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I’m old enough to remember when it was conservatives, not progressives, who were warning that COVID-19 might be a really big deal. That we might not be prepared for a major infectious disease outbreak. That the progressives making fun of mask-wearing were whistling past the graveyard. And I’m old enough to remember conservatives flipping their script on the pandemic just as events began to prove them right.
I’m thinking about all of this again because recently, in these pages, health journalist Gabrielle Bauer published a piece [ [link removed] ] arguing that “insisting that all deaths are equally tragic dishonors the natural arc of life.” This is a tidy abstraction of the idea that given scarce medical resources, young people should be prioritized. This is essentially triage: It’s an unpleasant choice to make, but it’s a choice imposed by circumstances and capacity.
However, Bauer’s argument appears to go far beyond the acknowledgement of the triage principle, endorsing the greater value of young people’s lives as a sort of metaphysical truth. And in doing so, it denigrates the truth that we share a society together, and owe each other something, especially in times of uncertainty and crisis.
Prioritization Problems
Are the lives of the young worth “more” than those of the elderly? Did we fail to sufficiently value the lives of the young during the pandemic? These are hardly questions about which everybody agrees, or ever agreed. Yet in recounting an anecdote about Fran Lebowitz and her smoking habit, Bauer claims:
Lebowitz was expressing a banal truth: A young person’s death is more tragic than the death of someone approaching the normal human lifespan. Of course it is. Everyone knows this.
Then along came COVID-19 and everyone stopped knowing it. The Overton Window lurched before our eyes, locking into an unfamiliar new position: All lives carry the same weight—age has nothing to do with it. A 95-year-old’s death is every bit as tragic as the death of a five-year-old child. Shutting down society in the hope of giving grandma a few extra months in her nursing home makes perfect sense. Those who timidly suggested otherwise got the window slammed on their fingers. “How dare you insinuate that frail, elderly people’s lives don’t matter as much! Sociopath! Ableist! Eugenicist!”
I would disagree with the premise that “everyone knows” that a young person’s death is more tragic than that of an elderly person. Four years ago, very few people made this argument. It is far more likely that most of us never discounted elderly lives so deeply in the first place than it is that the pandemic suddenly and comprehensively rewrote our prioritization.
Indeed, one could even argue that elderly deaths are more tragic than those of young people because old people hold so much knowledge. As the COVID death toll began to rise, we understood that we owed something to our elders, that they had earned their golden years, that they carried embodied wisdom, and that they might have 5, 10, 15 years left to live out in decent health. If there is something everybody knew then, it is far more likely to be this. And after a brief moment, we decided that this knowledge cost us too much.
In fact, there is instead evidence that the lives of the elderly were not prioritized during COVID. And in any case, people as young as their 50s or 60s, not to mention the immune-compromised, were at elevated risk, especially before we had fully developed treatment protocols or had vaccines. While those over 85 made up the largest share of COVID deaths [ [link removed] ], nearly 20% of COVID deaths were among those aged only 50 to 64. To put it plainly, the idea that we were choosing 95-year-olds over 5-year-olds, as Bauer suggests, is not accurate.
A Sad Commentary on Solidarity
I would also like to look closely at another segment from Bauer’s piece, on the Texas lieutenant governor’s remarks at the beginning of the pandemic. She writes:
The media kept reminding us of our duty toward the elderly but stayed curiously silent on our obligations to the young.
Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick took a stab at it in the spring of 2020. “Those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country,” he told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. The social media vultures pounced on his “callousness,” entirely missing the spirit of his comments: He wasn’t suggesting we kick oldsters to the curb, just expressing the biological imperative to prioritize the young—those whose lives still lie ahead.
Of course, the lieutenant governor of Texas was probably in a better position than most to “take care of himself” while the virus raged. But more important than that, he made that statement on March 23, 2020, when we still more or less expected a severe but brief crisis. A few weeks? A couple of months? Why upend everything for that when we can just ride it out?
He added, barely a week after most shelter-in-place orders were announced, “My message is let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living.” And he also said, more questionably, “As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” 
And this is from one of First Things editor Rusty Reno’s “Coronavirus Diary” pieces, written on March 26 [ [link removed] ]: “Many of my friends,” he laments, have “adopted the view that pro-life Christians are obligated to preserve life at any cost. This requires one to hold, as a matter of principle, that physical death is the greatest evil, since preventing death is the highest good. No ancient philosophers held such a view. Nor did the Old Testament prophets. Jesus certainly didn’t.” There were a lot of pieces expressing similar sentiments.
What is implicit in Patrick’s remarks, in the minimizing pieces written over at [ [link removed] ] [ [link removed] ]First Things [ [link removed] ], and in Bauer’s original piece is the notion that there is no such thing as solidarity, that there is no such thing as a collective problem that demands collective action. What did Patrick mean by weighing elderly deaths against the diminishment of the country? Remember that this is before the controversies over church closures, the riots following the murder of George Floyd and the infamous letter [ [link removed] ] arguing that it was acceptable to break lockdown for protesting racism.
Only a week or two into a crisis that would turn out to claim a million American lives, there was already a lurid, conspiratorial narrative forming: that not a novel virus, but an effort to contain it, was a threat to American liberty. That the “experts” were not merely fallible but malevolent. That there was something vaguely suspicious about public health officials in a pluralistic society determining that supermarkets were more essential than houses of worship. That indeed there was something vaguely suspicious about the collective effort to save lives at all. This was baffling to me from the very beginning, but it is even more baffling that anybody could still hold these beliefs today.
Conservatives’ COVID Folly
It seems to me that Bauer’s argument is simply the uncontroversial idea of triage that I mentioned earlier, but it is greatly misapplied to our pandemic response. Here, it functions as a post hoc justification for a monumental screw-up that absolutely nobody would have endorsed before it happened. “I meant to do that!” is not an argument. The boiled frog who decides he rather likes being boiled is not making an argument. Neither are those who try to divine some kind of success or purposefulness in the public health fallout of the last four years.
Let me ask a question: Is there a single American who, in February 2020, would have shrugged at a million dead? A single American who would have constructed an argument to excuse it, to justify it or, worst of all, to argue that it was the proper order of things? Whatever disagreements we may have had, even those who favored no public health actions at all were not imagining a death toll so immense.
The whole conceit of “returning to normalcy” or “getting on with life” or “reopening the economy” so urgently was that January 2020 would be there waiting for us. But it wasn’t, and it will never be. “The economy” is not a machine; it’s people. “The family” is not an abstraction that one “supports”; it’s people. Everybody talks now about the children whose schools were closed. Nobody talks about the children who were orphaned, about the grandparents who never got to see their grandbabies. Nobody has any interest in probing what the death of a million Americans—close to half of whom were under 75 years old—means for the lives of those who made it.
Few commentators ever made the temperamentally conservative argument that our desire to get back to living was rash, incautious and likely to have unintended but completely foreseeable consequences, like walking on a broken leg not quite healed. I think of the things my father taught me: There’s no such thing as an “accident” (agency matters); do potentially dangerous things cautiously all the time (build good habits); consider unlikely but severe possibilities and do what you can to insure against them.
I thought the pandemic would have been the perfect society-wide circumstance to practice these pieces of wisdom. Yet when the rubber truly met the road, conservatives jettisoned everything for the economy, and had the nerve to cloak naked self-interest in moralizing about “higher purposes” or the “natural arc of life.” Whatever the words, and whatever the intent, the only way to interpret such things is as a critique that we were too cautious about saving lives. I’d bet roughly a million people would beg to differ.

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