America's COVID-19 Deaths Surpass Chernobyl

 

I just binge-watched HBO's Chernobyl yesterday... all 6 1/2 hours of it. Here's the IMDB link.

I wasn't really planning to do that. Susan had encouraged me to give the show a try and watch the first episode. It's a dramatization, but based pretty closely on the real events (with some errors as I'll note later). I was hooked almost immediately, unable to look away as the tragedy of the disaster unfolded, which won out over my need for a break from the emotional wear and tear. It's been a while since I've watched something so horrifying and sad.

It's hard to miss the parallels to today's crisis. President Trump himself chose to frame the battle against Covid-19 as a war. Well, sure, you can think of it like that. It's a struggle in which people are dying, though the opponent is a force of nature instead of a human one. You could view the Chernobyl disaster, and especially the effort to contain it and recover from it, in the same terms. Once the explosion had occurred, it became a race against deadly radiation.

They quote the estimated deaths due to Chernobyl as between 4,000 and 97,000. Our estimates of American deaths due to Covid-19 are already higher than that, above 97,000. That's just within one country.

With Chernobyl, it was necessary to move quickly to contain the meltdown and prevent a much larger explosion. They flew helicopters over the site, dropping sand and boron in an effort to quell the radioactive bonfire. There were casualties, but that was just the start.

There were tanks of water underground, amid the wreckage, that were filled with water. Had the superheated nuclear material found its way to that water, it was believed it would have vaporized it, creating a blast that would have destroyed at least three other nuclear power plants, killed millions, and scattered radioactive waste across several countries. Men had to be sent underground, into the dark, to wade through highly toxic surroundings, to hook up pumps so the water could be drained.

(Note: Some of the science portrayed in this dramatization has been shown to be wrong. See 10 Times HBO's 'Chernobyl' Got the Science Wrong. They really did send in men to drain the water tanks, but we now know the risk of explosion was mistaken or overblown.)

The nuclear material could also have melted its way through to the groundwater, rendering large parts of the planet effectively uninhabitable. To prevent that, men had to dig a tunnel under the wrecked reactor core so it could be cooled by massive amounts of liquid nitrogen. To avoid the possibility of a collapse, it had to be dug by hand. (Here too: though miners did in fact risk their health to dig the hole, in the end it proved unnecessary to install a cooling system.)

Before the site could be sealed off, three layers of the roof had to be cleared of highly radioactive chunks of graphite. Two levels could be cleared remotely using robots. The third was so radioactive, it immediately fried the circuitry of anything placed there. So they had once again to use manpower, sending in people wearing heavy protective gear for periods of just 90 seconds.

It's the sort of war where high numbers of live bodies are thrown into danger, knowing some will die. But the sacrifice must be made to prevent something worse.

Efforts were hampered early on by national pride, by denial, by a refusal to believe that things could have gone so wrong in a nation that wanted to believe it was so great. The truth became clear slowly, thanks in large part to courageous whistleblowers willing to endure the backlash when they contradicted the party line.

In the war against Covid-19, the enemy is a virus, a similarly inhuman force of nature, whose nature is to kill. It's not an enemy with which one can bargain, negotiate, or reason. Like Chernobyl's radioactive waste, the goal is to contain it and limit the fatalities. We have people on the front lines, the doctors and nurses, and everyone whose job has been declared essential to keeping society running. Like the coal miners and the roof clearers, they are knowingly risking their lives for the good of society, and some of them are getting sick or dying.

We, too, have our national pride, that belief at the highest levels that "we're special, this can't hurt us". Moving too slowly has cost us dearly. Denying the science has multiplied the damage.

Thanks to the efforts of many men and women, the Chernobyl disaster remained limited to one patch of the globe. Only those who entered the area were affected (though the smoke greatly extended its reach). The virus is different, having found its way into just about every country by this point.

The two disasters are different in another way: Nuclear power plants are complicated. HBO's dramatization does a good job, at the end, of explaining exactly what went wrong to lead to the explosion. The mistakes were all too familiar, all too human. There was nobody on site who really understood the physics. So they took steps in ignorance that led inexorably to catastrophe.

Covid-19 is a virus. We're all familiar with viruses. This one has some nasty properties, such as its ability to hide out in the body for a week or two before showing itself. But we've seen that before, to a much greater extent, with HIV/AIDS. I grew up during the AIDS crisis, and there are many people around my age who remember the near-panic. We can understand the danger posed by a disease with a long incubation period, even if HIV was different because it couldn't be spread by talking or coughing.

A disaster at a nuclear plant: that's complicated, difficult to fully understand. When dealing with a dangerous virus that doesn't immediately manifest symptoms, the importance of having adequate testing kits should be comparatively obvious. As President, you'd have to be rather stupid not to see that.

What's really heartbreaking about America's handling of Covid-19, in particular, is the wound we've done ourselves thanks to the recent popularity of science denial. The people at Fox News, and InfoWars and similar media outlets, are as much to blame as Donald Trump, because they made it possible for an ignorant conspiracy theorist to take the Oval Office. When his own intelligence agencies began to warn him of the upcoming plague, he blew them off at first. At least with Chernobyl, Gorbachev didn't do that.

In my opinion, there is no bigger threat to the long-term survival of our species than our tendency to deny reality. Speaking of which, HBO has a documentary called After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News -- also worth watching, though it won't actually be news to many of you reading this.

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