Look, I really really really hope the data coming out of NY, LA, and San Mateo County (Bay Area) is correct. If it is, then Covid is far less deadly than first feared. Problem though is that the damn thing is still contagious when you're asymptomatic, and it still does kill plenty of people. So it's not like we can just flip a switch and go back to 2019. Because people are too damn scared.

The biggest problem though is that the entire concepts of 'truth' and 'facts' have been under attack for quite some time. From Fox to MSNBC, from Jerry Falwell Jr to AOC, most of us now spend our time in our own echo chambers, rather than listening to each other and working together on a problem that is biological, not political.

I get why Trump supporters are more likely to dismiss this whole thing as a dramatic overreaction. His support maps inversely to population density; there are plenty of impartial, factual surveys that show how this country has divided along lines of population density. Looking deeper than the state level (look at county-level density and voter preference mapping) it's easily shown that one's attitude towards Trump is heavily influenced not just by educational attainment, but by the density of your community. Rural areas, mostly, have seen far fewer deaths than urban areas (although that is slowly changing). If you're in rural Montana, your hospitals are empty; you're far less likely to know of someone who died of Covid; and you're far more likely to dismiss it as a 'liberal media overreaction.' That's not surprising; that's your perception, informed by what you see around you. Whereas if you live in Queens, you're seeing an entirely different reality.

Problem is, you now have the entire country now believing that whatever the 'other side' says is false. I can't say I have a solution. What I can say is that this president has done more than almost any American to erode public trust in the news media, in science, in reality itself. Denials, obfuscations, baldfaced lies -- all because he thinks it wins him support. He may be right about that. But the seeds he and his supporters have sown, will come back to haunt this country in a real crisis. Like this one.