The cautionary tale of Rand Paul, who voted against free coronavirus testing then caught Covid-19

The Senator, who is also a medical doctor, voted against making Covid-19 testing free for all Americans, and continued attending the gym. This weekend he tested positive

Rand Paul continued business as usual during the epidemic (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Rand Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky, is, as of yesterday, the first official member of the United States Senate to come down with coronavirus. He was also the sole member of the Senate to vote against an aid package that included free tests for members of the American public. Paul, of course, was not charged for his test, even though he demanded that ordinary Americans pay for their own testing.

Before his test came back positive, it seemed Paul was taking no real precautions regarding the spread of disease, despite warnings issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). While the rest of America was engaging in social distancing and helping to “flatten the curve” by working from home, Paul was visiting the Senate gym, coming into close contact with his colleagues during meetings, and generally conducting business as usual. Following the disclosure of Paul’s diagnosis, Senators Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, both of Utah, have self-quarantined; both have been in recent contact with Paul, who has now put the entire body at risk. Romney’s wife has multiple sclerosis.

We are still learning more about the novel coronavirus which causes Covid-19, but we know enough to know how it is spread. Rand Paul, himself a physician, should know the basics of virology — and that knowledge should have been enough to, at the very least, have kept him from the Senate gym. He should know, for instance, that the version of influenza with which most of us are familiar — the seasonal flu — is referred to, by disease specialists, as having an R-Naught 1. This is a basic reproduction number that indicates that, for each case of the flu, one person will be infected for each person that has it. SARS, by comparison, has an R-Naught 4.

We don’t fully know the R-Naught of coronavirus yet, just as we don’t fully know the mortality rate, because it is still changing. It is estimated that the R-Naught for coronavirus is somewhere between 2 and 4. That means that, for every person infected, the disease will be passed to another 2 to 4 people — and on and on from there.

But if I, a lowly writer learning epidemiology from my laptop in New York, can understand that my contact with, say, a public door handle touched by hundreds of people puts me at risk for both receiving and spreading a contagious disease, surely Rand Paul, a physician himself, should have known better than to spend time in a gym, itself one of the worst places for the spread of disease. The Senate may be the cooling saucer to the House, but the gym is where everything goes to steam and sweat, where bodily fluids are plentiful, and where disease goes to simmer and stew. It’s a viral playground. Who better to know the risks than an actual doctor?

I have no doubt that we will hear of more cases of coronavirus infections in the Senate in the coming days. And Rand Paul is likely not alone in his lack of precaution, though he is one of only four physicians in the Senate. I also have no doubt that there are others who acted irresponsibly, and who believed that this disease was not serious, even as real people were losing jobs, even as the economy was tanking, even as people were dying.

But not all of those people were as callous as Kentucky’s Rand Paul, a man who stood up as the only man in the Senate to deny Americans a right to see whether or not they were infected with a disease that they could be unwittingly passing on to vulnerable populations, a man who wanted people to have to pay out of their own dwindling pockets during a pandemic of unprecedented proportions.

Not all of those people had taken an oath to “first, do no harm.” Not all of those people had ignored the advice issued by members of their own field and done a day’s workout in a room that would be later be Ground Zero for contagion. In that sense, Rand Paul’s behavior is in a class of its own. And if we can learn anything from him, it is that removing ourselves from society — whether or not we believe we are infected — is both a medical truth and a medical necessity.