The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now tells us that since February 1, 2020, there have been 942,431 “excess deaths” in the United States. This is a 40% spike in the number of deaths that would otherwise have been predicted during this time.
The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the pandemic for the spike. In an article in The Hill by Shirin Ali, all but one of the medical and insurance industry authorities who are quoted take this line. But isn’t the number of Covid deaths as reported on death certificates far less than 942,431? Yes, but these experts assure us that the virus may have played a role in the other deaths by giving rise to other diseases. So even if Covid is not the direct cause of death, it may be the indirect cause.
Not until the very last sentence of the article are we allowed to hear another possibility. Meredith S. Sheils, a senior investigator in the Infections and Immunoepidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, agrees that some of the “excess deaths” may have been indirectly due to Covid-19, but mentions another possible cause too: “fear of seeking out health care during the pandemic.”
In other words, some people may have died not because of the pandemic, but because of their response to it. It isn’t difficult to think of other ways in which the response may be as lethal as the disease itself. For example, can anyone doubt that the daily gloom-and-dooming of pundits and experts has caused morbid anxiety to spike during the last two years? Constant stress has long been known to contribute to numerous illnesses including depression, cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS, and cancer.
But the most dangerous part of our response to the pandemic hasn’t been individual fear and anxiety, but excessive governmentally-imposed containment measures.
As I explain in my new book, How and How Not to Be Happy (Regnery, 2022), human beings are social creatures. I don’t just mean that we have a tendency to group together, like cows. For us, “the good life” is not good unless it can be shared with others. Radical isolation and excessive social distancing are unnatural for us, so unnatural that they are even unhealthy. Sharing in social life is not just a privilege to be enjoyed when the numbers of infections go down. It is quite literally a matter of life and death.
Our policymakers profoundly underestimate the depth of our need for community. We humans need others not just for the reasons the other animals need them, such as food, shelter, and mutual protection, but for reasons the beasts do not glimpse. Thanksgiving isn’t just a time to eat, but a time to share our personal histories together. Marriage isn’t just about mating, but about a union of lives that turns the wheel of the generations. We even rely on each other to gain knowledge and understanding of our lives. Human life turns out to be a partnership in everything from the most primitive needs to the highest, such as finding and living by the truth.
In short, we don’t just have an itch or an instinct to be social, which can be put off in an indefinite prolongation of those original “two weeks to flatten the curve.” The completeness of human life requires sociality. We aren’t just pushed toward others by our mammalian urges, but drawn into fellowship for our human fulfillment. Everything concerning life in community has the most penetrating importance to us.
May I add that we have to see each other? Words can’t say everything we need to say; they require the modulation of our faces. No other creature has a face as expressive as the human does. In fact, the faces of most animals are not expressive at all, and for them that is all right, because they have so little to express. To be forced to shield our countenances behind fortresses of cloth is not so far different from being forced not to talk and not to listen.
It is said “When you have health, you have everything – but this is a lie, and those who are isolated from social contact lose their health anyway. The problem doesn’t lie in thinking that health is good, but in treating it as the only good, so that all other goods must give way before it. Consider how many children have been kept from showing their faces, going to school, or playing with their friends. Consider how many people in nursing homes have been forced to die alone, isolated from the solace of the precious people who made their lives worth living.
It is too late to undo the mistakes of the recent past, but it is not too late to learn their hard lessons. Humans are not just bodies. We also have souls.
J. Budziszewski, a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, is the author of the new book How and How Not to Be Happy (Regnery, 2022). He writes about and ethics and politics, and blogs at The Underground Thomist.