Pandemics

 

When the U.S. hit the grim milestone of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem tweeted the following:

“In the military, there is a notion of acceptable losses, a calculation made about whether the risk of death is outweighed by the benefits of a battle win. We rightfully do not have a similar metric for the homeland. This is simply unacceptable. #100ThousandDead"

Kayyem’s comparison, it must be said, is somewhat flawed. The U.S. did not willingly enter the “battle” against COVID-19; it was thrust upon us, which limits our ability to generate a “similar metric.” However, our inability to develop such contingencies implicitly suggests that COVID-19 is not a battle that was ever “winnable,” in the traditional sense. This conclusion, then, makes the case for framing COVID-19 through Jacqueline Whitt’s “strategy of not losing.”

Ironically, partisan critics of tactical errors on “the other side” (e.g. President Trump’s failure to implement robust testing; Democratic governors’ decisions to move COVID-19 patients to nursing homes) share a clear implicit goal: avoiding excess deaths. In this sense, we have a (fairly obvious) picture of “not losing.” However, implementing this consensus priority as our overarching strategic goal makes it difficult to argue that there is a way to “win” against a pandemic–and thus strengthens the case for aiming at “not losing.”

As support for this framing, consider one recent analysis, which suggests that 70-90% of COVID deaths could have been prevented through swifter action by the U.S. government, particularly the President. While some of the actions mentioned are politically/Constitutionally nonviable (a national lockdown) or were contested (border closures), many of them were eminently achievable. However, this would still leave us with 35,000 unavoidable deaths at the time of analysis alone; given the intensity with which we still mourn the events of 9/11, which killed around 3,000, few would likely consider 35,000+ deaths to be a victory in any meaningful sense. 

Not only is this shift in discourse key to resolving political disputes during crisis–it is the necessary crux of the issue strategically, especially if we truly are entering an “age of pandemics.” Perhaps the most necessary retrospective analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. will involve coming to terms with several brutal realities: that there is no way to “win” against a pandemic, that our end strategic goal is to “not lose,” and that the pandemic-specific metric for “not losing” will always be largely out of our hands.